Nike’s #MeToo moment shows how ‘legal’ harassment can lead to illegal discrimination – CWEB.com

Elizabeth C. Tippett, University of Oregon

Nike’s having its #MeToo moment — and it illustrates plainly what’s still missing from our discussion of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Women at Nike, fed up with the status quo, recently undertook a covert survey asking about sexual harassment and gender discrimination, which eventually reached the CEO of the world’s largest sports brand. Six top executives have resigned or announced their departure.

Nike employees interviewed by The New York Times described being marginalized and passed over for promotion. One recounted a supervisor that called her “stupid bitch.” Another reported an email from a manager about an employee’s breasts. There was the manager who bragged about condoms in his bag and racy magazines on his desk. Oh, and of course there were trips to strip clubs, tacked on to the end of staff outings.

This happened over a period of years. All the while, human resources sat on its hands. The managers kept their jobs. The complaints piled on.

In some ways, it’s the familiar story of how companies have long turned a blind eye to harassment. But it also illustrates, perhaps better than any other example from the #MeToo era, how harassment can be a symptom — and precursor — of workplace discrimination.

And, as I explain in a forthcoming article in the Minnesota Law Review, understanding that link is critical for companies hoping to improve upon past mistakes.

Easy vs. hard

The #MeToo movement has rightly brought attention to questions of sexual harassment and assault. The types of cases that result could be divided into two buckets — what in law school we would label “easy cases” and “hard cases.”

One of the first thing students learn in law school is that “easy cases” refer to those in which the facts are really extreme — where a rule clearly applies or it doesn’t. Here, that would mean egregious examples of sexual harassment, such as allegations of Matt Lauer’s lewd and aggressive behavior toward subordinates.

“Hard cases” refer to situations where it’s harder to figure out whether the parties involved have violated the rule. There might be arguments on both sides, and it might be hard to predict how a court would rule. Or — a favored trap on the bar exam — the conduct might seem really bad as a matter of common sense but doesn’t meet the technical requirements of the legal rule.

The stories coming out of Nike are the hard cases. They do not clearly meet the legal standard for workplace harassment.

The problem of not-quite harassment

The law governing workplace harassment is quite unforgiving. The offensive conduct must be so severe or frequent that it creates an abusive working environment. The conduct must also be motivated by the victim’s membership in a protected category, like their gender or race.

Some legal scholars have argued courts have been too unforgiving in applying this test and that it should be brought closer to commonsense understandings of harassment.

Lawyers and human resources experts have long known that the legal standard for harassment is incredibly high. So companies worked around it by defining harassment very broadly in their policies. This gave companies the power (but not the obligation) to punish employees for violations of the policy. But pre-#MeToo, it seemed companies chose not to act, even when they had the power to do so.

As we now know, this just-do-nothing ethos was a terrible judgment from a moral and public relations standpoint. And while companies may have been correct that a claim may not have been harassment, legally speaking, they completely overlooked their potential liability for future discrimination claims.

Here’s why. A supervisor’s derogatory comments about an employee’s gender, race or religion may not amount to a harassment claim. But they are a smoking gun in a later discrimination claim.

The discrimination blind spot

Discrimination claims are all about the supervisor’s frame of mind when he or she made a decision about an employee promotion, compensation or firing. But since we can’t read someone’s mind, the only thing we have to go on is their comments and behavior.

If a supervisor makes objectifying comments about a woman’s body and then later denies her a promotion, those comments may later be used to show his decision was biased.

The Nike story offers a great illustration of this principle. A manager who views women primarily in terms of condom consumption is probably not also thinking of them as a potential vice president candidate. Nevertheless, it is unsurprising to me that Nike’s human resources department seemingly failed to identify the problem as discrimination when employees complained.

And that’s because, in all likelihood, the discrimination had not yet happened. When the woman complained, it probably wasn’t yet about a lost promotion, unfair compensation or a termination. It was “just” a comment.

Of course, to the employee, it was never just a comment. She would have been keenly aware that her career was in her supervisor’s hands. And that he could no longer be trusted.

This is not really a rare occurrence for women in the U.S. In representative samples, around 25 percent to 40 percent of women report having experienced unwanted sexually based behaviors at work, and 60 percent said they encountered hostile behaviors or comments based on their gender.

It’s as though the employee can see the gun and anticipates the bullet to come. But all human resources sees is a weak harassment complaint unworthy of intervention.

A better way

The #MeToo movement has generated discussion around “zero tolerance” harassment policies, containing perhaps the implied threat that even minor transgressions of the policy will be met with strong punishment.

But because harassment policies already cover the waterfront, they don’t really provide meaningful behavioral guidance. A Pew Research study published in March found that half of all adults surveyed thought that #MeToo made it harder for “men to know how to interact with women in the workplace.”

I actually think a more sustainable approach — which actually better aligns with a company’s true legal risks — would be to beef up anti-discrimination policies.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TXBP1t2rUc&w=560&h=315]

These policies would explain that supervisors are placed in a special position of trust regarding their subordinates’ careers and that supervisors act as the company’s proxy in carrying out the employer’s duty to provide equal employment opportunities.

When a supervisor engages in low-level harassing behaviors or makes derogatory comments based on a employee’s gender, race or religion, it is a breach of that trust.

And it is the company’s duty to make it right.

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Oregon

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why cities are becoming reluctant to host the World Cup and other big events – CWEB.com

Mark Wilson, Michigan State University

Getting ready to welcome millions of visitors — as Russia is now doing in Moscow, Sochi and other cities in advance of the 2018 World Cup soccer tournament — takes years of planning and lots of construction. It’s also expensive: Building 12 stadiums in 11 cities cost Russia an estimated US$11 billion.

When these big events are underway, they always seem worth the money and the trouble. Having worked at three World Expos, attended the Olympics twice and gone to a Tour de France and an Australian Open, I have personally experienced the palpable excitement they offer. But I have also done enough research to see that international extravaganzas don’t always benefit the locals in the long run.

I’m on a team at Michigan State University’s mega-event planning research group that identifies what works and what may prove disastrous.

Here’s what we’ve learned.

Local priorities

An overarching challenge we always see is that the organizations running big events and the public have different priorities. One side mainly cares about boosting its brand through the one-time spectacle’s success. The other wants to raise its profile and acquire new buildings, roads and other infrastructure that will improve the local quality of life in the long run — without breaking the bank.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TXBP1t2rUc&w=560&h=315]

In my view, both FIFA, the global governing body for soccer, and the International Olympic Committee, which organizes the Winter and Summer Games, need to reconsider their business models and start doing more to meet the needs of host cities. Metropolitan areas that successfully host these big events make them a means to an end: becoming better places to live.

Sometimes building what it takes to host a World Cup or other big events dovetails with a city’s ambitions. More often, the extensive preparations distort local priorities. Since the World Cup soccer tournament requires world-class stadiums that some host countries lack when they win the honor of hosting it, a construction frenzy ensues when a metropolitan area has the honor of hosting one.

That was certainly the case with Brazil’s 2014 and South Africa’s 2010 World Cups, when the host countries built several stadiums that soon proved unnecessary.

Likewise, the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro looked great on TV, but left behind many venues that quickly became a shambles following a process riddled with corruption that displaced thousands of people.

Pushback

Despite promises by event organizers and local bid committees, and expectations by the public that the event will solve some of their daily urban problems, host cities often end up with unwanted or unused facilities and saddled with debts that will take decades to repay.

The Olympics, which tend to be concentrated in a single metropolitan area, also often require oddball venues like baseball and beach volleyball stadiums in Athens or Rio’s Whitewater Stadium for canoeing and kayaking that may never be used again because the facilities are not maintained or no one plays that sport in the area.

There is growing public ambivalence to mega events because of debacles like the Athens, Sochi and Rio Olympics, and the South Africa and Brazil World Cups. Of the six finalists for the 2022 Winter Games, four withdrew: Stockholm, Sweden; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine; and Oslo, Norway due to public backlash and cost concerns. That only left Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the eventual winner, Beijing.

Boston and the German city of Hamburg withdrew their 2024 Olympic bids because of the public’s objections. Similarly, Vancouver backed out of the running to host the 2026 World Cup. When local leaders simply express an interest in holding one of these big events these days, a rapid and vocal questioning of the benefits of a bid usually ensues.

Four years before Qatar gets to host the 2022 World Cup, it already promises to serve as another example of what not to do. Hundreds of workers have died from doing dangerous construction related to the event, according to Human Rights Watch, in a process reportedly marked by corruption.

Better options

But to be sure, there are some success stories.

When countries largely have had all the venues they needed, such as the World Cups held in France in 1998 and Germany in 2006, the investments required are more reasonable and practical, since the new venues are sure to be used.

And Los Angeles led the way in 1984 toward finding more efficient ways to host the Olympics by using existing venues and donations for facilities. As that same city plans for the 2028 Olympics, it may once again get a chance to illustrate how cities can up their Olympic game by insisting on construction and other public works that will benefit their communities in the long run.

Mark Wilson, Professor and Program Director, Urban & Regional Planning, School of Planning, Design and Construction, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Should prostitution be decriminalized? – CWEB.com

Kari Lerum, University of Washington, Bothell

Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH which next airs on Tuesday, May 31 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about prostitution and sex work.

But with Amnesty International’s recent unflinching policy recommendation to decriminalize all adult consensual sex work — including their take-down of the Nordic model which claims to punish only clients — it is becoming increasingly difficult for naysayers to ignore the well-documented ways that sex workers are harmed by criminalization.

Amnesty’s position is based on many years of empirical research by leading health and human rights researchers, as well as calls by sex workers and advocates.

While much of the debate on sex work focuses on what is best for “women,” an enormous diversity of individuals trade sex at some point in their lives. This includes not just cisgender women from a range of age, racial, religious, dis/ability and sexual identities, but also transgender women, cisgender men and GLBTQ youth. Yet even when taking into account the diversity of individuals involved and the many settings in which sex is traded and policed, Amnesty studied the accumulating body of evidence and concluded:

to protect the rights of sex workers, it is necessary not only to repeal laws which criminalize the sale of sex, but also to repeal those which make the buying of sex from consenting adults or the organization of sex work (such as prohibitions on renting premises for sex work) a criminal offense.

As Amnesty explains:

Such laws force sex workers to operate covertly in ways that compromise their safety, prohibit actions that sex workers take to maximize their safety, and serve to deny sex workers support or protection from government officials. They therefore undermine a range of sex workers’ human rights, including their rights to security of person, housing and health.

Will Amnesty’s recommendation lead to a change in U.S. policies?

Beliefs versus empirical evidence

The answer to how U.S. lawmakers respond to Amnesty’s call will depend in part on their level of courage to fight other institutional and cultural pressures to maintain and even increase criminal penalties for clients and other individuals connected to the sex industry. But their reactions will also depend on their own personal beliefs.

As someone who has researched and taught about sex work and human trafficking for more than two decades, I know that for some individuals, no amount of evidence or logic will change their opinion that sex work is intrinsically wrong. For them, decriminalizing any form of sex work — including adult consensual encounters — would send the unacceptable message that sex work is a legitimate form of income generation. And it is in this emotional territory where the decision to decriminalize or not rests.

Because of the difficulty in evaluating evidence on emotional topics, my first assignment for students in my Sex Work, Human Trafficking, and Social Justice class is to document their current reactions to the issue of sex work.

I ask students to honestly reflect on how their life experiences might shape the way they approach the issue of exchanging sexual services for pay. At the end of the course I ask students to revisit their feelings. I have found that when given the opportunity to make space for their feelings and to evaluate the best empirical evidence (such as Alexandra Lutnick’s “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains”), most students conclude that adult consensual sex work should be decriminalized. They come to this conclusion even if they still personally do not “believe” in it.

Furthermore, students report that they understand how decriminalization can be one arm of a larger set of strategies to assist victims of structural and individual harms. These harms may include poverty, neglect, police violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

I wish that I could also give this assignment to all policymakers and anti-sex trade activists.

This includes organizations such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), which described Amnesty’s move toward decriminalization a “willful and callous rejection of women’s rights and equality,” and Hollywood celebrities such as Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet who have joined CATW in their opposition to decriminalization. While I have previously written that “it is no longer acceptable to prioritize the opinions of celebrities over those of sex workers and the scientists who advocate for them” — the belief systems underlying these opinions are still important to address.

Prostitution as a trope

As Barb Brents and I point out in our introduction to a special section of Sociological Perspectives on sex work and human trafficking, there has long been a serious decoupling between reliable empirical evidence and sex work policies in the U.S. While there are complex historical and institutional reasons for this disconnect, the answer in part is because sex workers have long served as a trope — a symbol for other people’s agendas.

Of course, sex workers have long been used as punchlines for misogynist jokes. But the symbol of the sex worker is also used by anti-prostitution activists who purportedly want to “help” them. For example, in a recent article discussing sex workers rights in The New York Times Magazine, Yasmeen Hassan, global executive director for Equality Now, expresses the following opinion about sex workers:

They’re sexual objects. What does that mean for how professional women are seen? And if women are sex toys you can buy, think about the relationships between men and women, in marriage or otherwise.

In Hassan’s statement and others like it coming from prohibitionists, a central “problem” of sex work is not what the best empirical evidence says, but what they believe sex workers symbolize. And when one is focused on one’s own symbolic interpretation, it is difficult to listen to conflicting evidence.

Listen to sex workers

Sex workers have long argued that criminalization and policing practices cause and/or exacerbate the worst harms to their well-being. Scientific evidence, as found in Amnesty’s reports, confirms this.

But changing the laws requires policymakers (and to some extent, the larger public) to respect and humanize people who are currently both stigmatized and criminalized.

Sex workers have made some progress in bringing attention to the harms of criminalizing sex work policies. One example is the practice of police using the carrying of condoms as evidence of prostitution. With growing global momentum behind the sex workers’ rights movement, I expect many more successes to come. Yet now is also a critical time for everyday citizens both to check in with their own feelings about the issue and to read and evaluate for themselves the best available empirical evidence.

U.S. history is full of examples of public beliefs and norms lagging behind progressive institutional change. Examples include civil rights for African-Americans, voting rights for women and marriage rights for same-sex couples. Most individuals in the U.S. now believe that upholding the civil rights for those groups was the right thing to do.

Decriminalizing sex work will not on its own fix misogyny, racism and other forms of systemic oppression. But decriminalization of consensual sex work is one key step toward social and sexual justice.

Kari Lerum, Associate Professor, Cultural Studies; Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Bothell

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

That distinctive springtime smell: Asparagus pee – CWEB.com

Sarah Coseo Markt, Harvard University

Along with many other delights, springtime brings the beginning of the asparagus growing season. Regardless of whether you prefer the green, purple or white variety, asparagus provides a rich source of vitamins and minerals, and its consumption as part of a healthy diet may reduce risk of cancer and cardiovascular-related diseases.

Despite the nutritional benefits of asparagus, many are opposed to eating the vegetable due to its pungent aftereffects. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1781, “A few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreable odour.” This odor has become so well known that post-consumption urine is now often referred to as “asparagus pee.”

Scientists believe the odor in question is due to two chemicals: methanethiol and S-methyl thioester. When enzymes in the human digestive tract break down the asparagusic acid that’s naturally present in the vegetable, these volatile compounds are created. When voided from the body, they become foul-smelling gas, wafting up from your asparagus pee.

And just because you don’t smell it doesn’t mean you’re not making it. Two studies have shown that people who are unable to smell the odor in their own urine also don’t detect it in the urine of known producers. Yes, volunteers sniffed samples of other people’s asparagus pee. Though most everyone probably produces the scent to some degree, it seems not everyone’s noses pick up on it.

In fact, a study my colleagues and I conducted last year found that only 40 percent of those surveyed reported detecting the odor in their urine. A lower proportion of women were able to detect the odor, compared to men, despite women being thought to have a more keen sense of smell.

We asked almost 7,000 participants from two large cohort studies to respond to the prompt “After eating asparagus, you notice a strong characteristic odor in your urine.” By linking the questionnaire data with genetic data, we were able to show that the ability to smell or not to smell depends on a person’s genetic makeup. Hundreds of variants in the DNA sequence across multiple genes involved in sense of smell are strongly associated with the ability to detect asparagus metabolites in urine.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TXBP1t2rUc&w=560&h=315]

Asparagus isn’t the only food that has genetically linked controversial smell or taste effects. Some people avoid eating cilantro because they claim it has a “soapy” aftertaste. A study using data from almost 30,000 users of 23andMe found genetic variants in olfactory receptors linked to people’s perception of this adverse taste.

Maybe you can conduct your own survey at the next family meal that includes a platter of asparagus — or soon after.

Sarah Coseo Markt, Research Scientist in Epidemiology, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Smart windows could combine solar panels and TVs too – CWEB.com

Kerry Rippy, Colorado State University

Imagine standing in front of a wall of windows, surveying the view. You hear someone enter the room behind you. You turn. “Welcome,” you say. “Here is the video I wanted to show you.” At the press of a button, the view vanishes and the windows transform into a high-definition TV screen.

No, your friend isn’t James Bond, and you aren’t the next Q. Still, even as you watch the video, your window-TV is doing as much to help avert global catastrophe as any Bond-film gadget ever did. You see, it’s also a solar panel, constantly harvesting renewable energy from the sun. The problem of climate change is not a typical movie supervillain, but it’s a trickier problem than Goldfinger posed. Worse, humanity’s efforts to solve it with existing technologies aren’t working fast enough.

The heroes swooping in to the rescue could be a new technology called organic semiconductors, a new way to make materials that conduct electricity only under certain conditions. Most semiconductors in modern electronics are made of crystalline, rock-forming elements like silicon. Organic semiconductors, by contrast, are made primarily of carbon-based molecules. They take less energy to make than conventional semiconductors. A conventional photovoltaic cell, for instance, can take years to produce as much energy as was required to build it; an organic photovoltaic cell takes just months.

However, perhaps the most exciting thing about organic semiconductors is that it’s possible to design molecules that are flexible, lightweight, colored or completely transparent. In the lab I work in, we design and test new small molecules that have specific, targeted properties — like making a simple transparent pane into a window, screen and solar panel.

Capturing solar energy

Making a solar panel that’s also a window involves a bit of creativity: It has to be something that both absorbs light, to make electricity, and lets light through, to let people see in and out.

Our material takes advantage of the fact that a window only needs to transmit human-visible light; in my lab, we can make molecules that absorb only UV and infrared light, wavelengths of light our eyes don’t see. These are parts of the spectrum we don’t really want to pass through a window anyway. UV light gives you a sunburn. And infrared light is hot: Filtering it out can save on the energy use and expense of air conditioning. It’s true that our method doesn’t capture absolutely all the energy in sunlight, but that’s okay. The amount of solar energy that reaches Earth every hour is more than all humanity uses in a year.

Flipping the process around

Organic semiconductors are also useful for making monitors and displays. If you think about it, a screen is basically a solar panel run backwards. It generates light from an electric current. Both solar panels and display screens involve conversions between light and electricity. Just like we can design transparent organic semiconductors, we can design molecules that emit specific colors of light when an electric current is applied.

Put together one molecule that emits red, one molecule that emits blue, and one molecule that emits green, and you have an organic light-emitting diode. Those are the key to what are known in the TV and monitor marketplace as OLED screens.

To make a smart window, we would need to deposit two layers of organic semiconductors — one layer to generate electricity from sunlight and another to emit light — onto a pan of a transparent conducting material, like indium tin oxide. These technologies exist, but are not yet available for sale.

Putting the pieces together

Half of this device is already commercially available: Energy-efficient high-resolution OLEDs are a big hit in the marketplace for home and office TVs.

Companies selling organic solar panels, and even organic solar panel windows, are just getting going. Ongoing research efforts, like mine, are aimed at optimizing the properties of these materials, increasing their efficiency, and making them more durable.

As we make the components better, we’ll also find ways to integrate organic-semiconductor solar cells and organic-semiconductor displays together. It may be a few years out yet, but there is certainly incentive to do so, with so many possible applications. An electric car with smart windows could collect enough solar energy to drive the car 10 to 15 miles a day, enough for a typical commute. Driving directions could appear on the windshield, too. Anywhere there’s a window — whether in a skyscraper or a mobile home — there could be a smart window, saving space, saving energy and letting the occupants feel like James Bond.

Kerry Rippy, Ph.D. Candidate in Chemistry, Colorado State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why the betrayal of Bill Cosby, Eric Schneiderman and other influential men is deeper than you think – CWEB.com

Hilary Jerome Scarsella, Vanderbilt University

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned on Monday, May 7, hours after The New Yorker published an article in which four women accused him of physical abuse.

This came soon after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced its expulsion of Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski for violating the organization’s standards of conduct. Cosby has been convicted of sexually assaulting a 29-year-old woman Andrea Constand in 2004, and at least 58 women have publicly accused him of sexual assault. Roman Polanski, who admitted to raping a 13-year-old in 1977, has been accused of four other child rapes.

All these men, and many others recently accused of sexual harm, carried enormous cultural influence. Indeed, the academy’s decision to expel Cosby and Polanski revived the age-old question: Can the value of a person’s creative work be separated from the harm of their behavior? As one who studies and writes on sexual violence,
I believe this question fails to recognize the loss resulting from their actions. I’ll focus on Cosby since, of the three figures I have named, he has arguably been the most culturally prized.

How does a society come to terms with the knowledge that a beloved figure has committed sexual assault?

The importance of being Bill Cosby

Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut developed the theory of “self psychology,” based on the idea that one’s sense of self develops – for better and worse – in response to external persons and things. He used the term “selfobject” to refer to those external influences that are so significant that they become a vital part of who a person is.

For Kohut, a “cultural selfobject” is an influential person whose creative work and public presence is vital to the development of selfhood for a group of people.

Cosby is a good example of a cultural selfobject. Affectionately nicknamed “America’s Dad” for his role as Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” Bill Cosby long represented an image of fatherhood, family and upper middle-class life that both reflected and shaped what Americans valued, understood themselves to be, and saw as possible for their lives. In this way, he became part of the American self.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TXBP1t2rUc&w=560&h=315]

Practical theologian Stephanie Crumpton defines cultural selfobjects, in part, as the “public figures who mirror back our value in ways that make us feel uplifted.”

As the first black actor to star in a 1965 American TV drama series, “I Spy,” Cosby also became the first black representation of idealized American values in TV entertainment. Cosby influenced the cultural sense of self held by both white and black Americans. For some white Americans, when Cosby became a household name, he nudged their cultural sense of self beyond their whiteness. For many black Americans, Cosby mirrored back the value of black families, fathers, entertainers and communities that they had been historically denied.

The effects of betrayal

What happens when a person with such deep meaning for one’s sense of self is accused of sexual assault?

Trauma specialist Judith Herman describes the trauma of sexual violence as characterized by betrayal. Being assaulted by someone who is known and trusted shatters a survivor’s basic sense of self and world.

This traumatic betrayal ripples outward and is replicated in a diluted way for all members of a community who invested trust in the one who caused harm.

As a cultural selfobject, Cosby’s acts of violence against individual women were also a betrayal for all those who built a part of themselves in response to the value he mirrored back to them.

He cannot remain a figure who mirrors ideal American cultural values and the value of black American life because his sexual violence — behavior that undeniably rejects the value of women — is incompatible with both.

Because cultural selfobjects shape who we are, this betrayal and loss is profound. It results in a loss of a part of our own selves.

Indeed, some people could argue that accusations of sexual assault have circled publicly for decades. What’s more, Cosby’s criticism of black culture, black women and his tendency to blame black people for the impact of systemic racism on their communities has led many to feel he does not reflect their values. Over the years, this has chipped away at the degree to which he continued to function as a cultural selfobject. Nonetheless, he remained a role model for many, and so the sense of loss is ongoing.

Responding in a constructive way

The next question is, how do we respond?

Herman would say responding well to such a loss involves, at the very least, affirming, rather than denying, it happened.

As a society, acknowledging the loss that resulted from Cosby’s behavior is important because doing so also recognizes the cause. It affirms that survivors’ testimonies are worthy of belief, that sexual violence is a social harm and that it is unacceptable.

This act of internal reckoning makes solidarity more possible with immediate survivors for whom the cost of sexual violence is considerably higher. And solidarity is key for any society wanting to stop sexual violence.

Hilary Jerome Scarsella, PhD Candidate, Vanderbilt University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

A hangover pill? Tests on drunk mice show promise – CWEB.com

Yunfeng Lu, University of California, Los Angeles

“Civilization begins with distillation,” said William Faulkner, a writer and drinker. Although our thirst for alcohol dates back to the Stone Age, nobody has figured out a good way to deal with the ensuing hangover after getting drunk.

As a chemical engineering professor and wine enthusiast, I felt I needed to find a solution. As frivolous as this project may sound, it has serious implications. Between 8 and 10 percent of emergency room visits in America are due to acute alcohol poisoning. Alcohol is the leading risk factor for premature deaths and disability among people aged 15-49 and its abuse leads to serious health problems, including cardiovascular and liver cancer. Despite these sobering facts, current treatments for alcohol overdose largely rely on the body’s own enzymes to break down this drug.

I decided to design an antidote that could help people enjoy wine or cocktails or beer without a hangover, and at the same time create a lifesaving therapy to treat intoxication and overdose victims in the ER. I chose to create capsules filled with natural enzymes usually found in liver cells to help the body process the alcohol faster.

Together with professor Cheng Ji, an expert in liver diseases from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and my graduate student Duo Xu, we developed an antidote and tested it in mice.

Inspired by the body’s approach for breaking down alcohol, we chose three natural enzymes that convert alcohol into harmless molecules that are then excreted. That might sound simple, because these enzymes were not new, but the tricky part was to figure out a safe, effective way to deliver them to the liver.

To protect the enzymes, we wrapped each of them in a shell, using a material the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had already approved for pills. We then injected these nanocapsules into the veins of drunk mice where they hurtled through the circulatory system, eventually arriving in the liver where they entered the cells and served as mini—reactors to digest alcohol.

We showed that in inebriated mice (which fall asleep much faster than drunk humans), the treatment decreased the blood alcohol level by 45 percent in just four hours compared to mice that didn’t receive any. Meanwhile, the blood concentration of acetaldehyde — a highly toxic compound that is carcinogenic, causes headaches and vomiting, makes people blush after drinking, and is produced during the normal alcohol metabolism — remained extremely low. The animals given the drug woke from their alcohol-induced slumber faster than their untreated counterparts — something all college students would appreciate.

The ability to efficiently break down alcohol quickly should help patients wake up earlier and prevent alcohol poisoning. It should also protect their liver from alcohol—associated stress and damage.

We are currently completing tests to ensure that our nanocapsules are safe and don’t trigger unexpected or dangerous side effects. If our treatments prove effective in animals, we could begin human clinical trials in as early as one year.

This sort of antidote won’t stop people from going too far when consuming alcohol, but it could help them recover quicker. In the meantime, we plan on drinking responsibly, and hope that you do too.

Yunfeng Lu, Professor Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal will effect Iran’s economy – CWEB.com

Negar Habibi, King’s College London

Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal doesn’t just have important political and security implications. Because sanctions are at the heart of the deal, it will also have a significant economic impact. Just how big this is depends on the response of the European signatories to the deal — the UK, France and Germany.

The Iran deal did not have as big an effect on Iran’s economy as it might have had. It was reached in November 2015, shortly before the start of the US electoral season and almost all the US presidential candidates took a harder line on Iran than Barack Obama. So, although the deal removed major legal barriers to trade with Iran, many businesses were waiting for the outcome of the US elections before approaching the Iranian market.

Some European businesses entered Iran following the nuclear deal, but the most disruptive banking restrictions effectively remained in place, as major European banks refused to work with Iran, especially once Donald Trump was elected. As a result Iran did not receive the full economic benefits it expected from the deal, even before Trump’s decision to withdraw.

Despite this, the deal did have some major effects on Iran’s economy. It resulted in a doubling of Iran’s oil exports, helped stabilise the foreign exchange market, created jobs and — most importantly — optimism to the overall trend of the economy.

The US withdrawal will weaken all the deal’s achievements but will not necessarily do away with them entirely. That depends on the rest of the world’s response.

If Europe ignores the US …

Europe now has a major role in determining the fate of the Iran deal. It will be very difficult to maintain the deal without the US as many of the unilateral US sanctions, are secondary sanctions that penalise non-American firms for trading with Iran. From a purely economic point of view, Europe might not find it worthwhile to confront the US over Iran, as it will be costly to oppose the US secondary sanctions.

But Europe has a lot to lose if the deal collapses from a security and political point of view. Trump’s move has been a humiliating rejection of the advice of his European counterparts to keep it. Its collapse and the potential for tensions to escalate poses a major security threat to the Middle East, which European leaders want to avoid. So, despite the economic costs, Europe might still decide to oppose the US, as Trump is effectively gambling Europe’s security to please his voters.

If Europe, along with China and Russia, decides to ignore the US, a non-dollar method of payment will be needed to secure Iranian oil transactions and protect European firms doing business with Iran from the US sanctions. In that case Iran will get access to its oil money. Plus, major industries like petrochemicals and cars, whose main trading partners are in Asia and to a lesser extent Europe, will continue to benefit.

As for the private sector, many businesses might still decide not to enter Iran, as it remains a high-risk environment. But at least those who have already entered the country will not be forced to leave. It will also create some confidence in the economy, which will help the Iranian private sector and small and medium firms.

Worst case scenario …

If Europe fails to find a way to avoid the US secondary sanctions, things will return to the situation between 2010-15. The significant loss of oil revenues will result in further devaluation of Iran’s currency, the rial, which has already lost its value against dollar by almost three times due to the recent uncertainties around the deal.

At the wider economic level this bring with it higher inflation and lower growth. For Iranian companies it will increase their operating costs, particularly those that rely on foreign markets for either their inputs or exports.

The sense of urgency in the sanctions environment will justify higher government intervention in the economy, which could lead to price and capital controls. The Iranian government has already put a tight capital control in place in anticipation of reduced oil revenues.

Government controls along with blockage of formal routes of financial transactions will create an incentive for smuggling and black markets. The main beneficiaries of these are the people and institutions involved in money laundering and other forms of illegal activities — not only inside Iran but also in its neighbouring countries.

In the long run, the Iranian economy under sanctions will become more reliant on the government and public sector. Sanctions weaken the private sector and small and medium firms who cannot bear the high costs of operating under them. This means a shrinking of the middle class, which will only increase support for populist politicians that are more confrontational towards the West.

Negar Habibi, PhD Candidate in Political Economy, King’s College London

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Smart Tips to Protect Your Identity in Search Engines – CWEB.com

By: Leslie Cohen

Managing Editor/CWEB

The web is an open source model for your personal information to get into the wrong hands.

“It’s time to get educated about identity theft. You need to be a little wiser, quite a bit smarter, and there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. We live in a time when if you make it easy for someone to steal from you, someone will.” Frank Abagnale

Identity theft, stalkers, lawyers, collection agencies, nosy co-workers, potential employers doing background checks, data hackers, creepy guys on dating sites, and stalkers are sniffing for information to abuse your personal information.

How to protect your personal information from public view.

Make sure to adjust your privacy options when signing up for social networking sites. It is recommended to use an alias name as a screen name, and never place your date of birth, real zip code, real phone number, and address in any website that involves social networking or dating.

Even if you have no plans to use a social venue, it’s a preventative measure to register a profile with your real name if that name has not registered. The same holds true for businesses looking to protect their identity. This helps to protect duplicate information of your business name for someone to pose as you.    If you own the intellectual property, domains, and trademarks, register all these names on every social site. It’s valuable online real estate. A little more on this below.

For example, Instagram is not for everyone or every business. Think of the venue or any other social networking platform as “free valuable real estate” for your personal use or business promotional use.

Is this Fail proof?   Of course not!    Advanced data stealers have a more sophisticated way around this.

Not all social networking sites work this way, there are hundreds of people with the same name allowed, such as on Facebook or LinkedIn.

If you’re lucky enough to get emails with all the free email sites with your full name, you can do that too- but it  guarantees no cloak of protection to the sophisticated perpetrator, using spam bots utilizing email addresses for identity fraud. It is best to use different emails for your social accounts and bank accounts. Banks and other websites have a two-step protocol, where you can get a text confirmation code to log on in addition to your password.

Protecting a Valuable Asset- Your Intellectual Property

If you are a domain holder, it is advised to register your domain as a private registration. Private domain registration will prevent email spamming, as your email, address and points of contact remain under the privacy cloak of private registration.

If you are a trademark holder, or holder of any pending registrations and have not appointed an attorney with an address on the record, set up a corporation in a state such as Delaware where owner information is not publically listed online. You can use a mailing address at a UPS store, or a U.S. Post Office box valid to receive correspondence. Everything listed in registering a trademark or patent is public information, even in the pre-registration application stage.

It’s been publicized that Twitter bots are stealing social media identities for profit.

The IFTF is a research company that makes sense of merging trends that are forces in changing the world. The institute purchased thousands of retweets for a research test for a monetary fraction and the bots retweeted up to 10,000 times for the holder of their account within a few days.

Twitter says in their policies it works to prevent any  manipulation. In today’s plethora of fake news and scammers, web users must err on the side of caution and approach certain things with a subjective view. The debacle of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook should not be surprising. As of this writing- Cambridge Analytica is shutting down.

Was this a big deal? Yes- personal information was leaked out all over the web to app developers.

Facebook will now tell users which websites are tracking them on the web and give users the option to delete their personal data. The program called “Clear History”  will let you opt out; your data will be cleared and so will all the cookies stored. When your data kept intact, cookies can make your user experience on Facebook a better one, as it already has your preference stored.

The only people that should have personal information about you should be your family, your banks, your medical doctor, and the IRS. Make sure you opt out of any 3rd party affiliates at your bank soliciting for home loans, credit cards, and new business. If you need these services, contact the banks directly. Don’t allow 3rd party affiliates to have this information from you from your banks. Your information is most likely to be resold over and over again.

Banks are now required by law to let you opt out of 3rd party advertisers. Contact each of your banks for the procedures to keep your information private and not offered to affiliates.

Your profiles on Facebook, Instagram, My Space, LinkedIn, and Classmates.com, and genealogy websites should be in private mode so only your online friends can view your information. LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to keep parts of your profile private and some public. While these are still are not fail-safe solutions, as any data can be compromised. It is best to choose the most private options available to you.

 What is Seeding Your Information?

There is a real truth on how data from your social networks get into the hands of data mining companies. Trackers can obtain your private information with seeding, which means where you are marketed to a link that offers a prize with a contest. You fill out the online survey request and your data is targeted along with your other friend’s data on your friend’s list, and then they begin to receive the same survey. Instead of using typical browser date, canvas fingerprinting utilizes the HTML 5 element to identify you instead of traditional cookies.

Data is usually collected by companies like Intellidyn, Tower Data, formerly Rapleaf, and Exelate. Exelate, a Nielson company. The company tracks your web searching and does have an online opt-out page to prevent your web searching from being analyzed.    They don’t ask for information from you when you opt-out, it is quite obvious they can see your IP and cookies automatically when opting out. Click the link to opt out of Exelate and then scroll down. You will see the data that they know about you, such as household income, age, and demographics.

Additionally, you check the other sites for their options such as NetworkAdvertising.org and AboutAds.info. You can contact these companies to help manage your privacy online. They work with the clearing houses and offer information on how to opt out of member ad networks.    You may search the term “opt-out of lists” in Google Chrome and Mozilla links to further the opt-out process with other types of reporting agencies.

Solutions To Keep You Safer.

Search your name and see if it appears on a website like Spokeo.com, My Life.com, Intellius.com, People Search.com, Emailfinder .com. Archives.com and a host of other sites. You will need to contact these companies directly and tell them that you want your information removed.

Instead of paying some of these websites to remove your information such as Reputation.com, you can also ask Google to remove it. Maybe you see a dead link for your business you want to be removed.

Run a search on Google not using the “Safe Search” filter and see if any derogatory information comes up on you before contacting Google. In addition, sign up for a Google account for the Google webmaster tool. The webmaster tools help webmasters control information or images that appear in the Google search.

If you find a page in Google search results that lists your personal info such as a credit card or social security number, contact Google to submit the request to contact the websites hosting company to request that the page, and have it taken down immediately.

To start the process to remove the information from its search results, email removals@google.com to eliminate your personal information from the Google index and cached pages. For that sensitive information, also contact law enforcement as that publically endorsed information is a federal crime.

If you see your phone number displayed in Google Search, fill out this form here for a removal request at .https://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html

Google states this on the page “To remove your residential listing information from the Google phonebook, please fill out the form below, entering all information exactly as it appears in your phonebook entry. Doing so will mean your residential listing does not appear in Google for any phonebook search, even searches conducted on your name instead of your phone number. This removal is permanent, and   it’s not possible to add your phone number again in the future.” Be cautious about this if you are a business,  listed in Google.   A business phone will enhance your visibility and exposure online.

How To Remove A Listing From Public Phone Search Sites

Removing a listing from Google will not remove personal information from other pages on the web or from other reverse phone listing lookup services, such as SpyDialer.com, Anywho, White Pages.com Reverse Phone Directory, Phonenumber.com, and Smartpages.com. These companies have listing removal links to request the removal of information. By law, these services must comply with the law. Proving ownership of the data is required.

Set up a Google Alert for  your name and phone numbers. When this information appears and gets indexed an email alert will be sent to see where the link is. Step Rep is another monitoring system https://www.steprep.com/. It allows checking up how business competitors stack up against your business in online searches.

There is a browser extension that can control ads and tracking technologies to speed up page loads, eliminate clutter, and protect surfing data. Downloading Ghostery at www.ghostery.com, which is a browser extension that lets users see who is tracking them when  visiting websites. It allows the ability to block scripts from untrusted companies, delete local shared objects, and the ability to block images. PrivacyChoice.org lists tracking data for over 250 sites and helps people opt out.

Reputation.com claims to remove and or bury data in the Google search engine and others for a monthly fee. The company claims will spend time adding back in positive data about you in the form of press releases and article mentions, and how to raise reputation scores higher than normal, so the other data gets buried. Only a legal action with the search engine can remove information that has caused defamation or libel against that has caused relevant harm. Contact an attorney that can execute a cease and desist request to the perpetrator.

Yahoo and Lycos’s People Search is powered by Acxiom. To remove basic search info from Yahoo, visit Yahoo Privacy Policy and other search engines, and view the privacy policy links.

Be sure to check the cell phone carriers and landline carriers. Verizon will no longer allow customers cell phone information to be purchased from companies that use your phone numbers in any public databases. The cellphone carriers were selling data to sites such as Intellius and others that list phone number searches and reverse lookups.

Make sure to understand the  ”Terms of Use”, because without reading or understanding them, like those apps on your cell phone you sign up for, they can be harvesting your personal information and selling it. The credit bureaus give away your information, which is how the credit card companies market to you, when you get those credit card offers in the mail. Don’t look away from those pesky telemarketers. You can register at https://donotcall.gov/ to keep your phone number on the “Do Not Call” List for telemarketers.

Can Property Records be Removed?

If you own property in your name it is likely to be searched and found on Zillow.com, the state’s local assessors’ office, county recorder’s office, and property record search websites to name a few. Property records are not private. Type in the name of a property owner and their address, city, and state and the top listings are companies that list real estate property records.

Can You Remove Information From State and City Records?

It’s almost impossible to remove information on deed searches, and conveyances in the chain of title. Deeds filed at the county clerk’s office are public record, as are taxes, and liens etc.    It is best to form an LLC /Corporation that will own the real estate.

Open Government Guide lists the open laws of each state.

Vpn’s Are They Worth It?

You can sign up for a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service which hides your actual I.P address, but they may be just a glorified proxy.    VPN marketers can use other metrics to identify you. That can be anything from a user-agent to a fingerprinting profile. A VPN cannot guarantee your anonymity. It has been said that VPN’s merely funnel the secure keystrokes through a proxy that can log them. Additionally, it may be safer to use the secure (https:) If you use TOR, the IP address you connect to changes about every 10 minutes, and often more frequently than that. This makes it much harder for websites to create any sort of consistent profile of Tor users. The Tor Project website delves deeper into that process.

In Final

Search yourself on the web with reverse phone lookup websites. Check these sites periodically to see how all your telephone numbers, name and addresses appear on the internet.

Make sure to monitor your credit report every 30 days. Sign up for a monitoring service that alerts to any changes in your report. There are many services out there such as Lifelock.com, Equifax-ID, Patrol, and ID Watch Dog to name a few. Start with a free credit report at Equifax or Trans Union. By law, you can get a free one every year.

Set up a Google Alert with your name and phone numbers. If your name appears and gets indexed, you will receive an email alert to see the link. Furthermore, make sure to monitor how your business competitors stack up against you in online searches, monitor reviews and ratings, and listings of your business with a   reputation monitoring program Network Solutions product – Reputation Alert

Your shampoo, hair spray and skin lotion may be polluting the air – CWEB.com

Matthew Coggon, University of Colorado

Millions of Americans apply personal care products every morning before heading to work or school. But these products don’t stick to our bodies permanently. Over the course of the day, compounds in deodorants, lotions, hair gels and perfumes evaporate from our skin and eventually make their way outdoors. Now there’s new evidence to suggest that these products are major sources of air pollution in urban areas.

For decades, motor vehicles were considered the primary source of air pollutants in major U.S. cities. Vehicle exhaust contains multiple pollutants that worsen air quality, including nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — a group of reactive gases that contribute to smog formation.

Thanks to advances in catalytic converters and improvements in fuel economy, combined emissions of common pollutants from cars have decreased by 65 percent since the 1970s. Air pollution is still a problem in urban areas like Los Angeles, but only a fraction of it can be attributed to vehicles. Today, scientists are finding that other non-combustion sources — including common household products — are also major contributors.

A unique fingerprint

In a recent study with U.S. and Canadian colleagues, our lab found that these sources can include personal care products. We analyzed urban air in two cities: Boulder, Colorado, and Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

In Boulder, our lab had recently invested in new instrumentation, which we wanted to use to measure wood stove emissions during winter months. For five weeks we sampled air from the roof of the NOAA David Skaggs Research Center in hope of measuring air parcels contaminated with smoke from residential wood stoves. Surprisingly, we noticed a signal that stood out unexpectedly from all the other data. This compound, which we identified as decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (or D5 siloxane), contains silicon, which uniquely differs from the organic compounds we normally detect.

By reviewing scientific literature, we learned that pure D5 siloxane is produced mainly as an additive for deodorants and hair care products. On average, people use products that contain a total of about 100-200 milligrams of D5 every day — roughly the weight of half an aspirin tablet. Some fraction of these products end up going down the drain when we shower, but the majority of what remains on our bodies ends up in the atmosphere. D5 can also be found in many other places, including soil, oceans and the tissues of fish and human beings

Many labs have studied the environmental fate of D5, but from our perspective it is particularly useful because it acts like a fingerprint. If we detect D5 in the atmosphere, we know that the air mass we measured was influenced by emissions from personal care products. By comparing the amount of D5 in the atmosphere to other fingerprint markers, such as compounds present in vehicle exhaust, we can estimate how important personal care products are as an emissions source relative to better-understood sources.

Emissions spike during morning rush hour

In Boulder and Toronto, we found that D5 was present in urban air at mass concentrations comparable to those of benzene, a chemical that is a marker for vehicle exhaust. (Benzene is a known carcinogen and is also found in industrial emissions and cigarette smoke.)

D5 concentrations were highest in the morning — the time when most people shower, apply personal care products and then leave the house to commute to work. We also observed a peak in benzene emissions in the morning, when people drive to work. During morning rush hour, we found that emissions of D5 and benzene were almost equivalent.

In other words, at this time of day, people emitted a plume of organic compounds that was comparable in mass to the plume of organic compounds emitted from their vehicles. Researchers still have a lot to learn about how these chemicals react in the atmosphere to form smog, so the air quality implications of these morning emissions remain unclear.

Benzene emissions remained high throughout the day as people drove around the city, but D5 emissions eventually tapered off as personal care products evaporated from users’ skin. We estimate that, on average, the entire population of the city of Boulder emits 3 to 5 kilograms (6 to 11 pounds) of D5 per day, and that their cars emit about 15 kilograms of benzene in vehicle exhaust.

VOC emissions from your medicine cabinet

While these numbers may seem surprisingly high, our findings support recent modeling work conducted by Brian McDonald, a co-author of this study, which showed that personal care product VOC emissions in Los Angeles now rival VOC emissions from gasoline and diesel exhaust. Taken together, these two studies demonstrate that our urban air is remarkably different from what it was decades ago. Cars today emit fewer smog-inducing organic compounds, while other sources are now becoming important contributors to air pollution.

D5 is only one component of personal care product emissions, and many other compounds could be emitted with it. To fully assess how seriously these emissions may affect the environment and human health, researchers have to answer many more questions. What other compounds enter the atmosphere after we apply personal care products? Once in the atmosphere, what happens to them? Are they capable of contributing to smog formation? Our lab and others around the country are considering these questions now in hopes of improving our understanding of urban air pollution.

Matthew Coggon, Research scientist, University of Colorado

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TXBP1t2rUc&w=560&h=315]

This article was originally published on The Conversation.