Gee Whiz Research Articles

Insect Power Misconceptions: Moving the Classic Bess Beetle Sled-Pull, a Discrepant Event Activity, Beyond “Gee Whiz”

Insect Power Misconceptions: Moving the Classic Bess Beetle Sled-Pull, a Discrepant Event Activity, Beyond “Gee Whiz”

Epistemological Luddism: Reinvigorating a Concept for Action in 21st Century Sociotechnical Struggles

ABSTRACTExplicitly dismantling or decommissioning existing sociotechnical systems seems to be unimaginable both within dominant public imaginaries and in academic thought. Indeed, ‘gee whiz’ journalistic narratives regarding emerging technoscience abound as many members of the public appear to eagerly await any new innovation coming out of Silicon Valley. At the same time, most science and technology studies (STS) research focuses on the creation of new technoscience, not its destruction or temporary decommissioning. Yet, lay citizens clearly engage in forms of Luddism: schoolchildren and overworked professionals take digital ‘detoxes’, a number of cities have dismantled their urban highways, and a growing movement of parents have opted their children out of their state’s standardized testing requirements. While all such efforts are rooted in the rejection of a technology, they vary in terms of their resemblance to 19th century English Luddism as well as with respect to Langdon Winner’s concept of epistemological Luddism. How might STS scholars better make sense of 21st century Luddism? This article conceptualizes a number of contemporary examples of technological dismantling with regard to their epistemological and political characteristics. We end with a call for research to better understand lay technological refusal, especially in comparison to elite-driven forms of disruption.

Cushicle/Suitaloon

An invitation from the editors of the JAE to revisit a project executed over fifty years ago may reflect a nostalgia for an imagined golden age when architects, in truth just a handful, dedicated themselves to the wholesale rethinking of the built environment. For this happy few the prospect of servitude in an architect's office endlessly reworking the client-funded classic one-off building did not exactly inspire; so, armed with a conviction that change needed to happen on the scale of the city, they coalesced into groups like Archigram to produce the clientless Plug-in City, Walking City, Instant City, Living City, Dream City and Rok Plug/Log Plug. All of them unrealizable except perhaps for Instant City, which was a sort of modernized traveling circus. And in 1969 Instant City actually happened when a cow pasture in Bethel, NY turned into a city pop. 400,000 for four days at the end of which the cows got their pasture back.My solo offering was the 1966 Cushicle/Suitaloon, a project whose genesis was a photograph I found of a man wearing a warm suit (manufactured, apparently, by the Frankenstein company[!]). Add an air cushion vehicle (abbreviated to Cushicle) type hovercraft, a few inflatables and some items from NASA and you were on the way to making a living environment…….or so went the hype.The JAE-requested revisitation, as might be expected, changed the project1 not so much in terms of its appearance but in the way it gets explained. It allowed the project to develop into a less gee whiz and more thoughtful study, I would like to believe, of the concentric skins surrounding us that help compensate for the fact that rarely is the local meteorology what you might call Garden-of-Eden quality—i.e. blue sky, temps. 80°F, humidity 52%, no bugs.2

The science grapevine: Influence of blog information on the online media coverage of the 2010 arsenic-based life study

Informal chatter has always been part of the scientific community, but with the emergence of online blogs these casual debates have become public. Here, I present a case study of how blog information influenced the online news frames during the December 2010 coverage of the arsenic-based life study. The results show how media frames were homogeneous and transformed abruptly from a positive ‘Gee Whiz’ frame towards a critical frame and lastly to a meta media frame over the course of a few days. From beginning to end, the blogosphere heavily influenced the news content, use of sources and spread of information between news outlets. Such rapid and uncontrollable influence of blogosphere information on online news coverage can be explained theoretically as an example of science grapevine communication.

A Laser Based Fluorination (BrF5) System for the Extraction of Oxygen (O2) from Silicate Rocks of Himalaya and δ18O Measurements: Method Establishment and Implications

Oxygen forms the majority of minerals constituting the terrestrial and planetary objects. Its chemical and isotopic compositions often bear signatures of the processes occurring within these objects on different time scales. Silicates are the common rocks in the Himalaya, the major feature on the Earth, which has witnessed different stages of metamorphism and got reworked during its evolution. Therefore, oxygen isotopes in silicate rocks can be used to reveal the processes pertaining to the Himalayan orogeny. These processes include petrogenesis, metamorphism, subduction and associated magmatic events, etc. Oxygen isotopic composition (δ18O) is needed to be measured in silicate rocks which require special arrangements. Towards this, a vacuum line of stainless steel coupled with a computer controlled CO2 laser system was fabricated, for the first time in India, to extract oxygen (O2) from rock forming mineral in the BrF5 environment. The line is equipped with suitable valves and traps for the efficient recovery of oxygen from the silicate minerals and reliable handling of hazardous oxidants (i.e., BrF5, etc.) that are used as fluorination agents to break Si=O bonds. This extraction system is interfaced with a continuous flow stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer and is being used successfully for the oxygen isotopic (δ18O) measurements in silicate and oxide minerals. Here we report the δ18O results on a set of silicate rocks and standard reference materials including Norway olivine, Gee Whiz Garnet standard from University of New Mexico, olivine from Norway Fan (Lab Standard), silicate rocks from North West Himalaya (India) and NBS-28 quartz a standard reference material from International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. The average δ18O values (relative to Vienna standard mean ocean water) and 2SD are 6.4 ± 0.3 ‰ (N = 17) for Norway olivine, 12.7 ± 0.2 ‰ (N = 10) for Gee Whiz Garnet and 9.5 ± 0.3 ‰ (N = 12) for NBS-28 quartz. In addition, some of the quartz vein and quartzites from the Garhwal Himalaya were also measured to establish the measurement protocols and procedures. Silicate rocks from the Himalaya near the main central thrust zone were tried to fix the end-member composition for oxygen isotopes (δ18O). Such information is helpful to infer about the origin of quartzite and their relationship with possible protoliths in the region. Further, this technique finds applications in the analysis of biogenic silica (diatoms and phytoliths, etc.) for paleoclimatic reconstruction.

Book Review: Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America, by Amber Roessner

Amber Roessner Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Sporting Press in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 227 pp.Roessner delves into heady days of what she calls gee whiz journalism (p. 2), when sportswriters and journalists embedded themselves with biggest stars, and how symbiotic relationship helped and, at times, disparaged both. The book primarily focuses on role of newspapers and magazines in shaping and bolstering images of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Roessner has experience covering sports. Before becoming an assistant professor in School of Journalism and Electronic Media at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, she was a sportswriter for Gainesville (GÂ) Times.Roessner provides an interesting analysis of relationship between three groups: baseball consuming public, early stars, and some of pundits. Roessner shows how sportswriters influenced ways in which consumers of base- ball news viewed Cobb and Mathewson, while two baseball stars and those same consumers influenced how writers packaged information for public.In early twentieth century, sports journalists and major league baseball players shared close quarters. Journalists traveled with teams they covered, ate with players, spent leisure time with them, and even visited them in off-season. Journalists leveraged close relationships to provide personal tidbits and insights into play- ers' philosophies of game, on-field skirmishes and plays, and off-season activities. Grantland Rice, John Wheeler, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and F.C. Lane, some of most prominent sportswriters of early twentieth century, had easy access to stars like Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner uses words of those writers to tell stories of Cobb and Mathewson and how those writers drenched two icons in American virtue and tenacity, while excusing Cobb when he displayed violent side of tenacity. Sportswriters painted Mathewson as baseball's archetypal saint and Cobb as the Major League's quintessential sinner . . . The more reliable sketched him for what he was-an anomaly, a chameleon-like trickster with an eerie knack of transforming just when sportswriters thought they had him figured out (p. 123).Roessner does a commendable job of showing free-wheeling journalistic styles of Rice, Wheeler, Lardner, and their colleagues. These writers experimenting with humor, characterization, and dialogue in their pieces-techniques that they put to good use in their literary journalism and in their fiction over next decade (p. 122). Rice even used poetry and verse to espouse nobility of Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner notes that editors gave their top writers more autonomy and independence than other reporters. Still, these writers knew there were constraints. Rice and other writers who developed close relationships with Cobb, Mathewson, and other players knew they could not betray their trust. Afraid of losing their insider status, they did not dare unearth controversial gossip (p. 166). Writers not only avoided disparaging stars they covered, they often served as promoters for players. Roessner spends a significant portion of book discussing conflict that writers faced in maintain- ing close relationships with stars like Cobb and Mathewson, while trying to maintain some objectivity to their reporting. Roessner couches discussion in W. Joseph Cambell's three paradigms of journalism: activist, narrative, and detached models. In era of yellow journalism and early-twentieth-century heydays of sports jour- nalism, activist and narrative models, or gee whiz journalism, became prevalent in coverage of Cobb and Mathewson. …

Biomarkers, Behavior, and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Biomarkers, Behavior, and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Spies That Fly (review)

Reviewed by: Spies That Fly A. Bowdoin Van Riper Spies That Fly (2002). Directed by Larry Klein. Produced and distributed by WGBH/Boston. 56 minutes. Spies in the Sky, a 2002 episode of the PBS television series Nova, explores the origins and early history of remotely piloted reconnaissance aircraft. Its main narrative thread begins with Israeli operations over Lebanon's Bekka Valley in 1982 and ends with American operations over Afghanistan in 2001. It is, however, less a story about combat than a story about successive attempts to find a technological fix for a difficult military problem. The problem—as the film's opening segments explain in some detail—was simple to state: how to acquire detailed, timely photographic intelligence over hostile territory. Piloted aircraft, like the U-2s whose cameras revealed Soviet missile sites in Cuba, were flexible but increasingly vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles. Satellites were immune to missiles, but incapable of lingering over a promising target and difficult to reroute on short notice. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were conceived in the 1960s as a third solution, one that provided the flexibility of a piloted aircraft without putting a pilot's life at risk. Making that "third way" work, however, proved to be more difficult than it appeared. The first American UAV, the jet-powered Lightning Bug of the 1960s, cost enormous amounts of money and delivered mediocre results. It took fifteen years before Israel fielded the first modern UAV: a small, radically simple, highly robust machine driven by a propeller and powered by a two-stroke engine. American designers expanded on the Israeli approach to UAV design in two distinct ways, and Spies That Fly chronicles both. The first thread traces the evolution of "full-size" UAVs from the ship-launched Pioneer used in the Gulf War through the turn-of-the-century Predator to the long-range, high-endurance Global Hawk used tested in Afghanistan. The second explores a [End Page 158] series of attempts to build small UAVs like the Dragonfly (a modular design that can be disassembled and carried in a suitcase) for use by units in the field. Both are illustrated with a rich variety of visuals: computer animation, interviews with military experts, and live-action footage of training exercises and combat operations, including a UAV-directed attack on enemy vehicles in Afghanistan. Keeping with the film's origins as an episode of Nova, the filmmakers focus on design and operational challenges rather than military applications. Some of its most interesting moments involve ongoing attempts to understand the dynamics of insect flight, in order to design insect-sized, flapping-wing UAVs for use inside buildings. To its credit, Spies That Fly emphasizes the difficulty of such work and the high failure rate for experimental UAVs. This warts-and-all treatment is a welcome departure from the credulous "gee whiz!" tone that frequently creeps into television documentaries on military technology. Reissued as part of a four-disc boxed set that includes Nova episodes on Soviet jet fighters and the U. S. Air Force's new Joint Strike Fighter, Spies That Fly is being marketed to viewers interested in exotic airplanes and recent military history. It is also, however, a finely crafted miniature case study in the history of a cutting-edge technology. A. Bowdoin Van Riper Southern Polytechnic State University Copyright © 2011 Center for the Study of Film and History

Mary Seely, visionary scientist and dedicated teacher, turns 70

ecology, physiology, geology, geomorphology, archaeology and sociology. What, during this first phase of Mary’s career, were the keys to her success? It is clear that a convergence of fate, fortune and Mary’s own special brand of energy, focus and self-motivation, all worked in her favour. The locality and research function of Gobabeb provided the perfect springboard to her career, together with the support of several colleagues and friends who helped to open doors, which she had no hesitation in entering! Much of the success of the Gobabeb research programme related to Mary’s commitment to facilitating other people’s research and becoming directly involved with research projects that were out of her own field, but that added to understanding of the Namib ecology. Gobabeb became a place where all were welcome. She has always worked tirelessly and without complaint, immersing herself fearlessly in the big issues, ever seeking out (and implementing) ways to do things better. She will be heard saying, ‘Make use of what you have, then build on it.’ She demonstrated this from the beginning, making minimal funds go a long way, while doggedly building up an increasingly viable and professional institution. An empathic human being, she is quick to offer a helping hand whether on a personal level, or to facilitate study and career opportunities for her proteges. ‘Out of the box’ thinking is Mary’s challenge to all, be they aspirant scientists, peers and colleagues, or young people who are ‘finding themselves in the desert’. Her favourite (and famous) comment on reviewing first drafts of publications is ‘So what?’, forcing the author to go back and find the ‘gee whiz’ aspects of the subject, and cut the waffle. Mary’s characteristic focus on her goals, and her perseverance in meeting them against all odds, paid off at the time of Namibia’s independence in 1990. The second phase of her career began at this time, with a crisis: South African funding which had underpinned Gobabeb was withdrawn, and closure was imminent. But Mary saw beyond Gobabeb, to the potential for applying science in the development arena. Her establishment of the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia (DRFN) opened a gateway in Namibia that served to connect science to development, translating desert knowledge into policy, training and capacity, awareness and sustainable development. She simultaneously activated Gobabeb as a site for integrated training, as well as maintaining its research and long-term monitoring functions, while dedicating enormous energy to securing funding for the research station. Mary’s work pioneered desertification

The pragmatics of connotation

The connotations of a language expression are pragmatic effects that arise from encyclopaedic knowledge about its denotation (or reference) and also from experiences, beliefs, and prejudices about the contexts in which the expression is typically used. The connotation of a language expression is clearly distinct from its sense, denotation and reference. For example, Mike and Michael can have the same reference but different connotations. John is an unsuitable name for your new-born daughter; so is Springtime in Paris an inappropriate name for a 1200cc Harley-Davidson motorbike or an auto-repair shop. Identifying the connotations of a term is to identify the community attitude towards it. For instance the connotations of English octopus and the Japanese translation equivalent tako are very different: an octopus is a sinister, alien creature; tako is edible and endearing. Connotation is intimately involved with notions of appropriateness in language use; i.e. with pragmatic effect. For instance, racist dysphemisms occur when a speaker refers to or implicates the hearer or some third person's race, ethnicity, or nationality in such terms as to cause a face affront. Many such ‘racist’ terms can be disarmed by being used, without irony, as in-group solidarity markers by the targeted group; e.g. the use of nigger/ nigga among African Americans. The negative connotations of some existing word often lead to its replacement. Although Jesus Christ! is blasphemous; Gee whiz and By jingo are not. From a purely rational viewpoint, if one of these is blasphemous, then all of them are. But the pragmatic effects, i.e. connotations are different. Connotation is a thoroughly pragmatic category of meaning.

Gee Whiz!: It's All About Pee (review)

Gee Whiz!: It's All About Pee (review)

Dropouts or Leftouts? School Leavers in Canada

ONTARIO'S education minister, Gerard Kennedy, has announced that no student will be allowed to drop out of school before the age of 18. The government has promised to link youths' eligibility to obtain driver's licenses with proof that they are still in school or have already graduated from high school. According to Mr. Kennedy, potential dropouts, aka early school leavers, will therefore be motivated to stay in school, if only to get their licenses. One could be forgiven for wondering if Mr. Kennedy resides in Pleasantville, where fresh-faced, clean-cut sons borrow their fathers' cars to take their perky dates out on Saturday nights and dream of one day fixing up old jalopies for themselves. Gee whiz, Dad, thanks. The bulk of the population at risk of dropping out sees car ownership as financially out of reach, even before calculating the extraordinarily high cost of obtaining mandatory insurance. A solution so mismatched to the problem it purports to address must be almost intolerably frustrating to the legions of researchers, advocates for the poor, literacy workers, and educators who recognize that neither carrots nor sticks have much impact on youths who are engaged in the sad process of dropping out of school. The prospects for the 10% of Canadian students who dropped out in 2004-05 are bleaker than ever before. The good news, however, is that more students are staying in school, although there are important gender, race, and regional disparities. (1) The stayin-school mantra has helped reduce the number of dropouts by 7% since 1990-91. Atlantic Canada showed the most dramatic improvement, with Newfoundland reducing its dropout rate during this period from 20% to 8%. But the prairie provinces and Quebec, while slightly increasing their graduation rates, showed less than the rest of the country, with Manitoba posting the highest dropout rate, at 13%. Provincial governments are not motivated exclusively by the desire to improve the lives of their young citizens by keeping them in school. Increasingly, governments have financial incentives to devise successful retention initiatives. According to one stay-in-school advocacy group in British Columbia, one in seven students who drops out receives social assistance within 18 months of leaving school, and 90% of criminal justice expenditures are associated with dropouts. Because of the lower earning power of non-high school graduates, federal and B.C. coffers forgo $515 million annually in tax revenue. (2) No other province has indicated that will follow Ontario's plan to restrict to school continuers the privilege of driving, although both in Ontario and in the rest of the country, significant attempts to retain students are being made, some of which (such as expanding co-op courses and apprenticeships in high school and focusing on success by 12 in elementary schools) have been welcomed. But only New Brunswick and Ontario have amended legislation to require students to stay in school until the age of 18, measure that teachers fear will lead to one of the most difficult of teaching circumstances --dealing with students who really, really don't want to be in school. However well intentioned, these measures implicitly assume that what happens--or doesn't happen--at school constitutes the root cause of dropping out. This assumption is contestable, at best. Certainly, ill-advised curriculum reforms and overly ambitious graduation requirements have had some impact on who stays and who leaves. In Ontario, for example, a study by Alan King identified the new grade-10 math course, reputed to be notoriously difficult, as a juggernaut. Less than 3% of students who failed the math or English courses in the applied stream were able to recover and graduate on time. (3) Yet according to a recent report by Statistics Canada, the profile of the typical dropout suggests that, in many ways, what's going on at school is only part of the story. …

Not Just Another Pretty Picture

Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders. Orrin Devinsky and Mark D'Esposito. 2004. New York: Oxford University Press. 451 pp., $99.95 (HB).A problem with many behavioral neurology texts is the tendency to minimize the connection between behavior and integrated neuroscience theory. Often the illustrative neurological principles are not grounded in behavioral neuroscience, but, instead, present unusual conditions in a type of “Gee whiz” display. The relationship of these conditions to neuroscience is often lost. In Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders, the relationship of neurologic condition to neuroscientific principles is clearly explicated. This is perhaps the greatest strength of this addition to the Oxford University Press Contemporary Neurology Series.

The Trouble with Research, Part 2

A OU MUST BE kidding. It i / can't be true. This is the 20th / E t anniversary of the Research column in the Kappan. Time sure flies when you're too busy to think about it. Although some of the pos itive trends I noted in the 10th anniversary edition have continued, overall the past dec ade has not been kind to educational First, some has been subordinat ed to and corrupted by ideology. Second, there has been substantial questioning of what educational research should be and a fear that the federal government is moving to a rigid orthodoxy in defining what counts as science or research. I had planned to deal with both problems here, but they're too much for one column. Darrell Huff's 1954 publication, How to Lie with Statistics, is still in print and still worth reading. So is my own (no false mod esty here) Bail Me Out!, the first third of which is called Principles of Data Inter pretation, or, How Not to Get Statistically Snookered. It's the flip side of Huff how to know when someone is lying to you with statistics. techniques in How to Lie with Statistics have been increasingly practiced to influence education policy. Huff titled one of his chapters The Gee Whiz Graph. In it, he first presents an ap propriate graphic depiction of monthly na tional income increases over a year and says, That is all very well if all you want to do

Designing Ve Training Systems that Work: Stacking the Deck in the User's Favor

Over the past decade, a veritable barrage of Virtual Environment (VE)-based training systems has burst onto the training and education scene (Cohn & Patrey, 2001). On the surface these systems, which claim such benefits as small footprint, rapid reconfiguration, and enhanced training delivery, appear to be the panacea for a market desperate for low cost, effective training tools. Yet, often the human element is taken for granted, with systems being designed to incorporate the latest technological advances, to the exclusion of the latest human-factors advances (Cohn, Breaux, Nguyen Schmorrow, 2001). Moreover, the utility of these systems is all too-rarely objectively evaluated. Consequently, the likelihood of designing a final product with a significant ‘gee whiz’ factor, coupled with, at best, an undefined ‘training effectiveness’ quotient, is quite high, leading users to over-estimate the value of their training. In the operational setting, these over-estimations can have costly –if not tragic- consequences. Such need not be the case. There are more than enough design methodologies for ensuring that training systems satisfy the needs of the users for whom they are intended. The crucial element that has been missing is an underlying philosophy linking these techniques in a logical fashion. The intent of this panel is to bring together a range of training technologies into a single forum, with the goal of presenting a comprehensive Design Effectiveness program.

Gee whiz: CpG DNA allergy therapy!

Gee whiz: CpG DNA allergy therapy!

Special Effects and the Invasive Camera

Special Effects and the Invasive Camera

How Comparative Is Comparative Research?

Social scientists tend to accept lower standards of rigor in cross-national surveys than in national surveys, leading to heroic conclusions about differences between nations on the basis of obviously faulty data. Arising perhaps from a commendable wish to respect different cultural norms, even some of the most conscientious cross-national studies make the mistake of permitting considerable variations by country in the type and quality of the methods they deploy. Meanwhile, analysts of cross-national data frequently abandon offering explanations and interpretations in favor of league tables of distributions showing merely “gee whiz” national differences. This article acknowledges the formidable obstacles in the way of achieving rigor in large-scale comparative studies and offers 10 possible rules to mitigate the difficulties. It suggests that bigger is usually worse and recommends routine cross-national collaboration in analysis and interpretation—not just in design, development, and execution—among scholars in each of the nations under the microscope.

Camille Paglia's Sex, Art, and American Culture

Camille Paglia's writing is often numbingly boring. The problem with reviewing her is that selective quotes make her appear snappy in a fashionably politically incorrect way. Then Camille the public performer and Camille the writer of books get all mixed up. Which is not to say reading Sex, Art and American Culture is only boring; it is also infuriating. I kept looking ahead to see how much more, oh lord, how much more to go before I was through? Then there were the moments of disgust and anger. And why didn't anyone warn me in one of the numerous hyped-up articles I read about naughty Camille that her writing is repetitious and tediously predictable? I'm bewildered that Paglia has apparently captivated so many with so little, including a swag of gay men and lesbians. In a recent issue of the Australian gay magazine Outrage, Peter Blazey practically elevated our Camille to saviour status (Blazey, 1993). It just goes to show, yet again, that being queer is no indicator of political acumen. At least her first book; Sexual Personae Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, no matter how nauseously undergraduate it tended to be, did focus on famous cultural artifacts and personalities. In it she tells us she is practically single-handedly rescuing us from the aridity of modernism and restoring the unity and continuity of Western culture in an approach which combines the disciplines of literature, art history, psychology and religion. Gee whiz. Her 'method is a form of sensationalism: I try to flesh out intellect with emotion and to induce a wide range of emotion from the reader' (1992: xiii). The aim is continued in this collection of essays, mostly written between 1990 and 1992 after the first book's publication. In it she expounds ad infinitum on her main themes, including the news that rape is one of life's little miseries, that paganism and astrology are deep and meaningful, that American academia sucks, French intellectuals suck, feminism sucks, lesbianism sucks, Madonna is fabulous and so is PAGLIA. But the focus

A BIOENGINEER'S ANALYSIS OF VERTEBRATE GIANTS

This is a dinosaur book with a difference. There are no color plates showing imaginative restorations of the great beasts in deadly combat or guarding their young. Description is minimal and selective. Instead, basic principles of engineering are applied to giant extinct vertebrates-the largest reptiles of land, sea, and air, and also the biggest birds and mammals-in order to learn how they may have lived. This is an idea book, not a gee whiz story: we learn much about the animals, but many answers are tentative; the game of the analytical process is no less important than the goal of understanding. Functional morphologists who are familiar with R. McNeill Alexander's research (and few would not be) know that he can plunge into difficult mathematics in the second paragraph, yet he can also write clearly for a general audience. This book is direct and not difficult to follow. It is suitable for all biology buffs, from high school students to professors. The former should know enough of the language of algebra to follow easy equations; the latter, according to specialty, may care to skip paragraphs about kinds of dinosaurs or the basic principles of natural selection, surface-to-volume ratios, and aerodynamics. Each of the 13 chapters ends with a succinct summary and a list of principal sources, and we are told what material was taken from each reference. Many titles cited are from Alexander's prolific laboratory and attest to the author's broad interests and versatility. The 164 text pages are profusely illustrated by 83 figures and 11 tables. The figures are simple line drawings which are usually clear; the outline of an elephant or Triceratops is sufficient because laymen already know what these animals look like. The same is not true of dinosaur pelves or sections of tooth rows, however, and such drawings (several lacking keys to their orientation) are barely adequate. The first chapter introduces the dinosaurs and reminds the reader how fossils are preserved, age-dated, and named. In the second chapter, two methods are given for finding the weights of extinct quadrupeds. Other workers have summed the circumferences of the upper leg bones (humerus and femur) of a wide range of modern mammals and have plotted the values against the masses of the animals. The regression obtained is then extended to include dinosaurs. Instead, Alexander first approximates the volume of various dinosaurs by weighing models (from the Natural History Museum, London) in and out of water (one gram of displaced