Strange Bedfellows: The Destigmatization of Anti-Abortion Reform

As the United States abortion debate continues into its fifth decade since Roe v. Wade, pro-life groups are increasingly aiming to align themselves and their messages with classically “feminist” or “liberal” interests. Pro-life groups now heavily focus on women’s rights as a platform for advancing their ideological arguments and achieving legislative measures that ultimately restrict access to abortion. The use of such platforms allows antiabortion sentiment to appear more palatable to a broader swath of women while enabling the pro-life movement to soften its image and improve its appeal. This strategy, which I will refer to as pro-life “destigmatization,” manifests itself most clearly in law and politics, wherein pro-life advocates frame their anti-abortion arguments in broadly appealing, women’s rights-oriented terms. This ironic alignment is demonstrated through three examples that collectively represent an underlying effort to destigmatize antiabortion reform and portray it as a branch of women’s rights: 1) advocacy for the expansion of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), particularly in the context of the recently decided Supreme Court case of Young v. United Parcel Service; 2) political advocacy organizations’ support for pro-life women candidates and the creative framing of antiabortion legislation in election campaigns; and 3) anti-abortion legislation that restricts abortions specifically performed for sex-selection purposes. In each of these examples, there is a deliberate appeal to ideals many women already value such that, in theory, there would not be much of a leap from supporting feminist concerns to supporting the pro-life movement writ large. This connection is so close because, as each of these example shows, the ultimate goal of chipping away at abortion rights is portrayed as secondary, if it is even acknowledged at all. Rather, the pro-life presence is positioned as advocating something different from abortion, be it pregnancy rights or tax reform. Casting anti-abortion arguments in “feminist” terms is not a new effort. Scholars like Reva Siegel have long charted the development of the pro-life movement’s “womenprotective antiabortion argument[s]” and the ways in which the pro-life movement has “supplant[ed] the constitutional argument ‘[a]bortion kills a baby’ with [the] new claim ‘[a]bortion hurts women.’” Similarly, Mary Ziegler’s 2013 article in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice provides a detailed history of pro-life feminism, assessing the evolution of “pro-life, socially conservative, self-proclaimed feminists” and their growing role in the abortion debate. Consider also the decades-old legislative history of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which, as discussed infra, shows the law’s twin goals of female equality in the workforce and the preservation of a woman’s right to bear and raise children. Still, the pro-life movement’s destigmatization strategy has gained traction in recent years as pro-life feminism targets “a new generation of young women who reject the illusion that to be pro-woman is to be pro-choice.” The examples discussed in this Note are contemporary ones that, when taken as a whole, coalesce into indications of a dominant trend. This Note adds to this area of scholarship by demonstrating how pro-life advocates, legislators, and courts are currently drawing on feminist and women’s rights movements to advance abortion bans and destigmatize anti-abortion sentiment

Energy-efficient and high-performance lock speculation hardware for embedded multicore systems

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly common in everyday life and like their general-purpose counterparts, they have shifted towards shared memory multicore architectures. However, they are much more resource constrained, and as they often run on batteries, energy efficiency becomes critically important. In such systems, achieving high concurrency is a key demand for delivering satisfactory performance at low energy cost. In order to achieve this high concurrency, consistency across the shared memory hierarchy must be accomplished in a cost-effective manner in terms of performance, energy, and implementation complexity. In this article, we propose Embedded-Spec, a hardware solution for supporting transparent lock speculation, without the requirement for special supporting instructions. Using this approach, we evaluate the energy consumption and performance of a suite of benchmarks, exploring a range of contention management and retry policies. We conclude that for resource-constrained platforms, lock speculation can provide real benefits in terms of improved concurrency and energy efficiency, as long as the underlying hardware support is carefully configured.This work is supported in part by NSF under Grants CCF-0903384, CCF-0903295, CNS-1319495, and CNS-1319095 as well the Semiconductor Research Corporation under grant number 1983.001. (CCF-0903384 - NSF; CCF-0903295 - NSF; CNS-1319495 - NSF; CNS-1319095 - NSF; 1983.001 - Semiconductor Research Corporation

Evaluating critical bits in arithmetic operations due to timing violations

Various error models are being used in simulation of voltage-scaled arithmetic units to examine application-level tolerance of timing violations. The selection of an error model needs further consideration, as differences in error models drastically affect the performance of the application. Specifically, floating point arithmetic units (FPUs) have architectural characteristics that characterize its behavior. We examine the architecture of FPUs and design a new error model, which we call Critical Bit. We run selected benchmark applications with Critical Bit and other widely used error injection models to demonstrate the differences

Preemption In The 21st Century: What Are The Legal Parameters?

In September 2002, President Bush and his national security team released the annual review of the United States\u27 National Security Strategy

On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities

In two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, we determined to what extent Grice’s maxim of informativeness as well as pragmatic ability contributes to the incremental build-up of sentence meaning, by examining the impact of underinformative versus informative scalar statements (e.g. “Some people have lungs/pets, and…”) on the N400 event-related potential (ERP), an electrophysiological index of semantic processing. In Experiment 1, only pragmatically skilled participants (as indexed by the Autism Quotient Communication subscale) showed a larger N400 to underinformative statements. In Experiment 2, this effect disappeared when the critical words were unfocused so that the local underinformativeness went unnoticed (e.g., “Some people have lungs that…”). Our results suggest that, while pragmatic scalar meaning can incrementally contribute to sentence comprehension, this contribution is dependent on contextual factors, whether these are derived from individual pragmatic abilities or the overall experimental context

Combined analysis of microbial metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequencing data to assess in situ physiological conditions in the premature infant gut.

Microbes alter their transcriptomic profiles in response to the environment. The physiological conditions experienced by a microbial community can thus be inferred using meta-transcriptomic sequencing by comparing transcription levels of specifically chosen genes. However, this analysis requires accurate reference genomes to identify the specific genes from which RNA reads originate. In addition, such an analysis should avoid biases in transcript counts related to differences in organism abundance. In this study we describe an approach to address these difficulties. Sample-specific meta-genomic assembled genomes (MAGs) were used as reference genomes to accurately identify the origin of RNA reads, and transcript ratios of genes with opposite transcription responses were compared to eliminate biases related to differences in organismal abundance, an approach hereafter named the "diametric ratio" method. We used this approach to probe the environmental conditions experienced by Escherichia spp. in the gut of 4 premature infants, 2 of whom developed necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a severe inflammatory intestinal disease. We analyzed twenty fecal samples taken from four premature infants (4-6 time points from each infant), and found significantly higher diametric ratios of genes associated with low oxygen levels in samples of infants later diagnosed with NEC than in samples without NEC. We also show this method can be used for examining other physiological conditions, such as exposure to nitric oxide and osmotic pressure. These study results should be treated with caution, due to the presence of confounding factors that might also distinguish between NEC and control infants. Nevertheless, together with benchmarking analyses, we show here that the diametric ratio approach can be applied for evaluating the physiological conditions experienced by microbes in situ. Results from similar studies can be further applied for designing diagnostic methods to detect NEC in its early developmental stages

Why and When Beliefs Change

Why people do or do not change their beliefs has been a long-standing puzzle. Sometimes people hold onto false beliefs despite ample contradictory evidence; sometimes they change their beliefs without sufficient reason. Here, we propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes associated with holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. Belief change can then be understood as an economic transaction in which the multidimensional utility of the old belief is compared against that of the new belief. Change will occur when potential outcomes alter across attributes, for example because of changing environments or when certain outcomes are made more or less salient

Shifts of Effective Connectivity within a Language Network during Rhyming and Spelling

This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0864-05.2005.We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine task-specific modulations of effective connectivity within a left-hemisphere language network during spelling and rhyming judgments on visually presented words. We identified sites showing task-specific activations for rhyming in the lateral temporal cortex (LTC) and for spelling in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). The inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and fusiform gyrus were engaged by both tasks. Dynamic causal modeling showed that each task preferentially strengthened modulatory influences converging on its task-specific site (LTC for rhyming, IPS for spelling). These remarkably selective and symmetrical findings demonstrate that the nature of the behavioral task dynamically shifts the locus of integration (or convergence) to the network component specialized for that task. Furthermore, they suggest that the role of the task-selective areas is to provide a differential synthesis of incoming information rather than providing differential control signals influencing the activity of other network components. Our findings also showed that switching tasks led to changes in the target area influenced by the IFG, suggesting that the IFG may play a pivotal role in setting the cognitive context for each task. We propose that task-dependent shifts in effective connectivity are likely to be mediated through top-down modulations from the IFG to the task-selective regions in a way that differentially enhances their sensitivity to incoming word-form information