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The classic audit cycle has been applied to the prescribing practice to improve aspects of the quality of prescribing in the setting of a department of health care for older people in a district general hospital. Details the methods used both to increase the appropriate prescribing of drugs of proven benefit, and also to restrict the use of drugs which may prove hazardous. The latter provides an example of risk management. Also discusses the dilemmas posed in treating older people with multiple pathologies, on the one hand, trying to avoid an ageist approach, on the other, attempting to minimise the pitfalls of polypharmacy.

The subject of this study is the availability of, and access to, information concerning individuals’ end‐of‐life health situations. The sensitive issues surrounding this subject are considered in detail, and the restraints, primarily legal, placed upon information availability highlighted. Questionnaires and interviews were used to determine public and professional awareness of, and attitudes towards, the issues and were compared with a similar, albeit larger, survey conducted by the Department of Health. Complementary to this fieldwork, a review of current and proposed clinical policies, guidelines and legislation and of media commentary was undertaken. The study revealed much public confusion and ignorance about how people can influence the medical treatment they receive when seriously or terminally ill. The study revealed an urgent need for Government initiatives to provide more information on patient rights in relation to consent forms and advance statements.

The Principle of Legitimacy as formulated by Malinowski (1930) states that the father is indispensable for the full status of the child and that distinctions are always drawn which stigmatise those who are fatherless in a social sense. The universality of this rule has been a moot point since there is empirical refutation of it in Caribbean societies, which have consistently high illegitimacy rates (Hartley, 1980) and more recently, the concurrent rise of illegitimacy rates in the U.S. (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1982:66) and in many European countries since the 1950s (Eurostat, 1983) suggests that the Principle of Legitimacy is an anachronism. Whether it is limited in its application or obsolete cannot be determined, however, without first considering the validity of illegitimacy rates as a measure of fatherlessness. That is, can high or escalating illegitimacy rates be taken as evidence that the father's role is diminished and the mother‐father‐child triad supplanted? In Scandinavian countries, it is clearly the case that they cannot. Trost (1977; 1978) has pointed out that in Sweden, cohabitation is increasingly regarded as a viable alternative to marriage and that many children born illegitimate are fatherless only according to a strictly legal definition. Similarly, Carter (1977: 131) discussing historical data from Great Britain, has maintained that illegitimacy rates denote official categorisation and do not necessarily reflect the formation of incomplete families. He argues that whereas birth and death are defined biologically, illegitimacy and suicide are social definitions. The same problems hindering the utility of suicide data, he asserts, arise in the construction of illegitimacy rates and ratios and in an equally intractable form.

This chapter examines the seeming paradox that although children may be a net cost to parents, they may nonetheless play a key role in underwriting the cost of large families. Maya time allocation and reproductive history data are used to approach children’s economic value from two methodological perspectives: wealth flows and the timing of children’s economic contributions. While Maya children are expensive to raise, when viewed in light of the timing of their labor supply across the demographic life cycle of the family, children’s economic contributions enable Maya parents to continue childbearing and raise more children than they might otherwise be able.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact and techniques for mitigating the effects of web robots on usage statistics collected by Open Access (OA) institutional repositories (IRs).

A close review of the literature provides a comprehensive list of web robot detection techniques. Reviews of system documentation and open source code are carried out along with personal interviews to provide a comparison of the robot detection techniques used in the major IR platforms. An empirical test based on a simple random sample of downloads with 96.20 per cent certainty is undertaken to measure the accuracy of an IR’s web robot detection at a large Irish University.

While web robot detection is not ignored in IRs, there are areas where the two main systems could be improved. The technique tested here is found to have successfully detected 94.18 per cent of web robots visiting the site over a two-year period (recall), with a precision of 98.92 per cent. Due to the high level of robot activity in repositories, correctly labelling more robots has an exponential effect on the accuracy of usage statistics.

This study is performed on one repository using a single system. Future studies across multiple sites and platforms are needed to determine the accuracy of web robot detection in OA repositories generally.

This is the only study to date to have investigated web robot detection in IRs. It puts forward the first empirical benchmarking of accuracy in IR usage statistics.

The greater availability of life‐sustaining technology, such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the medical, legal and moral pressures to use them, often enable the prolongation of lives of older people. The dying process can be extended regardless of quality of life. Further, there is much public debate on the increasing emphasis on individual rights and personal autonomy in the dying process. This qualitative study examined older people's perspectives on end‐of‐life decision‐making and advance care planning. A sample of 12 older people living in the community was recruited and studied in‐depth. A semi‐structured interview explored patients' conceptualisations of decision‐making in the later stages of life and the significant others they would like involved in the process. The data were analysed using ‘content analysis’. The resulting broad categories, themes and sub‐themes formed the foundation of an emerging model of older people talking about end‐of‐life care. Finally, results were discussed with regard to practice and policy development.

It is contended that knowledge management is directed towards finding out how and why information users think, what they know about what they know, the knowledge and attitudes they have and the decisions they make when they interact with others. At the heart lies the mutation of information into knowledge, a process best understood through seeing, knowing and information retrieval as features common to cognitive psychology and information management. The knowledge we have of knowledge, and changes to knowledge, can be monitored in negotiations like knowledge interviews for trainees. Such knowledge and belief systems can also be translated into managerial strategies, both qualitative, as when we emphasise value and benefit in the marketing approach to information, and quantitative, as when we devise ways of assessing probabilities with which desired outcomes will occur. Knowledge management is as much the management of meaning as management of entities and people, for in meaning lies the key to our understanding of what we decide to do as information managers. It is a multi‐disciplinary field offering a semantics and pragmatics for the evaluating and self‐evaluating manager.

Gradually, more and more women are being introduced to top managerial positions, providing a new challenge for educators, employers and organisational psychologists who are interested in the special characteristics of women that might be of relevance to their performance and success in a supervisory role.