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A GREAT deal is being, and has been, said about the role of public libraries in the provision of information of all kinds to the community. Sometimes there are full blown experiments such as that in Sunderland, but more likely is the gradual, evolutionary approach that most libraries have taken in recent years. Examples of libraries taking initiatives abound, ranging from stocking leaflets, to actually getting into an advice giving role, or to seeing information as simply an adjunct to more radical experiments in community librarianship. The gradualism may however be replaced, in such places as Corby, Shotton and Consett, to name three steel towns, with a more sudden push into the consideration of the underlying purpose of information services to a community.

MY SELF‐RESTRAINT in refraining until thus far through the year from mention of the game of cricket is not, I'm afraid, due to a waning of interest with the onset of old age (it's my birthday next week), but to a ripe contentment with the Ashes victory in Australia during the winter, plus the realisation that cricket is hardly a suitable subject for discussion in the arctic weather conditions we have been experiencing during the first three months of 1979.

This chapter explores the development of the dangerous, sexualized fembot archetype in science-fiction film and television, drawing a line from the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to contemporary versions of the archetype.

Primarily, this chapter outlines how this historically villainous trope has been augmented and redefined in twenty-first Century posthuman science-fiction texts Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and Westworld (Joy et al., 2016 –). Both feature fembot characters who are central to the narrative, and can be defined as both villainous at times, but who also occupy the position of arguable sympathetic protagonists. In part, this redefinition can be argued as more a reflection of a Western hegemonic shift towards feminist values. Nevertheless, there have been criticisms of the male gaze present in both and of the emphasis on female suffering.

As oblique texts for an 18–35 audience, both Ex Machina and Westworld ask more questions than they answer. Through textual analysis and with reference to relevant scholarship, this chapter considers the impact of audience and institution on representation, the interplay between genre conventions and the presentation of the archetype as well as a considering how both offer different treatment of intersectional androids.

Empirical studies show that years of schooling are positively correlated with good health. The implication may go from education to health, from health to education, or from factors that influence both variables. We formalize a model that determines an individual’s demand for knowledge and health based on the causal effects, and study the impacts on the individual’s decisions of policy instruments such as subsidies on medical care, subsidizing schooling, income tax reduction, lump-sum transfers, and improving health at young age. Our results indicate that income redistribution policies may be the best instrument to improve welfare, while a medical care subsidy is the best instrument for longevity. Subsidies to medical care or education would require large imperfections in these markets to be more welfare improving than distributional policies.

By 2006, Wikipedia had achieved the type of success that only a handful of young organizations could ever dream of reaching. It had grown from almost nothing in 2001 to become one of the consistently highest ranked and most visited sites on the Internet. This success brought new problems at a scale that no organization of this type had ever before faced. Exposes students to Wikipedia's brief history, the causes of its success, and the issues it faced going forward. Two topics form the focus: The first concerns the rules and norms for submission and editing, which raise questions about the ambiguity of Wikipedia's authority and the virtual cycle that keeps the site going; The second concerns the need to alter its practices as it gains in popularity, raising questions about what any wiki site, profit-oriented or open source, must do to scale to large numbers of participants and entries. These issues arise as part of a discussion about the site's priorities going forward.

To teach the factors that shape Wikipedia and wikis in general. Students will become familiar with the internal operations of wikis, open-source programs for developing text from many users. Also to facilitate teaching about factors that shape reference sites on the Internet, dividing discussion into three sub-topics: defining what Wikipedia is and what it is not, analyzing how it works, and understanding why it generates controversy in some circles.

This chapter studies the negative signals associated with nonpromotion. I first show theoretically that, when workers' productivity rises little with additional years on the same job level, the negative signal associated with nonpromotion leads to wage decreases. On the other hand, when additional job-level tenure leads to a sizable increase in productivity, workers' wages increase. I then test my model's predictions using the personnel records from a large US firm from 1970–1988. I find a clear hump-shaped wage-job-tenure profile for workers who stay at the same job level, which supports my model's prediction.

Households are exposed to a wide array of risks, characterized by a known or unknown probability distribution of events. Disasters are one of these risks at the extreme end. Understanding the nature of these risks is critical to recommending appropriate mitigation measures. A household’s resilience in resisting the negative outcomes of these risky events is indicative of its level of vulnerability. Vulnerability has emerged as the most critical concept in disaster studies, with several attempts at defining, measuring, indexing and modeling it. The paper presents the concept and meanings of risk and vulnerability as they have evolved in different disciplines. Building on these basic concepts, the paper suggests that assets are the key to reducing risk and vulnerability. Households resist and cope with adverse consequences of disasters and other risks through the assets that they can mobilize in face of shocks. Asustainable strategy for disaster reduction must therefore focus on asset‐building. There could be different types of assets, and their selection and application for disaster risk management is necessarily a contextual exercise. The mix of asset‐building strategies could vary from one community to another, depending upon households’ asset profile. The paper addresses the dynamics of assets‐risk interaction, thus focusing on the role of assets in risk management.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

When evaluating the worthiness of field guides to trees, there are several criteria which might be considered; perhaps the first should be geographic coverage. If one is attempting to identify a tree in Iowa, one should not be using a guide covering only trees of the Pacific Slope. Although this may seem obvious, problems can occur in guide selection due to geographically misleading titles. Some guides may imply a geographic coverage which is in fact quite different from the actual coverage.