List Of Classes Research Articles

THE INFLUENCE OF MALE ADOLESCENT REBELLION ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine influence of male adolescent rebellion on academic performance in public secondary schools in Kiambu district. Methodology: The study used ex-post facto research design. Stratified sampling was used to select the participants in the study. Schools were stratified into single sex and co-education schools. Systematic sampling using the class lists was used to identify the students who constituted the sample. The research instruments were the students’ questionnaire, the deputy principal’s and the teacher counsellor’s interview guide. The sample constituted 240 male students, six deputy principles and six teacher counselors. A pilot study was done to pre-test the research instruments so as to estimate their reliability and validity. Data collected was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings were presented using descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics included, frequency distribution, means, bar graphs, and tabulated according to the research objectives. Inferential statistics used included Chi Square and pearson correlation to test the hypotheses at 90% and 95% level of confidence; correlation coefficient was used to measure the strength of linear relationship between the variables of the study.Results: The results indicated that there was no statistically significant relationship between adolescent rebellion and academic performanceUnique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study came up with a model that is recommended to schools for adoption by guidance and counselling teachers to help create awareness and understanding to both the students and parents with the aim of improving or bettering their relationship, academic performance and prevent rebellion in public secondary schools.

THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL DEMANDINGNESS ON MALE ADOLESCENT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of parental demandingness on male adolescent academic performance in public secondary schools in Kiambu district. Methodology: The study used ex-post facto research design. Stratified sampling was used to select the participants in the study. Schools were stratified into single sex and co-education schools. Systematic sampling using the class lists was used to identify the students who constituted the sample. The research instruments were the students’ questionnaire, the deputy principal’s and the teacher counsellor’s interview guide. The sample constituted 240 male students, six deputy principles and six teacher counselors. A pilot study was done to pre-test the research instruments so as to estimate their reliability and validity. Data collected was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings were presented using descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics included, frequency distribution, means, bar graphs, and tabulated according to the research objectives. Inferential statistics used included Chi Square and pearson correlation to test the hypotheses at 90% and 95% level of confidence; correlation coefficient was used to measure the strength of linear relationship between the variables of the study.Results: The results indicated that rebellious behaviour was positively and significantly correlated to parental demandingness.Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study came up with a model that is recommended to schools for adoption by guidance and counselling teachers to help create awareness and understanding to both the students and parents with the aim of improving or bettering their relationship, academic performance and prevent rebellion in public secondary schools.

THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTAL DEMANDINGNESS ON MALE ADOLESCENT REBELLIOUS BEHAVIOUR IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of parental demandingness on male adolescent rebellious behaviour in public secondary schools in Kiambu district. Methodology: The study used ex-post facto research design. Stratified sampling was used to select the participants in the study. Schools were stratified into single sex and co-education schools. Systematic sampling using the class lists was used to identify the students who constituted the sample. The research instruments were the students’ questionnaire, the deputy principal’s and the teacher counsellor’s interview guide. The sample constituted 240 male students, six deputy principles and six teacher counselors. A pilot study was done to pre-test the research instruments so as to estimate their reliability and validity. Data collected was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings were presented using descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics included, frequency distribution, means, bar graphs, and tabulated according to the research objectives. Inferential statistics used included Chi Square and pearson correlation to test the hypotheses at 90% and 95% level of confidence; correlation coefficient was used to measure the strength of linear relationship between the variables of the study.Results: The results indicated that rebellious behaviour was positively and significantly correlated to parental demandingness.Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study came up with a model that is recommended to schools for adoption by guidance and counselling teachers to help create awareness and understanding to both the students and parents with the aim of improving or bettering their relationship, academic performance and prevent rebellion in public secondary schools.

POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING AUTOMATED LABORATORY (AUTOLAB) SYSTEM FOR TRANSACTION AND EQUIPMENT MONITORING

The aim of the study is to implement bar coding system as mechanism for the PUP ECE Laboratory Transaction recording and monitoring. The study was concerned on proper documenting and managing the daily transaction of the ECE Laboratory particularly to automate the existing manual mechanism procedure with the proposed AutoLab System. The study used QuasiExperimental method as it included both experimental and descriptive method to gather data for the study. Experimental in a way that the system was subjected to series of experiments to test its accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness and reliability using the singlegroup design. Two main experiments have been conducted the test for accuracy of the system in transaction recording and the equipment inventory monitoring. Test for accuracy was divided into four parts namely (1) Borrowing of Key; (2) Borrowing of Equipment; (3) Returning of Keys; and, (4) Returning of Equipment. On the other hand, the equipment inventory monitoring incorporates the analysis of the equipment utilization; from such as what equipments are usually borrowed, in what subjects a certain equipment is being used and the history of usage for a given equipment. The descriptive part was used to evaluate the system in three variables the Graphical User Interface, the Accuracy of Information displayed and the Transaction Recording duly rated from scales 1 to 5; 5 being the highest through survey among the ECE students and faculty members. The ECE Room Utilization Log Book, ECE Transaction Log Book and the Borrower’s Slips have been analyzed to assess the existing transaction recording and inventory monitoring. Results showed that the AutoLab System effectively automated the recording of transactions merging the existing manual method into one recording mechanism. Manual transaction recording cannot provide a 100% effectivity since there were percentages of 9.39% of the 2300 ECE Room Utilization Log Book transactions, 41.38% of the 742 Borrower’s Slip transactions and 45.94% of the 603 ECE Transactions Log Book entries that were analyzed. A 100% complete data being filled-out on the ECE Borrower’s Slip and the ECE Transactions Log Book permits a more comprehensive study of equipment inventory monitoring which gives a detailed room utilization for the ECE Room Utilization Log Book. The Automated Laboratory coined as AutoLab merged the ECE Room Utilization Log Book, ECE Borrower’s Slip and the ECE Transaction Log Book into one complete package in terms of transaction recording and equipment inventory monitoring incorporating four databases– the class list, the room utilization, the class schedule and the equipments. As PUP Student Identification Cards have bar codes that embed the student number, the system utilized the information to extract details regarding the identity of the student necessary for transaction and equipment inventory monitoring. Two hundred sixty seven (267) ECE students from the 1142 ECE student population and 19 ECE Faculty Members served as respondents for the study. The respondents assessed the system in three areas – the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the Accuracy of Information Displayed and the Transaction Recording. Respondents rated the GUI in terms of design, user friendliness, minimal amount of time to perform its function and reliability. Overall rating of the system in terms of design was 4.22 (Effective); user friendliness was 4.50 (Effective); minimal amount of time to perform function was 4.51 (Highly Effective) and reliability to be 4.50(Effective). In terms of the Accuracy of Information Displayed, the overall assessment for accuracy of reading of student Identification card was 4.72 (Highly Effective), accuracy of information being displayed was 4.71 (Highly Effective), accuracy of reading for room key to be 4.74 (Highly Effective) and equipment with 4.75 (Highly Effective). Overall rating of the system in terms of recording of borrower’s information as 4.72 (Highly Effective), recording of key 4.71(Highly Effective), recording of equipment 4.68(Highly Effective) and updating of record to be 4.70 (Highly Effective). The result from the faculty and student respondents were subjected to T-test analysis to determine whether there is a significant difference between their assessments. Result have shown that there was no significant difference between student and faculty assessment.

Struggles over human rights in local government – the case of access to education for undocumented youth in Malmö, Sweden

ABSTRACTThe present article elaborates on struggles over the inclusion and exclusion of undocumented children and young people in the Swedish school system. Through conducting an in-depth case study on the issue of access to school in the city of Malmö in Sweden, our analysis demonstrates how the right to education for undocumented migrant children is subject to a process of struggle between divergent discourses on children’s human rights. Internal debates at the city level of governance are identified around, for example, whether the police could be denied access to schools or if contradictory messages from various authorities might lead to a legitimacy problem. Other questions are the registration of grades when the children concerned are reluctant to be put into a register due to the risks involved; and if fictitious names could be used on class lists that police officers can request. As the article shows, these local struggles are an expression of tensions between different levels of governance that are also affected by the migration control regime, as regards rights for children who are residing irregularly. In that respect, there is a struggle over the appropriate legalistic discourse – as in, to which level should it make reference. However, actors contesting a restrictive interpretation of the right to education also make substantial use of, what we call here, an ‘experiential’ discourse – that is, drawing upon the everyday experiences and feelings of those whose rights are in question. Struggles at the local governance level also have relevance for exploring substantial parts of the broader political context in which the human rights of undocumented migrants are (de)contested.

Splitting line patterns in free groups

We construct a boundary of a finite rank free group relative to a finite list of conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups. From the cut points and uncrossed cut pairs of this boundary we construct a simplicial tree on which the group acts cocompactly. We show that the quotient graph of groups is the JSJ decomposition of the group relative to the given collection of conjugacy classes. This provides a characterization of virtually geometric multiwords: they are the multiwords that are built from geometric pieces. In particular, a multiword is virtually geometric if and only if the relative boundary is planar.

Computing isolated orbifolds in weighted flag varieties

Given a weighted flag variety wΣ(μ,u) corresponding to chosen fixed parameters μ and u, we present an algorithm to compute lists of all possible projectively Gorenstein n-folds, having canonical weight k and isolated orbifold points, appearing as weighted complete intersections in wΣ(μ,u) or some projective cone(s) over wΣ(μ,u). We apply our algorithm to compute lists of interesting classes of polarized 3-folds with isolated orbifold points in the codimension 8 weighted G2 variety. We also show the existence of some families of log-terminal Q-Fano 3-folds in codimension 8 by explicitly constructing them as quasilinear sections of a weighted G2-variety.

Determining the Attitudes of the Students of Inonu University, Faculty of Medicine, on Social Gender Roles [Inonu Universitesi Tip Fakultesi Ogrencilerinin Toplumsal Cinsiyet Rollerine Iliskin Tutumlarinin Belirlenmesi

Social gender tells about the personality traits, roles and responsibilities defined socially for women and men in the society. Social gender roles, on the other hand, tell about the roles that are considered to be related with men and women in a traditional way. Social gender role includes the personality traits and behaviors that are considered to be proper for men and women in a cultural manner. The aim of this study is to determine the attitudes of the students at Inonu University, Faculty of Medicine, on social gender roles, and examine the factors that are effective on these attitudes. The study was designed as a cross-sectional study, and was conducted at Inonu University, Faculty of Medicine between the dates December 2014 - March 2015. Written approval was received from Malatya Clinical Researches Ethics Board and Inonu University, Faculty of Medicine in order to conduct the study. The minimum sampling size formula was calculated for the 1298 students studying at Inonu University, Faculty of Medicine. The minimum sampling size was found as 328. Half of the students were selected randomly from the class lists at the beginning of the study. 684 students were included in the study. The questionnaire form which included the “Attitude Scale on Social Gender Roles” (ASGR), whose first part was developed by the socio-demographic properties of the participants, and the second part developed by the researcher, was used as the data collection tool. This scale consists of 38 Items. The highest points that may be received from the scale is 190 and the lowest is 38. Receiving high points means having an egalitarian attitude. There are five sub-dimensions of the scale and they are; egalitarian gender, woman gender, gender at marriage, traditional gender and male gender roles. In statistical analyses of the data for the independent variables, the Man Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis Test (Post Hoc Bonferroni) were used. The mean age of the participant students was 22±2,23. 40, 8% of the participants were male, and 59,2% were female. The average of the total points of the students received from the Attitude Scale on Social Gender Roles was found as 139 (min 53-max 185). It was determined that female students had meaningfully more egalitarian attitude with 146 median points (p=0.001). While the median points received in the 17-19 age group was 143, it was 135 in people over 25 years of age 135 (p=0,027). The median points of the students whose mothers worked was found to be 146, and of those whose mothers did not work was found as 137 (p=0,001). When the median points of the students received from the scale in terms of their families were compared, it was determined that it was 127 in students who lived in a wide family, and 140 in those who lived in an elementary family (p=0.004). When the median points of the ASGR were considered according to the educational status of the mothers, it was determined that the median points of those students whose mothers were not educated was 133; and the median points of those whose mothers were university graduates was found as 145 (p=0,010). When the points received from the social gender roles sub-dimensions were considered, it was observed that female students had meaningfully more egalitarian attitudes when compared with the male students (p=0,001). In this study, which was conducted to determine the attitudes of the students of faculty of medicine on social gender roles, it was determined that the students showed a more egalitarian attitudes when compared with other employees. Female students, younger students, those living in elementary families, those whose mothers are working and have higher educational status show more egalitarian attitudes. It may be recommended that classes on social gender may be added to the curriculum in medicine faculties, and peer trainings may be organized with the participation of especially male students.

The Possibility of Using RFID System to Automate and Integrate the Attendance of Professors and Students in the Classroom

One of the most important goals followed in most systems is to increase efficiency, reduce errors and enhance ease of data entry tasks such as better services in organizations. Therefore, the use of intelligent tools is of the most important requirements for a management system in order to collect complete and accurate data and create complete information. In management, use of new technologies is recommended to have smart systems and reduce human errors. This study aimed to investigate “professors and students attendance system using RFID” and research population consists of professors and students. Findings show that, as attendance checking system in universities and schools is done through the class list and checking attendance of students needs to spend time and energy so it leads to a waste of valuable time and energy of professors to teach. Therefore, it is essential to use efficient and modern systems, because with the design and implementation of RFID attendance system and replacing the traditional system, time and energy waste could be avoided and attendance system could be promoted to an intelligent and integrated one. The designed system includes a number of hours of presence and absence, delays and rush to pay the salaries of professors at the University with its automatic identification through radio frequency. This system aims to create changes in this area and it is economic in whole.

On a Property Motivated by Groups with a Specified Number of Subgroups

We consider finite groups with a given number of subgroups. With a carefully chosen definition of “similar,” we find that for each positive integer k, the groups with exactly k subgroups fall into a finite list of similarity classes.

Psychotropic Medication Refusal: Reasons and Patients′ Perception at a Secure Forensic Psychiatric Treatment Centre

Poor adherence to prescribed medication regimens can undermine the effectiveness of medications. This study was conducted to determine the demographic profile of forensic psychiatric inpatients refusing medications and to identify the reasons for refusal. Data were collected through interviews using a questionnaire including Drug Attitude Inventory-10. Medication refusal was more common among Aboriginals (68%, n = 34) than Caucasians (32%, n = 16) and was highest among the patients 21-30 years of age (44%, n = 22). Antisocial personality disorder and substance use disorder featured prominently among patients refusing medications. The main reasons for medication refusal were inconvenience (34%, n = 17) followed by side effects (22%, n = 11), ineffective medication (20%, n = 10), illness-related (16%, n = 8), and no reasons (8%, n = 6). Antipsychotic medications topped the list of the major classes of medications refused followed by Antidepressants and Mood Stabilizers.

The Development of Multimedia Education Platform Optimized for the Audiovisual Production

We describe in this paper a serial learning information reasoning method(Tree Tracking Method, TTM) that is flexible, smart education, culture place optimized for content planning and producing. The user participation centered online education platform that is based on N-Screen (multi device) so that user can direct lifelong learning. Learners of the field of producing contents use and share easily necessary information and recorded meta information such as role models by each competency. Both of instructor and learner are able to produce data and share them under the online environment since the list of classes and training data is set by tree structured classification of the ‘top skill group’ where the specific job training function from the basis of competency. We point out practical and functional limits of a common online learning system and the manner of lecturing. In the near future, we will show TTM is the proper education platform for the production affiliates with adopting open course ware and flipped learning. Received (September 07, 2015), Review Result(September 23, 2015) Accepted(October 08, 2015), Published(December 31, 2015) 617-716 Division of Digital

Particle Swarm Optimization for Creating Self Organized Evolutionary Back Propagation Artificial Neural Networks

A novel technique for developing a self organized Back Propagation Artificial Neural Networks (BPANNs) or simply Back Propagation Neural Network (BPN) with the help of swarm Intelligence (SI) technique. This paper proposes an overlapping swarm intelligence algorithm for training of neural networks in which a particle swarm is assigned to each neuron to search for that neuron’s weights. The training of ANN is a difficult task when it’s get into the local minima and causes the low learning rates; it is required of an evolutionary multi dimensional algorithm to seek optimal weight values, the positional optimum values and the dimensional optimum in values in the dynamic problem space. The approach discussed throughout in this paper is the credit assignment process by first focusing on updating weights and biases swarms Intelligence and then evaluating the fitness of the particles using a network. With the proper adaptation of the SI-BPN process, the proposed method can develop an optimum network within an architecture space for a particular problem. Additionally, it provides a class list of all other potential configurations. This algorithm will provide superior learning ability to the traditional Back-Propagation (BP) method in terms of accuracy and speed.

Multiclass Coarse Analysis for UAV Imagery

This paper presents a novel method to “coarsely” describe extremely high-resolution (EHR) images acquired by means of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over urban areas. Standard image analysis approaches cannot be directly exploited for the automatic description of UAV images due to their EHR. For this reason, we propose an alternative approach that consists first in the subdivision of the original UAV image in a grid of tiles. Then, each tile is compared with a library of training tiles to inherit the binary multilabel vector of the most similar training tile. This vector conveys a list of classes likely present in the considered tile. Our multiclass tile-based approach needs the definition of two main ingredients: 1) a suitable tile-representation strategy; and 2) a tile-to-tile matching operation. Various tile-representation and matching strategies are investigated. In particular, we present three global representation strategies, which process each tile as a whole and two point-based strategies that exploit points of interest within the considered tile. Regarding the matching strategies, two simple measures of distance, namely, the Euclidean and the chi-squared histogram distances, are explored. Interesting experimental results conducted on a rich set of real UAV images acquired over an urban area are reported and discussed.

Abstract PR11: Reference pharmacologic class analysis for Connectivity Map discovery

Abstract The Connectivity Map (CMap) is a database of 1.4 million transcriptional profiles from cell lines treated with small molecule or genetic perturbations. This resource promises to serve as a comprehensive “lookup table” for biology by linking drugs to genes and pathways. However, distinguishing true similarities from random noise within such a large, multidimensional dataset presents significant challenges to result interpretation and hit prioritization. To address these challenges, we took advantage of the fact that different CMap drugs may share the same molecular target or mechanism of action. We hypothesized that grouping drugs into reference pharmacologic classes would yield dramatically more crisp and readily interpretable query results. In order to successfully group drugs by mechanism of action, standardized drug annotations were required. More than 2,000 CMap compounds were mapped to their known targets by comparing chemical structures to entries in existing public databases or by manual searches using the scientific literature. Target information was stored as HUGO gene symbols. Next, targets were manually grouped into known pathways. The compound signatures of each class were assessed for internal consistency using a gene set enrichment-based approach known as introspection, and outlier compounds were eliminated. Using this approach, we identified and validated more than 50 reference pharmacologic class lists (PCLs), that include agonists or antagonists of a broad range of target types, such as GPCRs, nuclear hormone receptors, kinases, heat shock proteins, ribosomal proteins, biosynthetic enzymes, and others. Reference PCLs were evaluated through several approaches. First, a number of PCLs have strong connections to corresponding genetic treatments. For example, the MEK inhibitor PCL strongly matches MEK knockdown and is anti-correlated with RAF1 overexpression. Second, novel compounds with structures similar to known drugs connect to expected groups: for example, a derivative of betamethasone connects to corticosteroids, and a derivative of fasudil connects to ROCK inhibitors. Finally, we have observed multiple examples of unannotated compounds for which we can retrospectively find supporting evidence for the predicted mechanism. Applications of PCL analysis include screening for bioactivity, predicting novel compound mechanism of action, and assessing pathway modulation status from virtually any input query. We have developed a web application to enable scientists to easily view and explore the PCL connectivity results. Planned future experiments include testing reference compounds at multiple doses and adding additional pharmacologic classes of disease relevance. Citation Format: Steven M. Corsello, Rajiv Narayan, Joshua Gould, Ted E. Natoli, Xiaodong Lu, Aravind Subramanian, Todd R. Golub. Reference pharmacologic class analysis for Connectivity Map discovery. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Computational and Systems Biology of Cancer; Feb 8-11 2015; San Francisco, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(22 Suppl 2):Abstract nr PR11.

Abstract A2-26: Reference pharmacologic class analysis for Connectivity Map discovery

Abstract The Connectivity Map (CMap) is a database of 1.4 million transcriptional profiles from cell lines treated with small molecule or genetic perturbations. This resource promises to serve as a comprehensive “lookup table” for biology by linking drugs to genes and pathways. However, distinguishing true similarities from random noise within such a large, multidimensional dataset presents significant challenges to result interpretation and hit prioritization. To address these challenges, we took advantage of the fact that different CMap drugs may share the same molecular target or mechanism of action. We hypothesized that grouping drugs into reference pharmacologic classes would yield dramatically more crisp and readily interpretable query results. In order to successfully group drugs by mechanism of action, standardized drug annotations were required. More than 2,000 CMap compounds were mapped to their known targets by comparing chemical structures to entries in existing public databases or by manual searches using the scientific literature. Target information was stored as HUGO gene symbols. Next, targets were manually grouped into known pathways. The compound signatures of each class were assessed for internal consistency using a gene set enrichment-based approach known as introspection, and outlier compounds were eliminated. Using this approach, we identified and validated more than 50 reference pharmacologic class lists (PCLs), that include agonists or antagonists of a broad range of target types, such as GPCRs, nuclear hormone receptors, kinases, heat shock proteins, ribosomal proteins, biosynthetic enzymes, and others. Reference PCLs were evaluated through several approaches. First, a number of PCLs have strong connections to corresponding genetic treatments. For example, the MEK inhibitor PCL strongly matches MEK knockdown and is anti-correlated with RAF1 overexpression. Second, novel compounds with structures similar to known drugs connect to expected groups: for example, a derivative of betamethasone connects to corticosteroids, and a derivative of fasudil connects to ROCK inhibitors. Finally, we have observed multiple examples of unannotated compounds for which we can retrospectively find supporting evidence for the predicted mechanism. Applications of PCL analysis include screening for bioactivity, predicting novel compound mechanism of action, and assessing pathway modulation status from virtually any input query. We have developed a web application to enable scientists to easily view and explore the PCL connectivity results. Planned future experiments include testing reference compounds at multiple doses and adding additional pharmacologic classes of disease relevance. Citation Format: Steven M. Corsello, Rajiv Narayan, Joshua Gould, Ted E. Natoli, Xiaodong Lu, Aravind Subramanian, Todd R. Golub. Reference pharmacologic class analysis for Connectivity Map discovery. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Translation of the Cancer Genome; Feb 7-9, 2015; San Francisco, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(22 Suppl 1):Abstract nr A2-26.

What Is Missing? Rethinking Student Absences

As a lecturer or tutor, there are few things more frustrating than seeing the names of students on a class list who never actually attend. The considerable effort allocated to the design of the curriculum, assessment and teaching resources seems somewhat futile in light of students who purport to want a degree but do not want or ‘need’ to attend class. Such experiences are exacerbated by those students whose names appear in the following semester after failing the subject and they then proceed to repeat the same pattern of nonattendance. As noted in the literature, the reasons underlying student absences are often multifaceted and complex (Moore, Armstrong, & Pearson, 2008). Furthermore, the reasons for non-attendance can vary considerably (Longhurst, 1999; Lopez-Bonilla & Lopez-Bonilla, 2015), indicating potential contextual differences and the need for further investigation.This Postcard describes my recent experience of student absence at the university where I teach and an intervention implemented with a group of my students.

Federal Contractors, Title VII, and LGBT Employment Discrimination: Can Religious Organizations Continue to Staff on a Religious Basis?

A matter of keen debate in Europe and North America is the freedom of religious organizations to maintain their essential character by staffing with those of like-minded faith just as many nation-states are moving aggressively to eliminate forms of employment discrimination based on sexuality and the sexual practices of employees. In the United States the leading edge for addressing this issue is being worked out before a little known administrative office that oversees the terms and conditions of federal contracts. Effective April 2015, an amendment to a longstanding presidential executive order (EO) added ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ to the list of protected classes that are shielded from discrimination by private-sector employers that have secured a government contract. Enforcement fell to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs in the US Department of Labor, the agency with oversight of all contracts for the purchase of goods and services. Even before this recent amendment, the EO exempted religious employers from some forms of regulation of their employment practices, the exemption having been borrowed from the plenary civil rights act governing federal oversight of employment discrimination nationwide. The principal question addressed in this article is whether religious organizations with US contracts now have to comply with the new restrictions on employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, or does the EO’s pre-existing religious exemption serve to adequately defend employers acting upon their sincerely held religious beliefs. The question is poignant because now, for the first time, the definitions of two federally protected classes appear to be at odds with sexual morality as historically taught by the nation’s major religions. From the perspective of the religious employer, the new EO introduces a burden impacting longstanding religious beliefs. Religious employers, certainly those who are both vibrant and integrated in their faith practices, strive to build a community of employees that are faithful to a set of doctrinal beliefs and who are fully committed to the institution’s faith-shaped mission. Nevertheless, * Carl H Esbeck is the RB Price Professor and Isabelle Wade & Paul C Lyda Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Missouri. Email: esbeckc@missouri.edu. I want to thank those who read earlier drafts of this article and provided valuable suggestions: Stephanie Barclay, Thomas C Berg, Stanley Carlson-Thies, Kimberly Colby, Richard W Garnett, Luke Goodrich, Matthew Kacsmaryk, Douglas Laycock, Christopher C Lund, Steven T McFarland, Michael Moses, and Kevin C Walsh. VC The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 2015, 0, 1–30 doi: 10.1093/ojlr/rwv046 Article unless exempt these religious employers are now ordered to act otherwise or forfeit valuable contracts—a classic dilemma of conscience and coercion. Those who argue that the EO’s religious exemption is inapplicable make two points. First, they maintain that the exemption is a defence available only when the initial claim by the employee-complainant is one of religious discrimination—as distinct from the onset claim being based on an employee’s sex or sexual orientation. Second, they argue that the exemption is narrow, not one spanning the employer’s religion in all its aspects but an exemption limited to the employer being able to prefer only those who identify with the employer’s church or religious denomination. Neither point has support in the plain text of EO’s religious exemption or in the plenary civil rights act from which the exemption was modelled. With respect to the first point the case law is indecisive, never really locking onto the issue and resolving it. But the weight of the practice is contrary to the point, for most courts have allowed religious employers to defend against a claim no matter the protected class by introducing evidence of the employer’s religious motivation behind its adverse employment decision. And the second point directly contradicts the plenary act’s definition of ‘religion’ as embracing all aspects of religious belief or practice, hence not amenable to a narrow reading. Much is at stake regarding the exemption’s scope under the EO, for that resolution will likely dictate the sweep of the exemption under the civil rights act covering employment discrimination nationwide.

Colimits of abelian groups

In this paper we study the colimit N2(G) of abelian subgroups of a discrete group G. This group is the fundamental group of a subspace B(2,G) of the classifying space BG as introduced in [1]. We describe N2(G) for certain groups, and apply our results to study the homotopy type of the space B(2,G). We give a list of classes of groups for which B(2,G) is not an Eilenberg–Maclane space of type K(π,1).

Small circulant complex Hadamard matrices of Butson type

We study the circulant complex Hadamard matrices of order n whose entries are lth roots of unity. For n=l prime we prove that the only such matrix, up to equivalence, is the Fourier matrix, while for n=p+q,l=pq with p,q distinct primes there is no such matrix. We then provide a list of equivalence classes of such matrices, for small values of n,l.