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This essay aims to describe how the author began his career as a suicidologist and his style that made him so productive.

The author used autobiographical details to illustrate the elements of his career.

Childhood experiences include sleeping in air raid shelter from 1942 to 1945 in London (UK), while his style includes obsessiveness in reading everything on suicide, applying ideas from other fields (such as economics) to the study of suicide and obtaining academic freedom early in his career.

The essay offers guidelines for others who are in the early stages of a career as a researcher.

The main aim of this paper is to try and understand why our knowledge of why people take their own lives is so limited.

Methodological problems that have hindered our efforts to understand why people die by suicide are reviewed. Two solutions are proposed. The first describes a way of extrapolating from research on attempted suicides to those who die by suicide. The second solution is to develop a sound typology of suicides and search for causes for each type.

The piece provides a selective review of the literature on suicide.

This opinion piece is written by a researcher who has spent his entire career and much of his retirement studying the causes of suicide (Ed).

The purpose of this study is the same as those of the preceding 16 studies on happiness, health and religion, and they are as follows: to estimate the mean scores and the sex-related differences in the study scales; to examine the associations between the study scales; to investigate the principal components; and to compare the present results with the previous findings.

A non-probability sample of university students in the United Arab Emirates was selected by the “snowball” sample method. To overcome the issue of people refusing to participate in the study, this method was used in the selection process due to the challenge of sampling students in all the universities across the nation, which makes it difficult to choose a probability sample. The approval of the Ethics Committee was obtained from Ajman University to apply the study tools, and then the students were given the choice through open announcement to participate in the study and circulate it to other students at Ajman University.

Results showed that men had significantly higher mean ratings on mental health, physical health and happiness than did women. All the Pearson correlations between the scales were significant for men. Except for the correlations between religiosity and both happiness and mental health, all correlations between the scales for women were significant. A principal components analysis extracted one component for men which was labeled “Well-being and religiosity”, whereas two components were retained for the women which were labeled “Well-being” and “Religiosity and physical health”. Comparing the present sample’s mean happiness score to that of prior students from 16 other countries revealed that it was higher and consistent with other scores from rich Arab nations with a high GDP per capita (such as Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman). In conclusion, happiness was found to be associated with mental and physical health in both men and women, as well as religiosity in men.

Despite the strengths of the current investigation, i.e. the large sample size and the good to high reliability and validity properties of the scales, some limitations have to be acknowledged. First, the convenience and non-probability sample. Second, university students are a special segment of any country. Their age range is limited, and they probably have greater intelligence and more education compared to the general population. Therefore, a replication of the present study using a probability sample from the general population is needed.

SPSS (2009) was used for data analysis. Means, standard deviations, t-tests, d for effect size, Pearson product moment correlation coefficients and principal components analysis were used. For the principal components analysis, the Kaiser criterion (i.e. eigenvalue > 1.0) and the scree plot were used to define the number of components to be retained.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study about happiness in United Arab Emirates.

The purpose of this study is to examine why an attempt at suicide does not always indicate the beginning of a life with poor mental health.

Case studies, supplemented by follow-up studies of attempted suicides.

One of the strongest predictors of a healthy life after the suicide attempt was found to be improvement in the appropriateness of behavior toward others and improved adult functioning.

The results suggest that behavioral coaching, in addition to traditional psychiatric treatment, could help attempted suicides move on with their lives productively.

In order for the aerospace industry to achieve success in export markets through the provision of high levels of product choice, it will need to develop and economically use many new materials and manufacturing processes. Examines how the constraints imposed by changing market trends affect the identification of “cost estimating relationships” and investigates their relative benefits and limitations in terms of their effects on the overall cost model development process. A method of establishing cost estimating relationships that appears to offer benefits to the cost modelling process is that of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Using the Taguchi method, a series of experiments have been undertaken to select an appropriate network for the “turning process”. The estimation accuracy and robustness of cost models developed using suitable ANN structures have then been examined under varying conditions in order to identify guidelines.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

THE philosophy of “just in time manufacture” is being adopted by more and more forward looking companies. To achieve “just in time manufacture” one of the basic requirements is “just in time fixturing”. You cannot have one without the other.

The ability of traditional economic order quantity (EOQ) models to successfully determine optimum purchase and process batch sizes has declined in recent years. These models are simplistic in nature in that they make assumptions that are no longer valid in practice, in addition, they cannot take into account the wide variety of cost and other factors that influence inventory control decisions. Presents an alternative method for identifying economic batch quantities that uses genetic algorithms (GA) based on the underlying mathematical processes that control the reproduction of genes within biological species. Using genetic algorithms it is possible to successfully deal with complex inventory situations and there are no limits on the type and number of variables that can be used to influence the batch‐sizing decision.

In order to ensure that the introduction of a flexible manufacturing system confers overall benefits to a company there is a need to be able to measure quantitatively and then control flexibility levels. Initially identifies the various types and levels of flexibility that are important to a manufacturing concern. Identifies production range flexibility as that defining the universe of part types that a manufacturing system can process. Proposes a methodology that will enable probability measures to be established for each type of flexibility that contributes to the production range flexibility of a manufacturing system. In addition measuring flexibilities in terms of probabilities enables quantitative relationships to be established between levels of flexibility. Concludes that the result is an integrated system for measuring flexibility that can be used at both the strategic and operational planning and control levels.

To expand further the composites in aircraft structures a consortium of leading aerospace organisations, led by British Aerospace (BAe), is currently engaged in the second phase of the Affordable Manufacture of Composite Primary Structures (AMCAPS II) research and development programme. The aim of this programme is to investigate innovative design, material and manufacturing concepts and technologies with the potential of providing cost‐effective composite primary wing structures. In order to support AMCAPS II tasks within BAe, process time estimating models are being developed for each of the main manufacturing processes being considered for part manufacture and assembly. The outputs from these models form the basic data from which process costs are established. The objective of this paper is to describe, using examples from the automated tape laying process, the approach to model development being applied within the AMCAPS II programme.