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An intelligent decision‐support system was designed for assessing schedulability prior to assigning parts for scheduling. This was designed as part of a larger system for intelligent, real‐time control of a manufacturing system operation, where one of the system objectives was just‐in‐time delivery of production output. The manufacturing system was a conventional cellular manufacturing system where machines were assumed occasionally to fail. All necessary requirements for the processing of a job should actually or anticipatively be satisfied before a job is scheduled. The decision‐support system attempts to satisfy these requirements. The system thus helps the decision maker to make the right decision when system and customer constraints are violated. Illustrates the operation of the system through an example.

The intelligent agent object (IAO) system is a multi‐paradigm development environment which can be used to create intelligent agent systems for manufacturing or other domains. The IAO system was developed from the rule‐based object (RBO) system which is a programming environment integrating both the rule‐based and object‐oriented paradigms. Propagation‐oriented programming, access‐oriented programming and group‐oriented programming are among the extensions included in the IAO system. Its most unusual contribution is the propagation‐oriented programming paradigm which is not found in most systems. A key application is the messenger inferencing structure which is a user‐extendable framework supporting multiple knowledge representation, meta‐inference control, and distributed inference. This allows the IAO system to go beyond predicate logic based production rule programming. New developments are also introduced for access‐oriented programming. The IAO system can be used to develop integrated manufacturing systems such as the prototype automated guided vehicle planning and control system, which is briefly described.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content, purpose and effectiveness of the handover of information between care home staff beginning and completing a shift.

This was an exploratory study drawing on ethnographic methods. A total of 27 interviews with a range of care home staff, including managers, registered nurses, senior care workers and care workers were undertaken in five care homes selected to give a good contrast in terms of size, ownership, shift patterns and type of handover.

Most handovers were short – lasting 15 min or so – and were held in the office or secluded area in which staff could talk privately. They lasted longer in one home in which the incoming and outgoing shifts physically visited each resident’s room and the communal spaces. Staff felt that handovers were important for the efficient running of the home as well as to alert everyone to changes in a resident’s health or important events, such as a hospital appointment. In one home, handheld devices enabled staff to follow a resident’s care plan and update what was happening in real time.

This was a small scale study based on data from a limited number of care homes.

The increasing popularity of 12 h shifts means that many homes only hold two short handovers early in the morning and in the evening when the night staff arrive. There appears to be a trend to reduce the number of staff paid to attend handover. Despite this, handovers remain an important component of the routine of a care home. The information contained in handover relates to the running of the care home, as well as residents’ wellbeing, suggesting that, while their content overlaps with written records in the home, they are not superfluous.

Although the literature on handovers in hospitals is extensive, this appears to be the first published study of handover practices in care homes.

THE MAJOR CONTRIBUTION, though not the only one, has been made by Scottish authors, both by the well‐known ones, such as R. L. Stevenson and J. M. Barrie, in whose work their Scottish origin has played its part, and by others, like Norman Macleod and Ian Maclaren, whose reputation scarcely extended outside their native country or has been since forgotten.

ON April 23rd this year, when all countries in the world will be celebrating the Quater‐centenary of Shakespeare's birthday, the Shakespeare Memorial Library in Birmingham will have attained a majority of one hundred years. Although founded in 1864 the scope of the library was first envisaged by George Dawson, President of the local Shakespeare club in a letter to Aris's Birmingham Gazette of 1861.

This study examined the ability of the HCR‐20 Scale (version 2) to predict incidents of in‐patient violence during a stay on a medium secure ward. The study was carried out retrospectively on a sample of 94 admissions, using reports pre‐existing at the time of admission and nursing observations of behaviour in the two weeks that followed admission. The sample group was made up of mentally disordered offenders and patients with challenging behaviour. Their episodes of care averaged two years.The H and C scores, singly or combined, did not show powerful predictive capacity for the sample as a whole, which had a high base rate for violence. Insufficient variance and poor inter‐rater reliability precluded use of the R variable. For purposes of analysis, violent patients were also grouped on the number of incidents committed during their episode of care. Here the C Scale items showed strong predictive capacity for patients with more than 10 incidents during their stay. The paper argues that the latter finding supports a method of predicting admissions at risk of frequent incidents of violence.

A proposed model of the use of public library lending bookstocks, and a programme of data collection to establish the key parameters.

In this paper, the author traces the historical evolution of the use of methods by the police and the executive to undermine the protective effects of the right to silence. He argues that the introduction of greater protections for accused persons in the provisions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 has resulted in an increase in costs of the administration of summary jurisdiction with the commensurate reduction in the numbers of persons being convicted. Hence political initiatives are being undertaken to find an effective way to remove the effects of the right to silence, contained in these protections. He examines the effects of the so‐called s. 2 powers to compel answers to questions, possessed by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). The paper ends by examining the proposals in the recent Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and argues that the recommendation to extend the exercise of s. 2 powers to the police is merely another step towards the introduction of an increasingly authoritarian regime of criminal justice.