Looks at the kind of technological education and training which will benecessary to staff the successful companies of the year 2000, concentratingon the recent European Automation…
Abstract
Looks at the kind of technological education and training which will be necessary to staff the successful companies of the year 2000, concentrating on the recent European Automation and Robotics Training Conference held in London, where a discussion of this subject took place. Topics covered included ways of unlocking European funds to support education and training projects, the need for hybrid technicians with multi‐disciplinary skills and the launching of the first undergraduate degree course in the UK with robotics as a central theme. Concludes that training in robotics and automation is becoming more difficult as the complexity of controls, monitoring and adaptive devices grows. There is a need for more awareness of industry when developing courses for upcoming technicians and engineering graduates and a need to develop a continuous improvement culture that updates the education training of management and staff at all levels in companies.
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What Happened to 1992? It seems only yesterday that, as a result of EC legislation, we were being exhorted to think ahead and make all the changes necessary before 1992. At first…
Abstract
What Happened to 1992? It seems only yesterday that, as a result of EC legislation, we were being exhorted to think ahead and make all the changes necessary before 1992. At first, the message was softened a little by reference to the actual end‐of‐year dates. But now that the deadline has passed, there is an air of anticlimax, as loopholes are inserted in the legislation and timescales allowed to slip. Certainly the situation has not been helped by the European‐wide woes of economic recession and the focus on basic business survival.
I suppose that most noticeable of all the changes in our profession since I came into it has been the multiplicity of the methods by which one can become a librarian. A. E…
Abstract
I suppose that most noticeable of all the changes in our profession since I came into it has been the multiplicity of the methods by which one can become a librarian. A. E. Standley says in a recent article in the L.A.R., in 1970: “The term librarian includes the Library Association chartered librarian, the graduate with a degree in librarianship, the scholar librarian, the information and intelligence officer, the translator, the abstracter, the non‐library‐qualified subject expert”.
Few organisations exhibit the importance of physicality in leadership as explicitly as the symphony orchestra. While usually attributed to the direction of the conductor my own…
Abstract
Few organisations exhibit the importance of physicality in leadership as explicitly as the symphony orchestra. While usually attributed to the direction of the conductor my own experience suggests that leading in orchestral performance is grounded in physical relations between individuals and among instrumental groups across the orchestra as much as in the interaction between musicians and maestro. In order to further interrogate this experience while enhancing our understanding of onstage relations among orchestral musicians, I recently undertook research that employed an autoethnographic methodology underpinned by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (2002, 2004) and the sense-making ideas of Weick (1995, 2001a). Using this method while drawing on ideas such as kinaesthetic empathy (Pallaro, 1995; Parviainen, 2002), the picture presented in what follows is one of leadership embedded in physical interaction among colleagues.
This interaction is, I suggest, based on sense-making and sense-giving activity that occurs in a ‘kinaesthetic loop’ that draws on and is generated by auditory, visual and gestural information given and received by individual musicians. This activity in turn mediates the acoustic space between musicians and thus, ultimately, determines how leadership and coordination in the orchestra are constituted. Rather than being disembodied products of dictatorial direction dispensed through the orchestra’s hierarchy, orchestral performance and leadership emerge in this more nuanced account as co-creative processes in which all the musicians on stage share responsibility.
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Patrick Lo, Robert Sutherland, Wei-En Hsu and Russ Girsberger
After their long deconstruction of the notion of culture, social sciences have set about deconstructing the idea of nature, considering it as a social representation with…
Abstract
After their long deconstruction of the notion of culture, social sciences have set about deconstructing the idea of nature, considering it as a social representation with variations in time and in space. From this point of view, human reproduction is a particularly appropriate field of observation. Above and beyond the shared imaginary, in fact, nature does not (only) corresponds, at the empirical level, to biological data in human reproduction. As will we see in this chapter, what is thought to correspond to nature in relation to childbearing experience turns out to be something extremely sophisticated, with characteristics not unlike those of a cultural product. Based on the ethnographic research I carried out in one of the first maternity hospital in Italy to introduce natural childbirth, the chapter aims to add to the study of how nature is referred to in this model of birth, why is this category invoked and the extent to which its functions and contents have changed over time.
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IT would be quite impossible adequately to report a Dublin conference of any kind in purely professional terms. The warm friendliness of its people demands an equally personal…
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IT would be quite impossible adequately to report a Dublin conference of any kind in purely professional terms. The warm friendliness of its people demands an equally personal reaction from its visitors and for public librarians certainly this is as it should be, because we are ourselves, above all, involved with people. So professional affairs at this conference were kept in their proper place—as only a part of the whole and merely providing a framework round which the business of renewing contacts and making friends could take place.
THE NEWLY APPOINTED HEADMASTER of a church primary school in the North, from which no pupil had been known to proceed to grammar school, transformed his staff's attitude to…
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THE NEWLY APPOINTED HEADMASTER of a church primary school in the North, from which no pupil had been known to proceed to grammar school, transformed his staff's attitude to education by linking the curriculum firmly to the children's own use of books, with phenomenal results, including a steady stream of “11‐plus” successes. Another headmaster, of one of those unfortunate “all‐age” schools which are, at last, disappearing, reported to his governors that the average reading age of the school had risen by six months within a year of the opening of a good library.