This is the second edited volume in the Advances in Applied Linguistics Series - following from the one edited by Claire Kramsch (2002b). The book brings together invited papers from a wide range of scholars working in different linguistic and sociocultural contexts, all of whom have a focus on conversation analysis (CA) in second language encounters.

"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) dating--the best known of these methods--and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances, explaining how they reveal the age of our fossil ancestors such as "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs' extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the beginning of the earth's history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these advances through the stories of the scientists themselves--James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson--Macdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science's most significant accomplishments: a timescale for the earth's evolution and human prehistory.

Lecture Notes on Ophthalmology (Lecture Notes Series)
Stroke Mandeville Hospital, UK. Focuses on the most commonly encountered eye problems and covers the structure and function of the eye. Presents clinical cases and includes new material on recent advances in the treatment of diseases such as glaucoma and macular degeneration. Abundant color illustrations.