The Mixed Motive Instruction in Employment Discrimination Cases: What Employers Need to Know

In litigation regarding employment discrimination, the burden of establishing proof has continued to shift. As a result, employers and legal counsel need to be aware of the status of what they and human resources professionals should consider when an employee alleges that the employer has violated federal discrimination statutes. The original standard of proof required the plaintiff to establish that the employer discriminated against that person. Many cases still involve that approach, giving the plaintiff the burden of creating prima facie case. However, another line of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court added an alternative method for addressing discrimination litigation, known as the mixed motive approach. The two-prong mixed motive case requires the employee to demonstrate that a protected characteristic (e.g., race, sex, national origin) was a substantial factor in an employer\u27s adverse action. If that is established, the employer then has the burden of proving that the decision would have been made in any event, regardless of the employee\u27s protected characteristic. As a practical matter, employers facing litigation of this type must consider whether and how to defend such a case. Even a win can be expensive, because in cases where there is a divided decision, the employer must pay the plaintiff\u27s attorney fees and court costs, as well as its own. Moreover, since the Civil Rights Act of 1991 places discrimination cases in front of a jury, a divided decision is seemingly more likely. Although that presumably gives both sides a win, it still means a large expense for the employer

The envelope gene of transmitted HIV-1 resists a late interferon gamma-induced block

Type I interferon (IFN) signaling engenders an antiviral state that likely plays an important role in constraining HIV-1 transmission and contributes to defining subsequent AIDS pathogenesis. Type II IFN (IFNγ) also induces an antiviral state but is often primarily considered to be an immunomodulatory cytokine. We report that IFNγ stimulation can induce an antiviral state that can be both distinct from that of type I interferon, and can potently inhibit HIV-1 in primary CD4+ T cells and a number of human cell lines. Strikingly, we find that transmitted/founder (TF) HIV-1 viruses can resist a late block that is induced by type II IFN, and the use of chimeric IFNγ- sensitive/resistant viruses indicates that interferon-resistance maps to the env gene. Simultaneously, in vitro evolution also revealed that just a single amino acid substitution in envelope can confer substantial resistance to IFN-mediated inhibition. Thus, the env gene of transmitted HIV-1 confers resistance to a late block that is phenotypically distinct from those previously described to be resisted by env, and is therefore mediated by unknown IFNγ-stimulated factor(s) in human CD4+ T cells and cell lines. This important unidentified block could play a key role in constraining HIV-1 transmission

Ariel - Volume 4 Number 5

Editors David A. Jacoby Eugenia Miller Tom Williams Associate Editors Paul Bialas Terry Burt Michael Leo Gail Tenikat Editor Emeritus and Business Manager Richard J. Bonnano Movie Editor Robert Breckenridge Staff Richard. Blutstein Mary F. Buechler Alice M. Johnson J.D. Kanofskv Rocky Webe

Ariel - Volume 4 Number 2

Editors David A. Jacoby Eugenia Miller Tom Williams Associate Editors Paul Bialas Terry Burt Michael Leo Gail Tenikat Editor Emeritus and Business Manager Richard J. Bonnano Movie Editor Robert Breckenridge Staff Richard Blutstein Mary F. Buechler Steve Glinks Len Grasman Alice M. Johnson J. D. Kanofsky Tom Lehman Dave Mayer Bernie Odd

Ariel - Volume 4 Number 7

Editors David Jacoby Eugenia Miller Tom Williams Associate Editors Paul Bialas Terry Burt Michael Leo Gail Tenikat Editor Emeritus and Business Manager Richard J. Bonnano Movie Editor Robert Breckenridge Staff Richard Blutstein Mary F. Buechler J.D. Kanofsky David Mayer Rocket Webe

A macroscopic multifractal analysis of parabolic stochastic PDEs

It is generally argued that the solution to a stochastic PDE with multiplicative noise---such as $\dot{u}=\frac12 u"+u\xi$, where $\xi$ denotes space-time white noise---routinely produces exceptionally-large peaks that are "macroscopically multifractal." See, for example, Gibbon and Doering (2005), Gibbon and Titi (2005), and Zimmermann et al (2000). A few years ago, we proved that the spatial peaks of the solution to the mentioned stochastic PDE indeed form a random multifractal in the macroscopic sense of Barlow and Taylor (1989; 1992). The main result of the present paper is a proof of a rigorous formulation of the assertion that the spatio-temporal peaks of the solution form infinitely-many different multifractals on infinitely-many different scales, which we sometimes refer to as "stretch factors." A simpler, though still complex, such structure is shown to also exist for the constant-coefficient version of the said stochastic PDE.Comment: 41 page