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The escalating problem of electrostatic discharge damage to MOS devices, resulting from the need for a continual reduction in chip geometry, is examined, with data provided on the range of ESD susceptibility for various component families. It will clearly be of benefit to implement measures that will offer long‐term protection against device degradation.

WITH this issue we are commencing the twenty‐seventh year of our career as an independent Library Journal and trust that we shall carry on the tradition of our illustrious founder and continue to criticise or praise without fear or favour. During the past twelve months our editorial staff has successfully produced special numbers dealing with Bookbinding, Book Selection, Children's Departments, Classification, and Colonial Libraries. Judging by the correspondence we have received, our efforts have been greatly appreciated by the majority of our readers. Naturally we have not pleased everybody and we have even been dubbed the “little contemporary” in some quarters. However, we can point to an unbroken record of twenty‐six years' endeavour to serve the library profession and we ourselves are justly proud of the contemptible “little contemporary” that did not cease to appear even during the darkest hours of the dread war period.

ONE of the pressing problems that faces the public librarian of to‐day is the finding of adequate protection for the property committed to his care. The open‐access library loses books; at any rate now‐a‐days. But there is no means of prosecuting borrowers who take an extra book from the library in their pockets. There are model standing orders which may be adopted, which regulate the conduct of readers in reference libraries and reading rooms, but a book‐thief may plead that he meant only to borrow a book that has been found in his possession, and his offence will be treated merely as a technical breach of the rule that a book must be “charged” before it is taken from the library. When a clear case has been made, as in the notorious Walthamstow case, a foolishly sentimental Bench will refuse to help the libraries. We would urge the Library Association to give some consideration to the drafting of model standing orders which will give legal effect to the present “rules” under which libraries work, rules which the vicious may defy almost with impunity. The safety of the books in most libraries depends, actually, on public ignorance of the fact that most of our rules have no legal authority behind them.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an “inside” account of efforts to enhance the quality of care in a paediatric hospital department in Malawi.

The authors describe the problems they face as health workers in an overcrowded, under-resourced emergency departments in a low-income setting. Where it is helpful, the authors combine reports of their experience with reference to reports emanating from other African countries.

There is increased awareness of the need for a good health system to be able to provide quality care. The authors emphasise the importance of teamwork and the need for cross cutting activities that are not disease-centred or vertically driven. Task sharing and multi-tasking have helped fill the gaps left by inadequate staffing but specialists in emergency medicine are needed to advocate for the specialty and be role models in departments.

This paper is aimed at a broad audience of fellow clinicians, funders and policy makers, and those who have an interest in clinical governance in support of quality improvement in developing countries.

This is a firsthand account of efforts to enhance the quality of emergency care from a paediatric hospital department in Malawi.

We learn from various sources that the Cambridge Conference arrangements are well in hand. It is many years since the Library Association gathered in body at either Oxford or Cambridge and the event should therefore be of universal interest. On one point it has a special interest, for the President will be Mr. Jast, the first municipal librarian to hold our highest office for many years past; and no one will do otherwise than rejoice at the somewhat tardy honour thus to be paid him. Cambridge itself is making first‐class history in that it is about to build a new University Library, the elevation of which—and it is a most imposing one—has been published in The Observer and probably elsewhere. Moreover, the university city with its colleges, halls, libraries and quite glamorous history from the literary point of view, offers librarians more than most people the ideal place of meeting.

The case, briefly reported in the last issue of BFJ, an appeal to a Milk and Dairies Tribunal arising out of a local authority's refusal to grant a licence to a milk distributor because he failed to comply with a requirement that he should provide protective curtains to his milk floats, was a rare and in many ways, an interesting event. The Tribunal in this case was set up under reg. 16(2) (f), Milk (Special Designation) Regulations, 1963, constituted in accordance with Part I, clause 2 (2), Schedule 4 of the Regulations. Part II outlines procedure for such tribunals. The Tribunal is similar to that authorized by S.30, Food and Drugs Act, 1955, which deals with the registration of dairymen, dairy farms and farmers, and the Milk and Dairies (General) Regulations, 1959. Part II, Schedule 2 of the Act provided for reference to a tribunal of appeals against refusal or cancellation of registration by the Ministry, but of producers only. A local authority's power to refuse to register or cancellation contained in Part I, Schedule 2 provided for no such reference and related to instances where “public health is or is likely to be endangered by any act or default” of such a person, who was given the right of appeal against refusal to register, etc., to a magistrates' court. No such limitation exists in respect of the revoking, suspending, refusal to renew a licence under the Milk (Special Designation) Regulations, 1963; an appeal against same lies to the Minister, who must refer the matter to a tribunal, if the person so requests. This occurred in the case under discussion.

Looks at the historical positioning of housework as unpaid and questions the correctness of this idea. States that there is a fundamental theoretical error in defining housework as unpaid as market concepts are being applied to non‐market work. Continues to distinguish between the two markets considering the features of both, outlining the gender differences and the recent changes in the twentieth century.

A curious reaction to the Post‐War Policy Report of the Library Association is beginning to make itself articulate. Educationists, who are likely to be vocal in the matter, say that the three principles on which it is based are not in sufficient agreement for practical use. The Library Association wants local autonomy, while interfering most drastically with the small towns which are the very foundation of such autonomy; it advocates the educational value of libraries but is emphatic that they must live separately from the official education organization; and they should have government grants but be absolved from government control. There is a symposium covering some of these points in the Spring, 1944, number of Library Review, where are brought to bear the views of Professor H. J. Laski, as a former chairman, Mr. Frederick Cowles, as representing a small town library, Mr. F. M. Gardner, from a rather larger one, Mr. Edward Green, the former librarian of Halifax, whose enthusiasm is as great as ever, and Mr. Alfred Ogilvie, who speaks for county libraries, from Lanarkshire. Most of the contributions are severely critical and all are worth study.

The purpose of this paper is to identify good practice in conducting outreach for homeless people, and hence to provide recommendations for future library outreach projects.

The authors examine of four case studies taken from the library literature, and conduct six semi‐structured interviews with outreach and/or inclusion librarians from library authorities in South and West Yorkshire.

The recommendations include: developing partnerships with relevant organisations; removing proof‐of‐identity requirements for joining the library; disseminating the results obtained in projects; using book deposits and mobile library stops; training library staff to ensure that they are aware of relevant issues; building trust in the target audience; ensuring that outreach is tailored to the specific needs of different groups of homeless people; and using a range of methods to evaluate project effectiveness.

Identification of themes common to the published case studies and to the interviews provides a reasoned basis for the recommendations that are presented. These recommendations provide, for the first time in the UK, clear guidelines for future outreach projects for homeless people.

This paper aims to assess the application of seven statistical and data mining techniques to second-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) for bank performance.

Different statistical and data mining techniques are used to second-stage DEA for bank performance as a part of an attempt to produce a powerful model for bank performance with effective predictive ability. The projected data mining tools are classification and regression trees (CART), conditional inference trees (CIT), random forest based on CART and CIT, bagging, artificial neural networks and their statistical counterpart, logistic regression.

The results showed that random forests and bagging outperform other methods in terms of predictive power.

This is the first study to assess the impact of environmental factors on banking performance in Middle East and North Africa countries.