Sánchez joined the other members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate later that night to complete the certification, but her chilling interview – recalling how she feared for her life, and feared she may never see her child again simply for doing her job – underscored the price Latinas and other women of color pay in a political context where race and gender violence have become far too commonplace. Her interview made clear the costs – political, emotional, social, and even physical – that women of color bear as they confront entrenched systems of inequality that target them, their families, and their communities. Finally, the interview highlighted the chaotic nature of work that Latinas and other women of color elected to national office encounter as they attempt to legislate in a political environment inflamed by years of racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, immigrant bashing, and xenophobia.

Reed–Muller (RM) codes form a class of multiple error-correcting codes. These codes were first discovered by Muller in 1954 []. In the same year, Reed devised a simple method for decoding these codes [].

As presented in , there are two categories of error-correcting codes, block codes and convolutional codes. This chapter gives an introduction to linear block codes, a subclass of block codes. The coverage of this chapter includes: (1) fundamental concepts and structures of linear block codes; (2) generation of these codes in terms of their generator and parity-check matrices; (3) their error detection and correction capabilities; and (4) general decoding of these codes. We will begin the introduction of linear block codes with symbols from the binary field GF(2). Linear block codes over nonbinary fields, which have similar structures and properties to those over the binary field GF(2), will be briefly discussed at the end of this chapter.

When Shirley Chisholm ran for and won her seat in the 12th congressional district in New York in 1968, she did so without support from the Democratic Party. Undeterred by her party’s snub, Representative Chisholm joined the crowded field of Democrats who sought the party’s nomination for president in 1972. Though she failed to secure the nomination that eventually went to George McGovern, Chisholm received over 150 delegate votes – about 10 percent of the total votes. Chisholm would serve through seven Congresses, during which she served as a founding member for both the Congressional Black Caucus (1971) and the Congressional Women’s Caucus (1977). Like many women who have sought elected office without party support, Chisholm found her own way to political power and drew on her own counsel to other women: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” Given the lackluster efforts from both parties to recruit women candidates as well as the candidate-centered nature of campaigns in the United States, women’s organizations and political action committees have served as a figurative “folding chair” for women to gain entry to a place at the table of elected office.

Using a block code for error control, each codeword is generated and transmitted independently. At the receiving end, each received vector is decoded independently without using the reliability information of previously decoded received vectors.

Right after the discovery of binary BCH codes by Hocquenghem in 1959 [] and by Bose and Chaudhuri in 1960 [] independently, Gorenstein and Zierler extended this class of codes to the nonbinary case in 1961 [].

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes form a class of linear block codes whose parity-check matrices are low-density (or sparse). This class of codes can achieve near-capacity (or near Shannon limit) [] performance on various communication and data-storage channels. LDPC codes were discovered by Gallager in 1962 [, ].

On March 5, 2020, US Senator Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary contest, marking the departure of the last viable woman in the race. That evening, she spoke to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who prompted Warren by noting that her loss “feels a little bit like a death knell in terms of the prospects of having a woman for president in our lifetimes.” Warren quickly rebuked that conclusion, arguing, “This cannot be the right answer. … It doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.” She elaborated: “Look, here’s how I see this. You get in this fight, you know when you go into it there were multiple people who just said, this will be part of the problem. But you get in the fight because you just got to keep beating at it until you finally break the thing.” The “thing” to which Warren refers here is the highest, hardest glass ceiling in American politics: the United States presidency. For 233 years, that glass ceiling has remained unshattered, despite the many cracks that have come from women who waged presidential campaigns. But women have, in Warren’s words, stayed in the fight.

On January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the world witnessed the largest single-day protest in US history. The 2017 Women’s March spread not only across the United States but also worldwide. From major metropolitan areas to small rural towns, the streets filled, accented by pink knitted hats. In Washington, DC, the day started with a rally headlined by Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem, Janet Mock, and other prominent activists from an array of social justice movements (e.g. feminist, racial justice, LGBTQ, immigration, environmental, and labor). A panoply of signs reflected the varied motivations of marchers. Some expressing gendered outrage at Trump directly, twisting his own rhetoric and misdeeds to articulate resistance: “Our rights are not up for grabs,” “This pussy grabs back,” and “Nasty Women make (her)story.” Others addressed the many issues thought to be threatened by a candidate whose campaign was fraught with racist rhetoric about Muslims and Mexicans and an administration poised to undo decades of progressive policy. The protest was peaceful, even as the numbers swelled beyond what the march organizers or the city planners could ever have imagined.

The 2020 election will always be remembered for the tumultuous context in which it occurred – a pandemic, rising unemployment, social and racial justice protests. But from a women’s participation perspective, it was a record-breaking election in every way – registration, turnout, activism, and electoral successes at every level. The breakthroughs in 2020 were quite fitting because they coincided with the 100th anniversary of passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1920), guaranteeing the right of women to vote.

This chapter presents a simple model of a digital communication (or storage) system and its key function units, which are relevant for reliable information transmission (or storage) over a transmission (or storage) medium subject to noise disturbance (or medium defect). The two function units that play the key role in protection of transmitted (or stored) information against noise (or medium defect) are encoder and decoder. The function of the encoder is to transform an information sequence into another sequence, called a coded sequence, which enables the detection and correction of transmission errors at the receiving end of the system.