“One part politics, one part technology, one part history”:Racial representation in the Unicode 7.0 emoji set

Emoji are miniature pictographs that have taken over text messages, emails, and Tweets worldwide. Although contemporary emoji represent a variety of races, genders, and sexual orientations, the original emoji set came under fire for its racial homogeneity: minus two “ethnic” characters, the people emoji featured in Unicode 7.0 were represented as White. This article investigates the set of circumstances that gave rise to this state of affairs, and explores the implications for users of color whose full participation in the emoji phenomenon is constrained by their exclusion. This project reveals that the lack of racial representation within the emoji set is the result of colorblind racism as evidenced through two related factors: aversion to, and avoidance of, the politics of technical systems and a refusal to recognize that the racial homogeneity of the original emoji set was problematic in the first place

Interview with John Miltner

Vice Chancellor University Advancement, 1983-1991Digitized 2013 by Avant Productions, Inc

Revisiting Extraterritoriality after Al-Skeini: The ECHR and Its Lessons

On July 7, 2011, the European Court of Human Rights, sitting as a Grand Chamber, handed down two long-awaited judgments on the subject of the extraterritorial reach and scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In both Al-Skeini v. United Kingdom and Al-Jedda v. United Kingdom, the underlying issue was whether or not the United Kingdom was bound by its treaty obligations under the ECHR with regard to its military presence in Iraq. Al-Skeini involved the joined claims of six Iraqi nationals whose relatives were killed while allegedly under U.K. jurisdiction in Iraq; they claimed a lack of effective investigation into the deaths under Article 2. In Al-Jedda, a dual Iraqi-U.K. citizen challenged the lawfulness of his three-year detention in a British-controlled detention facility in Basrah City, Iraq. Both cases touch on the pivotal issue of U.K. jurisdiction over persons in Iraq, though the paths taken in the analysis of each case diverge from the outset. For Al-Skeini, the critical calculus was determining the existence of Article 1 jurisdiction, from which all ECHR obligations follow, while Al-Jedda\u27s inquiry focused primarily on the presence of attribution, without which no international responsibility could lie. Because of its greater bearing on Article 1 jurisdiction, Al-Skeini will be the primary focus of attention here. This Article seeks to comprehensively examine the Court\u27s treatment of extraterritoriality by tracing the history of provisions relevant to the issue as well as its evolving jurisprudence, including these recent landmark cases

Wearing a bike helmet leads to less cognitive control, revealed by lower frontal midline theta power and risk indifference

A recent study claims that participants wearing a bike helmet behave riskier in a computer-based risk task compared to control participants without a bike helmet. We hypothesized that wearing a bike helmet reduces cognitive control over risky behavior. To test our hypothesis, we recorded participants' EEG brain responses while they played a risk game developed in our laboratory. Previously, we found that, in this risk game, anxious participants showed greater levels of cognitive control as revealed by greater frontal midline theta power, which was associated with less risky decisions. Here, we predicted that cognitive control would be reduced in the helmet group, indicated by reduced frontal midline theta power, and that this group would prefer riskier options in the risk game. In line with our hypothesis, we found that participants in the helmet group showed significantly lower frontal midline theta power than participants in the control group, indicating less cognitive control. We did not replicate the finding of generally riskier behavior in the helmet group. Instead, we found that participants chose the riskier option in about half of trials, no matter how risky the other option was. Our results suggest that wearing a bike helmet reduces cognitive control, as revealed by reduced frontal midline theta power, leading to risk indifference when evaluating potential behaviors