Parenting and digital media: from the early days of the web to contemporary digital society.

Parents have accessed websites, online discussion forums and blogs for advice, information and support since the early days of the World Wide Web. In this article, we review the literature in sociology and related social research addressing the ways in which digital media have been used for parenting-related purposes. We begin with the longer-established media of parenting websites, online discussion forums, blogs, email, mobile phones and message and video services and then move on to the newer technologies of social media and apps. This is followed by a section on data privacy and security issues. The concluding section summarises some major issues arising from the review and points to directions for further research

Book genre and author gender: romance>paranormal-romance to autobiography>memoir

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 20/05/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23768 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Although gender differences are known to exist in the publishing industry and in reader preferences, there is little public systematic evidence about them. This article uses evidence from the book-based social website Goodreads to provide a large scale analysis of 50 major English book genres based on author genders. The results show gender differences in authorship in almost all categories and gender differences the level of interest in, and ratings of, books in a minority of categories. Perhaps surprisingly in this context, there is not a clear gender-based relationship between the success of an author and their prevalence within a genre. The unexpected almost universal authorship gender differences should give new impetus to investigations of the importance of gender in fiction and the success of minority genders in some genres should encourage publishers and librarians to take their work seriously, except perhaps for most male-authored chick-lit

Investigating the potential for individually distinctive signature whistles to be used in mark-recapture of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

Mark-recapture is used to investigate the abundance, survival and social relationships and even individual-specific habitat use of a number of species. Several studies suggest that individually distinctive acoustic signals could be used in a mark-recapture framework. We investigated the potential of using individually distinctive signature whistles of bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus. Acoustic and photo identification data were collected simultaneously from a small population of common bottlenose dolphins in Walvis Bay, Namibia, between 2009 and 2015. Visual classification and bout analysis was used to identify signature whistle types. Photos were graded for quality and fins for distinctiveness and matched to a pre-existing catalogue of individuals. Whistle data was graded on signal to noise ratio. Abundance was calculated for both signature whistles and photographic data for the years 2011, 2012 and 2015 separately using Huggins closed models. Since not all animals were used in the photographic mark-recapture and the signature whistles of all animals were not recorded in all encounters, it was necessary to extrapolate mark-recapture estimates up to total population size. Two methods of calculating theta (the proportion detected or 'marked') for acoustic data were investigated, one calculated from the field group size and another based solely on acoustic data. An attempt to match individuals with their signature whistle type was also conducted through a process of encounter matrices and elimination. Assuming that photographic mark-recapture data provides the most accurate measure of population size (2011=65, 2012=82, 2015=83 animals estimated), the acoustic abundance estimate extrapolated using a theta calculated from field group size overestimated the population (2011=131, 2012=243, 2015=133), while the acoustic abundance extrapolated using solely acoustic data gave an underestimation (2011=44, 2012=63, 2015=78). Differences between the acoustic estimates and photo identification estimates were between a 25% decrease and 121% increase. Seventeen signature whistle types were used in the matching process, 3 out of which were confidently matched with individuals and a further 3 were matched through the process of elimination. Overall, this study shows that acoustic abundance estimates using signature whistle data has the potential to provide a conservative estimate of abundance compared to photographic methods. However, estimates were effected by how theta was estimated and further studies to better estimate theta are required to improve abundance estimates from signature whistle data