Search results

1. Introduction Victorian librarians saw the public library as a place where citizens could find material relating to their contemporary community — its health, finance, welfare and educational organisations; it would also be a depository for items relating to its past. By 1901 the Cambridge Free Library had taken so much care in this regard that “the historian of the future will find here all that he will need and that is as it should be”. But priorities changed within the library service. Within 50 years 60 per cent of that material had been dispersed and the remainder moved out of public view where it lay largely unused and unremembered. It had no place in the post‐war priorities of the public library service which had turned instead to “current information”, lists of societies, tourist information and the development of a general reference service concentrating on areas of comprehensiveness such as bus and train timetables from across the country. Today, community information and computer databases are the current information priorities, and although the unique, comprehensive local collection has been revived, invigorated and republicised, it remains an oddity, non‐conforming to the pre‐ordained management structure, an “albatross inheritance”.

This chapter is an autoethnographic account of my journey from a working-class childhood and youth to becoming an academic in a large UK university. Using the techniques of poetics (Bachelard, 2004), the chapter focuses on several pivotal periods in my life, where I encountered a sequence of events that were to influence my journey towards transformation. Back in my early 20s, I knew that I wanted to change and to grow in new directions; however, infused with a particular heritage, set of experiences and cultural values – none of which embraced, recognised or understood learning and university as a possibility – I struggled to make sense of my feelings of frustration and being stranded. This is where my strange fascination with the airport, music, daydream and the notion of flight emerged (see Bachelard, 2011; Seres, 1993). Here, the nebulous and seemingly futile ache for an alternative and better future emerged as a potent hope and journey towards transition.

The dynamics of work have increased the importance of work conditions and job demand in the corporate environment. This has exposed the high predominance of work overload among employees and managers in social organisations. This study aims to investigate the contemporary determinants of workaholism (organisational culture, financial well-being and career development) and quality of work-life (QWL) in Nigeria’s information technology (IT) sector.

To synthesise an understanding of factors that are responsible for workaholic behaviour among employees in the IT industry, this study used a cross-sectional research design to investigate the phenomenon that accounts for such hysteric conditions. This study administered an inventory battery of scales to obtain data from the study population on a random sampling technique to measure the established constructs responsible for workaholism and QWL. This study surveyed 644 samples of IT professionals in Nigeria and used structural equation modelling and artificial neural networks to examine the data obtained from the IT professionals.

The outcome of this study was significant as proposed. This study demonstrated that compulsive work approach adversely affects employee QWL in Nigeria’s IT industry. Also, excessive work adversely affects employee QWL in Nigeria’s IT industry. This study further discovered that organisational culture and management pressure significantly affect the QWL in the Nigerian IT industry. The results of this study showed that financial well-being significantly affects the QWL in the Nigerian IT industry. Lastly, it established that career development significantly affects the QWL in the Nigerian IT industry. This study concluded that if working round the clock is not completely removed from Nigeria’s IT cultural system, the industry will not be a safe environment and will not attract employees anymore. It has enabled many Nigerian workforces to quit working in Nigeria and migrate to international organisations.

This study has shown a meaningful dimension by discovering that workaholism is inherently in the cultural values and DNA of Nigerian IT institutions and not work addiction in itself for the employees. The novelty of this research has indicated that workaholism has not been documented much in the Nigerian IT sector.

Several activity-based transportation models are now becoming operational and are entering the stage of application for the modelling of travel demand. In our application, we will use decision rules to support the decision-making of the model instead of principles of utility maximization, which means our work can be interpreted as an application of the concept of bounded rationality in the transportation domain. In this chapter we explored a novel idea of combining decision trees and Bayesian networks to improve decision-making in order to maintain the potential advantages of both techniques. The results of this study suggest that integrated Bayesian networks and decision trees can be used for modelling the different choice facets of a travel demand model with better predictive power than CHAID decision trees. Another conclusion is that there are initial indications that the new way of integrating decision trees and Bayesian networks has produced a decision tree that is structurally more stable.

Warns that in TQM, there is a danger of losing sight of the original motives that prompted the endeavour in the first place. The TQM initiative can become the end, rather than the means to the end, and the participants’ lives made miserable. Explores some human aspects behind TQM failures. Aims at two categories, the person who is about to start a TQM initiative and the one who has witnessed a failed initiative. Questions the motives for starting a TQM programme.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how two rural‐based universities in South Africa can contribute towards sustainable development especially in their immediate rural communities. It addresses the following questions: what conditions or policy frameworks exist that can engender a sustainable development trajectory? How can rural‐based universities reconstitute themselves so they can become effective agents for sustainable rural development? Historically, because of apartheid policies, these and other black universities were on the margins of the knowledge production process and have not effectively engaged in real development activities that would meaningfully improve the livelihoods of rural dwellers. The research identified policy and legislative instruments and strategies that can promote a dynamic interaction with other institutions thus empowering and promoting sustainability. The aim of the paper is to raise awareness about existing possibilities at the disposal of these institutions.

The paper is the outcome of two research initiatives: one was a doctoral study by one of the authors, and the other was a study conducted at both universities. Both studies involved extensive interviews with a wide spectrum of stakeholders (local and provincial authorities, members of the business and university communities). Both also involved document analyses.

That rural‐based universities are advantageously situated and possess a variety of characteristics that can enable them to effectively contribute to sustainable development. These include their strategic location within the rural communities; reinventing their mission orientation so as to enhance their research capacity; expanding their intellectual/entrepreneurial/social capital; and the establishment of strong collaborative relationships.

The first aim of the paper is to raise the awareness of policy makers and other stakeholders about the strategic value of these institutions. The awareness should lead to a series of engagements with appropriate individuals with the view to develop appropriate strategies for application.

The contribution of rural‐based universities to sustainable development has not been sufficiently researched in South Africa and, therefore, the study fills the gap by adding valuable knowledge, new perspectives, and presents possibilities for consideration.

Increasing endurance was a very appropriate subject for the biomimetic approach. The study aims to design and manufacture a long-lasting mini unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using active gliding and soaring.

The endurance of mini UAVs is limited by battery or fuel capacity, and it is not always possible to increase these energy sources due to the fuselage size. Long endurance aircraft are required in various areas such as silent environment and traffic monitoring or search and rescue. Literature research on bird flight performance conducted to determine design parameters. These parameters are used in the theoretical design of the UAV for optimization. Computational fluid dynamics simulation and flight tests of the UAV performed to figure out the success of the design.

For a mini UAV to be produced in this class, it has been observed that it is more accurate to examine birds instead of gliders due to the size similarity. The UAV design reaches a 27.5 L/D (Glide ratio) ratio in the theoretical approach. However, flight results approved max L/D ratio is around 25 at the sea level. This flight performance is enough to outperform in glide ratio of Wandering albatrosses.

Sailplanes are known as sport aircraft. However, recent projects focus on glider designs due to fuel efficiency and silent tracking. Stemme S-14 that carries a high-resolution camera is one of the examples of these projects. The unmanned glider design can lead to these implications in the UAVs at least during the stand-by period in the air. Thanks to low weight, UAVs do not require strong thermals, which allows flying almost all over the world.

Researchers generally focus on increasing the battery capacity or the performance of the UAV. However, this study’s concentration is to increase the flight duration of the UAV by using geographical currents. For this purpose, taking advantage of bird morphology is quite a new topic. Also, glider type designs are rarely found in the field.

The final examples given in last month's article—the Cornier main planes—hovered between the torsion‐box and two‐spar types of design. The first to be described in this instalment is also a borderline case: the de Havilland Albatross.

The problems of representing knowledge in computer systems are common to information science, artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics. The paper offers a brief review of the structures and techniques that have been developed in these different disciplines. It looks at the semantic structure of sentences, at roles, categories and relations in subject anlaysis, at semantic primitives, and at knowledge representation for reasoning. The paper concludes with a note on a prototype expert system that makes use of some of these techniques.