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The purpose of this paper is to list and discuss several workers on cybernetics and systems, all fairly recently deceased. Online sources of further details are quoted.

The aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

The demise of these workers is a great loss.

For all of the people listed, it is instructive to contemplate their achievements and to speculate on what else they would have done had they lived.

It is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

Previous research on global marketing has typically focussed on marketing strategies across national markets. Yet, the cross‐national mobility of individuals has increased heterogeneity within country markets. The purpose of this study is to examine how immigrant consumers perceive advertising appeals in the context of the consumer acculturation process. Specifically, our study focusses on the reactions of Mexican, American, and Mexican‐American consumers to puffery‐laden advertisements.

Using two‐factor theory as our theoretical prism, the study offers salient hypotheses regarding consumer perceptions of puffery‐laden advertising appeals, which are then tested in a cross‐national experiment in the USA and Mexico.

The results show that Mexican consumers are more susceptible to puffery‐laden claims than Americans. In contrast, American consumers are more susceptible to advertising that does not contain puffery‐laden claims than their Mexican counterparts. Interestingly, the findings also reveal that Mexican immigrants are highly susceptible to both, puffery‐laden and no puffery appeals. The mixed results show that recent Mexican immigrants struggle as they transition to the dominant American consumer culture. First and second generations of Mexican‐Americans, however, react to puffery‐laden advertisements just as typical American consumers.

The paper discusses relevant implications not only for the study of puffery and acculturation of immigrant minority groups, but also for companies engaged in global advertising campaigns in countries with diverse immigrant communities.

The paper offers a worthwhile and unique examination of consumer acculturation in an international cross‐cultural setting and puts forward interesting insights regarding the application of international advertising strategies.

Automating the construction of machine‐interpretable knowledge‐bases is one of the immediate next moves in the emerging technology of information. Feasibility of computer induction of new knowledge from examples has been shown in more than one laboratory. Means are described for generating knowledge‐based programs that are automatically guaranteed analysable and executable by machine and human brain alike.

Professor Donald Michie, the Director of the Turing Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, has discussed a breakthrough in artificial intelligence in an article in the UK Observer newspaper. Writing at the end of last year he said that:

Machine Intelligence and the Human Window Writing in Applied Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 5 No. 1, 1991, pp. 1–10), Donald Michie of the Turing Institute, Glasgow, UK, considers Machine Intelligence and the Human Window. He says that:

Three themes in complex information processing are revealing themselves to be mutually interconnected: problem‐solving mechanisms, automatic program writing, and the organization of large bodies of knowledge in machine memory. Interconnections are discussed in the contexts of chess and of automatic assembly. Reference is also made to automated chemistry systems.

This paper reviews the history of separate online system interfaces, leading to efforts to develop expert systems for searching databases, particularly for end users, and introduces the research in such expert systems. Appended is a bibliography of sources on interfaces and expert systems for online retrieval.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The recent copy of the ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 14, 3, 1982, deals with some of the problems of the “User‐Interface”. All who use computer systems, and particularly the Cybernetician, are concerned at the way in which information is stored, retrieved and edited. All too often, untried methods are implemented, and software engineers fail to search the literature for established and efficient techniques. Two papers in this issue of Computing Surveys brings together details of current editing and user interface developments. The first paper is about using and implementing interactive editing systems and the second, concerned with document formatting systems. Here interactive editing refers to the process of making changes to documents by direct, rather than batched, communication with the computer, during which the user's actions are interleaved with the computer's feedback on the results of each action.