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The President of the Board of Agriculture has introduced in the House of Commons his long‐promised Bill for preventing the sale of butter containing large amounts of water, and the proposed measure appears to have been received with general approval on both sides of the House.

IT is evident from the numerous press cuttings which are reaching us, that we are once more afflicted with one of those periodical visitations of antagonism to Public Libraries, which occasionally assume epidemic form as the result of a succession of library opening ceremonies, or a rush of Carnegie gifts. Let a new library building be opened, or an old one celebrate its jubilee, or let Lord Avebury regale us with his statistics of crime‐diminution and Public Libraries, and immediately we have the same old, never‐ending flood of articles, papers and speeches to prove that Public Libraries are not what their original promoters intended, and that they simply exist for the purpose of circulating American “Penny Bloods.” We have had this same chorus, with variations, at regular intervals during the past twenty years, and it is amazing to find old‐established newspapers, and gentlemen of wide reading and knowledge, treating the theme as a novelty. One of the latest gladiators to enter the arena against Public Libraries, is Mr. J. Churton Collins, who contributes a forcible and able article, on “Free Libraries, their Functions and Opportunities,” to the Nineteenth Century for June, 1903. Were we not assured by its benevolent tone that Mr. Collins seeks only the betterment of Public Libraries, we should be very much disposed to resent some of the conclusions at which he has arrived, by accepting erroneous and misleading information. As a matter of fact, we heartily endorse most of Mr. Collins' ideas, though on very different grounds, and feel delighted to find in him an able exponent of what we have striven for five years to establish, namely, that Public Libraries will never be improved till they are better financed and better staffed.

THE central question of librarianship now and in the past is that which occupies some of our pages this month. Reading with purpose and with system, Matthew Arnold declared, was the last service to be rendered to education; and in various manner librarians and their committees have been endeavouring to do this for many years; it has indeed been a guiding principle of the best libraries that they presented to the community only good book's. Lately, however, more generous (or lax, according to the standpoint) ideas have been allowed to condition the admission of books; there are not wanting those who object to any exercise of judgment on the part of the librarian; if people want certain books they must be served, as they pay for them. This argument was exploded long ago, but its revival is justified if the librarians are unequal to their pretentions as guides to readers. And to be guides requires ever‐increasing knowledge, not only of all work done in bibliographies and reference books, but, as our writers indicate, of people and their manifold relations and reactions to books. This is enormously difficult in any community but is manifestly so in large cities. As a small illustration we may point to a librarian who, when a branch librarian was appointed to his staff, gave him a month of freedom from library work proper in which he was to walk every street of his branch area, interview the clergy, teachers, leading traders, and the secretaries and committees of local societies. He thus came to his work with at least an elementary notion of the community he had to serve. Such study must have its effect on book‐service; and this is the sort of study that must be pursued in the manner Dr. Waples has advocated and practiced (or some such manner) if we are to arrive at a science of book‐selection applicable to the areas a library serves.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the widely‐held belief that marketing holds customers in thrall and persuades them to buy things they otherwise would not.

Rather than adopt a scientific approach to the mesmeric marketing phenomenon, it embraces an artistic perspective, focusing on three crucial cultural “moments” in the emergence of the great manipulator mindset.

Whereas innumerable scientific experiments show that subliminal advertising does not work, except in certain circumstances, the cultural approach demonstrates that subliminals are, in fact, enormously successful. Regardless of scientific evidence to the contrary, most consumers believe that subliminal advertising not only works but is an established marketing practice.

The paper suggests that marketers should place less reliance on the scientific paradigm. Marketing science has its place – a very important place – but not everything can be captured in a simultaneous equation or linear regression model. Cultural components analysis is just as significant as principal components analysis.

Received wisdom concerning subliminal advertising is challenged and creatively reinterpreted from a supra‐science standpoint.

One of the major developments of the post‐War years has been the rise of consumer protection ‘watchdog’ committees galore, a flood of legislation and completely changed enforcement methods by existing local authority officers who to all and intents have become a completely new service. Voluntary agencies, national and local, based on the local High Street, have appointed themselves the watchdogs of the retail trade; legislation and central departments, the larger scene. The new service has proved of inestimable value in the changed conditions; it continues to develop. When shopping was a personal transaction, with the housewife making her purchases from the shopkeeper or his staff on the opposite side of the counter; when each was well known to the other and the relationship had usually lasted for many years, often from one generation to the next, things were very different, complaints few, unsatisfactory items instantly replaced, usually without question. This continuing state of equanimity was destroyed by the retail revolution and new methods of advertising and marketing. Now, the numbers of complaints dealt with by consumer protection and environmental health departments of local authorities are truly enormous. We have become a nation of “complainers,” although in all conscience, we have much to complain about. Complaints cover the widest possible range of products and services, of which food and drink form an integral component. The complaints to enforcement authorities include many said to be unjustified, but from the reports of legal proceedings under relevant enactments, it is obvious that the bulk of them now originate from consumer complaints. Not all complainants, however, relish the thought of the case going before the courts. Less is heard publicly of complaints to the numerous voluntary bodies. Enforcement authorities see complaints in terms of infringements of the law, although their role as honest broker, securing recompense to the aggreived customer, has become important; a few departments being able to claim that they secured reimbursements and replacements of value totalling upwards of amounts which annually run into six figures. The broker role is also that adopted by voluntary bodies but with much less success since they lack the supporting authority of legal sanction.

The purpose of this study is to apply the motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) framework to investigate the relationships between ambiguity tolerance (AT), reflective thinking (RT) and performance in a complex task to predict knowledge-sharing intent.

In this study, 190 subjects performed a complex scheduling task in which they were randomly assigned to either participate in RT or not.

Results show that factors of the MOA framework positively predicted knowledge-sharing intent. In addition, RT significantly increased intention to share for individuals with low performance or with low AT.

More research is needed to determine relationships between complex task performance and knowledge sharing, and the role of learning strategies, particularly self-directed ones such as RT. Future studies may use a larger sample size for more complex analysis.

RT may be used to create a sustainable and low-cost method of increasing knowledge sharing in complex tasks, without which those with low AT or low performance may not have participated.

The study supports the importance of contextual influences and points to how organizations can use RT in addition to individual motivation and ability to encourage knowledge sharing.

OPTIMISM as to the outlook is shown by the report from Sheffield of a book‐moving day, or perhaps returning‐day would be a better phrase, which involved the return from safe storage to the Central Library of 10,000 books, 5,000 manuscripts and plans, and 10 tons of newspaper files. This probably is the first record of a homeward pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of volumes of books as well as artistic and other treasures from bomb‐proof concealment. It is, however, yet too early for the districts in southern England to undertake the risk involved in such return. The newspapers are wisely silent about the areas in which there is still risk, but they are quite inarticulate as to the nature of the risk and it is clear that it covers a large area. The recent mobilization of air defences at Edinburgh suggests too that the particular type of attack to which Great Britain is still subject may not be confined to the south of England—from the nature of the weapon there appears to be no reason why it should be. Nevertheless, the risk that we think Sheffield takes is a legitimate one. People have returned in large numbers to their own homes; they need libraries and within reasonable limits they should have them. Our best work cannot be done when the valuable part of our stock is in inaccessible places. This return of books will create in many towns a serious storage problem: we can point to libraries which distributed their stock and which through accessions, gifts from evacuated people and other sources of accession, have filled most of the space occupied by their ordinary stock. Most of us need new buildings and our priority for them must be low. The ingenuity of librarians will be severely taxed in this as in many other matters.

In October, 1902, the Secretary of the Mineral Water Bottle Exchange and Trade Protection Society addressed a letter to the Clerk of the London County Council stating that aerated and mineral waters are, in many instances, manufactured under insanitary conditions, and suggesting that the Council should take action in the matter. The Public Health Committee of the Council thereupon directed that a number of premises where aerated waters are manufactured should be inspected, and, in February, 1903, Dr. Shirley Murphy, the Medical Officer to the Council, presented a report drawn up by Dr. Hamer, the Assistant Medical Officer, by whom the inspections ordered were carried out. Dr. Hamer came to the conclusion that it was most desirable in the interests of the consumer that the manufacture of aerated waters in London should be regulated and controlled. The quantity of aerated water sold in London is very large, and Dr. Hamer's inspection of numerous premises showed that there are many possible sources of dangerous contamination of the water used during the process of the manufacture. We are in a position to state that Dr. Hamer was thoroughly justified in drawing the conclusions which appear in his report. The enormous growth in popularity during recent years of aerated and mineral waters, while unquestionably fraught with a most important influence for good, has brought a number of firms into existence who manufacture more or less inferior and, in some instances, positively injurious and dangerous waters, and who place their products on the market at “cutting” prices, with the result that the honest and careful manufacturer on the one hand, and the public on the other, are made to suffer. Unfair “competition” of the kind referred to exists, of course, in every trade, and only by the authoritative approval of the good and, by implication, the authoritative condemnation of the bad, can such “competition” be effectively checked. But where the health of the consumer is directly threatened or affected, as it particularly is by the supply of inferior or actually injurious aerated waters, the necessity for adequate regulation and control is immediately obvious. The matter cannot be dealt with under the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts. It is not one involving analysis only but, so far as analysis is concerned, the provisions of the Acts make it impossible to carry out the analytical investigations that would be required. In addition to the official registration of all manufacturers of mineral and aerated waters, a combination of inspection and analysis by an authoritative bedy of some kind, or by a recognised individual authority, is necessary to supply a sufficient guarantee to the public and efficient protection to the manufacturer and vendor of pure and high‐class waters.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral education. Pandemics throughout history have generated new educational theories and practices, accelerated some trends and signalled the abrupt end of others. The unpredictable effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have particularly impacted upon First Nations and transcultural communities and People of Colour throughout the globe. A second significant recent global trend that occurred at the height of the pandemic was the reignited #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) protest campaign. This campaign drew attention to the vast inequities faced by black, transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally diverse and international) and Indigenous peoples and triggered rapid action in higher education institutions against racism and unconscious bias.

This conceptual paper draws upon postcolonial/decolonial theory to demonstrate how the COVID pandemic and #BLM movement prompts us to revitalise doctoral education.

These two issues have created renewed urgency around the need to decolonise higher education and a desire to transform the “business-as-usual” geopolitical power dynamics that continue to privilege Northern knowledge over culturally diverse knowledge systems from First Nations and transcultural contexts. A key site where special opportunities exist to effect this transformation lies in doctoral education. Doctoral education is a significant location of new knowledge creation and the development of the world’s future researchers.

Applying post/decolonial theory enables one to rethink how doctoral education should be changed to work towards greater decolonisation.

This study applies Santos’ ideas about “the sociologies of emergence” in the global South to think about how doctoral education should be reconstructed as a liberated zone of decolonisation and epistemic justice.

This paper aims to measure and unveil the relationship between customer satisfaction and efficiency levels in the most relevant Brazilian airports.

The authors utilize a two-stage network DEA (data envelopment analysis) and AHP (analytic hierarchy process) model as the cornerstones of the study. The first stage of the network productive structure focuses on examining the infrastructure efficiency of the selected airports, while the second stage assesses their business efficiency.

Although the results indicate that infrastructure and business efficiency levels are heterogeneous and widely dispersed across airports, controlling the regression results with different contextual variables suggests that the impact of efficiency levels on customer satisfaction is mediated by a set of socio-economic and demographic (endogenous) and regulatory (exogenous) variables. Furthermore, encouraging investment in airports is necessary to achieve higher infrastructural efficiency and scale efficiency, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

There is a scarcity of studies examining the relationships among customer satisfaction, privatization and airport efficiency, particularly in developing countries like Brazil.