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This paper aims to demonstrate that virtual project management can be based on a common spirit and mutual trust to achieve project objectives, rather than the use of modern electronic devices to lower communication costs.

Evidence from the eighteenth-century files of Academies of Science and from astronomical literature is used to characterize the projects and to show how major elements of project management (such as identification of benefits to stakeholders, management of uncertainties, communication and data aggregation across related projects) were applied.

The analysis shows how the initiative to better measure the Astronomical Unit defined a megaproject, and how this was broken down at local Academies of Science into major projects or programs. This, in turn, resulted in individual expeditions. It demonstrates that innovations arose from the projects, and that learning from earlier expeditions resulted in the final success of the megaproject.

The literature used was not written to demonstrate project management. In this respect, both the original sources and the later reports may lack information with respect to the present topic. Today’s project management might learn from the study that coordination and communication can greatly benefit from a joint vision of the project if based on a common spirit and mutual trust.

Present day project management might benefit from the finding that common values reduce communication costs in a similar way as recent electronic communication devices.

The author believes that this is the first paper to analyze the Venus transit projects from the project management perspective. This was a complex and global megaproject. The approaches taken to achieve the objectives relevant to different stakeholders provide lessons for today’s management of megaprojects.

This chapter details a practice-based investigation of a 19th-century astronomical device known as ‘Janssen’s apparatus’. It questions traditional narratives of linear technological advancement and ‘sole inventor’ to reframe the historical artefact as a site which makes visible a network of technological knowledge interconnecting astronomy and visual culture. Approached from this perspective, the Janssen artefact is reframed as an ‘intersite of knowledge’, exploring how the various know-how contained within the device is located across disciplines rather than within a single field. Originally developed to calculate the Astronomical Unit during the 1874 Transit of Venus, Janssen’s apparatus failed in its endeavour as a measuring instrument, but its motion mechanism was successfully adapted into early cinema technologies. This chapter applies praxis through the development of a prototype artwork and the concept of ‘techne’ as speculative means of understanding how this mechanism was transferred from astronomy to the Western cultural realm. It proposes that the development of the apparatus was partially gleaned from moving image techniques already in use within 19th-century visual culture. The development of the prototype artwork is discussed in relation to the specific timing mechanism of the Janssen apparatus and how it establishes its own ‘intersite of knowledge’ relevant to its contemporary context. Finally, this chapter elaborates on how witnessing the Janssen mechanism in motion provided unique insight and how creating a dialogue between historical and contemporary apparatus facilitates a reconsideration of how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] and other host institutions that contain artefacts might share their hidden stories.

ALL who have visited Liverpool for any length of time have affection for her. She lies alongside a noble river, watched over by the lofty Liver building and the perhaps more architecturally perfect offices of the Mersey Dock authorities. Even in these days, when the very largest ships have been diverted to Southampton, splendid vessels come from and go to the ends of the earth almost daily. The river is the essential fact about Liverpool; she was born of the river and her waterfront is one of the world's rendezvous. As a city she compares favourably with any English town, and perhaps excels most in her few splendid buildings, amongst which the new and rapidly growing Cathedral takes first rank.

THIS month usually sees the estimates adopted that must govern public library spending for the year to come. It is likely to be a testing time for many librarians and we look forward with much interest to their experiences this year. The international rearmament programme, which authority has told us will not radically change our economic position, must have its repercussions on all municipal activities; expansion, so badly needed and so often deferred, is not likely to come immediately. However, as we remarked last month, dismal prophecies have so often been confounded by the subsequent facts that we hope 1951 will not be an exception. The defence programme may have some Staff effects, especially if the Z reserves are called again to the Colours. There is much that we may hope and much we should plan for in the months immediately ahead.

This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

This chapter examines the historical development of space tourism from early wondering at the heavens to more recent extraterrestrial astrotourism. It catalogs the development of the significant terrestrial space tourism market, including dark-sky tourism, launch tours, zero-G flights, and edutainment experiences, as part of a “steps to space” for costlier future developments in space tourism. Recent developments in the suborbital sector initiated by the XPRIZE and spearheaded by Virgin Galactic are the next stage in this product ladder. All these draw on a rich history of space exploration – imagined, virtual, and real – that frames how future developments in space tourism can be viewed.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.