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A minicomputer has been employed to monitor and control an advanced industrial robot during transfers of colour TV picture tubes between two asynchronous conveyors. The robot system described herein extracts a face up picture tube, from the index conveyor, inverts it, tracks a continually moving monorail carrier, and deposits the tube face down on this carrier. Since an optical tracking technique is employed, no physical contact is required between the robot and the monorail carrier. An interactive programming language, A Language For Automation (ALFA), allows the user to program the robot and adapt it to other industrial transfer tasks.

To confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters and the challenges that climate change is posing to disaster risk management (DRM) there is an imperative to further develop DRM. The resilience approach is emerging as one way to do this, and in the last decade has been strongly introduced into the policy arena, although it is not new for DRM practitioners and researchers. Nevertheless, resilience is a highly contested issue, and there is no agreed definition of it, which has resulted in confusion for stakeholders when applying it to practice. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how resilience is framed by researchers and DRM practitioners.

The analytical framework used was Hajer's “social-interactive discourse theory”, combined with analysis of government documents, in-depth interviews with practitioners and observation of field and practices within the context of the Natural Disaster Resilience Program in Queensland, Australia.

One of the key findings is that the idea of “bouncing back” is central to the resilience discourse but different interpretations of this idea results in real-world implications. Three different ways (storylines) in which practitioners construct the meaning of disaster resilience emerge from this study. Importantly the divergences between these storylines reveal possibilities for reframing to occur and these could lead to different policy options and practices.

The results presented in this paper offer empirical evidence on how resilience is understood on the ground, contributing to extending resilience theory and informing DRM and resilience practice.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper deals with two types of educational reform related to teaching and learning the traditional school subject of social studies. First, we consider the importance of teaching about controversial issues by examining the impact of Hurricane Katrina, the record-setting, natural disaster, which struck the Gulf Coast of the United States in late August 2005. Using this episode as their foundation, the authors demonstrate how the common practice of avoiding controversy within the social studies arena can be addressed. Since Katrina represents a topic for which no warrant exists within state standards for teaching the subject, it can be considered a true “teachable moment”. Second, we analyze a case study involving the use of technology to spark discussion relative to the issues of race and class tied to Katrina, primarily for the two-year period after the hurricane struck. While the use of digital technology has been slow to gain popularity in the field of social studies, the authors use the case study to demonstrate how it can be utilized to generate democratic dialogue and civic engagement.

As world society develops and nations become embedded in it, cultural patterns that began as properties of Western modernity diffuse to other areas. Individualism has long been noted as a unique feature of American nationalism (Arieli, 1964; Greene, 1993; Lipset, 1963, 1996). But both the spread of democracy and the declining legitimacy of dictatorship and racism after WW II opened the gates for forms of egalitarianism and individualism to spread transnationally (see Elliott & Lemert, 2006; Gaddis, 2005, p. 164ff). This chapter considers the consequences of this transformation.

International rates of child maltreatment, particularly for children with disabilities are difficult to determine due to a lack of centralized data bases, a tendency to not keep consistent records of disability characteristics in cases of suspected maltreatment, and in extreme cases, because maltreatment is not acknowledged or addressed publicly (Bonner et al., 1997; Morris, 1999). Therefore, most of the data on prevalence rates of maltreatment in disabled children are from western cultures such as the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. There is some evidence to suggest that the rates internationally are probably at least equal to those in the U.S. samples (Cooke & Standen, 2002; Gringorenko, 1998). Finklehor (1994) found that the rates of sexual abuse were consistent across nations for both males and females. The nations in that study included most European countries, Canada, Dominican Republic, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. On the other hand, Forrester and Harwin (2000) note that measuring child maltreatment internationally is nearly impossible due to the varying cultural norms, national resources, and the tendency for many forms of maltreatment to go unnoticed. They suggest that an alternative to measuring maltreatment internationally may be to evaluate each nation’s willingness to both address issues regarding the rights of children and to provide services to children who are maltreated.