The ADA in Turmoil: Judicial Dissonance, The Supreme Court\u27s Response, and the Future of Disability Discrimination Law

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 1 was enacted in 1990 with considerable fanfare and support. A broad-based coalition of supporters testified in favor of the legislation before committee hearings 2 and both houses of Congress passed the legislation by wide margins. 3 President George Bush, in signing the ADA into law, described the new statute as an historic opportunity 4 representing the full flowering of our democratic principles.

The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism

Common sense suggests that emotions are physical types that have little to do with the words we use to label them. Yet recent psychological constructionist accounts reveal that language is a fundamental element in emotion that is constitutive of both emotion experiences and perceptions. According to the psychological constructionist Conceptual Act Theory (CAT), an instance of emotion occurs when information from one’s body or other people’s bodies is made meaningful in light of the present situation using concept knowledge about emotion. The CAT suggests that language plays a role in emotion because language supports the conceptual knowledge used to make meaning of sensations from the body and world in a given context. In the present paper, we review evidence from developmental and cognitive science to reveal that language scaffolds concept knowledge in humans, helping humans to acquire abstract concepts such as emotion categories across the lifespan. Critically, language later helps individuals use concepts to make meaning of on-going sensory perceptions. Building on this evidence, we outline predictions from a psychological constructionist model of emotion in which language serves as the “glue” for emotion concept knowledge, binding concepts to embodied experiences and in turn shaping the ongoing processing of sensory information from the body and world to create emotional experiences and perceptions

Montana Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Reference Case Projections 1990-2020

The Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) prepared this report under contract to the Montana Department of Environment Quality (MDEQ). The report contains an inventory and forecast of the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 1990 to 2020

The role of language in the experience and perception of emotion: a neuroimaging meta-analysis

Recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that labeling one’s emotional experiences and perceptions alters those states. Here, we used a comprehensive meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature to systematically explore whether the presence of emotion words in experimental tasks has an impact on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions across studies. Using a database of 386 studies, we assessed brain activity when emotion words (e.g. ‘anger’, ‘disgust’) and more general affect words (e.g. ‘pleasant’, ‘unpleasant’) were present in experimental tasks vs not present. As predicted, when emotion words were present, we observed more frequent activations in regions related to semantic processing. When emotion words were not present, we observed more frequent activations in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus, bilaterally. The presence of affect words did not have the same effect on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions, suggesting that our observed effects are specific to emotion words. These findings are consistent with the psychological constructionist prediction that in the absence of accessible emotion concepts, the meaning of affective experiences and perceptions are ambiguous. Findings are also consistent with the regulatory role of ‘affect labeling’. Implications of the role of language in emotion construction and regulation are discussed

Final Vermont Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Reference Case Projections, 1990-2030

This report estimates the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sinks for Vermont from 1990-2030

Capacitating Community: The Writing Innovation Symposium

The topic of this symposium, capacitating community, invites CLJ readers to consider what makes community possible. This piece showcases one means, small conferences, via a retrospective on the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national scope that has hosted writers and writing educators annually in Milwaukee, WI, since 2018. Through a quilted conversation pieced from hours of small-group discussion, twenty-nine participants across academic and nonacademic ranks, roles, and ranges of experience offer insight into the WIS as well as the nature and value of professional community

Capacitating Community: The Writing Innovation Symposium

The topic of this symposium, capacitating community, invites CLJ readers to consider what makes a community possible. This piece showcases one means, small conferences, via a retrospective on the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national scope that has hosted writers and writing educators annually in Milwaukee, WI, since 2018. Through a quilted conversation pieced from hours of small-group discussion, twenty-nine participants across academic and nonacademic ranks, roles, and ranges of experience offer insight into the WIS as well as the nature and value of professional community

Moment Closure - A Brief Review

Moment closure methods appear in myriad scientific disciplines in the modelling of complex systems. The goal is to achieve a closed form of a large, usually even infinite, set of coupled differential (or difference) equations. Each equation describes the evolution of one "moment", a suitable coarse-grained quantity computable from the full state space. If the system is too large for analytical and/or numerical methods, then one aims to reduce it by finding a moment closure relation expressing "higher-order moments" in terms of "lower-order moments". In this brief review, we focus on highlighting how moment closure methods occur in different contexts. We also conjecture via a geometric explanation why it has been difficult to rigorously justify many moment closure approximations although they work very well in practice.Comment: short survey paper (max 20 pages) for a broad audience in mathematics, physics, chemistry and quantitative biolog

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism

Common sense suggests that emotions are physical types that have little to do with the words we use to label them. Yet recent psychological constructionist accounts reveal that language is a fundamental element in emotion that is constitutive of both emotion experiences and perceptions. According to the psychological constructionist Conceptual Act Theory, an instance of emotion occurs when information from one’s body or other people’s bodies is made meaningful in light of the present situation using concept knowledge about emotion. The CAT suggests that language plays a role in emotion because language supports the conceptual knowledge used to make meaning of sensations from the body and world in a given context. In the present paper, we review evidence from developmental and cognitive science to reveal that language scaffolds concept knowledge in humans, helping humans to acquire abstract concepts such as emotion categories across the lifespan. Critically, language later helps individuals use concepts to make meaning of on-going sensory perceptions. Building on this evidence, we outline predictions from a psychological constructionist model of emotion in which language serves as the glue for emotion concept knowledge, binding concepts to embodied experiences and in turn shaping the ongoing processing of sensory information from the body and world to create emotional experiences and perceptions