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The paper aims to propose a system that uses a combination of techniques to suggest weld requirements for ships parts. These suggestions are evaluated, decisions are made and then weld parameters are sent to a program generator.

A pattern recognition system recognizes shipbuilding parts using shape contour information. Fourier‐descriptors provide information and neural networks make decisions about shapes.

The system has distinguished between various parts and programs have been generated so that the methods have proved to be valid approaches.

The new system used a rudimentary curvature metric that measured Euclidean distance between two points in a window but the improved accuracy and ease of implementation can benefit other applications concerning curve approximation, node tracing, and image processing, but especially in identifying images of manufactured parts with distinct corners.

A new proposed system has been presented that uses image processing techniques in combination with a computer‐aided design model to provide information to a multi‐intelligent decision module. This module will use different criteria to determine a best weld path. Once the weld path has been determined then the program generator and post‐processor can be used to send a compatible program to the robot controller. The progress so far is described.

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce futures researchers to simple and practical ways they can employ intuitive intelligence to enhance their research.

The author outlines five specific intuitive tools which have been developed and are used regularly. The incorporation of these tools into the research process potentially makes research more efficient, meaningful and exciting. This paper contains a strong anecdotal component, to exemplify the processes. There is also a theoretical aspect. The author expands the mundane definition of intuition, and use it in the classical sense, where it incorporates the idea of the extended mind. This is referred to as “integrated intelligence”. While this definition places it beyond generally accepted definitions of intuition found in modern psychology, it has a long tradition in the history of art, literature and science right through to the modern era. It is also consistent with recent experimental scientific evidence. Further, it fits well into recent developments in critical and post‐conventional futures studies, where “other ways of knowing” are being increasingly legitimatised.

Intuitive intelligence can be used by futurists to make research more fluid, efficient and exciting

The theory of integrated intelligence is a new theory and has not been tested. It lies beyond conventional approaches to research in the West

This is a highly original and innovative approach which enhances research.

To date, community pharmacy research has largely focused on the impact of service quality elements on patronage behavior. Investigation into the influence of cost and value is limited. The purpose of this study is to explore what is known about customers’ perceptions of cost and value, and how these influence patronage patterns in community pharmacy.

A scoping review framework was used to conduct a systematic search of four databases with the addition of articles sourced from reference lists. The database search was reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis: Extension for Scoping Reviews protocol. Studies were analyzed in terms of author name, date of publication, study location, study population, methods and key findings.

The 26 studies retrieved were qualitative or quantitative in nature and included a broad sample population. Both cost and value were found to be key factors influencing pharmacy choice. Pharmacy customers were found to perceive costs in terms of monetary, psychological, emotional and convenience-related sacrifices. Value was either perceived as relating to the worth or utility of a good or service, or in terms of a trade-off relationship between what was received and given up by the consumer.

A comprehensive interrogation into the true meaning of “value” to consumers is warranted to improve quantitative measurement instruments.

Pharmacies may attempt to influence customer behavior by minimizing unfixed costs to the consumer such as the price of goods and services and time costs.

This review highlights the need for academic enquiry into how consumers trade-off perceived costs for service in community pharmacy.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

This paper presents a new research design to test the efficacy of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory of Ross [1976], similar to that applied by Christofi, Christofi and Philippatos [1993]. In particular, we use a combination of factor analysis and canonical correlation to test the underlying relationships between APT factors developed using factor analysis and unanticipated changes in five macro‐economic variables that have been shown to be related to stock returns. The results of this paper indicate that the first factor of industry returns is strongly related to the S&P 500 while the remaining four factors are highly correlated with the term structure of interest rates, the rate of inflation, the default premium, and the industrial production, respectively.

This paper proposes indicators for measuring the success of institutional repositories based on their demonstrated integration with other research initiatives and provides a snapshot of the current state of selected institutional repositories in Canada through a review of their web presence and their integration with university library and research pages.

Using the proposed indicators, an examination of the web sites of selected Canadian universities who are participating in the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Institutional Repository project was undertaken.

Institutional repositories are growing in Canada and that the Canadian IR community is on the way to the proposed model future – integration with existing university research practices.

Indicators such as those proposed in the paper can provide a basic framework for evaluating IR projects and highlight areas where the library can generate additional support for these worthwhile projects.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

In 1969, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying. In this influential essay, she presented her now-famous 5-stage model of approaching death, which can be modelled into a downward trajectory (1. shock and denial, 2. anger, 3. bargaining, 4. depression) followed by a symmetrical psychological rise (5. acceptance).

In 1888–1894, in response to Hans von Bülow's death, Gustav Mahler composed his Symphony No. 2 (subtitled ‘Resurrection’), in which the idea of death is omnipresent: it opens with a funeral march based on a symphonic poem called Totenfeier (‘Remembrance Ceremony’) containing a Dies Irae motive and closes with a very long finale inspired by Klopstock's Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection). The structure of the finale itself is quite similar to the symmetrical mechanism described by Kübler-Ross, which can be summarised in the symphony by this verse sung by the choir: ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!’ (‘I shall die, to live!’). With this ‘death and transfiguration’ movement, the orchestra and the choir embodying the psychological process of a dying subject covers every single step of the model: from a ‘cry of despair’ in the first bar (1. shock) to a horn call without response (2. denial), to the depiction of a rivalry between the Dies Irae motive (‘death’) and what will be the Resurrection theme (3. bargaining), to a grieving section (4. depression) and to a long rising towards an optimistic climax at the end (5. acceptance).

Even though the death acceptance process was far from being formalised in Mahler's days, this symphony shows that more than 75 years before Kübler-Ross, the composer, who had many opportunities to grieve since his youth (facing his brothers' and sisters' deaths), intuitively converted these experiences into an in-depth knowledge of the psychological processes of dying. In other words, after having dealt with the loss of loved ones, Mahler turns out to know how to deal with his own.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

These three little essays were written with a degree of licentia poeticae, and I hope they do not offend those few, mentioned herein, who are still with us. The purpose for writing these quasi‐reminiscences was to offer a glimpse into the atmosphere when these great minds try to talk and relax. These light‐hearted forays contain a very incomplete list of those who worked in and significantly contributed to the realm of “informatics” and “astronautics”, the two pylons of science in the 20th Century. Because my life is teaching, I could not miss the opportunity to indulge in some didactic excursions.