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The purpose of this paper is to highlight a novel manufacturing process for a biochip with a multi‐electrode array (MEA) that is specifically designed for use in characterising cardio‐active substances and to demonstrate a novel proposed solution prototype that has been constructed to meet the needs of end‐users.

Practical problems encountered with conventional MEA biochips are described and a novel biochip design to tackle these problems is presented. The manufacturing approach used to produce the prototypes of that design is described and depicted.

The novel prototype MEA biochips were successfully manufactured using conventional electronics manufacturing approaches. Prototypes demonstrated limited successes in the early stages of testing. Further revisions of the feature geometry are required to implement an alternative MEA biochip that is suitably reliable.

Basic photolithography techniques have been used to construct a base substrate for proof‐of‐principle studies. Increased sophistication in manufacturing stages is required in future iterations of the proposed concept.

This paper introduces a problem encountered by MEA system adopters that requires a suitable solution. The scale up of an electronics manufacturing process‐based solution to the problems described holds much promise for the screening of new chemical entities.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how practical research can be undertaken into sensitive issues within the criminal justice system having cognisance of the needs of those subject to the research process.

A mixed methods design which was complicated due to the subject matter being explored, that of historical reporting of sexual offences. Confidential questionnaires and focus group method utilised, but in constant contact with specialised victim support service to ensure rights of victims understood and interwoven into the design.

Even though there are some very sensitive areas within the criminal justice system where it is believed research is difficult to undertake, it can be achieved by constant reference to the needs of the victim and strict confidentiality. Given the right circumstances and approach, research into what has been previously considered areas of difficulty can be researched effectively.

Due to the research methods explored an utilised, a template for research methodology can be seen which can be transferred into any other sensitive topic that requires research. In addition, by undertaking this method, previously unheard voices of victims of historical crimes can be utilised to inform official policy and practice. However, a limitation of the approach can be the low number of respondents wishing to take part.

Victims have an opportunity to influence public policy. The methods utilised “opens up” the possibility for replication of research into other sensitive areas of the CJS. The methods utilised involved a number of Criminal Justice Agencies which assisted in maximising their understanding of victims experiences thorough the partnership approach. The research methods and results influencing training methods of the police as first responders to such incidents.

The social implications of this paper are that it will encourage other researchers not to be afraid of what appears to be “hard to reach” and sensitive topics in terms of social science research. This will allow for greater numbers of marginalised individuals and victims to engage and influence the criminal justice system, thereby influencing public policy and improving the way victims of crime are treated.

This paper is one of the few, if any, that explores ethical problems and sensitive topics such as historical reporting of sexual offences. It will have resonance for those who wish to undertake similar types of research.

Iron preceded steel in the history of the metal industry. It was used for over three thousand years, and when the British settled in North America, the first iron works was set up at James town, Virginia, in 1621. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were producing one‐seventh of the world’s supply of pig iron at thirty thousand tons. Steel is made by alloying iron with carbon to produce a hard, strong metal. It was expensive to manufacture and the United States imported most of its steel until after the Civil War. The steam age provided much growth to the iron industry in the 1800s, with enormous demand for iron rails. Pennsylvania, with its large deposits of anthracite coal, was the nation’s leading state in the iron industry. Aided by the great iron ore deposits in the Great Lakes area and cheap water transportation, the production of iron and steel drove the Industrial Revolution, and the Mid west became the centre of American heavy industry. Developments in steel processing during the mid 1800s lowered the cost of steel production and allowed the use of steel for rail roads, construction, and other industrial uses. By 1883, approximately twenty years after the Civil War, the United States produced nearly 115,000 tons of steel and the Iron Age disappeared. The American steel industry continued to grow rapidly and by 1910 it produced more than 24 million tons, which was the greatest of any country. One of the high lights of the steel industry was the establishment of United States Steel Corporation in 1901 led by J. Pierpont Morgan and Elbert H. Gary. The corporation was valued at $1.4 billion and controlled more than 60 percent of the US market. The strength of America’s steel industry continued after World War II and peaked in 1969 at 141,262,000 tons. At this time, competition from steel plants abroad with lower labour costs and newer mills started edging in on the US market. By 1975, US steel production declined to 89 million tons, but rebounded slightly in the late 1980s (Gordon). The American steel industry would not be central to the economy as it had for the previous 100 years.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

In this chapter, I discuss the development of the cannibal picking up from Jennifer Brown’s (2013) study, Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Brown (2013, p. 7) argued that the cannibal is a sign of ultimate difference who ‘reappears in various guises at times when popular culture needs to express real fears and anxieties’. I argue that the most recent version of the cannibal is gendered female and that this coincides with a postfeminist media culture. I explore how the cannibal is positioned as an ambiguous figure which questions both humanity and monstrosity. I argue that this is complicated by gendering it female as women have traditionally straddled the line between human and less-than human in popular culture. I discuss three films: 301/302 (Park, 1995), The Woman (Torino, Van Den Houten, & McKee, 2011) and Raw (De Forêts & Ducournau, 2016) and explore how they use incest, objectification and dehumanization as well as cannibalism to explore the ambiguities of postfeminist subjecthood. I will argue that by performing acts of cannibalism the female cannibals in these films reclaim their subjectivity both by objectifying others and by identifying with their victims. The cannibalism also presents the opportunity for female-oriented families through shared consumption which ironically embraces patriarchal ideals of feminine feeding roles and challenges the patriarchal basis of the family.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an “extended conceptualization of the business case” including both organizational characteristics and institutional conditions to analyse employer involvement in extra statutory childcare and leave arrangements. Special attention is given to Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The (multi‐level) multinomial regression analyses included company‐level data on human‐resource practices of 2,865 firms nested in 19 countries, representing all European welfare state regimes.

The extended business case appeared fruitful in order to explain variations in employer involvement. Particularly, state support was found to be negatively related to employer involvement. In the liberal regime, employer involvement was high, but variations across organizations were significant. In CEE‐countries, employer involvement was lowest, and did not vary by organizational business‐case factors.

The paper used data from a cross‐sectional survey. To capture the long‐term trends, dynamics and nuances in employer involvement within and across various institutional contexts, a longitudinal in depth study is needed.

While state support in many CEE countries is declining, the analyses showed that employers will not automatically step in by providing additional work‐family arrangements. Social partners could use institutional pressure to stimulate a balance between state support and employer involvement.

The extended business‐case perspective contributes to the theory on the institutional embeddedness of decision making of employers. Moreover, it adds to the knowledge on employer involvement in institutional contexts which have hardly been studied before.

Online Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly popular in the last decade. Each SNS varies somewhat, with different forms of expression, communication and customization. Different sites may have different priorities, methods of interacting, social features and definitions of what it means to be ‘social’ on their sites.

This paper reports on 2 months of exploratory observations and interviews with participants using two of the most popular SNSs; Facebook.com and Twitter.com. Paying attention to the modal nuances of the sites and their effect on social interaction and identity portrayal, the focus of analysis is upon how these two sites are interacted with as ‘stages’ for identity performances, and how the varying aspects of design and modality on these interactive sites can result in different multimodal identity performances and social interactions.

Data revealed that youth are adeptly able to negotiate the different modal options presented to them online, yet the temporal aspects presented by the design of the site, the differing definitions and priorities in the framing of identity presented by the SNSs, and the modal choices present across the two sites resulted in markedly differing presentations of identity to markedly differing audiences.

This research demonstrates the impact of modality and design on how we act and interact, and highlights that as Digital Sociologists and Researchers, we should be careful not to treat all Online SNSs the same, but pay attention to the plethora of nuances these sites offer as stages for identity performances.