Hoag Levins has been a journalist since 1970 and was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Courier Post in New Jersey. He has also been the executive editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, the founding and executive editor of APBnews.com, a crime and justice web site, and the editor of AdAge.com, the web site of Advertising Age magazine.His book that received the most attention is "AMERICAN SEX MACHINES: The Hidden History of Sex at the U.S. Patent Office," published in 1996. The project began as research for a series of magazine articles about corporate patent wars and ended up being a three-year project that retrieved more than 800 patents related to human sexuality. Despite its salacious-sounding title, the book is actually a serious and quite unique history of engineering and American social mores as documented in 150 years of patent applications.