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Q‐analysis is a methodology for investigating a wide range of structural phenomena. Structures are defined in terms of relations between members of sets and their salient features are revealed using techniques of algebraic topology. However, the basic method can be mastered by non‐mathematicians. Q‐analysis has been applied to problems as diverse as discovering the rules for the diagnosis of a rare disease and the study of tactics in a football match. Other applications include some of interest to librarians and information scientists. In bibliometrics, Q‐analysis has proved capable of emulating techniques such as bibliographic coupling, co‐citation analysis and co‐word analysis. It has also been used to produce a classification scheme for television programmes based on different principles from most bibliographic classifications. This paper introduces the basic ideas of Q‐analysis. Applications relevant to librarianship and information science are reviewed and present limitations of the approach described. New theoretical advances including some in other fields such as planning and design theory and artificial intelligence may lead to a still more powerful method of investigating structure.

The problems of representing knowledge in computer systems are common to information science, artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics. The paper offers a brief review of the structures and techniques that have been developed in these different disciplines. It looks at the semantic structure of sentences, at roles, categories and relations in subject anlaysis, at semantic primitives, and at knowledge representation for reasoning. The paper concludes with a note on a prototype expert system that makes use of some of these techniques.

The internal customer model has served well, but has many limitations and drawbacks. It can only take one so far. Now, we must change the model. It is time to let customer mean customer.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate whether and to what extent economic transactions are influenced by social structures, power distributions, and cultural understandings through an analysis of exchange at a scrap metal yard in Chicago.

Methodology/Approach – Between March 2000 and December 2002, 72 interviews were conducted with collectors who bring metal to City Iron. With 16 of these collectors the author had a working relationship, assisting the collector in all aspects of the job. Data were coded and analyzed with the assistance of NVIVO, a qualitative data management program.

Findings – The author finds that market transactions are not impersonal and that moral characterizations matter. In this universally risky business in which some level of in-market cheating is expected, material and moral appraisals become intertwined as participants look to extra-market cues and clues in evaluating with whom to transact and how. While the ascription of ethnicity serves as a proxy for the particularistic judgment of trustworthiness, this sorting is accomplished and legitimated by an ostensibly universal moral discourse. Actors evaluate each other using a moral yardstick, paying as much – if not more – attention to what one believes the other is doing when not working as to when one is.

Originality/Value of paper – By focusing on exchange-in-interaction and articulating how economic transactions are culturally embedded, this research contributes to scholarship in the sociologies of work and economies, and provides a glimpse into an understudied work world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Amartya Sen’s notion of adaptation and his views on identity politics by focussing on the issue of slavery and, more specifically, on the example of the happy or contented slave.

The paper is text based. The methodological approach adopted is that of conceptual analysis, as is typical for work of this kind.

The paper concludes that the example of the happy or contented slave is indeed a fruitful one for those interested in exploring the relationship between Sen’s views on “the adaptation problem” and his views on identity politics, especially in relation to the subjection of women. Here Sen’s debt to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill is particularly important.

One implication of the argument of the paper is that there is a need to consider more carefully the differences that exist between the views of Wollstonecraft and Mill, so far as the example of the happy or contented slave is concerned.

One practical implication of the paper is that, hopefully, it establishes the continued relevance of the ideas of thinkers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill today, not least because of the influence that they have had on theoreticians such as Amartya Sen.

The paper addresses issues which are of considerable social and political significance, especially for women in underdeveloped societies today.

The example of the happy or contented slave has not received much discussion in the literature on Sen, although Sen himself has suggested that the distinction between happiness and contentment is an important one, which does merit further discussion.

This article analyzes a classroom project that integrated desktop documentary making with an educational foundations course in order to foster empathetic development in pre-service teachers toward unfamiliar cultural groups. The project required each tertiary student in the course to create a desktop documentary about the school experience of a cultural group with which they did not immediately identify with. The findings indicate that half of the students in this project displayed empathetic development with regard to their chosen topics, using their encounters with imagery and stories to link their world with that which was unfamiliar. Additionally, as a result of the compositional process, several students became advocates for their assigned cultural group, carrying this sentiment with them as they progressed to become teachers. Implications of this study, including possible approaches toward improving this project’s effectiveness in achieving its aims, are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a privacy‐enhancing model, which is designed to help web users protect their private information. The model employs a collection of software agents. Privacy‐related decisions are made based on Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) information collected by the agents.

Based on P3P information collected and user preferences, the software agents play a role in the decision‐making process. This paper presents the design of the agent‐based privacy‐enhancing model and considers the benefits and utility of such an approach.

It is argued that the approach is feasible and it provides an effective solution to the usability limitations associated with P3P.

The paper focuses primarily on usability issues related to P3P. Consequently, some of the ancillary security‐related issues that arise are not covered in detail. Also the paper does not cover the development of an appropriate ontology in significant detail.

Based on this analysis and extensive testing of the prototype, it is believed that the privacy‐enhancing model presented provides a sound basis for privacy protection on the web. While the emphasis here is on resolving the usability problems associated with P3P, a few straightforward enhancements to the implementation would make it a genuinely practical tool.

The usability of the P3P framework is generally considered its weak point. The paper provides a practical solution to this usability problem. One is not aware of any comparable work.

Although tourist experience has been considerably studied, there is a dearth of research on spiritual cognitive stages in tourism literature. Therefore, this paper aims to reveal the dimensions of the tourist experience based on numinosity context.

A qualitative method is used by the etic and emic approach with an ethnographic background. After observation and active participation in the field, data was collected from 44 participants with semi-structured interviews to reveal their numinous experiences dimensions.

The results show that numinous experience in three categories (mysterium, tremendum and fascinans) can be evaluated in seven dimensions including history, story, awe, reverence, atmosphere, place-based and nature-based dimensions.

This study provides managerial and practical implications for tourism stakeholders to be aware of numinous experiences and to better manage sacred places.

This paper offers a novel tourist experience design in the numinous context to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

Concerns have been raised regarding the mental health of firefighters. In response to this, existing literature reviews have highlighted the significant role of trauma in influencing mental health and the experience of post-traumatic stress within firefighters.

This paper builds on the existing reviews and makes an original contribution to knowledge by systematically reviewing research exploring additional factors that contribute to poor mental health in firefighters.

This review finds that factors such as sleep, occupational stress, length of service, coping style and social support all influence negative mental health within firefighters. However, this paper also suggests there are challenges to distinguishing the nature of these relationships, due to the possible bidirectional nature of the relationships and study limitations.

Finally, we conclude by suggesting a clear need for further research to explore the biological, psychological and social factors influencing mental health outcomes in firefighters and the direction of these relationships, in order to inform effective intervention and support.

This paper aims to concentrate on an efficient finite impulse response (FIR) filter architecture in combination with the differential evolution ant colony algorithm (DE-ACO). For the design of FIR filter, the evolutionary algorithm (EA) is found to be very efficient because of its non-conventional, nonlinear, multi-modal and non-differentiable nature. While focusing with frequency domain specifications, most of the EA techniques described with the existing systems diverge from the power related matters.

The FIR filters are extensively used for many low power, low complexities, less area and high speed digital signal processing applications. In the existing systems, various FIR filters have been proposed to focus on the above criterion.

In the proposed method, a novel DE-ACO is used to design the FIR filter. It focuses on satisfying the economic power utilization and also the specifications in the frequency domain.

The proposed DE-ACO gives outstanding performance with a strong ability to find optimal solution, and it has got quick convergence speed. The proposed method also uses the Software integrated synthesis environment (ISE) project navigator (p.28xd) for the simulation of FIR filter based on DE-ACO techniques.