Caste, Race, and Abjection: An Essay on Sub-humanity

This article discusses continuities between the discourse of caste in ancient India, the racialization constitutive of the Enlightenment, and a similarly exclusionary, overdetermined conception of worthlessness—the lazy, immoral, deviant minorities—evident in contemporary racism as much as in the abandonment of a global underclass. We argue that the negative marking of a social condition or group as inferior and subhuman (on all kinds of grounds, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual) has been constitutive of the paradigms in which these societies subsist. The practices and project of all that is good is shadowed by this negative, its infectious, abominable presence. Analytically bringing together the politics of the homo sacer with the social psychology of abjection, we argue that such exclusion is as vested in politics and economic interests as in their psychic correspondences. </jats:p

The Racialization of Ethnicity: The New Face of White Ethnicity in Postmillennial America

In his landmark work, Richard Alba predicted that white ethnicity would fade into its twilight in the twenty-first century. Where direct inquiries into American white ethnicity have been scant since the millennium’s turn, the authors use recently collected (2014), nationally representative survey data to systematically assess “postmillennial” white ethnic identification. In particular, the authors explore the prevalence of whites identifying with ethnicity today, how this compares with other groups, and how drivers of white ethnic affiliation may have shifted in recent years. The data show that all ethnic claims have declined in the twenty-first-century United States, but the retreat from ethnicity has been accelerated among whites. By the authors’ estimates, only 8.4 percent of whites still claim ethnicity. The authors also find that white ethnic affiliation is now most substantively driven by racial ideology, experience, and perceived victimhood, though some demographic markers remain important. Further analyses show that remaining American white ethnic claimants now perceive white cultural advantages while simultaneously seeing themselves as victims of racial discrimination at rates that rival reports of nonwhites. In sum, these data suggest that white ethnicity has declined but not disappeared as a socially intelligible boundary claim in the postmillennial era and that it has developed as a racialized expression that holds implications for understandings of contemporary white identities, racisms, and resentments.</jats:p

Predicting Formal Verification Resource Needs (Computation Time and Memory) through Machine Learning

This paper presents an application of Machine Learning (ML) for estimating the resource requirements (time and memory) for formal verification of digital systems. Formal Verification has become the main bottleneck in the digital design process. As designs grow in size, the verification cost exponentially increases. Some verification efforts fail when the cost of the verification is too large. The most common failures are due to state explosion problem when memory runs out or when verification does not meet time constraints and cannot complete within the given time. For this reason, having an estimation of the computation resources beforehand can be valuable. In this work, a neural network is used to predict the formal verification cost for a diverse collection of designs. Experiments with a large variety of Verilog benchmarks have been conducted. In each experiment, the specific features of a given design are extracted, the design is synthesized and formally verified, and the verification time and memory usage are recorded. The neural network then uses this data to learn the correlation between design features and verification cost. A genetic algorithm experimented with different neural network designs to determine an appropriate framework. The experimental results confirm that the developed neural network can predict the resource requirements and memory usage with reasonable accuracy.</jats:p

Olefin Binding in a Binuclear Iridium Complex as a Function of Fluorine Substitution: Ethylene to Tetrafluoroethylene

The reactions of the diiridium methyl complex [Ir2(CH3)(CO)(μ-CO)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (1) with ethylene, fluoroethylene, Z-1,2-difluoroethylene, 1,1-difluoroethylene, trifluoroethylene, and tetrafluoroethylene have been investigated. Reaction of 1 with ethylene at −78 °C yields [Ir2H(η2-C2H4)(CO)2(μ-CH2)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (2a), resulting from C−H activation of the methyl group induced by ethylene coordination, whereas reaction at higher temperatures yields the simple ethylene adduct [Ir2(CH3)(CO)(η2-C2H4)(μ-CO)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (2b). Reactions of 1 with fluoroethylene and Z-1,2-difluoroethylene yield only the olefin adducts analogous to 2b. At −78 °C reaction with 1,1-difluoroethylene yields the methylene-bridged hydride product [Ir2H(η2-C2F2H2)(CO)2(μ-CH2)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (5a), which upon warming, yields first the olefin adduct [Ir2(CH3)(CO)(η2-C2F2H2)(μ-CO)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (5b) followed by the olefin-bridged product [Ir2(CH3)(CO)2(μ-C2F2H2)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (5c). Trifluoro- and tetrafluoroethylene yield only the olefin-bridged products [Ir2(CH3)(CO)2(μ-olefin)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (olefin = C2F3H (6), C2F4 (7)). The structure of the tetrafluoroethylene-bridged, tricarbonyl species [Ir2(CH3)(CO)3(μ-C2F4)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (8), determined by X-ray techniques, is reported

Binuclear Activation of Cumulenes: Roles of the Adjacent Metals and the Cumulene Binding Mode in the Activation Process

The binuclear complex [Ir2(CH3)(CO)(μ-CO)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (1; dppm = μ-Ph2PCH2PPh2) reacts with allene and methylallene to ultimately yield the vinylcarbene products [Ir2H(CO)2(μ-η1:η3-HCC(CH3)C(H)R)(dppm)2][CF3SO3] (R = H (6), CH3 (7)). Monitoring the reactions by NMR spectroscopy (1H, 13C, 31P) between −78 °C and ambient temperature allows the observation of several intermediates in each of these transformations in which the allene moves from an η2 binding site on one metal, through an η1:η1-bridging geometry in which the cumulene is coordinated through the “H2CC” moiety, to an η1:η3-bridging geometry in which the central carbon of the cumulene is σ-bound to one metal, adjacent to the methyl ligand, while the three cumulene carbons are η3-bound to the adjacent metal. We propose that formation of the respective vinyl carbene products results from migration of the methyl ligand to the central cumulene carbon followed by activation of a cumulene C−H bond. 1,1-Dimethylallene reacts with 1 at −78 °C to yield a methylene hydride product containing an η2-bound cumulene on one metal, much as observed for the first products in the allene and methylallene reactions. Upon warming, this intermediate isomerizes to the final product containing a methyl ligand on one metal and an η2-bound cumulene on the other. No cumulene-bridged products are observed with this disubstituted allene. 1,1-Difluoroallene also yields a methylene hydride product at −78 °C, which is analogous to the first species observed in all cases noted above. In this case, warming results in movement of the cumulene to an η1:η1-bridging position in which this group binds to the metals via the “H2CC” moiety. Unlike the transformations observed with allene and methyl allene, difluoroallene undergoes no additional transformations as the temperature is raised. A rationalization of these transformations is presented together with a perspective on how the cumulene ligand moves over the dimetallic framework leading to the final products