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The UK Medical Research Council's Neurological Prosthesis Unit was formed on 1 October 1968. In this review, Peter Donaldson, who has been with the unit from the beginning, reflects on what seem to him to be the most important contributions to implant technology from the unit, and suggests some possible developments for the future.

Medical electronics has its origins in basic physiological research, a field in which there has been a continual searching since the early years of the last century for instruments capable of detecting and measuring the electric currents which accompany the activity of nerve and muscle fibres (Fig. 1). The discovery of the magnetic effects of a current by Oersted in 1819 was followed by the invention of the tangent galvanometer by Schweigger in 1820, and the moving coil galvanometer by Sturgeon in 1836. Both types of instrument were used by physiologists but they were insensitive and slow in response. Bernstein's work, published in 1871, was a classic example of the victory of ingenuity over the limitations of a sluggish measuring instrument. He employed what we should now call a ballistic galvanometer in series with electrodes attached to a frog's muscle and a special switch. This switch applied a momentary electrical stimulus to the muscle, and then closed the circuit to the galvanometer after a predetermined time interval. By varying this time interval and repeating the stimulus, Bernstein laboriously built up a graph of the current against time. His curve was sur‐prisingly similar to those obtained today using electronic recording techniques (Fig. 1b). The duration of the action current, as it was called, was a few milli‐seconds. Bernstein was able to show further that the action current was pro‐pagated along the muscle fibres with a velocity of the order of 1 metre per second.

Solder is a major use for tin and in his function as Chief Metallurgist of the Tin Research Institute, C. J. Thwaites has become internationally recognised as an authority on soft soldering, particularly for the electronics industry. It is with pleasure that the Institute announces that he has recently been awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (Eng.) by London University, for his published work in the field of soldering and related topics.

Recalls that the first proposal for artificial neural nets was more than half a century ago. Subsequent developments are reviewed, with particular attention to the interface between regulatory, continuous processing and symbol manipulation. Recalls the standpoint of McCulloch and Pitts, that artificial nets are not precise models but are potentially informative about living systems.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the requirements for long‐term implantation of electronic devices with a focus on packaging and encapsulation.

Owing to their intended long‐term use in the human body, implants for electrical stimulation present specific challenges to the engineers. The respective roles of packaging and encapsulation must be clearly understood to make the most of new materials and modern machining technologies. This paper offers an introduction to the current situation and highlights challenges for future developments.

The innovative application of modern technologies may be useful to tackle key issues of encapsulation and sealing of small electrical devices for long‐term implantation.

Two examples of innovative application of alternative package manufacture and sealing method are described.

This paper proposes to rethink the concepts of relevance and usefulness and their relation to the theory–practice gap in management research.

On the basis of the cognitive-linguistic relevance theory or inferential pragmatics, supplemented by insights from information science, we define relevance as a general conceptual category, while reserving usefulness for the instrumental application in a particular case.

There is no reason to hold onto the difference between theoretical and practical relevance, nor to distinguish between instrumental and conceptual relevance.

This novel approach will help to clarify the confusion in the field and contribute to a better understanding of the added value of management research.

In this paper, we use the distributions of order statistics to define functions with the appropriate properties to represent social preferences regarding income distributions. Following the approach of Yaari (1987, 1988), this allows constructing a set of social welfare functions from which the corresponding inequality indices are derived. The obtained measures incorporate diverse normative criteria, with different degrees of preference for equality. The generalized Gini coefficients and the family of indices proposed by Aaberge (2000) are obtained as particular cases. This approach allows interpreting each inequality measure in terms of the statistics computed from a randomly selected sample and the identification of unbiased estimators of the Social Welfare Functions. It also shows that each of the families of inequality indices are obtained from the moments of the order statistics and, therefore, each of the families characterizes any income distribution with finite mean. This characterization is very useful in the case of distributions with heavy tail and pronounced positive skew that shows only a few potential moments.

Presents the empirical findings regarding the ethical attitudes of business people in four culturally and economically different countries (Russia, Slovenia, Turkey, and the United States) based on the assumptions of integrative social contracts theory. Given the quality of institutions in the four surveyed countries and the quality of economic interactions, it was anticipated that the United States would rank the highest in ethical attitudes, followed by Slovenia and Turkey, and then Russia. The hypothesis was largely confirmed with some interesting, situationally induced, exceptions.