Search results

Claims that manufacturing industry needs better multi‐dimensional position sensors to keep pace with increased speed and capabilities of automated equipment and robots. The market for laser and vision sensors is growing at a rapid speed. However, most of the robot‐mounted sensors are one‐, two‐ or at most three‐dimensional, while the robotics industry has progressed to six‐axis machines, leaving a gross mismatch in its capability to perform and sense the required task. A new laser sensor described in this paper provides information on up to six degrees of position, enabling robots to sense as well as they can physically manipulate, and opening the door to vast improvements in flexible manufacturing. To expedite these improvements, the manufacturing industry should take a lead and not let an outdated norm hinder implementation.

EVERY presidential address to the Library Association has had its own quality, just as our Presidents have each brought their own personal contribution to Association history. Some will recall from Dr. Bronowski's quite charming address the small foreign child, the possessor of only a few words of English, who, asking the Librarian of Whitechapel, a tall, thin, moustached man, for some book that would help him to fuller English, was given Midshipman Easy. It was “the perfect choice”, he was able to say some forty years after. That is characteristic of the President's method ; a generous recounting of his experiences in his own cultural development, with many all‐too‐brief side reflections on the relations of science to the humanities, the ultimate indispensability of reading in education and therefore of libraries as its providers. An assessment of Panizzi as our greatest and of Conrad as a novelist comes in, both like himself men born to another language and yet of extraordinary attainment in the adopted tongue which they had to learn in adult life. A repeated tribute to public libraries, to which he himself owed much and a plea that they should be careful to provide books which would enable not only the scientist to qualify in more general cultural reading but would enable the layman to know the language of science which to so many is indeed foreign. He instanced “the concept of relativity, the concept of quantum junips, the principle of uncertainty, the statistical principle,—ways of thinking which rank among the imaginative achievements of the human mind. But because they are evolved in science, they are formulated in language which few people understand”. His main plea, the one that the press chose to record, was for a standard edition of the classics of science, such as Newton's Opticks, Darwin's Origin of Species, the essays of William Kingdom Clifford, and of Charles Pearce, which can speak the language of science to this generation, as can the later ones of Sherrington, Eddington and Schrodinger, and for the availability of these in all public libraries as, indeed, in others. Librarians, he thought, could do much to bring about such an edition and its distribution.

I'VE said it before, and I'll say it again: Eastbourne is an excellent place for a conference, and I set out for it after five years' absence with the hope that its handsome and genial presence would produce something better than the mixture of ordinary, obvious and sometimes inaudible papers that have been a constituent of more than one intervening conference. That towns can affect such occasions is no doubt a farfetched conceit, but they certainly affect me; as soon as I arrived the environmental magic worked, and old friends and new faces were seen in the golden light of perfect autumn weather.

The United States Supreme Court in the City of Canton v. Harris (1989) held failing to train police officers may be the basis for managerial liability under Title 42 United States Code Section 1983. Using a content analysis, 1,525 Section 1983 lawsuits alleging failure to train were reviewed from 1989 to 1999. The research revealed ten frequent topic areas where the plaintiff regularly identifies police administrators as defendants. Emerging trends of this litigation and recommendations for police administrators are discussed.

Seeking legal advice today can be extremely costly, and Legal Aid is generally only available to the least well‐off members of society. But a special legal advisory service has been set up aimed at employers or groups of individuals. Our correspondent explains.

LIBRARIES have come impressively into the public picture in the past year or two, and seldom with more effect than when Their Majesties the King and Queen opened the new Central Reference Library at Manchester on July 17th. In a time, which is nearly the end of a great depression, that the city which probably felt the depression more than any in the Kingdom should have proceeded with the building of a vast store‐house of learning is a fact of great social significance and a happy augury for libraries as a whole. His Majesty the King has been most felicitous in providing what we may call “slogans” for libraries. It will be remembered that in connection with the opening of the National Central Library, he suggested that it was a “University which all may join and which none need ever leave” —words which should be written in imperishable letters upon that library and be printed upon its stationery for ever. As Mr. J. D. Stewart said at the annual meeting of the National Central Library, it was a slogan which every public library would like to appropriate. At Manchester, His Majesty gave us another. He said: “To our urban population open libraries are as essential to health of mind, as open spaces to health of body.” This will be at the disposal of all of us for use. It is a wonderful thing that Manchester in these times has been able to provide a building costing £450,000 embodying all that is modern and all that is attractive in the design of libraries. The architect, Mr. Vincent Harris, and the successive librarians, Mr. Jast and Mr. Nowell, are to be congratulated upon the crown of their work.

This paper has two purposes. First, it aims to explore how Australian universities used calculative rhetoric and practices through accounting numbers to persuade employees and legitimize their financial recovery plans to alleviate the financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it aims to analyze how the accounting-based solutions were legitimized through a well-blended pathos, logos and ethos rhetoric.

Building on a rhetorical theory of diffusion, we employed a qualitative research design within all 37 Australian public universities involving Internet-based documentary analysis.

This study finds that in an urgent crisis like the fiscal crisis caused by COVID-19, universities again found rescue in accounting tools, in particular budgets, as a rhetorical device to justify their operational and strategic choices such as job-cuts, programs closures and staff pay-cuts. However, in this crisis, the same old accounting-based solutions were even more quickly to be accepted by being delivered in management’s colorful blending of pathos–logos–ethos rhetoric.

While this study is constrained to Australian public universities’ financial responses, its findings have implications for university decision-makers and higher education policymakers across the globe when it comes to university management using calculative devices in persuading employees to work their way through financial hardship caused by an extreme health crisis-like COVID-19 pandemic.

This study adds more evidence that the use of budgets as a calculative tool continues to play a key role in organizations in the construction, mobilization and preservation of certain strategic and operational choices during volatilities. Especially, the same way of creating calculative-based solutions can be communicated via the colorful blending of different rhetoric to make it acceptable.

The news that the Ministry of Education has set up two Working Parties in connection with the proposed new Public Libraries Bill is welcome and gives further hope that such a Bill will appear in the not too distant future. From the constitutions of these Working Parties, which seem to us to be fairly representative of all interests, it would appear that the first is going to concern itself with the main aspects of the Roberts Report recommendations, while the second will be given the task of studying the problems of library co‐operation. On the first party, county libraries are represented by Miss Paulin and Mr. Budge, while Wales is represented by Mr. A. Edwards, librarian of the Cardiganshire and Aberystwyth Joint Library. Mr. D. I. Colley, the city librarian of Manchester, will be keeping a watching brief on behalf of the large libraries, but it should not be forgotten that he is also a member of the Libraries Committee of the Association of Municipal Corporations. Mr. Gardner is rightly there, perhaps not only as librarian of Luton but also as chairman of the Library Association's Executive Committee. The Smaller Libraries Group can surely have no complaints, for out of the ten members of Working Party No. I there are three librarians from smaller libraries, these being Mr. Helliwell of Winchester, Mr. Christopher of Penge and Mr. Parker of Ilkley. This Working Party is completed by two legal representatives in Mr. W. B. Murgatroyd, who is Town Clerk of Hornsey, and Mr. J. H. Oldham, who is Assistant County Solicitor for Kent.

As announced in the May issue of Hybrid Circuits, ISHM‐Benelux is organising a one‐day conference on applications of hybrid circuit technology.