The publication of these two very different books, indicates the increasing frankness with which the subject of homosexuality can nowadays be discussed; it is not many years since the word was practically unusable in newspaper or novel. Not unnaturally such past repression, even of discussion, has led now to some highly emotional pronouncements and illogical attitudes of our present society, wh...

E-books and e-readers are a publishing industry phenomenon. In 2011, e-book sales surpassed both paperback and hardback sales (Bosman 2012b). Because of this evolution, opponents of e-readers have predicted the death of reading. The death of reading is not imminent. However, the nature of reading is in flux as a generation of readers adjusts to reading from a computer screen rather than physica...

On an e-commerce site, product blurbs (short promotional statements) and user reviews give us a lot of information about products. While a blurb should be appealing to encourage more users to click on a product link, sometimes sellers may miss or misunderstand which aspects of the product are important to their users. We therefore propose a novel task: suggesting aspects of products for an adve...

According to Steven Pinker’s blurb on the dust jacket, ‘‘Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail, Ray Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and insightful ways.’’ Jackendoff is the aut...

In spite of its beguiling title and glowing blurb on the dust jacket, medical historians are likely to find this work remorselessly presentist, historically inaccurate and very hard going. It is the sort of book that gives philosophy of science something worse than a bad name. Besides the roller-coaster ride between technical philosophy and banal simplifications there is an unreconstructed real...

Cortex was founded in 1964 by Ennio De Renzi. As such it is one of the oldest journals of Neuropsychology, launched at the turning point in the history of the field (see De Renzi, 2001; Cubelli, 2005). According to the blurb presenting it, ‘‘Cortex is an international journal devoted to thestudy of cognition and of the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, particularly a...

Aphrodite of Knidos, which identified the reproductive organs as her "region of insanity" (Fig. 2.76, p. 108). Over-generalizations and the odd inconsistency are inevitable in a book that ranges so far, and many minor criticisms might be made of some of the authors' arguments, which they often lack space to fully substantiate (e.g., the assertion that the Enlightenment placed new emphasis on in...

The current study qualitatively examined blurbs in the discipline of physics which is perceived to be less infused with evaluative resources and more objective and impersonal in its textual argumentation. The study followed the appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005) to see how interpersonal meaning is textually constructed in blurbs. Findings indicated that writers of the blurb...

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. One of the key questions that guide and organise research on human consciousness is functional in nature: What is consciousness good for? Many answers to this question are possible, but the one that I shall be dealing with in this chapter is particularly popular. Although many laypeople and researchers would be willing to ...

The Medical and Legal Aspects of Sanitary Reform, by ALEXANDER P. STEWART and EDWARD JENKINS (reprint of 1866 ed., with an introduction by M. W. Flinn), Leicester University Press, 1969, pp. 24, 100, £1.60. The current interest in matters Victorian has prompted the Victorian Studies Centre of the University of Leicester to publish a series of Victorian classic literature in various fields. This...