The Anglo-Saxons--Stoddard and Lovecraft: Ideas of Anglo-Saxon Supremacy and the New England Counter-Revolution

This paper attempts to explain the New England Counter-Revolution through two very different men--H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and T. Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950). While one was a respected and popular scholar, and the other was a little-known pulp writer, both men combined New England regionalism, a belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, the primacy of modern science, and a belief in racial/eugenic differences to create a unique political paradigm little recognized at the time but influential today

Theoretically-Efficient and Practical Parallel DBSCAN

The DBSCAN method for spatial clustering has received significant attention due to its applicability in a variety of data analysis tasks. There are fast sequential algorithms for DBSCAN in Euclidean space that take $O(n\log n)$ work for two dimensions, sub-quadratic work for three or more dimensions, and can be computed approximately in linear work for any constant number of dimensions. However, existing parallel DBSCAN algorithms require quadratic work in the worst case, making them inefficient for large datasets. This paper bridges the gap between theory and practice of parallel DBSCAN by presenting new parallel algorithms for Euclidean exact DBSCAN and approximate DBSCAN that match the work bounds of their sequential counterparts, and are highly parallel (polylogarithmic depth). We present implementations of our algorithms along with optimizations that improve their practical performance. We perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation of our algorithms on a variety of datasets and parameter settings. Our experiments on a 36-core machine with hyper-threading show that we outperform existing parallel DBSCAN implementations by up to several orders of magnitude, and achieve speedups by up to 33x over the best sequential algorithms

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome

Unmasking the Other: Political and Racial Others in Selected Transatlantic Fiction, 1922-1935

The core idea behind detective fiction is to have the audience indentify with the sleuth. In this regard, the sleuth(s) must represent the feelings, anxieties, and morals of the reading audience. During the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, British and American detectives try to uncover racial and political threats in order to find some semblance of order and comfort in the pessimistic post-World War I world. Principally, the British school of interwar detective fiction relies heavily on the notions of the political Other. In the traditional British tale, a gentleman amateur comes from his ivory tower (of sorts) into a chaotic world which he then puts to rights. Specifically speaking, the “cozy” British mystery of the 1920s and 1930s is concerned with threats to the British status quo, and these are typically political threats stemming from foreign nationals such as Wilhemite Germans, mafia-infested Italians, and Soviet Russians. In such diverse Anglophonic texts as the late Sherlock Holmes canon, Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, and Ngaio Marsh’s The Nursing Home Murder, the political Other represents a foreign and a radical threat to the shaky British order of the interwar years. In the British tradition, the detective is a stabilizing agent. In the American “hard-boiled” tradition, the detective unveils the lies underlying the American myths of morality, political fairness, and cultural utopianism. Dashiell Hammett’s “Dead Yellow Women” presents an odyssey through the criminal maze that is San Francisco’s Chinatown. The Continental Op, the id of the white working class of California, navigates the cultural barriers of race in urban American only to be left utterly confounded and displaced. Similarly, Chandler’s Sam “Spanish” Delaguerra in “Spanish Blood” asserts that his upstanding and pure Spanish blood is a mechanism that allows for his honesty in a corrupt world of Filipino stick-up men, junkies, and Irish American political bosses. In both Hammett and Chandler, the issues of race and ethnic identity complicate the already hectic world of crime detection in the urban jungle, and ultimately these themes provide a counter-myth to the ideal of the Sunshine State. In short, my paper will examine the detective trope of using the detective as a mechanism for the unveiling of the threatening Other. In the British school, the Other is usually political other who seeks to destabilize the British legal, political, and cultural traditions. In the American school, the Other is a racial minority or outsider that stands as a symbol for the greater corruption of the American city. In doing this, my paper seeks to highlight the lie that detective fiction is a diversionary pursuit rather than a serious attempt to grapple with the thorny issues of race, politics, and social class

Reviews and syntheses:The clam before the storm - a meta-analysis showing the effect of combined climate change stressors on bivalves

The impacts of climate change on marine organisms have been increasingly documented in laboratory and experimental studies. However, the use of different taxonomic groupings and the assessment of a range of processes make identifying overall trends challenging. Meta-analysis has been used to determine general trends, but coarse taxonomic granularity may mask phylogenetically specific responses. Bivalve molluscs are a data-rich clade of ecologically and economically important calcifying marine taxa that allow for the assessment of species-specific vulnerability across developmental stages. Drawing on the large body of available literature, we conduct a meta-analysis of 203 unique experimental set-ups in order to examine how bivalve growth responds to increased water temperature, acidity, deoxygenation, and changes in salinity in 10 climate change stressor combinations. This is the most complete examination of bivalve responses to date and shows that anthropogenic climate change will disproportionally affect particular families, suggesting taxonomic differentiation in climate change response. Specifically, Mytilidae, Ostreidae, and Pectinidae (67 % of experiments) respond with negative effect sizes for all individual stressors, whereas responses in Pinnidae, Tellinidae, and Veneridae are more complex. Our analysis shows that earlier studies reporting negative impacts on bivalves are driven by only three or four well-studied, commercially important families. Despite the taxonomic differentiation, almost all drivers and their combinations have significant negative effects on growth. The synergistic impacts of deoxygenation, acidification, and temperature result in the largest negative effect size. Infaunal taxa, including Tellinidae and Veneridae, appear more resistant to warming and oxygen reduction than epifaunal or motile taxa, but this difference between the two taxa is also based on a small number of data points. The current focus of experimental set-ups on commercially important taxa and families within a small geographic range creates gaps in the understanding of global impacts on these economically important foundation organisms