Demographics and destiny

Although publishers are accustomed to defining audiences and markets, they rarely take into account demographic data. Knowing the size of various age groups can help publishers to distinguish between subject areas whose markets are likely to grow and those whose markets are likely to shrink or level off Kendrick Noble offers demographic profiles of the U.S. population in 1988 and 1995 and predicts some likely effects of demographic change on the markets for pubishers’ products. J. Kendrick Noble, Jr., is first vice president of Paine Webber, Inc. and a leading analyst of the publishing industry.     

Mergers and acquisitions of professional and scholarly publishers: A contrarian view

J. Kendrick Noble seeks the reasons for mergers and acquisitions in schlarly and professional publishing in the desire for market penetration and growth. He also offers a forecast about how long the current wave of merger activity is likely to last. J. Kendrick Noble, Jr., is first vice president of PaineWebber, Inc. and a leading analyst of the publishing industry. Address for correspondence     

Visual and olfactory oddity learning in rats: What evidence is necessary to show conceptual behavior?

Experiment 1 involved the use of plastic and wooden objects and trial-unique problems. The rats performed successfully on nonconceptual oddity problems given before and after conceptual training, showing that the testing conditions were suitable, but they showed chance performances on the trial-unique problems. Experiment 2 involved the use of olfactory discriminanda. Five pretraining problems and 300 unique five-trial problems were presented. Two of 3 rats performed better than chance on Trial 2 and on Trials 3–5, but all performed at chance levels on Trial 1 throughout. The data suggest that the rats responded to specific odors on Trials 2–5 following the Trial 1 experience, as opposed to respondingconceptually to the “odd” odor. Had they responded conceptually to odd odors, they should have performed better than chance on Trial 1. These findings and the general logical argument that they support are considered in the context of the numerous inconclusive reports of the use of the oddity concept by nonprimate animals.     

Interaction of normal children with anatomical dolls

Anatomical (sexually explicit) rag dolls are frequently used in interviews of children suspected of being sexually abused. Abused children have been noted clinically to be aggressive and sometimes sexually precocious in their doll play, and testimony to that effect is often accepted in the courtroom as pertinent evidence. However, to date, normative data on the play behaviors with the sexually explicit dolls have been unavailable. This pilot study provides empirical information on the play interaction of a relatively large number of normal (nonreferred) children with anatomical dolls. One hundred forty-four children (ages 3 to 8 years) were observed in a playroom containing these special dolls during three conditions: (1) with an adult present, (2) without an adult, and (3) with the dolls undressed. The observations showed that nonreferred children found these dolls no more interesting than other toys. Little aggression and no explicit sexual activity were observed. In contrast to clinical observation of abused children, the doll play of nonreferred children is unlikely to be characterized by aggression or sexual concerns; thus these behaviors when observed in interaction with these dolls should be taken seriously.     

Re‐visioning Science “Love and Passion in the Scientific Imagination”: Art and science

The often portrayed media image of the scientist is a rather strange one, grim‐looking scientists, usually male, poised beside incomprehensible instruments. It is little wonder that we encounter the stereotype of the bespectacled scientist; thick black rims, coke bottle lenses, roman sandals, dressed in lab coats, trousers up to their necks. A qualitative study designed to produce a series of visual and oral narratives based on the everyday lived realities of “the contemporary scientist” was undertaken. The study was a participative project in which a research team, including the project leaders Anne Noble and Michelle Lunn, together with research assistants and documentary photography students, worked alongside scientists to produce contemporary and deliberately challenging stories of “the scientist” ¹ 1. Please see acknowledgements for details of the research team and the scientists involved in the project. . In this paper, the most pervasive theme to emerge from the research, the link between art and science, is discussed.