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Reviews current key areas of acknowledged best practice in “green” design and building management systems including the Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method, Eco labelling and “green” building materials profiling systems. Identifies and discusses specific problems and “green” refurbishment techniques using examples drawn from recent case studies from commercial portfolios: energy and resource use; internal environmental services and systems; planned “green” maintenance programmes and techniques; “green” building management issues; and cost analysis of “green” refurbishment; cost effectiveness, viability and recovery of investment. The examples cited are from recent case studies undertaken by the Environmental Research Group at Oxford Brookes University as part of an ongoing collaboration with a number of major commercial property owners.

Describes the approach of London Underground Limited to the implementation of total quality management, highlighting the experience of the company′s information technology department.

Reviews the evidence on the inflation‐hedging characteristics of UK commercial property as an asset class. That evidence suggests that commercial property is a very imperfect hedge against unanticipated inflation. Furthermore, the returns have been substantially lower than on equities and residential property. Describes and considers new financial contracts which might allow investors to gain exposure to movements in house price without becoming landlords.

For centuries economists have been analysing how regulations governing the operation of markets may improve the workings of an economic system. In the past twenty years, particularly in the United States, there has emerged a large body of research which analyses the role of a particular type of regulation: those operating in financial markets. Much of this research reflects the particular forms of regulation of financial ‐ and in particular banking ‐ oper‐ations in the United States. As in the UK, there are forms of supervision and regulation of financial markets in the United States which are unique to that sector of the economy. This has prompted a whole range of questions ‐ can the existence of special forms of regulation for banks and other financial institutions be justified in terms of some fundamental differences between these and other (non‐finan‐cial) firms? Who benefits from the restrictions on financial firms? What are the costs of the particular forms of supervision which are used?

In October of 1987 stock market prices all over the world fell by staggering amounts. A financial panic spreading beyond stock markets did not occur and it would appear that any real economic consequences of the crash have, thus far, been small. A superficial reading of economic history suggests that things might have turned out a whole lot worse. It is this thought that makes an evaluation of various restrictions designed to limit stock market volatility ‐ so called circuit breakers ‐ timely.

The overwhelming speed and scale of digital media production greatly outpace conventional indexing methods by humans. The management of Big Data for e-library speech resources requires an automated metadata solution. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A conceptual model called semantic ontologies for multimedia indexing (SOMI) allows for assembly of the speech objects, encapsulation of semantic associations between phonic units and the definition of indexing techniques designed to invoke and maximize the semantic ontologies for indexing. A literature review and architectural overview are followed by evaluation techniques and a conclusion.

This approach is only possible because of recent innovations in automated speech recognition. The introduction of semantic keyword spotting allows for indexing models that disambiguate and prioritize meaning using probability algorithms within a word confusion network. By the use of AI error-training procedures, optimization is sought for each index item.

Validation and implementation of this approach within the field of digital libraries still remain under development, but rapid developments in technology and research show rich conceptual promise for automated speech indexing.

The SOMI process has been preliminarily tested, showing that hybrid semantic-ontological approaches produce better accuracy than semantic automation alone.

Even as testing proceeds on recorded conference talks at the University of Tebessa (Algeria), other digital archives can look toward similar indexing. This will mean greater access to sound file metadata.

Huge masses of spoken data, unmanageable for a human indexer, can prospectively find semantically sorted and prioritized indexing – not transcription, but generated metadata – automatically, quickly and accurately.

Language may be a treasured heritage of small comunities, all that is left to bind them together. It is often a matter of national or regional pride, keeping alive a tongue dead centuries past everywhere else; in an area of the Grisons forty thousand Swiss speak the Latin Romansch, the tongue spoken by the citizens of ancient Rome, and nowhere else in the world is it heard. There are so‐called official languages; in the councils of Europe, it has always been French, which is the official language of the European Economic Community; this means, of course, that all EEC Directives and in due course, judgments of its courts, will be first delivered in French.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an analysis of the improbable events of housing market bubbles occurring in a period when US and UK central bankers were responding to perceived risks of a new deflation.

The methodology focuses on how the anti-deflation policies implemented by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England contributed to the housing market bubbles. The central bankers perceived the deflation as a Keynesian short-run deficiency in aggregate demand, triggered by a financial crisis. Indications are that the deflation is in the nature of long-run aggregate-supply-driven trend as explained in Veblen’s theory of “chronic” deflation driven by cost-reducing advances in technology and globalization.

The Keynesian anti-deflation policies of the Federal Reserve and Bank of England failed to counter the deflation risks while contributing to housing market bubbles. Moreover, the policies failed to address the structural problems of unemployment and income inequality associated with long-run aggregate supply deflation.

Effective policies must be based on a correct theoretical understanding of the problems. The chronic nature of the new deflation points to the need for new approaches to deal with the negative income and employment effects that exclude an increasing number from the housing markets.

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