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“The issue we confront today is not primarily one concerning a special day for an individual. The issue is in reality whether our nation can summon the will and vision to recognize a great and historic period in its history by designating the birthdate of one who made major contributions to the period a national public holiday.”

Last month we published a major article describing the development of Martin‐Baker ejection seats on the occasion of 1,000 lives being saved. Based on the successful ejection rate for the previous twelve months, we had estimated in January 1965 that the thousandth life would be saved in May and, in fact, we went to press with the May issue on exactly the same day that Martin‐Baker announced that the figure had been achieved. There is little more to add to our leading article and comments published last month except to congratulate all concerned—and especially Mr James Martin, C.B.E., M.I.Mech.E., F.R.Ae.S., Managing Director and Chief Designer of the Martin‐Baker Aircraft Co. Ltd. (pictured above).

According to Figure 1, semi‐loof shell, plate and beam elements are implemented in such a way that three independent blocks are formed to obtain the stiffness, mass, load and stress matrices. These three blocks are controlled by subroutine MSTIF, which is directly called from a standard FE program.

To summarize and evaluate John Levi Marin’s recent book, The Explanation of Social Action (2011), the central thesis of which is that the actions of other people cannot be explained without first understanding those actions from the point of view of the actors themselves. Martin thus endeavors to reorient social science toward concrete experience and away from purportedly useless abstractions.

This review chapter employs close scrutiny of and applies immanent critique to Martin’s argumentative claims, warrants, and the polemical style in which these arguments are presented.

This chapter arrives at the following conclusions: (1) Martin unnecessarily truncates the scope of sociological investigation; (2) he fails to define the key concepts within his argument, including “explanation,” “social action,” and “understanding,” among others; (3) he overemphasizes the external or “environmental” causes of action; (4) rather than inducing actions, the so-called “action-fields” induce experiences, and are therefore incapable of explaining actions; (5) Martin rejects counterfactual definitions of causality while defining his own notion of causality in terms of counterfactuals; (6) most of his critiques of other philosophical accounts of causality are really critiques of their potential misapplication; (7) the separation of experience and language (i.e., propositions about experience) in order to secure the validity of the former does not secure the validity of sociological inquiry, since experiences are invariably reported in language; and, finally, (8) Martin’s argument that people are neurologically incapable of providing accurate, retrospective accounts of the motivations behind their own actions is based on the kind of third-person social science he elsewhere repudiates; that he acknowledges the veracity of these studies demonstrates the potential utility of the “third-person” perspectives and the implausibility of any social science that abandons them.

To date Martin’s book has received much praise but little critical attention. This review chapter seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature in order to better elucidate Martin’s central arguments and the conclusions that can be reasonably inferred from the logical and empirical evidence presented.

Understanding the dynamic hygrothermal behavior of building elements is very important to ensure the optimal performance of buildings. The Laboratory for Quality Control in Buildings of the Basque Government tested a flat roof designed by a construction company that developed a building to be constructed using prefabricated modules. This is a five to eight floor building with ventilated façade and a flat roof covered by gravel with the possibility of changing it to a green cover. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The interest of this research was threefold. The first objective was to accurately test, under real dynamic weather conditions, the roof design in a PASLINK test cell to obtain the U-value and the thermal capacitance of the different roof layers, and of the roof as a whole, through the precise calibration of resistance-capacitance mathematical models of the roof. Based on the parameters and experimental information of these calibrated models, a second goal was to calibrate and validate a Wufi model of the roof.

This second calibrated model was then used to simulate the dynamic hygrothermal behavior of the roof, obtaining the roof’s hourly thermal demand per square meter for a whole year in different locations considered in the Spanish Building Code. These simulations also permitted the authors to study the risk of condensation and mold growth of the tested component under different climatic conditions.

The successful combination of the PASLINK method to calibrate the Wufi hygrothermal model is the main novelty of this research.

This chapter examines the long-run behavior of real food prices and the impact of food prices on poor and vulnerable households. It also examines the price policy responses of governments to high and volatile food prices, and the impact of food prices and policies on the poorest in the society.

We focus on the impacts of food price changes on individual households, particularly on those living near the poverty line using the standard World Bank measure of poverty at US$1.25 per day in purchasing power.

We found that the effect of an exogenous increase in food prices typically raises poverty in the short run when many poor households are net buyers of grain and wage rates do not have time to fully adjust. In the long run, higher food prices increase food output and raise the wage rates of poor households from unskilled off-farm labor. The end result is that higher food prices can contribute to long-run poverty reduction.

Combining the impact of the price changes and government policy responses allows an assessment of the overall impact of higher world food prices on poverty.

The French company Ets. G. Martin S.A., 50 rue Greffulhe, Levallois (Seine) are well known for their radial grease lubricators and are now marketing a new line of recently developed centralised apparatus. This is of the double‐line system which they have well proved with previous systems over many years. The comprehensive range of lubricating pumps and regulators now offered are largely standardised and therefore cost less than before.