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This work is intended to historically commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the invention of a new type of electronic circuit, referred to in 1919 by Abraham and Bloch as a multivibrator and by Eccles and Jordan as a trigger relay (later known as a flip-flop).

The author also considers the circuit-technical side of this new type of circuit, considering the technological change as well as the mathematical concepts developed in the context of the analysis of the circuit.

The multivibrator resulted in a “circuit shape” which became one of the most applied nonlinear circuits in electronics. It is shown that at the beginning the multivibrator as well as the flip-flop circuits were used because their interesting properties in the frequency domain.

Therefore, it is a very interesting subject to consider the history of the multivibrator as electronic circuits in different technologies including tube, transistors and integrated circuits as well as the mathematical theory based on the concept from electrical circuit theory.

This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

IT is too early to examine what the change of Government may portend for libraries sustained attract malign attention from any party. We are aware enough, however, that a time of financial stringency lies ahead for every public activity. In book production, the restrictions on imports may worsen a position which is bad enough as it is. There may not be a sinister intention in the gesture of cutting the salaries of Cabinet Ministers by a sum which for several of them represents about £25 or about a half crown a week on such salaries as librarians earn. We hope there is not. Although all good Britons will make necessary sacrifices; but they want to be sure that they are necessary and not, as usually is the case, merely attacks on public servants. We are told that there will be no Geddes axe this time, but experience shows that the politician can always find a way of reversing a statement in what he imagines to be the public interest. Fortunately those likely to be affected are better organized than they were in the early twenties.

Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities. There are good reasons why students of deviance in particular should be interested in what can be learned from their subjects' explanations of their social practices. Actors are normally called to account for or to explain their activities precisely when these actions are seen by significant others to be in some sense “unreasonable”. Moreover, accounts are central to the processes of law. The purpose of legal judgements is to attribute or withold responsibility. In order to assess an individual's guilt, where criminal activities are concerned, lawyers, judges, and juries pose such questions as: “Did the defendant perform an illegal act?”; “if so, can he or she explain his or her actions in reasonable terms?”; “Was the act in question pre‐meditated?” (that is, “motivated”); and, perhaps most important of all “What is the relationship between the accused's account of his or her involvement in an act, and their real involvement?”

Attention was called in the March number of this Journal to the promotion of a Bill for the reconstitution of the Local Government Board, and the opinion was expressed that the renovated Department should contain among its staff “experts of the first rank in all the branches of science from which the knowledge essential for efficient administration can be drawn.”

The long controversy that has waxed furiously around the implementation of the EEC Directives on the inspection of poultry meat and hygiene standards to be observed in poultry slaughterhouses, cutting‐up premises, &c, appears to be resolved at last. (The Prayer lodged against the Regulations when they were formally laid before Parliament just before the summer recess, which meant they would have to be debated when the House reassembled, could have resulted in some delay to the early operative dates, but little chance of the main proposals being changed.) The controversy began as soon as the EEC draft directive was published and has continued from the Directive of 1971 with 1975 amendments. There has been long and painstaking study of problems by the Ministry with all interested parties; enforcement was not the least of these. The expansion and growth of the poultry meat industry in the past decade has been tremendous and the constitution of what is virtually a new service, within the framework of general food inspection, was inevitable. None will question the need for efficient inspection or improved and higher standards of hygiene, but the extent of the organization in the first and the enormous cost of structural and other alterations to premises in the second, were seen as formidable tasks, and costly. The execution and enforcement of the new Regulations is assigned to local authorities (District, Metropolitan and London Borough Councils), who are empowered to make charges for inspection, licences, etc., to recoup the full costs of administration. The Government had previously promised that the cost of this new service, which when fully operative, will be significant, would not fall upon the already over‐burdened economies of local authorities. The figure of a penny per bird is given; in those areas with very large poultry processing plants, with annual outputs counted in millions of birds, this levy should adequately cover costs of enforcing the Regulations, but there are many areas with only one of a few small concerns with annual killings of perhaps no more than 200,000 birds—this much we know from perusing annual health reports received at the offices of this Journal—and the returns from charges will certainly be inadequate to cover the cost of extra staff. The Regulations require the appointment of “official veterinary surgeons” and “poultry meat inspectors”, both new to local government.

FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to understand his chosen profession it must necessarily be placed within its social context. Most students at some stage of their development reflect on the social problems that beset the human situation, and some, as the mass media would have us believe, are anxious to remould the “sorry scheme of things” as represented by the existing social structure.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.