Disobedience Is What NWSA Is Potentially about

For those of you who are unaware of it, I want to start with the fact that the advance coverage of this Convention by the Hartford Courant on May 19, 1981, was headlined Lesbian Housing Available for Women\u27s Conference at UConn and focused entirely on the arrangements for a lesbian section of the dormitory, where between 60 and 75 women would by request be lodged. Heavy emphasis was laid on alleged difficulties between lesbians and heterosexual women last year in Bloomington, and the issue of segregated housing. There was no mention whatsoever of racism as the theme of the Convention. I feel it is important to start by analyzing this. It is, first of all, a deliberate erasure of our declared purpose here. The National Women\u27s Studies Association chose, as a part of the feminist movement rather than as a dutiful daughter of academia, to address the estrangement, ignorance, fear, anger, and disempowerment created by the institutional racism which saturates all our lives. Many of us have come here in a mixture of hope and fear, hope and anger, hope and determination. Many, it may be assumed, have stayed away: some for lack of money, some for lack of hope, some for lack of determination, some for lack of caring. But these meetings have a purpose, and this purpose, visibly stated in NWSA\u27s literature, has been wiped out by the local press

History dependence in insect flight decisions during odor tracking

Natural decision-making often involves extended decision sequences in response to variable stimuli with complex structure. As an example, many animals follow odor plumes to locate food sources or mates, but turbulence breaks up the advected odor signal into intermittent filaments and puffs. This scenario provides an opportunity to ask how animals use sparse, instantaneous, and stochastic signal encounters to generate goal-oriented behavioral sequences. Here we examined the trajectories of flying fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) navigating in controlled plumes of attractive odorants. While it is known that mean odor-triggered flight responses are dominated by upwind turns, individual responses are highly variable. We asked whether deviations from mean responses depended on specific features of odor encounters, and found that odor-triggered turns were slightly but significantly modulated by two features of odor encounters. First, encounters with higher concentrations triggered stronger upwind turns. Second, encounters occurring later in a sequence triggered weaker upwind turns. To contextualize the latter history dependence theoretically, we examined trajectories simulated from three normative tracking strategies. We found that neither a purely reactive strategy nor a strategy in which the tracker learned the plume centerline over time captured the observed history dependence. In contrast, “infotaxis”, in which flight decisions maximized expected information gain about source location, exhibited a history dependence aligned in sign with the data, though much larger in magnitude. These findings suggest that while true plume tracking is dominated by a reactive odor response it might also involve a history-dependent modulation of responses consistent with the accumulation of information about a source over multi-encounter timescales. This suggests that short-term memory processes modulating decision sequences may play a role in natural plume tracking

Pregnancy and Childbirth Expectations During COVID-19 in a Convenience Sample of Women in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the health care landscape and shifted individuals’ expectations for and interactions with essential health services, including pregnancy-related care. This study explores alterations to individuals’ pregnancy and childbirth decisions during an infectious disease pandemic. A convenience sample of 380 pregnant individuals with an expected delivery date between April and December 2020 consented to enroll and complete an online questionnaire on their pregnancy and childbirth expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic; a subset of respondents (n = 18) participated in semi-structured phone interviews. Survey data were analyzed quantitatively while interview data were analyzed using a thematic content analysis until a consensus on key themes was achieved. Respondents reported substantial stressors related to shifting policies of health care facilities and rapidly changing information about COVID-19 disease risks. As a result, respondents considered modifying their prenatal and childbirth plans, including the location of their birth (25%), health care provider (19%), and delivery mode (13%). These findings illuminate the concerns and choices pregnant individuals face during the COVID-19 pandemic and offer recommendations to engage in compassionate, supportive, and person-centered care during a time of unprecedented risk and uncertainty