Book review: race news: black journalists and the fight for racial justice in the twentieth century by Fred Carroll

In Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century, Fred Carroll traces the history of black journalism in the USA from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s, focusing on the porous boundaries between ‘commercial’ and ‘alternative’ outlets. This is a well-researched, readable and comprehensive account that will offer valuable insights to those interested in African American history, journalism and civil rights activism, finds Max Lewontin

Book review: Narrative expansions: interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt

In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their doors to underrepresented voices. This timely collection is a brilliant effort to unite the thinking behind the movements to decolonise the curriculum, writes Amy Lewontin

Book review: Narrative expansions: interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt

In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their doors to underrepresented voices. This timely collection is a brilliant effort to unite the thinking behind the movements to decolonise the curriculum, writes Amy Lewontin

Book review: Book wars: the digital revolution in publishing by John B. Thompson

In Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, John B. Thompson explores the digital transformations that have turned book publishing on its head over the last 30 years. Offering a noteworthy study of recent changes to the publishing world, this work is well worth reading to understand where the book was in the latter part of the twentieth century and where it is headed well into the twenty-first, writes Amy Lewontin. Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. John B. Thompson. Polity. 2021

Robust identification of local adaptation from allele frequencies

Comparing allele frequencies among populations that differ in environment has long been a tool for detecting loci involved in local adaptation. However, such analyses are complicated by an imperfect knowledge of population allele frequencies and neutral correlations of allele frequencies among populations due to shared population history and gene flow. Here we develop a set of methods to robustly test for unusual allele frequency patterns, and correlations between environmental variables and allele frequencies while accounting for these complications based on a Bayesian model previously implemented in the software Bayenv. Using this model, we calculate a set of `standardized allele frequencies' that allows investigators to apply tests of their choice to multiple populations, while accounting for sampling and covariance due to population history. We illustrate this first by showing that these standardized frequencies can be used to calculate powerful tests to detect non-parametric correlations with environmental variables, which are also less prone to spurious results due to outlier populations. We then demonstrate how these standardized allele frequencies can be used to construct a test to detect SNPs that deviate strongly from neutral population structure. This test is conceptually related to FST but should be more powerful as we account for population history. We also extend the model to next-generation sequencing of population pools, which is a cost-efficient way to estimate population allele frequencies, but it implies an additional level of sampling noise. The utility of these methods is demonstrated in simulations and by re-analyzing human SNP data from the HGDP populations. An implementation of our method will be available from http://gcbias.org.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

Book review: the broadcast 41: women and the anti-communist blacklist by Carol A. Stabile

In The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist, Carol A. Stabile explores the 41 women working in US television and radio who were blacklisted during the 1950s ‘Red Scare’, showing how the removal of these progressives from the media continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century. This is a fascinating and well-researched study, finds Max Lewontin, that contributes to the ongoing effort to recover the voices of women, immigrants and people of colour in the history of broadcasting and challenge the amnesia surrounding the impact of the anti-communist blacklist

Book review: Narrative expansions: Interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt

In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their doors to underrepresented voices. This timely collection is a brilliant effort to unite the thinking behind the movements to decolonise the curriculum, writes Amy Lewontin

A combinatorial approach to angiosperm pollen morphology

Angiosperms (flowering plants) are strikingly diverse. This is clearly expressed in the morphology of their pollen grains, which are characterized by enormous variety in their shape and patterning. In this paper, I approach angiosperm pollen morphology from the perspective of enumerative combinatorics. This involves generating angiosperm pollen morphotypes by algorithmically combining character states and enumerating the results of these combinations. I use this approach to generate 3 643 200 pollen morphotypes, which I visualize using a parallel-coordinates plot. This represents a raw morphospace. To compare real-world and theoretical morphologies, I map the pollen of 1008 species of Neotropical angiosperms growing on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, onto this raw morphospace. This highlights that, in addition to their well-documented taxonomic diversity, Neotropical rainforests also represent an enormous reservoir of morphological diversity. Angiosperm pollen morphospace at BCI has been filled mostly by pollen morphotypes that are unique to single plant species. Repetition of pollen morphotypes among higher taxa at BCI reflects both constraint and convergence. This combinatorial approach to morphology addresses the complexity that results from large numbers of discrete character combinations and could be employed in any situation where organismal form can be captured by discrete morphological characters

Characterizing web pornography consumption from passive measurements

Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works typically build on surveys, limited by different factors, e.g. unreliable answers that volunteers may (involuntarily) provide. In this work, we collect anonymized accesses to pornography websites using HTTP-level passive traces. Our dataset includes about $15\,000$ broadband subscribers over a period of 3 years. We use it to provide quantitative information about the interactions of users with pornographic websites, focusing on time and frequency of use, habits, and trends. We distribute our anonymized dataset to the community to ease reproducibility and allow further studies.Comment: Passive and Active Measurements Conference 2019 (PAM 2019). 14 pages, 7 figure