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Describes how and where we perceive the sense of taste, the traditional four basic taste sensations, and why different parts of the mouth are more or less sensitive to a particular one. Outlines types of compounds having a particular taste with some relationships between and anomalies of their chemical structure and the taste sensation they elicit, together with individual variation in tasting sensitivity and factors affecting this, such as adaptation. Summarizes interesting taste phenomena including: taste blindness; taste modification; the role of heavy metals in taste perception. Describes the additional taste sensations that have been proposed such as: umami; water‐taste; metallic; alkalinity and other gustatory effects such as pungency (burning sensation), cooling and astringency.

Describes the nature of gin and how it got its name, the history of gin from its creation for use as a medicine, its rise in popularity and how this created a major social problem through to its current regained respectability, the range of botanicals used in its production with the sources of the major ingredients. Explains its production, describing the gin still operation and the subsequent dilution and blending, the range of different types of gins available throughout the world, including both “true” gins and other beverages known as gin.

As their name implies, the prime function of these ingredients is to donate flavour which is detected by the senses of taste and smell. Taste itself is made up of the four primary tastes — sweet, sour, salt and bitter — which are detected by the taste buds situated in the mouth, mainly on the tongue, palate and cheeks. Smell is detected by extremely sensitive cells at the top of the nasal cavity. The current standard definition of flavour is as follows: ‘Flavour is the sensation elicited by a foodstuff when the taste and odour receptors are stimulated’.

The current study examines developing racial attitudes among a group of African American adolescents. Data for this study include 28 open-ended, qualitative interviews with African American adolescents (64% girls, 36% boys) in Detroit, Michigan, and were drawn from a larger study in which these adolescents and their mothers were interviewed about racial socialization. Data analysis shows adolescents' racial attitudes to be ambivalent and influenced by the dissonance between “color-blind” rhetoric – the idea that “race doesn't matter” – and their everyday experiences, in which race does matter in important ways. Adolescents' reports of racial attitudes and experiences with racism frequently include travel anecdotes, which reveal how place, travel, and negotiating the color line influence their developing ideas about race. The findings suggest that sources beyond parental socialization strongly affect adolescents' developing racial attitudes and identities and that young people's voices should be further utilized in studies examining these issues.

Integration is a critical success factor for achieving a mature level of e‐government. This research seeks to identify barriers to e‐government integration (EGI).

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 14 consultants with significant experience of e‐government projects. The interview transcripts were analysed by the researcher to identify barriers in EGI.

The findings resulted in a set of 17 barriers which were organised into one of four categories: strategy, technology, policy and organization. Strategy barriers include common e‐government goals and objectives, delivery timeframes, and ownership and governance. Technology barriers include architecture interoperability, data standards and legacy systems. Policy barriers include citizen privacy, data ownership and policy implications. Organization barriers include pace of government reform, legacy government processes and management and technical skills.

One of the limitations of the research is that it involved in‐depth interviews with a relatively small number of individuals. In addition, improvements in research procedure, such as the use of multiple interviewers, will go some way towards increasing the reliability of the research findings.

EGI is not simply a technical matter of getting IT systems to talk to each other. Stakeholders should engage in strategic planning and change management.

The paper has identified a set of barriers in e‐government. Certain barriers, specifically in the area of policy, are particular to e‐government projects. A model of EGI, based on a synthesis of government relationships, is also proposed.

In the past government organisations have paid little attention to service quality or responsiveness to clients. This changed with the movement termed “new public management”, which occurred in most developed nations around 1990. This paper briefly examines the concept of quality and its application to the public sector and discusses e‐government, the latest manifestation of attempts to improve quality in government. The paper also reports on a survey of senior personnel across the three levels of government in Australia. The results of the survey and other published research materials suggest, that the impact of e‐government on service delivery is modest and not well distributed. While there has been widespread adoption of e‐government measures, these have generally been lacking in sophistication and have been disproportionately beneficial to city dwellers without addressing problems of equity and access.

This study aims to explore the textual and sociopolitical relationships of kinship writing as 15 youth wrote politically charged poetry while participating in a four-week summer writing program grounded in a Black studies curriculum.

The authors explore the following research questions: How do youth writers draw upon each other’s writing to compose sociopolitical kinship poems when writing about critical issues affecting Black lives? What topics and oppressions do youth choose to write about and how do they write about these topics?

The authors found that the youth wrote across multiple topics affecting Black lives in their kinship poems. These include the appropriation of black beauty, gun violence and police brutality, love and Black lives, the need for equality, negative depictions and misrepresentations of Black people, the neglect and omission of Black lives and suppression of freedom. The youth took up various critical issues in their poems, which addressed what they deemed as most urgent in the lives of Black people, and these selected topics were highly historicized. We also found that the youth used the content, styles and audience of the original poems to pen their own pieces.

Writing with another peer afforded collaborative writing and spaces for youth to read and interrogate the world while building criticality through their writing.

Kinship writing is a genre in which one piece of writing has a relationship with another piece of writing. Kinship writing carries significance in the Black literary community as the history of Black education has been interlaced with ideals of social learning, community, family and kinship. This literary approach contributes to ways Black people used each other’s writings to offer healing, comfort and care in a turmoil filled world.

Since Bram Stoker’s tale of Count Dracula struck a chord with a sensation-hungry public, vampires have remained a popular part of horror in cinema. Since the turn of the millennium, vampires have now become a mainstay of horror TV. Programmes like True Blood (2008–2014) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017) have propelled the vampire into the home.

This chapter will investigate the problematic, but often sympathetic relationship between vampires and humans in The Vampire Diaries.