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This paper aims to explore the policy background, educational rationale, developmental stages, and the introduction and piloting of a foundation degree (FD).

The approach is a description and discussion. The paper draws together, for the first time, the main policy documents and reviews and relates these to the pilot programme.

This new qualification is an attempt to reduce the academic and vocational divide, improve intermediate skill levels, develop the qualifications progression ladder and effectively widen participation to higher education (HE) for non‐traditional groups. Despite criticisms and hesitant take up FDs represent a significant development in British Higher Education producing some innovative and successful programmes such as the FD in Health and Social Care at Bradford University.

Of value to those interested in developments in HE. A number of conclusions are drawn and questions are raised regarding the extent to which FDs might achieve their objectives.

Purpose: The author seeks to identify how suicide-bereaved individuals conceptualize their relationships with deceased loved ones. The author engages Durkheim’s theory of suicide to provide a new framework to analyze this population.

Methodology: The author uses qualitative research and coding methods to produce a secondary analysis of previously collected interview transcripts.

Findings: The author concludes that participants experience the suicide of a loved one as a social event, conceptualizing it similarly to how Durkheim defined his four suicide types – characterized by too much or too little regulation and/or integration.

Research Limitations: As a result of the secondary analysis, a lack of demographic information remains the largest limitation, and the available demographic information indicates the participant population is not a diverse one. Therefore, the larger analysis is limited.

Practical and Social Implications: This work provides potential ways to improve current prevention and postvention practices for both the suicide-bereaved and those struggling with suicidality. Subsequently, it may help to improve the health outcomes of these groups.

Originality: To the author’s current knowledge, this is the first published use of Durkheim’s Suicide (1897/1966) as a framework to directly examine the suicide-bereaved population in this way. Thus, this work contributes to suicidology and sociology more broadly in two ways: by providing a new way to understand and ultimately help a vulnerable population and by providing a new use of a classic theory.

AT THE instigation of Peter Labdon, who is County Librarian of Suffolk as well as a member of the executive committee of the National Book League (when his awesome editorial responsibilities at NLW allow him the time), the NBL is starting an exciting new development designed to create, it is hoped, a set of regional branches throughout the UK.

Explores the issue of Section 1983 civil liability against law enforcement supervisors who infringe on their employees’ First Amendment rights to support political candidates and pursue political activities. The sacred right to engage freely in the political process periodically conflicts with law enforcement supervisors’ interests in ensuring political loyalty and efficient delivery of services from their subordinates. After reviewing relevant United States Supreme Court cases, develops a legal/conceptual framework from which the lower court cases on overt political expression are analyzed. Concludes that, to minimize civil liability, law enforcement supervisors must be educated about employees’ First Amendment rights.

Inside information about companies is in demand. Out of some 400 CD‐ROMs related to business, for instance, over a third deal with company data (141 titles). Even so, when information managers and business librarians were asked to suggest ideas for new CD‐ROM titles, several said they wanted even more company information discs. Online, you can find more information about more companies in more countries every month. The big boom at the moment is in data from East European and Soviet companies. Yet here, again, there is a cry for more — especially in the way of reliability and quality.

As the municipal year ends this month, the public librarian will lightly (or otherwise) turn to thoughts of annual reports. Year by year the problem before him is to justify his ways to men, by producing a document which in the first place is attractive and in the second, third, and as many other places as possible, is true, logical, readable. It is no easy task, especially for those who are new to the experiment or who have made it for so many years that ideas do not come freely ; for, after all, the annual report is a question of ideas. If our minds are of pedestrian, unoriginal—or perhaps infertile is a better word, as originality is as rare as a new planet— type, we shall copy one of the received models, and will be well advised to do so. That is to say, we shall give a brief narrative of what we think are the outstanding events of the year with suitable acknowledgments to committee and staff, and add such statistical tables as will prove the position. These last are always to be summarised in the form prescribed by the Library Association ; the omission of such summary is inexcusable in the modern librarian.

A VERY interesting winter lies ahead for all students and other librarians; for, we suppose, almost immediately attempts will be made to harmonize the practice of the Library Association with the expressed wishes of its last Annual Meeting. We publish some notes in Letters on Our Affairs on the crisis, if it may be so called, but we would add such voice as we have to that of those who plead for moderation. Violent changes are rarely justified, and violent expressions still less rarely, and as there appears to be now a disposition to bury hatchets and to get to work we hope that every advantage will be taken of it.

This paper uses a representative sample of U.S. workers to examine how self-employment may reduce work-life conflict. We find that self-employment prevents work from interfering with life (WIL), especially among women, but it heightens the tendency for life to interfere with work (LIW). We show that self-employment is connected to WIL and LIW by different causal mechanisms. The self-employed experience less WIL because they have more autonomy and control over the duration and timing of work. Working at home is the most important reason the self-employed experience more LIW than wage and salary workers.

Organizations in many domains generate a considerable amount of heterogeneous data every day. Such data can be processed to enhance these organizations’ decisions in real time. However, storing and processing large and varied datasets (known as big data) is challenging to do in real time. In machine learning, streaming feature selection has always been considered a superior technique for selecting the relevant subset features from highly dimensional data and thus reducing learning complexity. In the relevant literature, streaming feature selection refers to the features that arrive consecutively over time; despite a lack of exact figure on the number of features, numbers of instances are well-established. Many scholars in the field have proposed streaming-feature-selection algorithms in attempts to find the proper solution to this problem. This paper presents an exhaustive and methodological introduction of these techniques. This study provides a review of the traditional feature-selection algorithms and then scrutinizes the current algorithms that use streaming feature selection to determine their strengths and weaknesses. The survey also sheds light on the ongoing challenges in big-data research.