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In the 2021-2022 school year, more books were banned in US school districts than in any previous year. Book banning and other forms of information censorship have serious implications for democratic processes, and censorship has become a central theme of partisan political rhetoric in the United States. However, there is little empirical work on the exact content, predictors of, and repercussions of this rise in book bans. Using a comprehensive dataset of 2,532 bans that occurred during the 2021-2022 school year from PEN America, combined with county-level administrative data, multiple book-level digital trace datasets, restricted-use book sales data, and a new crowd-sourced dataset of author demographic information, we find that (i) banned books are disproportionately written by people of color and feature characters of color, both fictional and historical, in children's books; (ii) right-leaning counties that have become less conservative over time are more likely to ban books than neighboring counties; and (iii) national and state levels of interest in books are largely unaffected after they are banned. Together, these results suggest that rather than serving primarily as a censorship tactic, book banning in this recent US context, targeted at low-interest children's books featuring diverse characters, is more similar to symbolic political action to galvanize shrinking voting blocs., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.)

Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields. Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at United States-based PhD-granting departments, we show that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty. A large-scale survey of the same faculty indicates that the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not. Women are more likely than men to feel pushed from their jobs and less likely to feel pulled toward better opportunities, and women leave or consider leaving because of workplace climate more often than work-life balance. These results quantify the systemic nature of gendered faculty retention; contextualize its relationship with career age, institutional prestige, and field; and highlight the importance of understanding the gendered reasons for attrition rather than focusing on rates alone.

Recent advances in deep learning have been driven by ever-increasing model sizes, with networks growing to millions or even billions of parameters. Such enormous models call for fast and energy-efficient hardware accelerators. We study the potential of Analog AI accelerators based on Non-Volatile Memory, in particular Phase Change Memory (PCM), for software-equivalent accurate inference of natural language processing applications. We demonstrate a path to software-equivalent accuracy for the GLUE benchmark on BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), by combining noise-aware training to combat inherent PCM drift and noise sources, together with reduced-precision digital attention-block computation down to INT6., Competing Interests: The authors were employed by IBM Research., (Copyright © 2021 Spoon, Tsai, Chen, Rasch, Ambrogio, Mackin, Fasoli, Friz, Narayanan, Stanisavljevic and Burr.)

Objective: Subjective health is a complex indicator predicting longevity independent of objective health. Few studies examine genetic and environmental mechanisms underlying different facets of subjective health across the life course., Method: Three subjective health measures were examined in 12,900 twins ( M age = 63.38, range = 25-102) from nine studies in the Interplay of Genes and Environment across Multiple Studies Consortium: self-rated health (SRH), health compared with others (COMP), and health interfering with activities (ACT)., Results: Analyses indicated age and sex differences in mean scores depending on the measure. SRH and ACT showed significant linear and non-linear moderation by age for individual differences in both genetic and environmental variance. Significant sex differences in components of variance were found for SRH and ACT, but not COMP., Discussion: Subjective health appears to be dependent on frame of reference and reflect different aspects of health. Results suggest different genetic and environmental mechanisms underlie each facet.

In this longitudinal study we investigate the influence of childhood disadvantage on midlife hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis regulation. Two mechanisms by which early life stress may affect later pathophysiology are through its influence on cognitive functioning or later socioeconomic (SES) disadvantage. We predicted that individual differences in young adult cognitive ability and midlife SES would mediate the influence of childhood disadvantage on midlife cortisol. On each of three nonconsecutive days, participants provided five salivary cortisol samples corresponding to their diurnal rhythm (N=727 men; mean age 55, SD=2.6). We calculated three measures of cortisol regulation (area-under-the curve cortisol reflecting total daytime cortisol output; cortisol-awakening-response; and wake-to-bed slope), averaging scores for each measure across multiple days. Childhood disadvantage combined four dichotomous indicators used previously by Rutter (1985): father low SES; mother education less than 12th grade; major family disruption/separation before age 18; and large family size (more than 5 siblings). The two mediators were a measure of general cognitive ability assessed at age 20 and highest achieved midlife SES. Men from more disadvantaged childhoods were significantly more likely to have dysregulated cortisol at midlife, with higher daytime cortisol levels decades after their childhood experience. Effects of childhood disadvantage were both direct and indirect. Cognitive ability and adult SES, however, only partially mediated the associations between early life stress and midlife cortisol. Specific indirect effects accounted for 33.8% of the total effect of childhood disadvantage [β=0.12 (0.05; 0.18)] on total daytime cortisol. Associations remained significant after accounting for ethnicity, smoking status, and self-reported depressive symptoms., (Copyright © 2013. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)