We share our experiences comprehending social theory as it applies to numeracy scholarship. We build on existing arguments that social theory-explicitly acknowledging the presence and influence of histories, power, and purposes-offers something important to scholars who study and discuss numeracy. In this article, we translate the six propositions of one particular social theory of literacy into propositions about numeracy, then we explore the meaning of each proposition, its connections to existing scholarship, and its implications. This article emerges from two literature reviews: one on social theories (especially their application to and development in literacy) and one on numeracy. We bring these two reviews together through the decisions and connections we make during this translation. We hope this account of our experiences can help other numeracy scholars as they approach, adapt, and apply theory.

Protein-coding sequences can arise either from duplication and divergence of existing sequences, or de novo from noncoding DNA. Unfortunately, recently evolved de novo genes can be hard to distinguish from false positives, making their study difficult. Here, we study a more tractable version of the process of conversion of noncoding sequence into coding: the co-option of short segments of noncoding sequence into the C-termini of existing proteins via the loss of a stop codon. Because we study recent additions to potentially old genes, we are able to apply a variety of stringent quality filters to our annotations of what is a true protein-coding gene, discarding the putative proteins of unknown function that are typical of recent fully de novo genes. We identify 54 examples of C-terminal extensions in Saccharomyces and 28 in Drosophila, all of them recent enough to still be polymorphic. We find one putative gene fusion that turns out, on close inspection, to be the product of replicated assembly errors, further highlighting the issue of false positives in the study of rare events. Four of the Saccharomyces C-terminal extensions (to ADH1, ARP8, TPM2, and PIS1) that survived our quality filters are predicted to lead to significant modification of a protein domain structure.

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their preferences through subtle multimodal design choices. One of these design choices is using a quantitative visual rhetoric: persuasive multimodal moves that draw on quantification through visual, spatial, and textual manipulation-involving the choice of data representation, visual images, and illustrations, (im)balance between numeric and alphabetic texts, and general quantitative narrative. This quantitative visual rhetoric helps news outlets manipulate facts without lying with words, leaving the onus of misinterpretation on the readers/viewers. In this article, using examples from five types of media outlets-far-left, left-leaning, central, right-leaning, and far-rightwe share examples of design choices we found through multimodal analysis of their quantitative visual rhetoric during the 2016 elections. We share implications for media literacy education and civic engagement.

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