Evidence of uneven selective pressure on different subsets of the conserved human genome : implications for the significance of intronic and intergenic DNA

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Sweet brown narrative : modern internet folklore

Miranda Sings, GloZell Simon, Charlie the Unicorn, Antoine Dotson, and Rebecca Black are living viral, Internet sensations that prove celebrity can be created online. The digital age has created a new venue for storytelling, legend, myth, jokes and other forms of folklore. Although they are not traditional, new venues for folklore such as YouTube videos and Memes create platforms for communication among individuals on large and small scales across the United States. As a result, they facilitate the rise of ordinary individuals to stardom. As a part of our modern day folklore, these stars are evidence of our culture, communicating messages and revealing truths about American culture

Gender, intertextuality & market demands: publishing children\u27s picture books

Children’s literature in the U.S. has long since reflected, and also influenced, the nation’s societal and cultural identity. The genre’s representation of gender has historically aligned with traditionally distinct and separate sex-typed roles of domestic or non-domestic behavior. Through textual analysis of 80 New York Times bestselling picture books between 2009 and 2019, this research seeks to determine if publishers and consumers are selecting titles that support or subvert stereotypical gender roles. Prior studies on gender representation in children’s literature have concluded that the prevalence of static, passive female characters and active male characters negatively impacts the identity development of child readers (Gooden and Gooden; Hamilton et al.; DeLoache et al.; Bishop). The studies’ findings when paired with an analysis of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever informed my approach to the literary analysis. Although there is an improvement in the quality of female representation in the sample, stereotypical tropes of male and female behavior recur frequently. While male characters comprise the majority of the sample, there are no male minority characters; in fact, only five of the 80 titles centered on a female minority character. Though the presence of gender stereotypes appears to be gradually declining in children’s literature, representation of diverse characters and narratives remains low

Attention Demands in Text Entry Interfaces

The rationale for a model of text input that includes perceptual and cognitives processes is given. Reducing keystrokes is fine, but if the design imposes an increased perceptual and/or cognitive load on the user (e.g., shifting attention points or perusing a list of candidate words in a word completion system), then a newinterface may not be as efficient as first thought. This argument as well as others underscoring the need to more thoroughly acknowledge and quantifiy attention demans in text entry interface are developed

USING RIGHTS OF FIRST REFUSAL FOR FARMLAND RETENTION

How can rights of first refusal protect prime agricultural land? This paper develops a theory for valuing rights of first refusal based on compensation for foreclosing future demand, information asymmetry, and advance purchase of market share. A procedure is developed for governments to use these rights to prevent conversion.Land Economics/Use,

Evidence for regulatory diversity and auto-regulation at the TAC1 locus in sensory neurones

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Managing Misinformation on Social Media: Targeted Newsfeed Interventions and Freedom of Thought

Whether it is being told a particular politician consumes children, or drinking cow urine will cure your disease, or that Jimi Hendrix is alive and well living the good life in Drumnadrochit, misinformation affects societies in myriad ways. Its spread online via social media platforms raises questions concerning how it can be addressed. This article engages with a related problem: Can the use of targeted behavioral interventions on social media newsfeeds to reduce the spread of misinformation be reconciled with the human right to freedom of thought