Specialist Booksellers

Conscientious workmen or booksellers' hacks? The professional identities of science writers in the mid-nineteenth century.

Existing scholarship on the debates over expertise in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has demonstrated the importance of popular writings on the sciences to definitions of scientific authority. Yet while men of science might position themselves in opposition to the stereotype of the merely popular writer, the self-identity of the popular writer remained ambiguous. This essay examines the careers...

Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers

Erik Brynjolfsson • Yu (Jeffrey) Hu • Michael D. Smith Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 The Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 [email protected] • [email protected] • mds@cm...

Mosquito-specialist spiders

What does ‘mosquito specialist’ mean? A mosquito specialist is a predator that actively prefers mosquitoes, by which we mean that it is differentially motivated to capture mosquitoes among possible prey. This would make it extraordinarily useful, as it would be targeting an insect that matters to people. At best, the mosquito is a nuisance and, at worst, it is a notorious disease vector. There ...

Achieving specialist status.

The Nursing Specialist Group

Medical software tools began to emerge during the 1980's, some became known as 'expert systems'. In contrast to conventional software which process data, expert systems process 'knowledge'. For this reason, expert systems are also called ‘Knowledge Based Systems' (KBS). The most well known medical example is MYCIN.' This expert system was developed at Stanford University in 1976 to aid physicia...