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High precision robots are often used for complex assembly or positioning tasks. One way to achieve high motion precision is to design mechanical systems based on flexure joints. Flexure joints (or flexures) utilize the elastic properties of matter, which brings avoidance of dry friction. Nanometer scale motions are then possible, without wear, mechanical play or particle emission. Leading to high performance systems in terms of dynamics, parallel kinematics are useful for high precision robot design. Two research projects are presented in this paper. The first one has already led to the realization of a micro electro‐discharge machine (μ‐EDM), and the second one’s goal is to generate a family of compact ultra‐high precision manipulators.

In the context of American institutions of higher education, the practical implementation of strategies associated with the development of L3+ or multilingual education often remain difficult to implement. Furthermore, students who reach the university level with pre-acquired bi/multilingual and bi/multicultural skills may perceive their competencies as trivialized and undervalued due to the lack of linguistically relevant opportunities available to them.

By contrast, the recent implementation of a multilingual course titled “Intercomprehension of the Romance languages: a pathway to Multilingualism,” at California State University, Long Beach (2014–2018) and St. Lawrence University (2018) offers bi/multilingual students the tools to develop skills geared toward language learning in a continuous effort to appraise, nurture, and upraise the ever-growing linguistic diversity present among students and faculty members in universities across the United States. This course and its iterations specifically benefit students’ pre-existing bi/multilingual competencies while offering them opportunities to reinforce and expand their multilingual repertoire. Students learn how to read in 5+ Romance languages, reinforce their knowledge of English, as well as of their Romance language, all while strengthening their metalinguistic awareness by learning how to navigate a larger repertoire of either foreign or unknown related languages.

In addition to discussing the pedagogical and theoretical framework of the course, the authors propose to explore how this innovative approach favors the development of multilingualism among students in North-American universities by examining course demographic data collected from several of these courses and key results relating certain aspects of students’ initial contact with new languages through intercomprehension.

There has been increasing engagement with Annual General Meetings (AGMs) in the UK during the past decade by both private investors and protesters. At the same time, proposals have been mooted to allow companies to not hold such meetings. When examined from an agency theory perspective, AGMs appear largely redundant. This paper reports a qualitative investigation of such meetings and considers their relevance both as sites for the expression of stakeholder issues and also as a means for management to (re)confirm their power and status. The paper utilises Lukes (1974) three‐dimensional model of power as an alternative to the conceptualisation of power inherent in agency theory as a means of analysing the dynamics of power at AGMs

This paper develops a new theory arguing that party change results from ruptures in political parties’ ties to civil society organizations. I demonstrate the utility of this approach by using it to explain why the Rhode Island Democratic Party (RIDP) changed from a hierarchical machine to a porous political field occupied by multiple interlegislator cliques and brokered by extra-party political organizations and professionals. While others attribute party change to bureaucratization, electoral demand, or system-level changes, I analyze historical, observational, and interview data to find that a severance in the RIDP’s relationship with organized labor prompted party change by causing power to diffuse outward as leadership lost control over nominations and the careers of elected office holders. In the spaces that remained, interest groups and political professionals came to occupy central positions within the party field, serving as brokers of the information and relationships necessary to coordinate legislative activity. This analysis refines existing theories of party change and provides a historically-grounded explanation for the institutionalization of interest groups and political professionals in American party politics.

The classics will circulate wrote a public librarian several years ago. She found that new, attractive, prominently displayed editions of literary classics would indeed find a substantial audience among public library patrons.