Life’s often not fair and we all suffer from illness and affliction at times that are not of our own making. It is then we are often confronted with a choice – to continue to want to be with God even though we don’t understand why certain things are happening to us; or to let the seeming unfairness of our circumstance drive us away from Him. Join Michael as he uses a whimsical episode of the Brady Bunch to illustrate and discuss this profound truth we all experience.

Fr. Lawrence Farley argues that Herod had more insight into the significance of Jesus than do most moderns.

Washington — The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is now accepting charges of discrimination under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Washington — The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has published a final rule to implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, including guidance to provide workers with more clarity on the law – and employers with a better understanding of their responsibilities.

In Episode 37, the S+H team celebrates the third anniversary of the podcast by diving into the March issue’s feature story on the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Additionally, Reginald Jackson, a safety and health specialist in OSHA’s Office of General Industry and Agricultural Enforcement, discusses loading dock safety in an expanded “5 Questions With …” interview.

Almost 110,000 Americans are waiting for organ transplants, but there are significant inequities in who gets access to the waiting list and an eventual transplant. A new report recommends several policy changes to create a more fair, equitable, and patient-focused system for organ allocation.

The federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) was signed into law on December 29, 2022 and becomes effective in June. Here’s a detailed look at what this means.

The EEOC published proposed regulations to implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act on 08/11/2023. Read this article for answers to your questions. 

Final rules for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act are now published. The following should be your priority actions to ensure compliance and success with the new law.

EEOC’s final rule and interpretive guidance for implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was published in the April 19, 2024 Federal Register.

Explore the thought-provoking release of 'Choose Life,' the latest episode from Rev. Richard Klingeisen's celebrated web series, 'A Life of Giving.' You can stream it right now at www.Klingeisen.com.

We're hard at work on new episodes of the TED Radio Hour, which will start rolling out in March. In the meantime, new host Manoush Zomorodi shares some of her favorite episodes of the show. This episode originally aired on February 1, 2019.

The Me Too movement has changed the way we think and talk about gender discrimination. This hour, TED speakers explore how the conversation has moved beyond a hashtag, and where we go from here. Guests include Me Too movement founder Tarana Burke, actor and activist Ashley Judd, writer Laura Bates, and anti-sexism educator Jackson Katz.

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Street selling is a risky activity in Mexico City. But the mercaditas movement aims to empower women and nonbinary sellers to protect themselves from economic exploitation.

Washington, D.C. -- In response to the announcement by the House Judiciary Committee that it will markup the American Music Fairness Act next week, the following statement can be attributed to NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt:

Washington, D.C. -- In response to the House Judiciary Committee's markup of the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA), the following statement can be attributed to NAB CEO and President Curtis LeGeyt:

John Berlau, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses the Fair Access Rule by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

The post Does banking fairness come at a fair price to consumers? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The availability of an artificial intelligence system's training data can promote transparency and accountability of that system, according to Penn State researchers.

Sandra Wachter is a Lawyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford. In this video, Sandra discusses how the law can keep up with new technology. Particularly, she spoke about her recent work on targeted advertising – a big issue for tech giants including Facebook and Amazon. The law already protects against discrimination based on certain identity traits such as race or gender. But targeted advertisers claim to group people according to “affinity” – an aggregate measure of their online behaviour – not identity. Wachter believes, however, that existing concepts in the law may have something to say about discrimination by affinity. ABOUT WIRED PULSE: AI AT THE BARBICAN 450 business executives, technologists and enthusiasts gathered at The Barbican Centre’s Concert Hall in London, for WIRED Pulse: AI at the Barbican on June 15, 2019. Discover some of the fascinating insights from speakers here: http://wired.uk/ai-event ABOUT WIRED PULSE AND WIRED EVENTS The WIRED Pulse series offers an engaging, top-level perspective on how disruptive technology and fast-changing industries - such as artificial intelligence, deep tech and health - are impacting the human experience. The aim is to distill the most pertinent strands of themes within each complex topic and to share it with the wider public as a thought-provoking conversation-starter. WIRED events shine a spotlight on the innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs who are changing our world for the better. Explore this channel for videos showing on-stage talks, behind-the-scenes action, exclusive interviews and performances from our roster of events. Join us as we uncover the most relevant, up-and-coming trends and meet the people building the future. ABOUT WIRED WIRED brings you the future as it happens - the people, the trends, the big ideas that will change our lives. An award-winning printed monthly and online publication. WIRED is an agenda-setting magazine offering brain food on a wide range of topics, from science, technology and business to pop-culture and politics. CONNECT WITH WIRED Events: http://wired.uk/events Web: http://po.st/WiredVideo Twitter: http://po.st/TwitterWired Facebook: http://po.st/FacebookWired Google+: http://po.st/GoogleWired Instagram: http://po.st/InstagramWired Magazine: http://po.st/MagazineWired Newsletter: http://po.st/NewslettersWired

Generation Z is reshaping the workplace with their demand for flexibility, fair treatment, and meaningful work

As the NBA begins to allow practice facilities to reopen on a team-by-team basis, with state and local rules regarding reopening dictate which teams can welcome players back, one NFL coach wants his league to take a different approach when pro football gets back to work.

John Tomasi’s attempt to reconcile the beliefs of libertarians and left liberals leaves too many questions unanswered

; Credit: /Jackie Ferrentino for NPR

A lot is at stake for students taking Advanced Placement exams, even in normal times. If you score high enough, you can earn college credit. It's also a big factor in college applications. But for some students, the idea of studying right now feels impossible.

"I'm constantly thinking about making sure my family doesn't get sick and I don't get sick," says Elise, a high school junior outside Boston. (We're not using her full name because she's worried about hurting her college applications.)

Concerns about the coronavirus have put most standardized tests, such as the SAT and ACT, on hold this spring. But AP exams are going forward with a new online format — and that's raising questions about fairness.

Elise, 17, says she spent months preparing for what is typically a three-hour, multiple-choice and essay-based exam; she was blindsided when she learned it will now be an online, 45-minute, open-response test.

"I have no idea what I'm going to get when I open that test," she says.

Elise was hoping the College Board, which administers AP exams, would cancel this year's exams, as it did the spring SATs. But since the tests are being offered, she says she feels she has to take them. She worries it would look bad on her college applications if she opted out.

For other students, just the idea of taking the exam at home is causing anxiety. Kayleen Guzman, 17, from Boston says it's hard to find peace and quiet in her house right now.

"Currently, it's me, my mom, my dog, my sister and my stepdad," she explains. "Sometimes I feel like it's too much chaos."

But Guzman is glad she still has the opportunity to take the AP exams at all this year. She says she worked hard in her two AP classes and she wants the chance to earn college credit.

However, it's still unclear how much credit colleges will give students for this year's exams.

"None of us would say that we are confident that a 3 or 4 or 5 on the AP exam this year means the exact same thing as a 3, 4 and 5 on the exam last year," says Harvard University's Andrew Ho, who studies the reliability of educational tests.

Ho says that because of the new format, this year's AP exams won't be measuring the same thing as previous years' exams. For one, the new tests will cover less material. And changing where kids take it — from a proctored classroom to their laptops at home — is a big deal. But Ho adds, "Just because it's not completely comparable doesn't mean the College Board and colleges, through their own policies, couldn't adjust."

Some colleges are already adjusting. The University of California system has come out explicitly to say it won't change the way it credits AP scores. Other colleges that didn't want to go on the record say they are planning to change their policies, but the details weren't ready to share just yet.

In a statement, College Board spokesperson Jerome White said the organization decided to move forward with AP testing to give motivated students the opportunity to earn college credit. He added that the organization is making "a significant financial investment" to make the exams available online, from cheating prevention software to helping students who may not have an Internet connection or access to a computer.

Still, some educators worry that those efforts won't be enough.

"This situation has created a lot of distraction," says Savannah Lodge-Scharff, an AP Physics teacher for Boston Public Schools. She argues that without in-person classes, many students won't be able to engage with the material in the same way. On top of that, financial stress means many of her students are juggling additional responsibilities, like taking care of siblings.

"I have some of my students who are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week at the grocery store right now in the fear their parents are going to be laid off," she explains.

And then there's the question of geographic equity. This year's exams will be administered at the same time worldwide, meaning students in Hong Kong will be up at midnight to take it.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The rise and fall of Rev. Billy James Hargis, along with the popularity of Glenn Beck, makes our media columnist long for the days of the Fairness Doctrine.

In this paper, we study the problem of fair classification in the presence of prior probability shifts, where the training set distribution differs from the test set. This phenomenon can be observed in the yearly records of several real-world datasets, such as recidivism records and medical expenditure surveys. If unaccounted for, such shifts can cause the predictions of a classifier to become unfair towards specific population subgroups. While the fairness notion called Proportional Equality (PE) accounts for such shifts, a procedure to ensure PE-fairness was unknown.

In this work, we propose a method, called CAPE, which provides a comprehensive solution to the aforementioned problem. CAPE makes novel use of prevalence estimation techniques, sampling and an ensemble of classifiers to ensure fair predictions under prior probability shifts. We introduce a metric, called prevalence difference (PD), which CAPE attempts to minimize in order to ensure PE-fairness. We theoretically establish that this metric exhibits several desirable properties.

We evaluate the efficacy of CAPE via a thorough empirical evaluation on synthetic datasets. We also compare the performance of CAPE with several popular fair classifiers on real-world datasets like COMPAS (criminal risk assessment) and MEPS (medical expenditure panel survey). The results indicate that CAPE ensures PE-fair predictions, while performing well on other performance metrics.

A technique for emulating virtual port control of airtime fairness for wireless stations using per station Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) parameters. Specific parameters are received for each of a plurality of stations connected to the access point. An EDCA field of a beacon that stores a general EDCA parameter is set to an empty state. The beacon is broadcast to a plurality stations on the wireless communication network and within range of an access point. The beacon comprises a BSSID (Basic Service Set Identifier) for use by the plurality of stations to connect with the access point for access to the wireless communication network. The beacon also comprises an empty EDCA field. In response to broadcasting the empty EDCA parameter, receiving a direct inquiry from each of the plurality of stations for the general EDCA parameter. Each of the plurality of stations is responded to with a direct communication of a specific parameter corresponding to each station. A transmission is received from at least one of the stations complying with the specific parameter.

There is no market for me today because every brand in the category has convinced the consumer that they need to look fair to be successful in life.

Beto O'Rourke on the economic plight of African Americans.

Colleges are grappling with competing student demands to change grading during the coronavirus outbreak. Some want pass/fail for all to ensure equity while others want letter grades to boost GPAs.

In classification models fairness can be ensured by solving a constrained optimization problem. We focus on fairness constraints like Disparate Impact, Demographic Parity, and Equalized Odds, which are non-decomposable and non-convex. Researchers define convex surrogates of the constraints and then apply convex optimization frameworks to obtain fair classifiers. Surrogates serve only as an upper bound to the actual constraints, and convexifying fairness constraints might be challenging.

We propose a neural network-based framework, emph{FNNC}, to achieve fairness while maintaining high accuracy in classification. The above fairness constraints are included in the loss using Lagrangian multipliers. We prove bounds on generalization errors for the constrained losses which asymptotically go to zero. The network is optimized using two-step mini-batch stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments show that FNNC performs as good as the state of the art, if not better. The experimental evidence supplements our theoretical guarantees. In summary, we have an automated solution to achieve fairness in classification, which is easily extendable to many fairness constraints.

Saroj Lal

Having student board members with voting clout on school boards poses a number of logistical challenges, readers say in response to a recent Education Week feature.

In many cities, politicians are looking at the world through their windshields.

A group of 21 Republican members of the US Senate have signed a letter to the Treasury Secretary urging him to amend how capital gains tax liability is calculated.

This publication summarises three roundtable discussions on transparency and procedural fairness held during 2010 and 2011 at OECD Competition meetings.

MARTIN SAMUEL - CHIEF SPORTS WRITER: At some stage this week, the National League will make a decision on their competitions above tier seven of the pyramid system.

Shamed Cosby, 82, right, called Weinstein's conviction 'a very sad day' in a statement Monday. Weinstein, 67, left, was found guilty of third degree rape and a criminal sexual act by a NYC jury Monday.

MARTIN SAMUEL - CHIEF SPORTS WRITER: At some stage this week, the National League will make a decision on their competitions above tier seven of the pyramid system.

What firmly sticks in my craw with regards to students is the appalling treatment many of them are receiving from landlords, says Jeff Prestridge.

Cham : Springer, 2020.

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