I am writing this despite a reluctance to add to the chorus of criticisms of the scientific publication process — an industry full of easy over-generalisations and proposals to discard babies with their bathwater. But a couple of recent publications do, I think, illustrate some recurring problems in the scientific “literature”. One of these is highlighted by the Graur et al. [1] paper in Genome...

In 2000, my wife Lynn and I were in Namibia researching the social organization of Elephantulus intufi (Rathbun and Rathbun 2006). During a meal at our study site which we shared with the landowner, his two sons and two archaeologists studying local rock art, the archaeologists showed us a newly published book (LewisWilliams 2000). When Justin Holloway, the youngest son of the landowner, saw th...

THIS book by a graduate of this medical school and a Fellow of this Society, who is now Professor of Histopathology at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, is a fascinating record of interesting clinical an,d pathological experiences. The conditions described are rare or presented in some unusual way, but the author has been able to indicate something of general value and interest in nearly a...

In this essay, we review the methods of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis available to the Canterbury Tales Project.1 Our belief that these techniques will permit us to arrive at a more exact reconstruction of the history of the Canterbury Tales than could Manly and Rickert (1940) is vital to our decision to undertake this work. There are two major strands to these techniques. The first, cla...

The paper discusses erotic desire and the motif of going on pilgrimage in the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and in William Shakespeare’s sonnets. What connects most of the texts chosen for consideration in the paper is their diptych-like composition, corresponding to the dual theme of eros and pilgrimage. At the outset, I read the first eighteen lines of...

Research on storytelling over the last 100 years has distinguished at least two levels of narrative representation (1) story, or fabula; and (2) discourse, or sujhet. We use this distinction to create Fabula Tales, a computational framework for a virtual storyteller that can tell the same story in different ways through the implementation of general narratological variations, such as varying di...

The idea of control or power is central to the notion of democracy, since the ideal is one of giving kratos to the demos: giving maximal or at least significant control over government to the people. But it turns out that the notion of kratos or control is definable in various ways and that as the notion is differently understood, so the ideal of democracy is differently interpreted. In this li...

The travels of a young man feigning subarachnoid haemorrhage in London and Scotland, over the past year, are documented. The origins of the Munchausen Tales are reviewed.