From the National Office

During the final weeks of preparation for the First NWSA Convention last spring, various National Office tasks and concerns had to be postponed to a less hectic time we called After Kansas. There was such a peaceful moment: it lasted just about as long as it took for the National Office staff to return from Lawrence to begin counting down days and deadlines Before Indiana. After Kansas / Before Indiana we have been responding to congratulations received on our first Convention and to suggestions for the second ; filling requests for information or materials from the 1979 meeting and beginning to publicize the 1980 one; writing thank-yous and paying bills; assembling and reproducing committee reports and preparing this year\u27s financial accounting; seeking and beginning to work with those who will take responsibility for the Bloomington Convention

NWSA News and Views

FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE By Elaine Reuben Summing up the seventies, or looking ahead to the decade now beginning, I cannot adopt the weary/wary tone of most columnists and commentators. The 1980 listing of women\u27s studies programs in this issue reflects a ten-percent increase in the number of programs since the last compilation, with related growth in the number of certificates and degrees programs offer. NWSA\u27s survey sought and obtained more detailed information than in the past, and we anticipate being able to maintain and provide such data more efficiently in the future

Guest Editorial

FROM THE NWSA NATIONAL OFFICE The spring term has been completed; conference participants at our Third annual meeting have departed Storrs. Some will be participating in one of the several summer institutes for women\u27s studies curriculum development offered around the country, and the world; or attending other feminist workshops and conferences; or taking part in summer school sessions, or simply savoring and looking forward to continuing activities in the fall. This year, though, more than ever, it is hard not to be painfully aware of powerful contradictions to an old story-book picture: teachers, students and academics at their leisure for a privileged three-month vacation, free to take advantage of opportunities for rest, research and renewal

From the National Office

In lieu of my usual quarterly report on the work of the National Office—some of which is reflected in the news of this issue—it seemed appropriate in this pre-Convention column to share the substance of one activity. The following statement made on behalf of NWSA was my response to a request from Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., for testimony before the Senate Committee on Human Resources. This sort of public presence is one aspect of NWSA\u27s function as a national voice for feminist education. Our purpose as an organization is not only to share experiences and information among ourselves but to educate and exert influence upon a larger community. Similarly, our Convention will in its totality provide the opportunity to express to ourselves and to others the state of our art and our concerns

NWSA News

FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE The National Women\u27s Studies Association has been in business at the University of Maryland for two months as I write this memo. When it appears, the semester will be almost over, the weather may be better, and I will be preparing to report on my activities as Coordinator at the Spring 1978 meeting of the NWSA Coordinating Council. The outlines of that report are already taking shape

Editorial

COOPERATION AND COMMUNICATION Those of us who work in feminist programs and woman-centered institutions in many different educational settings recognize the increasing need for cooperation and communication. Thanks to Barnard College (and the support of the Rockefeller Foundation), an exceptionally diverse group of women in higher education in the Northeast recently had an opportunity to share information and discuss strategies for the coming decades. The Barnard Conference confirmed, not only informally but in the Conference Resolutions we have printed below, the need for and the commitment to collaborative strategies for the future

Planning a National Women\u27s Studies Association

On Saturday, March 20, thirty women came together in Philadelphia to begin laying the groundwork for a National Women\u27s Studies Association and to plan for a national founding convention at which the Association will be launched. After two days of intense and high energy discussion, the group agreed in principle on a working paper which proposes a shape for the Association; they also created and approved an outline for a three-day, representational convention to be held in mid-November at San Jose State University

NWSA News and Views

FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE By Elaine Reuben I am pleased to be able to report that NWSA has been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The outcome of our application was never in doubt, but the administrative process took a good while to complete. Technically, that process will continue: the notice accompanying the form announcement of our tax-exempt status indicated that we will be under continuing scrutiny, since it appears, to the IRS, that we are likely to engage in significant lobbying activities

NWSA News and Views

Elaine Reuben FROM THE NATIONAL OFFICE Summer is traditionally known as a slow season in the Washington area, and an organization like NWSA, involving so many students and teachers, also seems to take a break between semesters. I can\u27t speak for the Federal folk—except to note that July\u27s march on the Capitol was followed by their extending the deadline for ratification of the ERA—but our work continued

From "Thumbs Up" to "10 out of 10": Reconsidering Scalar Feedback in Interactive Reinforcement Learning

Learning from human feedback is an effective way to improve robotic learning in exploration-heavy tasks. Compared to the wide application of binary human feedback, scalar human feedback has been used less because it is believed to be noisy and unstable. In this paper, we compare scalar and binary feedback, and demonstrate that scalar feedback benefits learning when properly handled. We collected binary or scalar feedback respectively from two groups of crowdworkers on a robot task. We found that when considering how consistently a participant labeled the same data, scalar feedback led to less consistency than binary feedback; however, the difference vanishes if small mismatches are allowed. Additionally, scalar and binary feedback show no significant differences in their correlations with key Reinforcement Learning targets. We then introduce Stabilizing TEacher Assessment DYnamics (STEADY) to improve learning from scalar feedback. Based on the idea that scalar feedback is muti-distributional, STEADY re-constructs underlying positive and negative feedback distributions and re-scales scalar feedback based on feedback statistics. We show that models trained with \textit{scalar feedback + STEADY } outperform baselines, including binary feedback and raw scalar feedback, in a robot reaching task with non-expert human feedback. Our results show that both binary feedback and scalar feedback are dynamic, and scalar feedback is a promising signal for use in interactive Reinforcement Learning