In the Bronx, New York’s rugby fans gathered for the debut of RUNY, a team set for Major League Rugby next yearOn Saturday night at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, New York’s first professional rugby union team played its first game in the city. Related: Houston? No problem – SaberCats bullish about latest US rugby venture Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/mar/26/rugby-united-new-york-runy-boston-mystic-mlr-gaelic-park-bronx

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is famous for its influence on American politics. Under its executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, the group has resisted changes to gun legislation for more than four decades, despite
multiple mass shootings. Here’s how the group keeps the status quo Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2018/mar/26/why-is-the-nra-so-powerful-video

Daniels added Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, to a lawsuit filed against Trump, saying he had defamed her by claiming she lied about her relationship with the presidentThe White House has attacked the credibility of Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who spoke out on US TV on Sunday night about her alleged affair with the president and threats she said she received. Concurrently, the legal battle between Daniels and Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, grew fiercer. Related: Stormy Daniels interviewed by Anderson Cooper – the key moments Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/26/donald-trump-stormy-daniels-alleged-affair-threat

My research shows that everything from profits to creativity is improved when employees are well restedI have long been puzzled by the entrenched mentality, and often enforced practice, of longer work hours and less sleep. Innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behaviour and injury and disease prevention. But insufficient sleep – another physically and mentally harmful, and potentially deadly factor – is commonly tolerated and even, woefully, encouraged.Many business leaders still believe that time on-task equates to productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too. Every key facet required for business success will fail when sleep becomes short within an organisation. Why do we overvalue employees who undervalue sleep, and often glorify the high-powered executive who is on email until 1.30am and in the office by 5.45 the following morning? Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/26/succeed-business-sleep-profits-employees-bosses

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. In the case, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld  California’s FACT Act which requires licensed pregnancy counseling clinics to disseminate a notice on the existence of publicly-funded family planning services, including contraception and abortion.  Unlicensed clinics must disseminate a notice that they and their personnel are unlicensed. (See prior posting.) The Supreme Court granted certiorari only on the free speech issues in the case, excluding review of the free exercise question. (See prior posting.)  SCOTUSblog’s case page has links to all the briefs filed in the case, as well as to further analysis.

Source: https://religionclause.blogspot.com/2018/03/supreme-court-will-hear-arguments-today.html

In the Indian state of Karnataka, the cabinet (on the recommendation of the State Minorities Commission)  has voted to grant the status of a separate religious minority to Lingayats, instead of treating them as a Hindu sect.  More controversially, the cabinet also voted to include Veerashaivas as part of the same community.  Lingayats, and Veerashaivas constitute 17% of the state’s population.  India West and The Mirror report that the move is seen as an attempt by the ruling Congress party to attract the sect’s votes away from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the state assembly elections that will be held in April and May. The cabinet recommendation now goes to the central government for approval under §2(c) of the Central Minority Commission Act.

Source: https://religionclause.blogspot.com/2018/03/indian-state-moves-to-grant-minority.html

ACLU of Kansas announced yesterday that it has filed a religious and ethnic discrimination lawsuit on behalf of an employee of Spirit AeroSystems against a recreational organization open to Spirit employees.  The organization owns a recreational lake in Wichita, Kansas that can be rented by the organization’s members. The complaint (full text) in Zanial v. Spirit Boeing Employees’ Association, (D KA, filed 3/19/2018) alleges:11. On September 2, 2017, Mr. Zanial rented space at the SBEA recreation lake to host a party celebrating the end of Ramadan. The party was attended by approximately 45 guests, the majority of whom were of Malaysian Indian ancestry. Several of Plaintiff’s female guests, including his wife, were wearing hijabs. 12. Because the party took place shortly after the 60th Anniversary of Malaysian Independence Day, Mr. Zanial’s guest, Nik Azri brought a Malaysian flag to the party. Mr. Zanial and his guests took turns posing with the flag.This led to a complaint being filed:Following the party, SBEA reported Mr. Zanial to the Spirit Aerosystems (“Spirit”) security team based on a concern that Mr. Zanial was affiliated with radical Islamic terrorism and alleged that he had used the SBEA lake to hold an ISIS meeting. SBEA alleged that Mr. Zanial and his guests had an American flag that had been “desecrated by ISIS insignia” and were wearing “Muslim garb.” SBEA restricted Mr. Zanial’s membership so he could no longer rent property to host events at the lake.

Source: https://religionclause.blogspot.com/2018/03/suit-alleges-religious-discrimination.html

Many modern NLP systems rely on word embeddings, previously trained in an
unsupervised manner on large corpora, as base features. Efforts to obtain
embeddings for larger chunks of text, such as sentences, have however not been
so successful. Several attempts at learning unsupervised representations of
sentences have not reached satisfactory enough performance to be widely
adopted. In this paper, we show how universal sentence representations trained
using the supervised data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference dataset
can consistently outperform unsupervised methods like SkipThought vectors on a
wide range of transfer tasks. Much like how computer vision uses ImageNet to
obtain features, which can then be transferred to other tasks, our work tends
to indicate the suitability of natural language inference for transfer learning
to other NLP tasks. Our sentence encoder is publicly available.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.02364v3