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This Article explores the intersection of First Amendment claims (religious and speech) and the social science research about the harms of misgendering transgender people in the classroom and beyond. Using medical and social science data about the harms of misgendering transgender and non-binary people, we show that misgendering dramatically and negatively impacts transgender students in the classroom and in society. We show that the harms are not individualized but are collective; they derive from being part of a stigmatized minority population. After demonstrating the harms of misgendering, we consider the First Amendment claims that seek to offer constitutional protection to misgendering. We argue that on balance, the First Amendment claims of free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of religion provide no basis on which professors should be allowed to misgender trans students in the classroom. As we show, debates about the First Amendment, when analyzed through a lens that considers social hierarchy, fail to provide a constitutional mandate for speakers or religious practitioners to engage in misgendering. Rather, we point out that the law does not provide a consistent principle to determine what is protected speech, but instead privileges the claims of already privileged groups, in this case white evangelical Christians. Given the troubled history of First Amendment law that purports to be “neutral” but protects privileged social statuses, it is disingenuous and constitutionally suspect to allow a First Amendment claim to cover misgendering students in the classroom. We argue that transgender students should be protected by their institutions from faculty members who prefer to stubbornly misgender students in the classroom. Even assuming for the sake of argument that misgendering is “protected” speech, professors who choose to misgender are intentionally harming their students, a breach of professional norms and most schools’ policies. 

The shared log paradigm is at the heart of modern distributed applications in the growing cloud computing industry. Often, application logs must be stored durably for analytics, regulations, or failure recovery, and their smooth operation depends closely on how the log is implemented. Scalog is a new implementation of the shared log abstraction that offers an unprecedented combination of features for continuous smooth delivery of service: Scalog allows applications to customize data placement, supports reconfiguration with no loss in availability, and recovers quickly from failures. At the same time, Scalog provides high throughput and total order. The paper describes the design and implementation of Scalog and presents examples of applications running upon it. To evaluate Scalog at scale, we use a combination of real experiments and emulation. Using 4KB records, a 10 Gbps infrastructure, and SSDs, Scalog can totally order up to 52 million records per second. 

Abstract Monobodies are synthetic non-immunoglobulin customizable protein binders invaluable to basic and applied research, and of considerable potential as future therapeutics and diagnostic tools. The ability to reversibly control their binding activity to their targets on demand would significantly expand their applications in biotechnology, medicine, and research. Here we present, as proof-of-principle, the development of a light-controlled monobody (OptoMB) that works in vitro and in cells and whose affinity for its SH2-domain target exhibits a 330-fold shift in binding affinity upon illumination. We demonstrate that our αSH2-OptoMB can be used to purify SH2-tagged proteins directly from crudeE. coliextract, achieving 99.8% purity and over 40% yield in a single purification step. By virtue of their ability to be designed to bind any protein of interest, OptoMBs have the potential to find new powerful applications as light-switchable binders of untagged proteins with the temporal and spatial precision afforded by light.