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The US manned space flight program is interpreted as an expression of American culture. Since the inception of the program one can detect a regression in the projected image from that which the original astronauts built around themselves to that which NASA constructed with Christa McAuliffe — the “teacher‐in‐space”. The first represents the theme of the American attaining immortality through competence. The second, characterized by the “denial of difference,” represents the American as a participant at “Disneyland‐in‐space”. The capacity to manage technological achievement is present in the former and absent in the latter, in which the concept of technology is replaced by the concept of magic. It is suggested that the same cultural regression may be found in the recent history of American organizational culture.

This bibliographic essay examines the scope and variety of nonfiction works in comics form with the intent of expanding librarians’ awareness of the diversity of such materials and serving as a resource for librarians.

It provides some theoretical background for understanding what constitutes nonfiction in graphic form and an overview of works available in print.

The article provides a representative (but not comprehensive) survey of graphic nonfiction works in the genres of memoir, travel, journalism, history, biography, science, essays and educational materials.

The essay focuses on materials published in books in English; the library world would benefit from subsequent research exploring the richness of materials available in other formats and other languages.

The field of graphic nonfiction is expanding, and this article serves as a guide for libraries interested in building or expanding collections in this format.

This article seeks to revitalise and add to the debate on the rising and declining fortunes of the field of information systems, to contrast and compare this to computer science, and to argue for a review within the field of the scientific basis of the field in general.

The article draws upon the existing debate within the information systems (IS) field and highlights pertinent IS debate and dogma from the historical past – including the notion of “cargo cult science” as debated by the Nobel laureate, Richard Feynmann, as a vehicle for the viewpoint discussion.

The field of IS is still susceptible to having weak roots in terms of scientific and theoretical formality for its fundamental basis, and those in the field should be warned against complacency in developing the field in an incremental manner.

This article adds to the debate on IS in general.

This paper aims to explore several methods for developing an effective content model for library websites.

This paper is conceptual.

Websites can take a couple of approaches to design. One is “top down” that focuses on the User Interface (UI) and graphic design. Another is “bottom up” that focuses on the organization of content. This paper encourages website designers to take a more “bottom up” approach to web design.

Neuro‐linguistic programming (NLP) is a popular form of inter‐personal skill and communication training. Originating in the 1970s, the technique made specific claims about the ways in which individuals processed the world about them, and quickly established itself, not only as an aid to communication, but as a form of psychotherapy in its own right. Today, NLP is big business with large numbers of training courses, personal development programmes, therapeutic and educational interventions purporting to be based on the principles of NLP. This paper explores what NLP is, the evidence for it, and issues related to its use. It concludes that after three decades, there is still no credible theoretical basis for NLP, researchers having failed to establish any evidence for its efficacy that is not anecdotal.

This paper's aim is to highlight the relationship between individual tacit knowledge and bounded awareness in managerial decision making.

The paper reviews pertinent literature on bounded awareness, individual tacit knowledge and decision making as well as that on the NASA Challenger disaster of 1986. The authors then build logical arguments towards three distinct propositions.

The distinct three propositions are: managers' dependence upon their existing tacit knowledge interacts with the bounds on their awareness in a cycle of positive reinforcement; different decision makers in the organization can experience differing bounds on their awareness towards the same piece of information; and the tension between experiences of success and failure influences the development of bounded awareness in individuals.

This study reflects on only a single case of decision‐making failure in its analyses. A variegated sample of different failures in multiple contexts might lead to finer insights.

These realizations bring to the fore a paradoxical property of dependence on tacit knowledge that it can be beneficial but can sometimes be harmful. This has implications for the field of knowledge management, wherein tacit knowledge is often a central construct.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, the relationship between bounded awareness and tacit knowledge has not been explicitly discussed before. The propositions can open useful new avenues for future researchers on the antecedents of, and remedies for, bounds on managerial awareness during decision making.

This text proposes that time is essentially related to one's visual metabolic rate. Metabolic rate is regulated by the speed of the intake of energy, the rate of the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to the visual areas. The author's working hypothesis is that the visual area of the brain known as human V5, the region involved in motion detection, may be the region most responsible for time perception. Our time sense from all the senses is, thus, compiled in the visual region, the speed of the human perception of reality. Time is the relationship of the human perception of reality and the rate that the reality itself is taking place (given by light waves in the environment). Hence, vision (and the visual cortex area V5) may be the vitally important aspects in answering the question: what is time? When we are not looking at a clock, time may be governed by our rate of metabolism; rate of the production of ATP by the mitochondria in V5. For example, when general human metabolism (and V5) is fast, time runs slow. When metabolic rate is relatively slow, time runs relatively faster. Many factors enter into the speed of metabolism such as age, sex, drug effects, velocity compared to speed c, states of boredom or excitement, darkness or light and mental states such as sleep. The relationship between time and space is discussed with the metabolic rate of V5 in mind. Because the uncertainty principle and the quantum picture of reality are adopted, this model qualitatively quantizes space and time, showing why they must forever be connected i.e. space‐time. This idea is discussed in relation to Zeno's paradox, which suggests that space and time are indeed quantized. Events, instants and entropy are defined. Reality can be understood in terms of the speed of the processing of instants. The arrow of time is pictured as caused by long‐term potentiation of synaptic neurons within the brain. Minkowski‐Einstein space‐time is analyzed and compared with the visual metabolic rate. The probable consequences of this model are proposed.

At the heart of any process of observation there are certain basic things which must happen. These might be analysed in abstract terms, or then again in terms of the quantum physical irreducibles. The paper links between these concerns. It starts by exploring the macroscopic processes which are essential to observation and from there it develops the outline of a path heading towards a continuum based model of quantum mechanics, and in particular, electrodynamics. It exposes attributes which are fundamental to the existence of an observer process, and then explores how the seat of those attributes may be found in the way we set‐up our notion of the basic properties of physical reality. Such a model is offered as a contribution to what is called “second‐order cybernetics”, namely the study of how we go about observing the observer process.