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Objective. To report on the patterns of substance use in newly admitted male and female South Australian prisoners using the WHO‐ASSIST screening tool (Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test) and observe the feasibility of using the ASSIST and associated Brief Intervention in this population. Data sources. Results of the first 518 prisoners screened using ASSIST in South Australian reception prisons. Results. In the first 10 months of the implementation of the WHO ASSIST, 518 clients were assessed in the 3 metropolitan intake prisons in Adelaide, Australia. This represents 31% of all male and 35% of all female prisoners admitted over this period. Injecting drug use was reported in the previous 3 months by 55% of men and 51% of women. The six most common substances used at high and moderate risk levels, in order of prevalence (from high to low) in males were tobacco, cannabis, amphetamines, opiates, alcohol, and sedatives. In women the order was tobacco, amphetamines, cannabis, opiates and sedatives equal, and alcohol. Fifty percent of men and 33% of women were using four or more substances. Overall rates of substance use related risk amongst men coming into prison are slightly greater than for women. Accessing prisoners for screening within the first few days is difficult with 55% already being released or at court or other external appointments.

The speaker explained that the stimulus for the SRC proposal came partially from the UNISIST study report in which the working group responsible for subject specification had drawn attention to the need for better tools for the control and conversion of information retrieval languages, such as UDC and to the need for further study and experiments. The working group had already considered a study undertaken at their request by a team from the Aslib Research Department under Mr B. C. Vickery in which, however, only the term content of different schemes, mainly in the English language and including UDC, were compared. When this investigation was carried out in 1969, only twenty of the expected one hundred parts of the English Full edition were available, whereas now there are eighty. Even so, UDC was less defective (including over 80 per cent) in content of terms than the other major general schemes of classification studied, i.e. BC, CC and DDC. The study also included a comparison between the classificatory relations used in some major thesauri, i.e. the EJC/TEST, NLM/MeSH and EURATOM thesaurus, with those used in the general classifications already mentioned. As far as UDC was concerned, this did not compare as favourably as more recent studies by Kara, Öhman and Ölivecrona, and Stueart, and Wellisch. This was partly because the Aslib study did not take into account the well‐known synthetic characteristics of UDC, i.e. the use of colon combinations and of common and special auxiliary subdivisions. He maintained that FID should not have embarked upon a programme of radical revision based upon the proposals for an SRC (see Aslib Proc., Vol. 24, no. 4, April 1972, p. 222–5) because:

Organizational development and change may be initiated from two different starting points. A diagnostic approach begins with an examination of problems to assess and correct dysfunction. In contrast, the Appreciative Inquiry approach begins by identifying an organization’s strengths as resources for change. An experimental study was conducted to compare the processes and outcomes that arise during the first phase of each approach. Results show that both approaches lead to different but favorable and complementary outcomes. Both participant gender and the gender construction of the dyads in which individuals participated moderate these effects in unexpected ways. The implications for understanding the processes by which both methods work, and the potential for combining them, are discussed

THIS number will appear at the beginning of the Leeds Conference. Although there is no evidence that the attendance will surpass the record attendance registered at the Birmingham Conference, there is every reason to believe that the attendance at Leeds will be very large. The year is one of importance in the history of the city, for it has marked the 300th anniversary of its charter. We hope that some of the festival spirit will survive into the week of the Conference. As a contributor has suggested on another page, we hope that all librarians who attend will do so with the determination to make the Conference one of the friendliest possible character. It has occasionally been pointed out that as the Association grows older it is liable to become more stilted and formal; that institutions and people become standardized and less dynamic. This, if it were true, would be a great pity.

The aim of this paper is to propose a grasping method based on intelligent perception for implementing a grasp task with human conduct.

First, the authors leverage Kinect to collect the environment information including both image and voice. The target object is located and segmented by gesture recognition and speech analysis and finally grasped through path teaching. To obtain the posture of the human gesture accurately, the authors use the Kalman filtering (KF) algorithm to calibrate the posture use the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) for human motion modeling, and then use Gaussian mixed regression (GMR) to predict human motion posture.

In the point-cloud information, many of which are useless, the authors combined human’s gesture to remove irrelevant objects in the environment as much as possible, which can help to reduce the computation while dividing and recognizing objects; at the same time to reduce the computation, the authors used the sampling algorithm based on the voxel grid.

The authors used the down-sampling algorithm, kd-tree algorithm and viewpoint feature histogram algorithm to remove the impact of unrelated objects and to get a better grasp of the state.

I have often heard at conferences at which a general resolution in favour of co‐operation in the library and information field is put, a reply by Americans to the effect that we all love our mothers and are against sin. It is easy enough to get a conference to agree that co‐operation is a good thing, but not so easy to get all the members to agree to take specific steps: there always seems to be some very good reason why somebody should not do something which it is essential he should do if a project is to succeed. No doubt we have all had similar experiences and wondered why it should be that it is so difficult to operate a scheme which is plainly to the general benefit, and no doubt many of us have at times wondered if the game is worth the candle.

Information management practice falls under various themes: vision and policy, change implementation, alignment of strategies to information technology (IT), business process re‐engineering, the review of new systems and IT infrastructure. It has been found from exploratory case studies in the construction industry that the current management of information is characterized by systems in which: (1) information exchange between project parties is limited to paper, a medium in which retrieval is very slow and inefficient; (2) functional departments maintain their own data structured to suit their particular needs; (3) most information searching and transfer between project parties and clients are paper based, providing constant source of delays; (4) no efficient interfaces exist between departmental systems to access information electronically;and (5) the impact of IT investment to date has been limited. These characteristics can be first traced to the general lack of coherent management policy and vision on information management. Also, although construction is a distinctly collaborative business environment, for historical, cultural and legal reasons, there is no desire to consider seriously the use of collaborative IT tools. Thirdly, although there is a degree of knowledge of business process evaluation and improvement techniques such as business process re‐engineering (BPR), it appears there is less confidence for management to adopt such tools in its drive to solve information management problems. Finally, the lack of progress in adopting IT to widely improve communication is related to the fact that until now stand‐alone departmental systems have been the norm. Above all, the culture of the industry dictates that each function maintains total independence in all aspects including information retrieval and exchange. The result is that experience of implementing corporate IT systems is lacking and it is clearly affecting the ability to examine the potential of emerging IT or appraise current infrastructure.

September THUR.2. Visit to Port of London Authority. See paragraph below.

Aslib R&D meeting: computer‐produced indexes. The speaker at the second in the series of evening meetings arranged by the Aslib Research and Development Department, to be held on Tuesday, 6th June, is Mrs Lucille Campey, B.SC, who will speak on ‘Computer‐produced subject indexes.’