This book analyses common perceptions about drink-spiking, a pervasive fear for many and sometimes a troubling reality. Ideas about spiked drinks have shaped the way we think about drugs, alcohol, criminal law, risk, nightspots, and socializing for over one hundred and fifty years, since the rise of modern anaesthesia and synthetic 'pharma-ubiquity'. The book offers a wide-ranging look at the constantly shifting cultural and gender politics of 'psycho-chemical treachery'. It provides rich case histories, assesses evolving scientific knowledge, and analyses the influence of social forces as disparate as Temperance and the acid enthusiasts of the 1960s. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, the book will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of criminal law, forensic science, public health, and social movements.

Examining "old media" treatment of crime legends: news reports, fictional film and television depictions, and "new media" interactive discussions: versions and discussions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists, this text examines a social context vastly changed from the height of rumour research in the mid-20th century.

Recent years have seen a shift in health care and social work that has moved collaborative work to the center of everyday practice. But has that change led to better outcomes for the people who use these social services? Evaluating Outcomes in Health and Social Care takes up that question--as well as the crucial underlying question of how best to measure those outcomes. This new edition brings the book fully up to date with the latest research findings and offers more tools, frameworks, and international examples of best practices to aid practitioners as they evaluate partnerships.

This volume describes the methods used in the surveillance of drinking water quality in the light of the special problems of small-community supplies, particularly in developing countries, and outlines the strategies necessary to ensure that surveillance is effective.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.

Written in a handbook style with specific methods and tips on eliminating false positive and false negative results, this book is a practical guide to the detailed mechanisms of such occurrences.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.