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Reports on an ESRC‐funded, in‐depth qualitative research project into 50 micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the cultural industries. Our evidence sheds light on the extent to which the teaching and learning strategies adopted by higher education, further education and other VET providers are effective in providing entrepreneurship education and training for this innovative, high skill sector. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs in this sector learn best by being able to experiment with ideas, by “doing” and networking with others and by working with more experienced mentors in their sector. The article concludes by suggesting a more “naturalistic” approach to teaching and learning entrepreneurship for micro and small businesses in the cultural industries sector.

A “critical case” approach is used to examine whether the recruitment practices and procedures advocated by social scientists within the personnel field are realised in practice. The “critical case” selected is the graduate recruitment known as the “milkround”, where “scientific techniques” in theory stand the best chance of being used. In practice a major discrepancy between theory and practice was found, which is explained in terms of the preoccupation with material and symbolic security that conditions the actions of personnel managers in competitively co‐ordinated employment establishments.

Drastic reductions in financial and personal support for public education over the last years in Germany seem to open gateways to ‘new’ acceptance of punishment in the realm of pedagogy. This ‘discourse’ is clandestine in theory, hidden from the public but real in institutions of the child and young people welfare system. They intensify the penalisation of their ‘drop-out’ clientele. The special schools for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) tend to act in that way, too. Particularly children and young people living in poverty are on the agenda of this new trend to penalise ‘deviant’ behaviour.

Programmes, trainings and drills are available. They are meant to help social workers and teacher in their position with new aims and functions. In their daily routine, most of them are overburdened and overloaded, because classes are overfilled and the number of families in the communal welfare system is growing rapidly, due to the so-called ‘Hartz IV’ legislative for unemployed families. This new trend is also a market place for the media; they launched an emergency call on education.

Some punitive praxis is contradictory to the human rights and the children rights, so that all professors for SEBD in Germany published a public declaration against the breaking up of the agreement of an education without violence. There is no empirical evidence for any positive outcome of such ‘pedagogy’. Despite all ‘modern’ promises, working with fear, anxiety, shame and punishment doesn't pay in the long run.

This chapter clarifies the relationship between socio-economic development and this ‘law and order’ pedagogy, the loss of professional standards and the psychodynamic consequences for pupils labelled as ‘deviant’.

The Department of National Health and Welfare, Canada, has recently issued a most useful guide to manufacturers, advertisers and importers of food, drugs and cosmetics. The guide has been produced by the Inspection Services of the Food and Drug Directorate. This Department is in the habit of giving advice and opinions to manufacturers who submit labels or advertisements for its consideration, and sometimes suggests modifications thought likely to be satisfactory. The Department has no power to give actual approval or to usurp the function of Courts of Law. In general, there is a great similarity between the requirements of the Dominion and those of Great Britain in the matter of labels and advertisements. But Canada—very wisely, as we think—has not followed the bad example set in the mother country by the Ministry of Food a few years ago when—in defiance of the opinions of nearly all competent persons—the Ministry suddenly decided to emasculate its Food Standards and Labelling Division. The present position is that the admirably informative and helpful yellow book, published in 1949, is now out of date and that manufacturers for years have been unable to obtain the guidance and assistance which used to be available from the Ministry. There have been recent signs that the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food may be willing before long to issue some guidance to the British public which will protect them against imposture. As is shown by the sea‐salmon prosecution reported at page 84, there is still plenty of scope for such protection. We have no doubt that as soon as the consolidated Food and Drugs Acts—that for Scotland as well as that for the remainder of the United Kingdom—and the Regulations to be made under them have become effective, a comprehensive guide, based on the yellow book of 1949, ought to be issued by the Ministry in the interests of traders and consumers. We are less sure that it will be.

There are very few individuals who have studied the question of weights and measures who do not most strongly favour the decimal system. The disadvantages of the weights and measures at present in use in the United Kingdom are indeed manifold. At the very commencement of life the schoolboy is expected to commit to memory the conglomerate mass of facts and figures which he usually refers to as “Tables,” and in this way the greater part of twelve months is absorbed. And when he has so learned them, what is the result? Immediately he leaves school he forgets the whole of them, unless he happens to enter a business‐house in which some of them are still in use; and it ought to be plain that the case would be very different were all our weights and measures divided or multiplied decimally. Instead of wasting twelve months, the pupil would almost be taught to understand the decimal system in two or three lessons, and so simple is the explanation that he would never be likely to forget it. There is perhaps no more interesting, ingenious and useful example of the decimal system than that in use in France. There the standard of length is the metre, the standard of capacity the cubic decimetre or the litre, while one cubic centimetre of distilled water weighs exactly one gramme, the standard of weight. Thus the measures of length, capacity and weight are most closely and usefully related. In the present English system there is absolutely no relationship between these weights and measures. Frequently a weight or measure bearing the same name has a different value for different bodies. Take, for instance, the stone; for dead meat its value is 8 pounds, for live meat 14 pounds; and other instances will occur to anyone who happens to remember his “Tables.” How much simpler for the business man to reckon in multiples of ten for everything than in the present confusing jumble. Mental arithmetic in matters of buying and selling would become much easier, undoubtedly more accurate, and the possibility of petty fraud be far more remote, because even the most dense could rapidly calculate by using the decimal system.

The latest information from the magazine chemist is extremely valuable. He has dealt with milk‐adulteration and how it is done. His advice, if followed, might, however, speedily bring the manipulating dealer before a magistrate, since the learned writer's recipe is to take a milk having a specific gravity of 1030, and skim it until the gravity is raised to 1036; then add 20 per cent. of water, so that the gravity may be reduced to 1030, and the thing is done. The advice to serve as “fresh from the cow,” preferably in a well‐battered milk‐measure, might perhaps have been added to this analytical gem.

IEEE Ontologies for Robotics and Automation Working Group were divided into subgroups that were in charge of studying industrial robotics, service robotics and autonomous robotics. This paper aims to present the work in-progress developed by the autonomous robotics (AuR) subgroup. This group aims to extend the core ontology for robotics and automation to represent more specific concepts and axioms that are commonly used in autonomous robots.

For autonomous robots, various concepts for aerial robots, underwater robots and ground robots are described. Components of an autonomous system are defined, such as robotic platforms, actuators, sensors, control, state estimation, path planning, perception and decision-making.

AuR has identified the core concepts and domains needed to create an ontology for autonomous robots.

AuR targets to create a standard ontology to represent the knowledge and reasoning needed to create autonomous systems that comprise robots that can operate in the air, ground and underwater environments. The concepts in the developed ontology will endow a robot with autonomy, that is, endow robots with the ability to perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous explicit human guidance.

Creating a standard for knowledge representation and reasoning in autonomous robotics will have a significant impact on all R&A domains, such as on the knowledge transmission among agents, including autonomous robots and humans. This tends to facilitate the communication among them and also provide reasoning capabilities involving the knowledge of all elements using the ontology. This will result in improved autonomy of autonomous systems. The autonomy will have considerable impact on how robots interact with humans. As a result, the use of robots will further benefit our society. Many tedious tasks that currently can only be performed by humans will be performed by robots, which will further improve the quality of life. To the best of the authors’knowledge, AuR is the first group that adopts a systematic approach to develop ontologies consisting of specific concepts and axioms that are commonly used in autonomous robots.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of software pricing, following the advent of cloud-based business intelligence & analytics (BI & A) Software. A value-based conceptual software model is developed to ignite and structure further research.

A two-step research approach is applied. In step one, the available literature is screened and evaluated, and this is followed by ten semi-structured expert interviews. With that input, a conceptual software pricing model is designed. In step two, this model is validated and refined through discussions with representatives of the five leading business intelligence suites.

The paper sheds light on the value perception of customers and suggests a clear focus on the interaction between customers and vendors, and less on technical issues. The developed customer-centric, value-based pricing framework helps to improve pricing techniques and strategies.

The research is focused on the pricing strategy of software houses and excludes differentiations of technical specifications and functionalities.

The research can support practitioners in the field of BI & A in rethinking their pricing methods. Placing the customer at center stage can lead to lower customer churn rates, higher customer satisfaction and more pricing flexibility.

This empirical study reveals the importance of a customer-centric pricing approach in the specific case of BI & A. It can also be applied to other fast-developing sectors of the software industry.