Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alternative abortion history

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 No comments

by Irin Carmon

Last Friday, some of the most distinguished scholars and litigants working on gender and the law gathered to honor a foremother and inspiration, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as Columbia University Law School marked the 40th anniversary of Ginsburg becoming the first tenured female professor there.

But there was another 40th anniversary as well, one less-known, but very much on Ginsburg’s mind. It has been 40 years since she filed a brief before the Supreme Court for a case she wishes had established the abortion right instead of Roe v. Wade.

That was the case of Capt. Susan Struck, who had become pregnant in 1970. The Air Force demanded she either terminate the pregnancy — abortions were being conducted on bases back then — or leave her post. Struck, a Catholic, said she wouldn’t have an abortion but would put the child up to adoption without taking off any unusual amount of medical leave. Though she lost both at the district court and the circuit-court level, she appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear her case until Solicitor General Erwin Griswold persuaded the Air Force to simply waive her discharge and change the rule. Ginsburg was disappointed.

“I thought if Susan’s case came first,” she said — before Roe, which would be heard a year later — it would be preferable for the goals of women’s equality, because “her choice was birth. Solicitor General Griswold saw to it that we did not have that opportunity.” (This was the same Griswold who, as dean of Harvard Law School, asked the rare women in Ginsburg’s class how they justified taking spots that should have gone to men. Ginsburg later transferred to Columbia Law School.)

Read article: Struck By Stereotype: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Pregnancy Discrimination as Sex Discrimination

Alternate downloading site: Struck by Stereotype

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 No comments

by Chad Orzel

As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them revise.

One of the many, many problems with teaching writing is that too many students regard the writing of drafts as pointless busy-work. Others have no real concept of what a rough draft is-- when I've collected drafts in the past, I often get things that would barely qualify as an outline, let alone a draft. Already this term, I've had to explain severl times that when I ask for a draft of the final paper, I want a draft of the whole thing.

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There are signs that the Syrian regime may become still more violent

Tuesday, February 14, 2012 No comments

Media review: Here is how the Economist sees the crisis in Syria:

SECURITY men, most in plain clothes, speckle the main market square of Deraa, a town of 350,000 near Syria’s border with Jordan. Yet in the brief time given for visiting journalists to stray from a scripted tour that highlights “terrorist” attacks on state property, a few ordinary citizens dare to speak. “We are so scared,” says a woman clutching a boy’s hand. “I come out to buy food, which costs more every day, but never know if I can make it home again.” A young man with burning, bloodshot eyes lifts his shirt, revealing two bullet scars. “We will never give up,” he declares as men in leather jackets approach to hustle him off. A middle-aged shopper pauses briefly before slipping into an alley. “God help us,” he whispers in deliberate English.

It was in Deraa that Syria’s uprising began last March, with riots protesting against the arrest and nail-pulling torture of teenage boys who, inspired by other Arab revolts unfolding on satellite television, had daubed a wall with the words, “The people demand the fall of the regime”. An ongoing government crackdown has left perhaps 1,000 civilians dead in the town and surrounding villages, imposing an ice-thin calm. Most shops and schools are open only some of the time. Internet-video footage reveals daily combat between chanting, rock-throwing citizens and soldiers shooting live rounds. Officials speak of sporadic “terrorist” attacks on sandbagged checkpoints. As proof they parade a collection of captured pipe bombs and rusted firearms. Clearly though, should the government withdraw its armoured vehicles, combat troops, rooftop snipers and gun-toting thugs, then Deraa would swiftly revert to rebel rule.

Monday, February 13, 2012

U.S. officials: Al Qaida behind Syria bombings

Monday, February 13, 2012 No comments

by Jonathan S. Landay

The Iraqi branch of al Qaida, seeking to exploit the bloody turmoil in Syria to reassert its potency, carried out two recent bombings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and likely was behind suicide bombings Friday that killed at least 28 people in the largest city, Aleppo, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

The officials cited U.S. intelligence reports on the incidents, which appear to verify Syrian President Bashar Assad's charges of al Qaida involvement in the 11-month uprising against his rule. The Syrian opposition has claimed that Assad's regime, which has responded with massive force against the uprising, staged the bombings to discredit the pro-democracy movement calling for his ouster.

The international terrorist network's presence in Syria also raises the possibility that Islamic extremists will try to hijack the uprising, which would seriously complicate efforts by the United States and its European and Arab partners to force Assad's regime from power. On Friday, President Barack Obama repeated his call for Assad to step down, accusing his forces of "outrageous bloodshed."

Thursday, February 09, 2012

British, Qatari troops already waging secret war in Syria?

Thursday, February 09, 2012 No comments

British, Qatari troops already waging secret war in Syria?

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Why do women have casual sex? Casual Sex: Are Men and Women So Different?

Wednesday, February 08, 2012 No comments

A researcher upends traditional thinking and argues that both genders are looking for the same thing: Pleasure.

“Sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive.” For decades, psychologists have relied on this mantra to explain why women are sexually choosy and men are sexually promiscuous. However, if women are so prudish, who exactly are men getting lucky with? Perhaps “sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive” is only half of the story, and something besides the scarcity of their eggs drives female sexuality … In a classic study by Clark and Hatfield (1989), women solicited a one-night stand to male strangers and men solicited a one-night stand to female strangers on a college campus. Results showed that men were much more willing to accept sex with a stranger than were women. In fact, women declined casual sex offers 100 percent of the time; men only declined casual sex offers 25 to 31 percent of the time. These findings dramatically demonstrated that men and women differ in their mating behaviors, with women appearing sexually prude compared to men. The study became quite influential in academic psychology, and it has been cited in over 350 published reports.

Despite the startling results of Clark and Hatfield’s (1989) study, it is possible that differences in the solicitors influenced the results. That is, women might have perceived male solicitors as aggressive and violent, while men might have perceived female solicitors as nurturing and warm. Perhaps women avoid casual sexual encounters with unfamiliar partners because they want to avoid potentially unpleasant or dangerous sexual experiences, and men accept these encounters more readily because they expect women to be nurturing, pleasant sexual partners.

Psychologist Terri Conley (2011) recently explored these possibilities by reconstructing the Clark and Hatfield study with several new manipulations. In particular, Conley (2011) found that women and men do indeed have different perceptions of one another in a casual sex scenario: female solicitors were considered warmer, more generous, and better sexual partners overall than were males. To test whether these perceptual differences influenced peoples’ willingness to accept casual sex offers, she examined whether bisexual women were more likely to accept a casual sexual encounter with another woman than with a man. As expected, bisexual women were much more likely to accept casual sex offers from women than from men.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Tunisian Minister: “A Foreign country is intent on destabilizing Tunisia”

Tuesday, February 07, 2012 No comments

Arab Spring News Digest:

On February 4, and two days after the Tunisian security forces killed two members of an armed group and arrested a third, the Education minister accused a foreign country of “pumping large sums of money to destabilize the country." Moucef Ben Salim, minister of higher education and member of Ennahda, made his accusation in Sfax, the scene of the deadly clash that left a policeman and three soldiers wounded, one of them critically, according to the state news agency. He said the Interpol is conducting an investigation to track the source of funding for "terrorist groups."

The incident took place in the southern region of Bir Ali Ben Khalifa. Ali Laaridh, Interior Minister, described it as “serious.” The armed group, consisting of three “bearded men” opened fire with assault rifles at a checkpoint then escaped into a nearby olive forest. Police announced that they found weapons and lists of names of people from all over the country in the get way car.

The interior minister indicated that police seized more than 600 weapons in 2011, believed to be coming through Libya. Many Tunisians accuse some of the Gulf States of using Tunisia to arm radical Salafi Libyan groups that participated in the overthrow of Qaddafi. Many Tunisians protested the Qatar rulers interference in the region. Others are angry because Saudi Arabia refuses to handover the former dictator, Ben Ali. The presence of the Salafis in Tunisia, generally seen as a Saudi influenced movement, as an attempt to spread Saudi ideology in North Africa.

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Could a College Scorecard Backfire? It Did for Law Students

Sunday, February 05, 2012 No comments

In an ostensibly unrelated story a few days later, a group of lawyers filed suits against a dozen different law schools accusing them of using rosy, and grossly distorted, jobs data to dupe students into applying. They followed three similar suits filed last year, including one against Thomas M. Cooley Law School, which is the largest law school by enrollment in the country. The cases are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars, tuition refunds, and reforms to the way law schools calculate and present their jobs data.

Yes, these cases sound like a bad joke -- If a law school loses a suit to its recently graduated students, does that make it a terrible law school or a great one? -- but they offer a lesson that the administration should keep in mind if it's serious about pushing schools to collect job numbers. Bad data can be much, much worse than no data at all. And without serious oversight, there's a good chance you'll end up with some terribly misleading numbers.

Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight

Sunday, February 05, 2012 No comments

by TAMAR LEWIN

SEATTLE — This is the University of Washington’s new math: 18 percent of its freshmen come from abroad, most from China. Each pays tuition of $28,059, about three times as much as students from Washington State. And that, according to the dean of admissions, is how low-income Washingtonians — more than a quarter of the class — get a free ride.

With state financing slashed by more than half in the last three years, university officials decided to pull back on admissions offers to Washington residents, and increase them to students overseas.

That has rankled some local politicians and parents, a few of whom have even asked Michael K. Young, the university president, whether their children could get in if they paid nonresident tuition. “It does appeal to me a little,” he said.

There is a widespread belief in Washington that internationalization is the key to the future, and Mr. Young said he was not at all bothered that there were now more students from other countries than from other states. (Out-of-state students pay the same tuition as foreign students.)

“Is there any advantage to our taking a kid from California versus a kid from China?” he said. “You’d have to convince me, because the world isn’t divided the way it used to be.”

If the university’s reliance on full-freight Chinese students to balance the budget echoes the nation’s dependence on China as the largest holder of American debt, well, said the dean of admissions, Philip A. Ballinger, “this is a way of getting some of that money back.”

By the reckoning of the Institute of International Education, foreign students in the United States contribute about $21 billion a year to the national economy, including $463 million here in Washington State. But the influx affects more than just the bottom line — campus culture, too, is changing.

While the University of Washington’s demographic shifts have been sharper and faster — international students were 2 percent of the freshmen in 2006 — similar changes are under way at flagship public universities across the nation: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles all had at least 10 percent foreign freshmen this academic year, more than twice that of five years ago. And at top private schools including Columbia University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, at least 15 percent of this year’s freshmen are from other countries.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Exercise and longevity: Worth all the sweat

Thursday, February 02, 2012 No comments

ONE sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.

Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.

To carry out the test, Dr Levine turned to those stalwarts of medical research, genetically modified mice. Her first batch of rodents were tweaked so that their autophagosomes—structures that form around components which have been marked for recycling—glowed green. After these mice had spent half an hour on a treadmill, she found that the number of autophagosomes in their muscles had increased, and it went on increasing until they had been running for 80 minutes.

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