Aftermath of the Hobby Lobby Decision: Implications for Women in the Workforce

Hobby Lobby is a chain of 640 arts and crafts stores owned by the Green family, based in Oklahoma City. This company is required to follow the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates that larger employers—those with more than 50 employees—have to include coverage for the full range of preventative care, including contraceptives, in their female employees’ health insurance plans. However, the Green family holds deeply religious views and did not want to include four of the twenty contraceptives covered by the ACA, including long acting reversible contraception and emergency contraception, in their female employee coverage. The family believed that providing those contraceptives would go against their Christian values by making them complicit with abortion. Therefore, the Green Family challenged the contraceptive mandate in the landmark Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. by citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. This act prohibits the federal government from enacting laws that substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion. A corporation like Hobby Lobby can be considered a person as well, due to a series of Supreme Court rulings from the past 200 years that have granted corporate personhood and rights. In consideration of the RFRA, the Supreme Court, in a highly controversial five to four decision, sided with Hobby Lobby, and declared that the contraceptive mandate was an unnecessary and substantial burden on Hobby Lobby’s exercise of religious freedom. All three female Supreme Court justices voted against the ruling, but were unable to change the outcome. The majority claimed that the ruling only applied to “closely-held” for-profit corporations run on religious principles; however, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the dissent, attacked the majority opinion as a careless decision that could apply to all corporations and numerous laws (Charo 1538). The immediate effect of this decision is on female employees in the workforce who are left to wonder why male contraception is covered while theirs is not. In addition, by dropping coverage of more expensive methods of contraception, Hobby Lobby is driving its female employees towards less expensive and less efficient methods, leading to more unintended pregnancies and abortions. This portrays the idea of a corporate world that is not interested in the well-being of its female employees. By the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, and by not providing certain types of long-acting reversible contraceptive coverage for women, corporations such as Hobby Lobby are essentially creating a hostile work environment for female employees

Calculation of supersonic three-dimensional free-mixing flows using the parabolic-elliptic Navier-Stokes equations

A numerical method is presented which is valid for integration of the parabolic-elliptic Navier-Stokes equations. The solution procedure is applied to the three-dimensional supersonic flow of a jet issuing into a supersonic free stream. Difficulties associated with the imposition of free-stream boundary conditions are noted, and a coordinate transformation, which maps the point at infinity onto a finite value, is introduced to alleviate these difficulties. Results are presented for calculations of a square jet and varying-aspect-ratio rectangular jets. The solution behavior varies from axisymmetry for the square jet to nearly two-dimensional for the high-aspect-ratio rectangle, although the computation always calculates the flow as though it were truly three-dimensional

The effect of the spacing of background elements upon optomotor memory responses in the crab: the influence of adding or deleting features during darkness

1. Study was made of the effect of separation between stripes in the visual field upon responses which indicate memory of those stripes. 2. The amount of separation between white stripes had very little effect, whereas response strength and the amount of separation between black stripes were directly proportional. 3. The presence of extra, non-displaced black stripes prior to or following displacement reduced the size of the memory responses. 4. The effects of the amount of separation in the two cases were comparable. In both situations the separation affected only the responses to displacement of the stripe borders nearest to the extra stripe. 5. The effect of extra stripes present prior to displacement was in turn affected by the duration of the dark period, whilst the effect of those present during the post-displacement period was not. This accounts for the larger effect of extra stripes present during the psot-displacement period. 6. By expanding stripe width during darkness it was possible to distinguish between the effects of distance between stripes and the amount of white space separating them. Reducing white space while distance remains constant causes reductions in response strength, whereas reducing the distance between a memory zone and the white space between it and the neighboring stripe increased the size of the memory response

Learning to Predict the Wisdom of Crowds

The problem of "approximating the crowd" is that of estimating the crowd's majority opinion by querying only a subset of it. Algorithms that approximate the crowd can intelligently stretch a limited budget for a crowdsourcing task. We present an algorithm, "CrowdSense," that works in an online fashion to dynamically sample subsets of labelers based on an exploration/exploitation criterion. The algorithm produces a weighted combination of a subset of the labelers' votes that approximates the crowd's opinion.Comment: Presented at Collective Intelligence conference, 2012 (arXiv:1204.2991

Technological systems and momentum change: American electric utilities, restructuring, and distributed generation

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Wind turbines and invisible technology: unarticulated reasons for local opposition to wind energy

Local opposition to wind turbines stems from concerns about environmental and economic damage, as well as conflicts between rural and urban residents. This essay goes beyond these considerations to explore the often-unarticulated explanations for animosity toward this energy technology. Originally, it posits that opposition to visually obvious turbines arises from the successful history of an electric utility system that made its product largely invisible in its manufacture and physical manifestation. The existence of conspicuous turbines, however, reminds observers that power generation requires difficult choices in a technology-based society. The system’s previous achievement in hiding infrastructural elements, in other words, sometimes works ironically to spur objections to wind turbines. Receiving little historical study, the concealed features of a system’s infrastructure often influence assessments of technologies. By revealing the previously invisible, this essay, which draws on research in history, landscape architecture, geography, and psychology, therefore provides insights for social scientists and policymakers