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As a past President and present friend of Aslib, I count it a pleasure as well as an honour to be invited to give an Aslib lecture. The subject that I have chosen—the relations of expert and layman in contemporary society—will, I hope, commend itself as being at once highly topical and highly controversial.

This study aims to examine whether there are significant differences between laymen's, professionals' and policy makers' evaluations of the conservation of historic buildings.

The research began with interview surveys using a sample of laymen and professionals in the built environment and it examined their evaluation standards of a sample of 25 historic buildings in Hong Kong. The research also used the controversial Queen's Pier case to examine the extent to which different preferences of conservation between laymen and professionals and policy makers has led to its conservation campaign.

The results indicate that laymen and professional groups evaluate historic buildings based on slightly different criteria. The research also reveals that their preference for what is worth conserving is different from policy makers. The debate over the conservation of the Queen's Pier illustrates a wide range of issues other than differences of preference that may have stimulated the campaign.

The sample size of the respondents and the sample buildings are limited due to manpower resource and funding. Further study can expand the sampling size.

The study is original research which illustrates the differences between laymen's, professionals' and policy makers' evaluation criteria and assessment of historic buildings. It recommends a greater understanding of all stakeholders' interests in heritage conservation and the incorporation of the public's view into legislative and administrative procedures in designating and listing historic buildings.

The purpose of this study is to propose a framework for extracting medical information from the Web using domain ontologies. Patient–Doctor conversations have become prevalent on the Web. For instance, solutions like HealthTap or AskTheDoctors allow patients to ask doctors health-related questions. However, most online health-care consumers still struggle to express their questions efficiently due mainly to the expert/layman language and knowledge discrepancy. Extracting information from these layman descriptions, which typically lack expert terminology, is challenging. This hinders the efficiency of the underlying applications such as information retrieval. Herein, an ontology-driven approach is proposed, which aims at extracting information from such sparse descriptions using a meta-model.

A meta-model is designed to bridge the gap between the vocabulary of the medical experts and the consumers of the health services. The meta-model is mapped with SNOMED-CT to access the comprehensive medical vocabulary, as well as with WordNet to improve the coverage of layman terms during information extraction. To assess the potential of the approach, an information extraction prototype based on syntactical patterns is implemented.

The evaluation of the approach on the gold standard corpus defined in Task1 of ShARe CLEF 2013 showed promising results, an F-score of 0.79 for recognizing medical concepts in real-life medical documents.

The originality of the proposed approach lies in the way information is extracted. The context defined through a meta-model proved to be efficient for the task of information extraction, especially from layman descriptions.

This paper aims to explore how different risk perceptions of experts, institutions and laymen have to be taken into consideration if non-governmental organizations and donors want to include the community in disaster risk reduction. Otherwise, community-based disaster risk management will not be community-based.

This research is based on an intensive literature review, as well as a four-month felt study in Kathmandu (November 2011-February 2012). This study explores, from a social constructive point of view, the relationship among international, national and local actors in the effort to conduct disaster risk reduction in Nepal through a community-based approach.

The Kathmandu Valley is at risk of being hit by an earthquake at anytime. If an earthquake hits, it will cause total devastation. Although the Nepalese are aware of the risks of a potential earthquake, very few have begun preparations. The author finds that the lack of preparation is partly caused by different risk perceptions among experts, institutions and laymen.

Involving the community in disaster risk reduction today is widely accepted as the right way to work with disaster risk reduction. But, rarely the question is made: are we really involving the community by taking their risk perception serious, and not just accepting the risk perceptions from experts and institutions of science as being the right way to perceive disaster risk. The author finds that there is a tendency to ignore the community in community-based earthquake preparedness in Nepal.

The study of wine labels can be a non vinous entry to the wine world. There was self labelling of vats before 3000BC — followed by that of smaller vessels, and later, corks. Paper labels were used in the nineteenth century, and became compulsory in the twentieth. To assess a wine, the grape variety, the soil of the area indicated, and the climate, will form the platform upon which to impose the effect of the complicated regulations appearing on the front label. It may be necessary to discount near deception, or over advertisement. The basic wine laws of two countries are highlighted in order to appraise three illustrated labels. Concluding are brief indicative notes of some other countries.

Recently Bertie Everard, ICI Education and Training Manager, lectured on this subject at a Conference on ‘Mission in an Industrial and Technological Society’, which was broadcast on BBC Radio Leeds. He shared the platform with Bill Gowland, President of the Methodist Conference and Principal of Luton Industrial College, with the Bishop of Ripon and with Bob Clemmett who stood in for the General Secretary of the TUC (Len Murray being otherwise engaged with the steel strike). He makes no claim to speak for Christian managers in general, or ICI managers in particular — only for himself. What he said takes up some of the themes on which John Wellens has written in this journal, and which, he acknowledges, inspired part of his argument.

Our purpose is to critically discuss the quality of governability and scrutiny of, as well as insight in, enterprises owned by local government. Our analysis is empirically grounded in an in-depth case study of one of Sweden’s 10 largest municipalities. The ambition is to highlight troublesome areas and danger zones when it comes to public owning of corporations. We have consulted diverse types of material: conducted document studies, as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews. In addition, we have conducted a survey directed to 156 individuals (which is the total population of councillors and members of municipal corporation boards in the municipality we have studied).

From an in-depth study of Sweden, we show that corporatising parts of local governments’ operations have serious implications for accountability. Our study therefore adds to the knowledge about hybrid organisations and the challenges dual logics of the private and public sector imposes on political governance as well as management. The result of this study is based on one single case study in one specific hybrid context. No empirical generalisation is aspired to. Instead the aim has been to – by way of an explorative approach – make an analytical contribution to our knowledge about hybrid organisations. Further studies are thus necessary in order to deepen our understanding of the hybrid context and the situations under which hybrid organisations operate and develop.

This study increases our knowledge regarding the challenges of governing hybrid organisations in general and enterprises owned by local government in particular. Therefore, the findings of this study are considered to be of support to politicians as well as civil servants involved in and responsible for the governance of hybrid organisations. We argue that it is important to carefully supervise this development in local government. As corporations owned and operated by local governments have increased in numbers, they are responsible for large values and services that are crucial for the modern society (water, waste management, energy, IT). Consequently, they are becoming ever more important players in their respective local economies. At the same time, concerns have been raised regarding how to govern hybrid organisations in order to secure accountability and to protect public sector values.

Using models of social behaviour in small organizations developed by J. W. Getzels and E. G. Guba, an attempt has been made to investigate the role expectations of the members of the governing councils of two Australian universities whose membership was drawn from academic, government and business circles. It was found that not only were the expectations of the members about the functions of the body itself and of themselves fewer than might be expected, but also, arising from the membership patterns, there were important areas of the institution's functions where expectations were in opposition. There appear to be fruitful areas for research not only into the rationale for the commonly accepted membership pattern of university governing councils but also into ways of increasing their effectiveness.

Goldbach conjecture of prime numbers is one of the unsolved mathematical problems. Many trial solutions appeared in the literature, but so far none has been accepted by the mathematics societies. This paper describes a graphical method devised by me to explain the mystery of the said conjecture. My method based on the teachings of analytical geometry using a rectangular coordinate frame with even numbers as ordinates and prime numbers as abscissas. Straight lines with 45 degree slop and intercepets of varying prime numbers on the ordinate are drawn to meet all the vertical straight draw grom the abscissas. These diagonal lines are designated as separation lines and identified by its intercept number. The intersection of vertical abscissa line, the separation line and a horizontal line drawn from the ordinates shows the relationship of an even number and its pair of prime numbers. These intersections vividly appear on the horizontal even number line and can be easily seen. This method is a graphical version of binary combination of prime numbers and can locate the prime-pairs of any even nuber by drawing a family of separation lines.

Attempts to describe some of the forces which, from a marketing perspective, drive and shape the pharmaceutical industry. The industry is of massive importance to the UK economy and rarely a day goes by without mention in the press of the activities of the leading manufacturers – Glaxo, Wellcome, SmithKline Beecham etc. British companies are amongst the most innovative in the world and pharmaceuticals is the only area of science where the UK can claim to match, and frequently outperform, the Americans, Japanese and Germans. Written by a layman for the benefit of laymen.