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Examines the “Supertag” automatic identification system which is an innovative electronic replacement for barcodes and which can also function as an anti shoplifting device. Each Supertag is a single integrated circuit chip plus a printed flat aerial. Using radio links, Supertag readers are capable of multiple identification and counting at electronic speed. Outlines the technical developments which brought about “electronic counting” and compares them with conventional RFID systems. Describes the potential used for Supertag including its ability to “read” the entire contents of a supermarket trolley in a second, making it very attractive for use in the retail industry.

One day seminar held in London by the IEE and the Association for Biometrics presented recent progress in the development and application of biometrics. Speakers told the audience how the terrorist attacks in the USA in September 2001 have created new opportunities for biometrics due to new initiatives to introduce biometric‐enabled passports. Papers presented at the seminar covered standards development and biometric implementation guidance. New organisations for promoting the application of biometrics both in the UK and Europe were outlined.

Total quality management is both an aspirational and an inspirational concept with elements of the philosophical, quasi religious and qualitative juxtaposed with the empirical and quantified. In the audit society there are many voices clamouring for recognition and acclaim. With the possibility that we are being over‐audited, and the ambiguity of evaluative reports on the various competing contenders, the time ahead will be both challenging and interesting.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the organizational culture of courts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the culture type required to achieve business excellence. This research also aims to benchmark the criteria weights of the International Framework for Court Excellence (IFCE) in the UAE and suggest new weights that better reflect courts’ local priorities and national work culture.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method was used to prioritize the IFCE criteria and select the most important culture types to consider. A questionnaire was designed and data were collected from first instance courts in UAE. The respondents were judges in management roles, to ensure that the opinions provided reflected experience of judging and were aligned with the courts’ strategic objectives.

The results show that the IFCE model criteria have different levels of importance in UAE than in the original model. The major differences are in court proceedings and processes, and affordability and accessibility of services. Adaptability and mission seem to be the most important cultural traits.

No previous studies have investigated court excellence in UAE. This study should supply court managers and administrators with a clearer understanding of the priorities for achieving court excellence. There is inconsistency about the culture needed to boost good performance in public service organizations like courts, and decision makers may use these findings to enhance the cultural attributes that are particularly associated with excellence in courts.

Safety precautions in the use of raw materials, in manufacturing and processing, marketing and enforcement of food and drug law on purity and quality may appear nowadays to be largely a matter of routine, with manufacturers as much involved and interested in maintaining a more or less settled equilibrium as the enforcement agencies. Occasionally the peace is shattered, eg, a search and recovery operation of canned goods of doubtful bacterial purity or containing excess metal contamination, seen very much as an isolated incident; or the recent very large enforcement enterprise in the marketing of horseflesh (and other substitutions) for beef. The nationwide sale and distribution of meat on such a vast scale, only possible by reason of marketing methods — frozen blocks of boneless meat, which even after thawing out is not easily distinguishable from the genuine even in the eye of the expert; this is in effect only a fraud always around in the long ago years built up into a massive illicit trade.

Veincheck is a biometric system which uses back‐of‐hand vein patterns to verify an individual's identity. A biometric system can be loosely defined as a means of verifying an individual's identity by analysis of a physiological feature or a characteristic action. There are a wide variety of biometric systems under development ranging from signature to fingerprint to voice. Biometric systems are often compared on the basis of their False Accept Rates (FAR) and False Reject Rates (FRR). These rates are also referred to as Type 1 and Type 2 errors respectively. The acceptable values and the relative importance for these error rates varies from application to application. It is generally agreed that error rates of much less than 1 per cent are needed before deploying a biometric system for use by the general public.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of ongoing conversations between researchers and librarians. Without such conversations followed by the active purchasing of manuscripts, the important contributions of individual first settlers would likely remain untold. The research review that unfolds here is of one of New Zealand's significant first settlers, William Colenso (1811-1899). Yet, 30 years ago William Colenso was mostly regarded as a local rather than a national figure, renowned and ridiculed for his being dismissed from the Church Missionary Society for moral impropriety in 1852. By 2011, however, a conference dedicated to his life and work attracted both national and international scholars raising awareness and contributing unique knowledge about Colenso as missionary, printer, linguist, explorer, botanist, politician, author and inspector of schools. It is argued that such scholarship was enabled through the purposeful collecting of Colenso's papers over 30 years.

The historical analysis draws from original documents and published papers chronicling the role and the views of one of New Zealand's first inspector of schools. A self-reflective review approach will show how new knowledge can enhance earlier published works and provide opportunities for further analysis.

It will be demonstrated that as a result of ongoing conversations between librarians and researchers purposeful buying of archives and manuscripts have added fresh perspectives to the contributions William Colenso made to education in provincial New Zealand.

This work is perhaps the first critical re-reading and review of one's own scholarship undertaken across 30 years within New Zealand history of education. It offers unique self-reflections on the subject focus and analyses of it over time.

The Internet has been heralded as having the potential to completely revolutionise the way organisations conduct their business and cited as the most rapidly adopted medium of our time. This study investigates Internet usage in the context of Hawke's Bay wineries within New Zealand. Although web potential has been well documented, the reality lags somewhat behind. A survey of thirty‐six Hawke's Bay winery websites was conducted applying a content analysis method previously used within the international wine sector. The results show positive adoption of current web technology. However, the analysis shows potential still remains for better utilisation by wineries of the web. There appears to be significant room to add value to websites and emphasise a range of brand and relationship building activities. Such a policy could confer competitive advantage and add another option for global exposure for wineries committed to incorporating a fully functioning web dimension into their long‐term marketing strategy. International markets will increase in importance as New Zealand wine production continues to rise steeply.

As part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research project that conducts research in metropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system, scientists have measured the effect of urbanization on entire watersheds, such as Gwynns Falls, from headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. In general, urbanization has buried many seasonal headwater streams and has contributed to the erosion of extant streams due to flashy urban storm runoff in what was a slow moving, beaver-dominated landscape (Elmore & Kaushal, 2008; Brush, 2009). This chapter fuses scientific ecological research in Baltimore with ethnographic evidence of human ecological technologies practiced in Northern Thailand. Anthropologist Shigeharu Tanabe studied one such ecological technology practiced for centuries in Chiang Mai called muang fai. More recently, a royally inspired community project of forest regeneration was successfully completed through small headwater dam building in nearby Lampang. The authors report on a recently conducted survey of the sites Tanabe documented in the 1970s and the results of the community reforestation project in relation to design proposals for three neighborhoods in Baltimore. The ecological research in Baltimore and the ethnographic research in Chiang Mai are integrated in this chapter to argue for new sustainable design practices in urban headwaters that combine ethnography, scientific monitoring, and design.