Free Speech, Official History and Nationalist Politics: Toward a Typology of Objections to Memory Laws

The past two decades have seen an explosion of memory laws, especially in Eastern Europe, and an explosion of objections to them. According to critics, memory laws (i) violate freedom of speech, (ii) create an official history, and (iii) foster a narrow, particularistic politics. This essay evaluates these competing arguments. The tendency to oppose memory laws on free speech grounds, or as state-enforced history, does not get at the deeper, political threat posed by a newer generation of more particularistic memory laws. At the same time, however, the political objection leans on an a priori premise that a nationalistic, exclusionary form of politics is morally illegitimate – which can be hard, pragmatically, for opponents of memory laws in Poland, Hungary or Russia to raise directly. Consequently, memory law opponents should emphasize universalistic objections based on speech and academic freedom while remaining sensitive to the exclusionary nature of some memory laws. As a final point, the academic study of memory laws would grow if it saw exclusionary memory laws as part of broader political project that, in countries like Denmark and Hungary, shapes the polity by restricting immigration and indoctrinating immigrants

The Long Road Back to Skokie: Returning the First Amendment to Mask Wearers

When the Seventh Circuit upheld the First Amendment right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978, the protection of mask wearers was not far behind. Since then, doctrinal paths have diverged. While the Supreme Court continues to protect hate speech, mask wearing has been increasingly placed outside First Amendment protection. This article seeks to get to the bottom of this doctrinal divergence by addressing the symbolic purposes of mask bans—rooted in repudiating the Ku Klux Klan—as well as the doctrinal steps taken over the past forty years to restrict the First Amendment claims of mask wearers. It also highlights the dangers posed by the current, state-friendly mask law doctrine in an age of technological growth, mass-surveillance, and a move to anoint Antifa as the new Ku Klux Klan. The article ends with a call for courts to restore mask wearing to its rightful place in the First Amendment pantheon

A correlation inequality for connection events in percolation

It is well-known in percolation theory (and intuitively plausible) that two events of the form ``there is an open path from $s$ to $a$' are positively correlated. We prove the (not intuitively obvious) fact that this is still true if we condition on an event of the form ``there is no open path from $s$ to $t$'

Some conditional correlation inequalities for percolation and related processes

Consider ordinary bond percolation on a finite or countably infinite graph. Let s, t, a and b be vertices. An earlier paper proved the (nonintuitive) result that, conditioned on the event that there is no open path from s to t, the two events ``there is an open path from s to a' and ``there is an open path from s to b' are positively correlated. In the present paper we further investigate and generalize the theorem of which this result was a consequence. This leads to results saying, informally, that, with the above conditioning, the open cluster of s is conditionally positively (self-)associated and that it is conditionally negatively correlated with the open cluster of t. We also present analogues of some of our results for (a) random-cluster measures, and (b) directed percolation and contact processes, and observe that the latter lead to improvements of some of the results in a paper of Belitsky, Ferrari, Konno and Liggett (1997

The extent and consequences of p-hacking in science

A focus on novel, confirmatory, and statistically significant results leads to substantial bias in the scientific literature. One type of bias, known as “p-hacking,” occurs when researchers collect or select data or statistical analyses until nonsignificant results become significant. Here, we use text-mining to demonstrate that p-hacking is widespread throughout science. We then illustrate how one can test for p-hacking when performing a meta-analysis and show that, while p-hacking is probably common, its effect seems to be weak relative to the real effect sizes being measured. This result suggests that p-hacking probably does not drastically alter scientific consensuses drawn from meta-analyses

Surveillance study of apparent life-threatening events (ALTE) in the Netherlands

SIDS and ALTE are different entities that somehow show some similarities. Both constitute heterogeneous conditions. The Netherlands is a low-incidence country for SIDS. To study whether the same would hold for ALTE, we studied the incidence, etiology, and current treatment of ALTE in The Netherlands. Using the Dutch Pediatric Surveillance Unit, pediatricians working in second- and third-level hospitals in the Netherlands were asked to report any case of ALTE presented in their hospital from January 2002 to January 2003. A questionnaire was subsequently sent to collect personal data, data on pregnancy and birth, condition preceding the incident, the incident itself, condition after the incident, investigations performed, monitoring or treatment initiated during admission, any diagnosis made at discharge, and treatment or parental support offered after discharge. A total of 115 cases of ALTE were reported, of which 110 questionnaires were filled in and returned (response rate 97%). Based on the national birth rate of 200,000, the incidence of ALTE amounted 0.58/1,000 live born infants. No deaths occurred. Clinical diagnoses could be assessed in 58.2%. Most frequent diagnoses were (percentages of the total of 110 cases) gastro-esophageal reflux and respiratory tract infection (37.3% and 8.2%, respectively); main symptoms were change of color and muscle tone, choking, and gagging. The differences in diagnoses are heterogeneous. In 34%, parents shook their infants, which is alarmingly high. Pre- and postmature infants were overrepresented in this survey (29.5% and 8.2%, respectively). Ten percent had recurrent ALTE. In total, 15.5% of the infants were discharged with a home monitor. In conclusion, ALTE has a low incidence in second- and third-level hospitals in the Netherlands. Parents should be systematically informed about the possible devastating effects of shaking an infant. Careful history taking and targeted additional investigations are of utmost importance