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This paper aims to illustrate the growing role of robots in the electronics industries.

Following a short introduction, this paper discusses robotic applications and products in three sectors of the electronics industry: semiconductor processing, printed circuit manufacture and electronic product assembly. Finally, conclusions are drawn.

The major application in semiconductor manufacture is the handling of silicon wafers during both front- and back-end processes and products include cleanroom certified multi-axis robotic arms, some mounted on mobile platforms, and automated guided vehicles. Applications in printed circuit board production include component handling and insertion, soldering, inspection, testing and packing. These exploit Cartesian, SCARA and six-axis articulated robots and cobots play an important role where automated and manual processes operate in close proximity. Electronic product assembly applications include part handling, soldering, bonding and sealing, screw driving, test and inspection and packaging. Cobots offer the benefits of a small footprint which allows deployment in the often limited space and use in proximity to humans. As yet, robotic assembly of complex electronic products such as smartphones and computers has not been realised for technical reasons.

This study provides a detailed review of robotic products and applications in three key sectors of the electronics industries.

This study aims to identify the political alignment and political activity of the 11 Presidents of Britain’s most important scientific organisation, the Royal Society of London, in its early years 1662–1703, to determine whether or not the institution was politically aligned.

There is almost no information addressing the political alignment of the Royal Society or its Presidents available in the institution’s archives, or in the writings of historians specialising in its administration. Even reliable biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provide very limited information. However, as 10 Presidents were elected Member of Parliament (MP), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History provides a wealth of accurate, in-depth data, revealing the alignment of both.

All Presidents held senior government offices, the first was a Royalist aristocrat; of the remaining 10, 8 were Royalist or Tory MPs, 2 of whom were falsely imprisoned by the House of Commons, 2 were Whig MPs, while 4 were elevated to the Lords. The institution was Royalist aligned 1662–1680, Tory aligned 1680–1695 and Whig aligned 1695–1703, which reflects changes in Parliament and State.

This study establishes that the early Royal Society was not an apolitical institution and that the political alignment of Presidents and institution continued in later eras. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the election or appointment of an organisation’s most senior officer can be used to signal its political alignment with government and other organisations to serve various ends.

The purpose of this paper is to use a wear test to determine the effect of sand on the wear rates of materials typically used in aerospace applications. Once a repeatable wear test has been established, it can be used to test any combination of materials or coatings. The effectiveness of several different test methods will also be evaluated, including the sample height, surface roughness and mass difference. In addition, the current work will observe the differences between applying sand before the samples are brought into contact or after. The wear rates obtained from these tests could also be used to predict the wear of other components in similar abrasive particulate environments.

A modified block-on-flat wear test of anodized aluminum on hard coat anodized aluminum was used to study this. The experiments were performed with and without sand to study the effects of the sand. Two methods of adding sand were also evaluated. Weighing and profilometry were used to study the differences between the tests.

Wear rates have been calculated based on both the change in the masses of the samples and the change in the height between the upper and lower samples over the course of each test. The wear rates from the change in the masses are repeatable with and without sand, but the results for the change in height show no repeatability without sand. In addition, only in the presence of sand do the trends for the two methods agree. The wear rate was found to be non-linear as a function of load and therefore not in agreement with Archard’s Wear Law. The wear rate also increased significantly when sand was present in the contact for the duration of the test. The sand appears to change the wear mechanism from an adhesive to an abrasive mechanism. Black wear particles formed both when there was sand and when there was not sand. The source of these particles has been investigated but not determined.

This work has not been previously published and is the original work of the authors.

Job advertisements are important means of communicating role expectations for management accountants to the labor market. They provide information about which roles are sought and expected. However, which roles are communicated in job advertisements is unknown so far.

With a text-mining approach on a large sample of 889 job ads, the authors extract information on roles, type of firm and hierarchical position of the management accountant sought.

The results indicate an apparent mix of different role types with a strong focus on a classic watchdog role. However, the business partner role is more often sought for leadership positions or in family businesses and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

The main limitation is the lack of an agreed-upon measurement instrument for roles in job offers. The study results imply that corporate practice is not as theory-driven as is postulated and communicated in the management accounting community. This indicates the existence of a research-practice gap and tensions between different actors in the management accounting field.

The results challenge the current role discussion of professional organizations for management accountants as business partners.

The authors contribute the first study, which explicitly analyzes the communication of roles in job offers for management accountants. It indicates a discrepancy between scholarly discussion on roles and management accountants' work from an employer's perspective.

Escape room-based learning is a new educational game-based learning trend which embeds student learning within an exciting escape room scenario. Ordinarily these educational escape rooms are in a table-top format which involves learners decoding clues together around a table. In the age of a global pandemic [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] with stringent social distancing and lock-downs, this normal game modality was not possible and so an alternate online approach was required. Thus, this paper aims to study escape room activities during global pandemics.

In this paper, the authors outline how these escape room activities have been taken online, in an synchronous virtual environment and evaluate the student perception of these escape rooms, in contrast to previous cohorts of students who completed escape rooms together in person.

The authors' results indicate that although students enjoy the escape room game-based learning environment, the remote nature of the activity means the students take longer to solve the puzzles. The students are also more likely to struggle in the activity and find them less engaging than the in-person escape room challenges.

Although educational escape rooms have been devised for a variety of subjects and can be run through several different modalities (table-top, full rooms and online), this study compares different modalities (online vs table-top) for identical puzzles taken over different cohorts of students.

This chapter examines early childhood pedagogy in Germany. It developed in the wake of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) education debate, and the expansion of higher education led to new types of application-oriented courses. For a long time, child day care in Germany was not seen as a subject of theoretical worth. Vocational training for kindergarten teachers, overwhelmingly employed in day care centers, has not yet been academized. The academic study of childhood pedagogy is a thereof separate project, taught especially at universities of applied science. Nevertheless, constructions of new disciplines are directed toward professional fields, for which they claim relevance with their academic training. With its focus on “Bildung” childhood pedagogy in Germany claims to offer a scientifically based solution to the practical problems of action in child day care. This chapter discusses the specific content of the curricula statistical figures of graduates at universities and in the fields of practice. It provides first empirical clarification on observable phenomena of a scientific “penetration” of cognitive rationality in kindergartens. It fosters an academic habitus that induces a distancing from direct interaction with children, leads to a diversification of tasks in day care centers, and promotes hierarchical processes of professional role differentiation in the field of childcare.

This paper explores the reporting of the Russian American Company (RAC), from 1840 to 1863. Trading in fur, company fears of animal extinctions viewed from a monetary perspective led to early extinction reporting practice. These were not altruistic reports; they were generated by a wish to use natural resources. Despite the motivations, these reports present an example of successful extinction management by a for-profit company and a workable example of emancipatory extinction accounting.

Using thematic analysis, this study demonstrates how moving from transparency to accountability driven accounting can assist in biodiversity reporting, by exploring this historical business case of extinction management through the lens of Atkins and Maroun's (2018) extinction framework.

The application of the framework to the RAC's set of reports indicates that this offers a viable proposal for development of extinction management, providing a reporting tool for a for-profit company.

Exploring RAC's reports focusing on their extinction management processes and reporting, the paper contributes to the contemporary debate on the development of extinction reporting frameworks. These historical examples of extinction accounting, show extinction management and reporting is not a unique contemporary development in accounting. The research uses historical data as the empirical foundation for exploring applicability and further development of this extinction framework.