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In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.

“[W]hat if they gave an apocalypse and nobody noticed?” was the question that Brooks Landon (1991, 239) proposed as the central thematic concern of the 1980s cyberpunk – a movement which today represents a landmark in the development of the science fiction genre. Diverse as they are in their focus and scope, the contributions to this issue of ELOPE, dedicated to the position and role of speculative fiction, and especially science fiction, in a world which is increasingly becoming speculative and science fictional, invariably demonstrate that an apocalypse did indeed take place and went by largely unnoticed.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate food taste, smell, and characteristics from consumers’ online reviews. Several studies in food sensory evaluation have been presented for consumer acceptance. However, these studies need taste descriptive word lexicon, and they are not suitable for analyzing large number of evaluators to predict consumer acceptance. In this paper, an automated text analysis method for food evaluation is presented to analyze and compare recently introduced two jjampong ramen types (mixed seafood noodles). To avoid building a sensory word lexicon, consumers’ reviews are collected from SNS. Then, by training word embedding model with acquired reviews, words in the large amount of review text are converted into vectors. Based on these words represented as vectors, inference is performed to evaluate taste and smell of two jjampong ramen types. Finally, the reliability and merits of the proposed food evaluation method are confirmed by a comparison with the results from an actual consumer preference taste evaluation.

THE efficacy of the resistance to wave action of vertical wall breakwaters built on a rubble mound foundation has been called into question recently by reason of two unfortunate, and, in fact, structurally disastrous, incidents which have been experienced, at Catania in Sicily in March 1933 and at Algiers in North Africa in February 1934. The matter is one of fundamental importance, since quite a number of important harbours in the Mediterranean and elsewhere are protected by breakwaters of this type. It was. discussed at considerable length by an eminent Italian engineer, Prof. E. Coen Cagli, in a lecture which he delivered lately at the Institution of Civil Engineers, a short reference to which was made in NATURE of July 20, p. 99.