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Lasting differences between the ‘extract’ and the ‘inject’ schools of thought on liberal content suggest that some more general principle is needed. The author finds in wartime Army education a principle which gives coherence, balance, and some guidance on allocating time.

Since the original publication of Circular 323, further education colleges have been faced with two rather different curricular tasks. The first was the broadening of the base of the specifically vocational or technical curriculum; the second was the addition to that curriculum of other studies that would have reference to wider social and community needs, and the personal development of the individual students. For a considerable period there was confusion between these two tasks and between the two parts of the second task. More recently there has been some measure of clarification, thanks to the publication in 1970 of the City and Guilds monograph General Studies, the introduction of the ONC (Technology), the coming of TEC and BEC, and the discussions and experiments associated with those developments. We have now reached a point where it is clear that there are two distinctive aspects to General Studies which have been labelled ‘integrative’ and ‘additive’, but there is still dispute as to whether both aspects must be equally part of a unified and prescriptive policy; whether they exist as optional alternative approaches (or should so exist); whether the one has priority over the other; and whether whichever aspect is deemed to have priority should be the prescriptive element, while the other be a line of approach open to colleges to choose if they so wish. A further complication arises from conflict within the ‘additive’ area between those people who are mainly concerned with social and community needs, and those who are concerned with personal development.

TEACHERS OF all subjects in technical colleges are largely agreed that there is a place for English in their curricula. Badly written and misspelt lab reports force them to recognise the inadequacy of their students' command of language. Employers, aware of the difficulties their technical staff find in writing correctly and comprehensibly, demand a sound grounding in English. The White Paper of February 1956 on Technical Education found space to call for “good plain English, the use of which saves time and money and avoids trouble”.

The Liverpool Educational Priority Area is pioneering a new style of education. Tom Lovett describes the impact on the adult sector.

Staffing needs at ATI Conference. “Why isn't he on the Burnham Committee?” This was the reaction of several people to the outstanding address given to the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Technical Institutions by Mr E. L. Russell, Chief Education Officer, Birmingham, on the Demand for Technical Teachers. Committee C of the National Advisory Committee is indeed fortunate in its Chairman, Sir Willis Jackson, and deputy chairman, Mr Russell. They have already done more in a couple of years to focus national interest on the need for technical teachers than was achieved at any previous stage in the development of technical education. Mr Russell's paper added still further to the body of information being accumulated.

This study centers the reflections of principals across the USA as they navigated the overwhelming stress of closing and reopening schools during a global pandemic. Specifically, the authors explored how school principals addressed self-care and their own well-being during the pandemic.

This research study is part of a broader qualitative study conducted by 20 scholars from across the USA in Spring 2020 and organized by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). This national research team conducted 120 qualitative interviews with public school principals in 19 different states and 100 districts. As part of this team, the authors coded and analyzed all 120 transcripts in NVivo using a self-care framework.

The responses from the participants capture some of the complexity of self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found evidence of both negative and positive sentiments towards self-care that will be described in five major themes. For the tensions with self-care, the authors developed two primary themes: leaders eat last and keep from falling off the cliff. For the demonstrations of self-care, the authors also developed three primary themes: release the endorphins, people need people and unplug from work.

Although researchers have identified the stressors and reactions of principals during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known on how principals engaged in self-care practices. This study aims to identify these self-care practices and offer recommendations for principals.

The two-tank level control system is one of the real-world's second-order system (SOS) widely used as the process control in industries. It is normally operated under the Proportional integral and derivative (PID) feedback control loop. The conventional PID controller performance degrades significantly in the existence of modeling uncertainty, faults and process disturbances. To overcome these limitations, the paper suggests an interval type-2 fuzzy logic based Tilt-Integral-Derivative Controller (IT2TID) which is modified structure of PID controller.

In this paper, an optimization IT2TID controller design for the conical, noninteracting level control system is presented. Regarding to modern optimization context, the flower pollination algorithm (FPA), among the most coherent population-based metaheuristic optimization techniques is applied to search for the appropriate IT2FTID's and IT2FPID's parameters. The proposed FPA-based IT2FTID/IT2FPID design framework is considered as the constrained optimization problem. System responses obtained by the IT2FTID controller designed by the FPA will be differentiated with those acquired by the IT2FPID controller also designed by the FPA.

As the results, it was found that the IT2FTID can provide the very satisfactory tracking and regulating responses of the conical two-tank noninteracting level control system superior as compared to IT2FPID significantly under the actuator and system component faults. Additionally, statistical Z-test carried out for both the controllers and an effectiveness of the proposed IT2FTID controller is proven as compared to IT2FPID and existing passive fault tolerant controller in recent literature.

Application of new metaheuristic algorithm to optimize interval type-2 fractional order TID controller for nonlinear level control system with two type of faults. Also, proposed method will compare with other method and statistical analysis will be presented.

Assembly sequence optimization is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem having to simultaneously satisfy various feasibility constraints and optimization criteria. Applications of evolutionary algorithms have shown a lot of promise in terms of lower computational cost and time. But there remain challenges like achieving global optimum in least number of iterations with fast convergence speed, robustness/consistency in finding global optimum, etc. With the above challenges in mind, this study aims to propose an improved flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and hybrid genetic algorithm (GA)-FPA.

In view of slower convergence rate and more computational time required by the previous discrete FPA, this paper presents an improved hybrid FPA with different representation scheme, initial population generation strategy and modifications in local and global pollination rules. Different optimization objectives are considered like direction changes, tool changes, assembly stability, base component location and feasibility. The parameter settings of hybrid GA-FPA are also discussed.

The results, when compared with previous discrete FPA and GA, memetic algorithm (MA), harmony search and improved FPA (IFPA), the proposed hybrid GA-FPA gives promising results with respect to higher global best fitness and higher average fitness, faster convergence (especially from the previously developed variant of FPA) and most importantly improved robustness/consistency in generating global optimum solutions.

It is anticipated that using the proposed approach, assembly sequence planning can be accomplished efficiently and consistently with reduced lead time for process planning, making it cost-effective for industrial applications.

Different representation schemes, initial population generation strategy and modifications in local and global pollination rules are introduced in the IFPA. Moreover, hybridization with GA is proposed to improve convergence speed and robustness/consistency in finding globally optimal solutions.

The newsvendor problem is fundamental to many operations management models. The problem focuses on the trade-off between the gains from satisfying demand and losses from unsold products. The newsvendor model and its extensions have been applied to various areas, such as production plan and supply chain management. This chapter examines the study about newsvendor problem. In this research, there is a review of the contributions for the multiproduct newsvendor problem. It focuses on the current literature concerning the mathematical models and the solution methods for the multiitem newsvendor problems with single or multiple constraints, as well as with the risks. The objective of this research is to go over the newsvendor problem and bring into comparison different newsvendor models applied to the flower industry. A few case studies are described addressing topics related to the newsvendor problem such as discounting and replenishment policies, inventory inaccuracies, or demand estimation. Three newsvendor models are put into practice in the field of flower selling. A full database of the flowers sold by an anonymous retailer is available for the study. Computational experiments for practical example have been conducted with use of the CPLEX solver with AMPL programming language. Models are solved, and an analysis of different circumstances and cases is accomplished.

IT is fitting that a new series of this magazine should be introduced by some reflections on the whole question of book selection, both for the general public and libraries.