Prologue

The prologue recounts in detail the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. An illiterate farm worker with a wife and three-year-old son, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman with a penknife in front of her young children. Captured after a three-day manhunt, Stacy was lynched by a racist deputy sheriff and his body riddled with seventeen bullets fired by mob members. No one was charged with his murder, but the lynching prompted an effort by Black leaders and the NAACP to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill in Congress, using as a visual reminder of lynching’s horrors a photo of Stacy’s lifeless body hanging from a pine branch while several White children gaze at it. FDR refused, citing his reliance on racist southern senators for passage of his New Deal programs to combat the Great Depression. The prologue also explores the ancestral roots of Stacy and the family of the woman he was accused of assaulting. Both had ancestors among the early Virginia residents; Stacy’s were Black slaves, and his alleged victim’s were White farmers. The different cultures in which they were raised—one oppressed by the other—made Stacy’s lynching an example of White fear of Black men “violating” their wives and daughters.

White Men's Law

White Men’s Law recounts and explores the legal and extralegal means by which systemic White racism has kept Black Americans “in their place” from slavery to police and vigilante killings of Black men and women, from 1619 to the present. The book argues that African Americans have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions—especially the legal and educational systems—that hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to Supreme Court decisions and test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, the book examines the various ways White racists justify and perpetuate their superior position in American society. The book is framed around the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1935. An illiterate Black farmhand, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman and was lynched by a deputy sheriff and a mob that fired seventeen bullets into his lifeless body. White Men’s Law poses a critical question: What historical forces preceded and followed this and thousands more lynchings that show the damaging—and often deadly—impact of systemic racism on Black Americans? After recounting struggles over racism from the first shipment of slaves to colonial Virginia until the present, it concludes with a look at efforts by President Joe Biden to “root out systemic racism” in both public and private institutions and the barriers those efforts face from entrenched racism in those institutions.

Changing Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease Dynamics Through Time in Montastraea cavernosa

Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) is affecting corals across the Western Atlantic and displays species-specific and regional differences in prevalence, incidence, degree of mortality, and lesion morphology. We examined two Florida sites with different temporal histories of disease emergence; Fort Lauderdale where SCTLD is endemic and the Lower Florida Keys where SCTLD has recently emerged. Our objectives were to (1) assess the potential impact of SCTLD on overall reef condition by surveying reefs in each region, (2) in a single common species, Montastraea cavernosa, examine differences in SCTLD prevalence, colony mortality, and lesion morphology in each region, and (3) look for differences in contagion by conducting transmission experiments using lesions from each region. Reef surveys found sites in both regions had low coral cover, high algae cover, and similar coral species composition. SCTLD prevalence was higher in the Lower Keys than at Fort Lauderdale and two of the common species, M. cavernosa and S. siderea at Fort Lauderdale were dominated by smaller colonies (<5 cm) whereas larger colonies occurred in the Lower Keys. Tagged M. cavernosa SCTLD-affected colonies were followed for 2 years at one site in each region. In both years, Fort Lauderdale colonies showed declining disease prevalence, low colony mortality, and disease lesions were mainly bleached spots lacking tissue loss. In contrast, Lower Keys colonies tagged in the first year maintained 100% disease prevalence with high mortality, and disease lesions were predominantly tissue loss with no bleached edges. However, SCTLD dynamics changed, with year two tagged colonies showing declining disease prevalence, low mortality, and lesion morphology switched to a mixture of bleached polyps and tissue loss with or without bleached edges. Lesion morphology on colonies was a significant predictor of amount of tissue loss. Aquaria studies found the rate of SCTLD transmission using lesions from the different zones (emergent and endemic) were similar. Our study highlights that differences in coral mortality from SCTLD are not necessarily linked to host species, lesion morphology is reflective of subsequent rate of mortality, and disease dynamics change through time on reefs where the disease has newly emerged.

Predictive Prevalence of Risk Phenotypes Associated With rs2285666 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism of ACE2 in the World Population Susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Variability of ACE2 expression encoded by the ACE2 gene may be important for susceptibility and clinical outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This study was aimed to identify potential single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of ACE2 relevant to SARS-CoV-2 infection and predictively assigned risk phenotypes. Allele and genotype information of rs2285666 SNP of ACE2 was obtained from the 1000 Genomes project Phase III in line with Fort Lauderdale principles. About 16 SNPs of ACE2 as potential venture for susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection was identified from the literature. Predicted high-risk phenotypes of ACE2 expressor due to carrying rs2285666 SNP of ACE2 was highly prevalent in East Asia (40.7%; 95% CI 36%-45%), followed by South Asia (36.8%; 95% CI 33%-41%), America (22.8%; 95% CI 18%-27%), Europe (14.5%; 95% CI 11%-18%) and Africa (12.3%; 95% CI 10%-15%), respectively. In total, ~25% of the world populations were predictively identified as being at high-risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection due to carrying rs2285666 ACE2 genetic polymorphism. Identification of high-risk phenotypes for SARS-CoV-2 infection through screening of ACE2 genetic polymorphisms may be valuable for SARS-CoV-2- related COVID-19 prevention and treatment in the population. Customized DNA microarray techniques or next generation sequencing may holistically advance this newly evolving research area of infection genetics.

MAKO Robotic-Arm Assisted Total Knee Arthroplasty: Surgical Technique From the Office to the Operating Room

Recently, robotic assistance has become more readily available to perform total knee arthroplasties. However, training can often be time consuming and there can be a learning curve. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to clearly and concisely describe the preoperative planning and surgical technique for using one version of robotic assistance, specifically the MAKO platform (MAKO Surgical Corp. [Stryker], Fort Lauderdale, Florida), for a standard osteoarthritic knee with a varus deformity that is commonly encountered by joint arthroplasty surgeons.

Assessment of Arterial Signal Timings Based on Various Operational Policies and Optimization Tools

Traffic simulation and optimization tools are classified, according to their practical applicability, into two main categories: theoretical and practical. The performance of the optimized signal timing derived by any tool is influenced by how calculations are executed in the particular tool. Highway Capacity Software (HCS) and Vistro implement the procedures defined in the Highway Capacity Manual, thus they are essentially utilized by traffic operations and design engineers. Considering its capability of timing diagram drafting and travel time collection studies, Tru-Traffic is more commonly used by practitioners. All these programs have different built-in objective function(s) to develop optimized signal plans for intersections. In this study, the performance of the optimal signal timing plans developed by HCS, Tru-Traffic, and Vistro are evaluated and compared by using the microsimulation software Vissim. A real-world urban arterial with 20 intersections and heavy traffic in Fort Lauderdale, Florida served as the testbed. To eliminate any bias in the comparisons, all experiments were performed under identical geometric and traffic conditions, coded in each tool. The evaluation of the optimized plans was conducted based on average delay, number of stops, performance index, travel time, and percentage of arrivals on green. Results indicated that although timings developed in HCS reduced delay, they drastically increased number of stops. Tru-Traffic signal timings, when only offsets are optimized, performed better than timings developed by all of the other tools. Finally, Vistro increased arrivals on green, but it also increased delay. Optimized signal plans were transferred manually from optimization tools to Vissim. Therefore, future research should find methods for automatically transferring optimized plans to Vissim.

Pre-Tax Wage and Salary Income Inequalities in Largest Metropolitan Areas in the United States

The distribution of pre-tax wages and salaries for employed individuals between the ages of 18-65 in the ten largest metropolitan areas of the USA are studied in this paper using the American Community Survey data from 2019. The included metropolitan areas are Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Chicago–Naperville-Elgin, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, New York-Newark-Jersey City, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria. These ten metropolitan areas employed over 39 million individuals representing well over a quarter of the total employed labour force in the USA. Mean, median, standard error of the mean, 25th percentile, 50th percentile, and the Gini coefficient of pre-tax wages and salaries are presented for each metropolitan area. The metros differ significantly in terms of average pre-tax wages and salaries. They differ significantly in terms of the spread in the distribution of pre-tax wages and salaries measured both in terms of the inter-quartile range (the difference between 75th and 25th percentiles) and the Gini coefficient. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward is found to have both the highest average pre-tax wages and salaries and widest inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. The Smallest Gini coefficient is observed in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan area. Inequality measured in terms of the Gini coefficient is nearly 15% higher in San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward as compared to Washington-Arlington-Alexandria. The average pre-tax wages and salaries are about 83% higher in San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward than Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, the lowest in the nation. While aggregate nationwide inequalities attract intense attention, these regional variations point to significant and wide-ranging variations between different regions (metropolitan cities). By focusing on the pre-tax wages and salaries, this study allows us to tie inequalities that are most closely related to the labour market conditions, unlike other sources of income like capital gains, inheritance, government transfers, etc.

Corrigendum: Echinotermes biriba, a new genus and species of soldierless termite from the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon (Termitidae, Apicotermitinae). ZooKeys 748: 21–30. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.748.24253

Our recent description of Echinotermes biriba (Castro et al. 2018) does not clearly define the type repositories as we only give the acronyms “CATAC” and “UF”. The holotype and paratype workers are deposited in the Colección de artrópodos terrestres de la Amazonía Colombiana of the SINCHI Institute in Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia (CATAC). Additional paratype workers are deposited in the University of Florida Termite Collection at Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, Davie, Florida, United States (UF).