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The n‐dimensional direct search algorithm, DIRECT, developed by Jones, Perttunen, and Stuckman has attracted recent attention from the multidisciplinary design optimization community. Since DIRECT only requires function values (or ranking) and balances global exploration with local refinement better than n‐dimensional bisection, it is well suited to the noisy function values typical of realistic simulations. While not efficient for high accuracy optimization, DIRECT is appropriate for the sort of global design space exploration done in large scale engineering design. Direct and pattern search schemes have the potential to exploit massive parallelism, but efficient use of massively parallel machines is non‐trivial to achieve. A fully‐distributed control version of DIRECT that is designed for massively parallel (distributed memory) architectures is presented. Parallel results are presented for a multidisciplinary design optimization problem – configuration design of a high speed civil transport.

Rap music subordinates music to language. It is this emphasis on language that can make rap a vehicle for many ideas, if that is the rapper's intention. Playthell Benjamin, former academic and freelance writer for such magazines as the Village Voice and Emerge, believes that rappers can be divided into distinct groups, based on the message or non‐message conveyed. He groups rappers as “Narcissists, didactics, party‐time rappers, or gangsters” based on the content of their rapping. Any rapper who falls into one of these groups can have political significance for blacks, whites, women, liberals, conservatives, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Narcissists frequently refer to women as mere sex objects, the worst example being the group 2 Live Crew, and less offensive examples being L.L. Cool J. and Big Daddy Kane. Didactics are the chief proponents of Afrocentric thinking and revisionist history. Representatives of this style would be Public Enemy, KRS‐One, and X‐Clan. Party‐time rappers, such as Heavy D and the Boyz or Biz Markie, are rarely serious, but sexism and homophobia can be elements in their raps. Gangster rappers N.W.A., Ice‐T, and Ice Cube are currently receiving a lot of attention from the press, and violent behavior characterizes their lyrics.

In a recent food case, heard before a local bench (the actual details being of no special interest or importance for our present purpose), the defendant concerned, very naively, and no doubt quite unwittingly, delivered a most profound remark in the course of his statement, throwing an illuminating beam on the dark workings of the minds of those who find themselves up against the law, and one that could well serve as part of a general confession for that too large company who have spent and, we fear, still spend time in attempting, to a greater or lesser extent, its evasion. The individual in question, the owner of a pretty miserable kind of business, said, gesturing defiantly, we imagine, at the local inspectorate in court, that “his shop could make money if he was left alone and not interfered with”. This, of course, is a basic idea in most wrong‐doing, although it is a senti‐ment probably more often thought inwardly than publicly expressed, by anti‐socially minded people from time immemorial, whether honest adulterators of food, sophisticators of drugs, pickpockets, or merely evaders of the just demands of the Inland Revenue.

THE opening months of the last war were conducted in a very leisurely fashion because the expected disasters had not befallen us. Not until our armies were rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk did the stark realities of the situation percolate into the public mind. Once the facts were understood the whole country was galvanised into activity.

“Streets broad and narrow”. In terms of shops and retail trade, it was always the narrow streets of town centres which attracted the trade, although the shops were small cramped for space, but always a cosy, friendly air. Few ever became vacant and although interspersing chain shops seemed to break the rhythm, most were privately owned, run through the years by generations of the same family. The shops removed the proverbial meanness of narrow streets; the lights, the shopping crowds, especially on Saturday nights; shop frontmen bawling their prices, the new boys calling the late editions—all this made shopping an attractive outing; it still does. There were the practical advantages of being able to cross and re‐cross the street, with many shops on both sides within the field of vision. The broad highway had none of these things and it was extremely rare for shops to exist both sides of the street, and still less to flourish. It is much the same to this day. Hygiene purists would find much to fault, but it was what the public wanted and curiously, there was very little food poisoning; it would be untrue to say outbreaks never occurred but they were extremely rare.

INCENTIVE schemes are used by five‐sixths of British industry and at least a third of them are based on false values. Yet in general managements are satisfied with their schemes and have no desire to change them. That is only one of the startling findings in the Survey on Incentive Payments which its Industrial Engineering Committee has carried out for the Institution of British Managers.

By 1964, ten years after Skinner's original publication on the subject, programmed instruction has made remarkably little headway in Britain. Some excellent work has been done in the Services and a number of schools have shown an interest, but the industrial firms which have made use of, or are experimenting with, programmed instruction number round about half a dozen.

THE Treaty of Rome is one of the least publicised, yet potentially most important, international documents of our time. Under that treaty the six signatory powers began on the first day of this year that process of tariff reductions which will, over the next twelve or fourteen years, reduce and ultimately abolish all tariffs and trade barriers between them. For all practical purposes six national economies will be welded into a single supranational authority, with a common trade and commercial policy. That is to re‐draw the economic map of Europe.

A hundred years ago the adulteration of food for fraudulent purposes was rife and public opinion demanded protection. The series of statutes which followed, including the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875—a landmark in food legislation for upwards of half a century—virtually stamped out these practices. Today, there is as great an anxiety about the quality and purity of food used for human consumption. In 1951, Sir Edward Mellanby, speaking of the rising incidence of certain diseases in recent years, said he found it “difficult to avoid the conclusion that some at least of these increases in disease are due to errors in living recently introduced or greatly expanded in modern times”, and that “it may be that one of these errors is the ingestion of food treated by unnatural chemical substances”.