Late night comedians and journalists eagerly seized upon the case of an elderly woman who sued McDonald’s when she spilled hot coffee in her lap as a prime example of frivolous litigation. But as Rustad and Koenig argue, cases such as these are an incomplete and misleading characterization of tort law. Corporations have successfully waged a public relations battle to create the impression that most lawsuits are spurious, when in fact the opposite is true: tort law plays a crucial role in p...

An original account of the importance of diverse forms of fiction in the early American republic—one that challenges the “rise of the novel” narrativeWhat is the use of fiction? This question preoccupied writers in the early United States, where many cultural authorities insisted that fiction-reading would mislead readers about reality. Founded in Fiction argues that this suspicion made early American writers especially attuned to one of fiction’s defining...

The human life course is filled with and subject to a wide range of personal difficulties, many of which are shared by others. Life events and processes such as birth, childhood, training for and entering an occupation, marriage, and procreation, growing older, death and dying are all subject to dilemmas, obstacles, and barriers. Social Problems across the Life Course offers accessible readings that examine the societal construction of social problems out of the personal troubles that peop...

Electrical neuroimaging is based on the analysis of brain electrical activity recorded from the human scalp with multichannel EEG. It offers enormous potential for the dynamic mapping of brain functions, and for the non-invasive diagnosis of neurological and psychiatric conditions. This authoritative reference gives a systematic overview of new electrical imaging methods, with a sound introduction to the basics of multichannel recording of EEG and event-related potential (ERP) data, as wel...

For thirty-five years and through thirteen editions, Jim Henslin's Down to Earth Sociology has opened new windows onto the social realities that shape our world. Now in its fourteenth edition, the most popular anthology in sociology includes new articles on our changing world while also retaining its classic must-read essays. Focusing on social interaction in everyday life, the forty-six selections bring students face-to-face with the twin projects of contemporary sociology: under...

Everybody needs to know something about their brain. But who wants to wade through a tedious textbook that tells you far more than you want to know? This Core Ideas of Neuroscience also probably tells you more than you want to know too. But it does not cost anywhere near the $100 or more you would spend for a traditional text. Moreover, my book is organized as modules explaining the basic principles of 75 core ideas. You don't have to wade through it. You can dance through it, easily getti...

In this new edition of his landmark book, Richard Layard shows that there is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not just anecdotally true, it is the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes hav...

Studies of mechanisms in the brain that allow complicated things to happen in a coordinated fashion have produced some of the most spectacular discoveries in neuroscience. This book provides eloquent support for the idea that spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities. It takes a fresh look at the co-evolution of structure and function in the mammalian brain, illustrating how self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brains fundam...

To practice nursing effectively today requires a sound understanding of the legal system and the laws specifically affecting nurses. Legal and Ethical Standards for Nurses is filled with practical information, covering topics such as delegation, documentation, professional liability insurance, regulatory issues, advance directives and many others! While these are exciting and challenging times for nurses clinically, they are equally challenging legally. It is, therefore, increasingly impor...

The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property provides both a bird's eye overview of property law and an introduction to how property law affects larger concerns with individual autonomy, personhood, and economic organization. Written by two authorities on property law, this book gives students of property a coherent account of how property law works, with an emphasis on describing the central issues and policy debates. It is designed for law students who want a short and theoret...

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

Motion processing is an essential piece of the complex brain machinery that allows us to reconstruct the 3D layout of objects in the environment, to break camouflage, to perform scene segmentation, to estimate the ego movement, and to control our action. Although motion perception and its neural basis have been a topic of intensive research and modeling the last two decades, recent experimental evidences have stressed the dynamical aspects of motion integration and segmentation. This book ...