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Accounting’s definition of accountability should include attributes of socioenvironmental degradation manufactured by unsustainable technologies. Beck argues that emergent accounts should reflect the following primary characteristics of technological degradation: complexity, uncertainty, and diffused responsibility. Financial stewardship accounts and probabilistic assessments of risk, which are traditionally employed to allay the public’s fear of uncontrollable technological hazards, cannot reflect these characteristics because they are constructed to perpetuate the status quo by fabricating certainty and security. The process through which safety thresholds are constructed and contested represents the ultimate form of socialized accountability because these thresholds shape how much risk people consent to be exposed to. Beck’s socialized total accountability is suggested as a way forward: It has two dimensions, extended spatiotemporal responsibility and the psychology of decision-making. These dimensions are teased out from the following constructs of Beck’s Risk Society thesis: manufactured risks and hazards, organized irresponsibility, politics of risk, radical individualization and social learning. These dimensions are then used to critically evaluate the capacity of full cost accounting (FCA), and two emergent socialized risk accounts, to integrate the multiple attributes of sustainability. This critique should inform the journey of constructing more representative accounts of technological degradation.

The Western Australian Group of University Librarians (WAGUL) has a long history of successful collaborative ventures. A well‐established cooperative interlending agreement is one notable venture that has operated successfully for over 20 years. To further enhance this service, WAGUL decided to participate in the national local interlending and document delivery administration system (LIDDAS) project with the objective of implementing an automated system, using the VDX software, to manage document delivery activity. Since 2002, VDX has been used for the transmission of requests and documents between the WAGUL member libraries. The success of this project has largely been the result of the four libraries working together to share expertise and problem‐solving. This article discusses the process of working collaboratively across institutions ‐ and its benefits and difficulties – in the context of implementing an automated document delivery system.

The consequences of electronic publishing continue to manifest themselves in the 110 journals scanned for this literature review. Pricing, access, e‐books and e‐journals are amongst the issues considered in this issue’s literature review. Further criticism of the publishing sector is identified and the potential for micro payments.

As we approach the millennium, we find ourselves in a world that places ever greater weight and significance on the outcome of polls, surveys, and market research. The advent of modern polling began with the use of scientific sampling in the mid‐1930s and has progressed vastly beyond the initial techniques and purposes of the early practitioners such as George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley. In today's environment, the computer is an integral part of most commercial survey work, as are the efforts by academic and nonprofit enterprises. It should be noted that the distinction between the use of the words “poll” and “survey” is somewhat arbitrary, with the mass media seeming to prefer “polling,” and with academia selecting “survey research.” However, searching online systems will yield differing results, hence this author's inclusion of both terms in the title of this article.

Accounts manipulation has been the subject of research, discussion and even controversy in several countries including the USA, Canada, the U.K., Australia, Finland and France. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the literature and propose a conceptual framework for accounts manipulation. This framework is based on the possibility of wealth transfer between the different stake‐holders, and in practice, the target of the manipulation appears generally to be the earnings per share and the debt/equity ratio. The paper also describes the different actors involved and their potential gains and losses. We review the literature on the various techniques of accounts manipulation: earnings management, income smoothing, big bath accounting, creative accounting, and window‐dressing. The various definitions of all these, the main motivations behind their application and the research methodologies used are all examined. This study reveals that all the above techniques have common elements, but there are also important differences between them.

Impairment of intelligence in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patients was described by Duchenne de Boulogne himself in 1868. Further studies report intelligence disorders with mayor impairment of memory. The aim of the present study was to assess the presence of affective and personality disorders in a group of children affected by DMD. Twenty six male DMD patients, mean age eleven and four months years old, were assessed for their affective and personality disorder. Only eight subjects had a total IQ below average with major difficulties in verbal and visual-spatial memory, comprehension, arithmetic and vocabulary. All the subjects presented some disorders: tendency to marginalization and isolation, self-depreciation, sense of insecurity, hypochondriac thoughts and marked state of anxiety. These disorders are often a dynamic prolongation of a psychological process which starts when the diagnosis is made and continues, in a slow and latent fashion, throughout the evolution of the disease.

Discuss in detail the uses which might legitimately be made of the following passage by the writer of a profound study of economic life and thought in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. In answering the question make full use of your knowledge of (a) historical criticism; (b) French economic and general history.

The chapter analyses the uses made in the economic literature of the two modern names of the Paretian criterion: optimality and efficiency. Based on a large database of 10,000 EconLit referenced scientific publications, we use a lexicometric and historical approach to study the uses, instead of the meaning, of the Paretian Criterion. We prove that economists differentiate their use of optimality and efficiency and that since the 1970s, uses of Pareto-efficiency have gradually replaced those of Pareto-optimality. Our interpretation is that economists who use the Paretian criterion change the status of their analysis from normative to positive economics.

THE Librarian faces one of the turning times in library history. The flow of progress has not yet begun, the shortages and consequent imperious demands for food, housing and clothing stand in the way of the beginning, except on paper. How long the interregnum will last none can say. The authorities, which are a reflection in some ways of the Parliamentary party in power, are well‐disposed towards libraries; the official handbook of the Labour Party proves that; but the clamour of the needs we have mentioned deafens everybody to library needs—except in certain instances. For example, the rebuilding and enlarging of the staff at Holborn is an encouraging sign. Of more potential significance is the working out of the so‐called National Charter. It has involved many towns in the task of creating an establishment for each public department. Thus, in one library system we hear that each branch or department may claim a librarian and a deputy both on the A.P.T. scale, but all the assistants are either general or clerical. Some assistants we hear have applied to be of clerical grade as the maximum salary is greater than in the general. This we suggest is putting cash before status because it is accepted as an axiom that a clerk has only clerical qualifications and potentialities, while a general assistant may aspire, when there is a vacancy and if he have certificates, to the professional status. The grading in the particular library mentioned has rather a petrifying effect in that no assistant can get into the professional grade unless his librarian or deputy departs. Possibly this sort of thing may alter, but the fact remains for good or ill—it is not all ill by any means—that no library is able to attract men from another except to a definitely higher post.