Missing Links: The First Amendment's Place in an Ever-Changing Web

Legal questions remain surrounding hateful rhetoric online, including when the government should or can legally step in and do something to prevent acts of terror or hate crimes. This Article explores the current legal landscape surrounding access to publishing online, and its benefits and costs for everyday users and private companies. Through a First Amendment lens, as well as other relevant case law, legislation, and regulation, this Article seeks to provide an understanding of the civil liberty implications of how a change in the law or policy would affect the rights of private companies and publishers and users, both readers and writers of content. This analysis focuses specifically on legal ramifications, protections, and liabilities of major social media outlets and news sites, as well as easily accessible online forums and public-facing websites of hate groups

Bad Gurley Feminism: The Myth of Post-War Domesticity

According to feminist history, the 1950s constitute a lapse in feminist literature as women in the post-war era were ushered into the realm of domesticity. In this article I argue that this perceived literary “gap” was both created and perpetuated by feminist historians and scholars who insist that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) was the defining feminist text of the time. I offer an alternative discourse to that of Friedan by presenting feminist writers who challenge, rather than adopt, masculine ideology as the means to women’s empowerment. I end by encouraging feminists to allow commonly dismissed feminists from the 1950s, like Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and domestic humor writers Shirley Jackson and Jean Kerr, into the feminist canon

Improving Emergency Response Decisions by Using Web 2.0

Emergency response organizations such as the American Red Cross are delving into Web 2.0 applications. Although, social media has flattened the communication hierarchy, large organizations continue to use traditional top-down modes of communication. There is an opportunity to use social media to document the events of an emergency as it happens. The knowledge of a crisis could be captured first-hand by the victims of that emergency and then fed up the communication channel in a bottom-up approach through Web 2.0 applications

The Seduction of Feminist Theory

My dissertation, The Seduction of Feminist Theory, comes out of my research on South African fiction and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and focuses broadly on feminist theory and the question of female power. Traditionally feminist theory has sought to empower women by insisting on their equality to men and by allowing their voices to be heard. But in trying to understand why women did not speak about their personal victimization at the TRC hearings, and why so many women characters in South African fiction are unable or unwilling to speak, I have come to see that women do not gain equality or liberation through equal involvement in an unequal system. What should be challenged is not women\u27s silence but the system itself. The work of French theorist and sociologist Jean Baudrillard provides me with the conceptual model and critical vocabulary to reframe feminist theory. Baudrillard conceptualizes society as governed by the system of production. As a power structure, production functions to make meaning of everything from labor to sex to silence in an effort to confirm the authority of such ideologies. Yet such efforts have been harmful to women insofar as those women who do not conform to the social value of production are continually represented as disempowered. Baudrillard\u27s theory of seduction provides an alternative discourse. According to Baudrillard, femininity actually has no meaning, though people constantly attribute meaning to it, and this very lack of meaning gives femininity its power over production. What seduces us, Baudrillard says, is that to which we cannot attribute meaning. My objective in this dissertation is to establish seduction as a feminist reading practice of resistance to production, and to uncover a history of seduction in feminist writing. In the first chapter, I argue that Baudrillard has not offered feminism an entirely unfamiliar theory of resistance. It is more that feminists have yet to read feminism seductively. Baudrillard\u27s theory allows me to accentuate seduction in earlier feminist writing that is either dismissed by more productive-minded feminists or championed for making apparently productive arguments. Virginia Woolf, I suggest, by avocating laughter as a response to patriarchy, was among the first feminists in whom we can identify seduction as a feminist practice. Once I saw laughter as a seductive writing practice, I began to perceive a resonance of seduction echoing throughout the work of feminists from French theorists such as Joan Rivière, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, to contemporary American scholars such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The rest of my chapters take a historical approach, showing how a theory of seduction, and a reading practice based on this theory, change our understanding of feminism and literature from the turn of the twentieth century to the postmodern era. My second chapter addresses feminism of the Progressive Era and argues that focusing on productive discourse systematically disempowers women. The Progressive Era is primarily imagined as a period of social and labor reform. As such, the social world was inextricably linked to the lexicon of production. Quite literally one\u27s social value and sense of self worth were defined in relation to the labor one preformed or what one produced. Progressive reformers sought to rationalize the labor system by investigating, measuring, and classifying working conditions in an attempt to assuage an increasingly disparate and volatile class conflict. In documenting the labor of lower-class women, reformers such as Cornelia Stratton Parker and Charlotte Perkins Gilman established feminism as a materialist practice grounded in production. Defining women\u27s power in relation to production, however, does not further women\u27s status in society; it only reinforces the hegemonic notion that production is the only form of power. An effective feminist movement would, alternatively, attempt to break down the idea of production as power, because, as Baudrillard argues, the more the system becomes concentrated the more it expels whole social groups. The more it becomes hierarchized according to the law of value, the more it excludes whoever resists this law. As I show in chapter 2, there is no language with which to define women as powerful in the Progressive discourse insofar as it establishes production as the only form of social value. In this chapter, I re-read Edith Wharton\u27s The House of Mirth (1905) as resistant to the feminism promoted by reformers such as Gilman and Parker. Wharton, I argue, negotiates a seductive alternative in her characterization of Lily Bart. My third chapter addresses the feminist insistence on sexual equality in the modernist era. I begin by presenting work of feminist sexual reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennet, and Helena Rosa Wright who argue that, in order to achieve full equality between the sexes, women must be allowed control over their reproductive function and enjoy sex on a par with men. However, such arguments unwittingly disempower women who do not confirm the social value of sex. In this chapter I explore the public social success of Irene Castle, an influential ballroom dancer of the 1920s, in relation to modern fictional characters such as Lorelei Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1925), Myrtle Wilson (The Great Gatsby, 1925), and Florinda (Jacob\u27s Room, 1922) to demonstrate that social mobility, as imagined by authors in the `20s, was contingent upon a woman\u27s ability to seduce while denying engagement in sex--that is, not through sex, but through performing femininity. I explore the significance of this shift in relation to the work of Liz Conor who, in The Spectacular Modern Woman (2004), argues that the modern appearing woman, far from being objectified, provides a way of rethinking agency outside of the terms provided by masculine discourse. To bridge the gap between the modernist and postmodernist eras, I include a short piece, Post-war Feminism: An Interlude, addressing the dearth of feminist scholarship on the post-war period. I argue that embracing the ideology of production has led feminists to assume that Betty Friedan was the only serious feminist writing in the post-war era. Recognizing seduction as a feminist reading practice allows commonly dismissed feminists, such as Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown and humor writer Shirley Jackson, into the feminist canon. My fourth chapter examines what happens to the concepts of the modern woman and modern feminism in postmodern literature within a global framework. Rita Felski claims that the recent work of feminism attempts to incorporate a global perspective on women: By refusing to give any specific content to the feminine, the feminist philosopher hopes to avoid the charge of ethnocentrism. Such a framework can include all rather than only some women (120). While Felski acknowledges this approach as problematic because it fails to take into account the material conditions of women, I argue that the problem resides in the feminist adoption of post-Enlightenment ideals of equality and difference, which need to be critiqued before theorizing a global feminist reading practice. Moreover, in our postmodern condition, the dominance of mass media with its overproduction of meaning threatens to annihilate the power of seduction. Drawing on Baudrillard\u27s insight, I explore the significance of silence as an untapped resource for the disruption of power in an era dependant on the proliferation of speech. Using Isabelle Allende\u27s House of Spirits (1986), Salman Rushdie\u27s Midnight\u27s Children (1981), and J.M. Coetzee\u27s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), postmodern novels which explore the proliferation of speech and information within the current postmodern condition, I show the way silent female characters function to thwart power in a global society contingent on the assumption that speech is an expression of the real. My fifth and final chapter takes my analysis of literature and feminist theory into the social and political arena. My readings of women\u27s silence in the post-apartheid hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) explore the political significance of the shift from modern laughter to postmodern silence. In light of the discourse established by the TRC, where power is restored through public speech, it is important to examine the alternate ways in which women, like female characters in modern and postmodern literature, are able to expose the ideology of a social and judicial system that fails to adequately represent them. By paying close attention to the gaps and silences within the TRC testimonies, I seek to establish a new discourse recognizing silence as, in Baudrillard\u27s words, the immense, latent defection from productivist discourse

Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide association analyses in 3 million individuals

We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12-16% of EA variance and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases. Direct effects (i.e., controlling for parental PGIs) explain roughly half the PGI's magnitude of association with EA and other phenotypes. The correlation between mate-pair PGIs is far too large to be consistent with phenotypic assortment alone, implying additional assortment on PGI-associated factors. In an additional GWAS of dominance deviations from the additive model, we identify no genome-wide-significant SNPs, and a separate X-chromosome additive GWAS identifies 57

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Processing of joint molecule intermediates by structure-selective endonucleases during homologous recombination in eukaryotes

Homologous recombination is required for maintaining genomic integrity by functioning in high-fidelity repair of DNA double-strand breaks and other complex lesions, replication fork support, and meiotic chromosome segregation. Joint DNA molecules are key intermediates in recombination and their differential processing determines whether the genetic outcome is a crossover or non-crossover event. The Holliday model of recombination highlights the resolution of four-way DNA joint molecules, termed Holliday junctions, and the bacterial Holliday junction resolvase RuvC set the paradigm for the mechanism of crossover formation. In eukaryotes, much effort has been invested in identifying the eukaryotic equivalent of bacterial RuvC, leading to the discovery of a number of DNA endonucleases, including Mus81–Mms4/EME1, Slx1–Slx4/BTBD12/MUS312, XPF–ERCC1, and Yen1/GEN1. These nucleases exert different selectivity for various DNA joint molecules, including Holliday junctions. Their mutant phenotypes and distinct species-specific characteristics expose a surprisingly complex system of joint molecule processing. In an attempt to reconcile the biochemical and genetic data, we propose that nicked junctions constitute important in vivo recombination intermediates whose processing determines the efficiency and outcome (crossover/non-crossover) of homologous recombination

Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling, but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In the present study, we gave the same speech production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting insubstantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further find little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions

Author Correction:Study of 300,486 individuals identifies 148 independent genetic loci influencing general cognitive function

Christina M. Lill, who contributed to analysis of data, was inadvertently omitted from the author list in the originally published version of this article. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article