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Less than two years ago, businesses were being told every day they'd better jump on the Web exchange bandwagon fast or risk getting left behind in the B2B Goldrush. They heard this from the trade press and the mainstream press, from eager‐beaver B2B exchange developers, and even from their Web‐sawy kids. The line went that B2B Web exchanges—online marketplaces where buyers in a particular market can evaluate the best offers from many vendors, and vendors can gain access to a world of new customers—promised giant leaps in efficiency so major that vendors could both lower their prices yet increase their profits.

The findings of the Steering Group on Food Freshness in relation to the compulsory date marking of food contained in their Report, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, has brought within measurable distance the Regulations which were, in any case, promised for1975. The Group consider that the extension of voluntary open date marking systems will not be sufficiently rapid (or sufficiently comprehensive) to avoid the need or justify the delay in introducing legislation.

The finite element analysis capabilities of DART and the design routines for the computerized design in accordance with CP 110 and BS 5337 are briefly described. The DART program is used to compare some reservoir roof systems including a novel floated dome. Temperature effects on reservoirs can appear to yield severe stresses, but do they? The DART program is used for the design of non‐axisymmetric loaded structures and examples are given of wind loads on water towers and chimneys. A simple procedure has been incorporated into DART to allow for soil—structure interaction. The DART program can print out reinforcing or prestressing requirements. An elementary cost study has been made on reservoir walls to compare the relevant merits of the two methods of design. A facility has been incorporated into the DART program to find the optimum shape of reservoirs and water towers for a given set of construction costs. The Dynamic Programming method has been used for this purpose. Natural frequencies and mode shapes can be determined by the DART program using the Sturm sequence property and inverse iteration respectively.

Purpose – This chapter analyses the independent U.S. film Reefer Madness, a fictional full-length feature about marijuana use and selling that has grown in cult status since it was produced in 1936. In addition, this chapter discusses a number of examples of early and contemporary illegal drug films that focus on marijuana, including a short film scene from Broken Flowers (2005).

Methodology – Drawing from critical and feminist criminology, sociology, and cultural studies, this chapter provides an analysis of fictional illegal drug films with a focus on marijuana.

Findings – The significance of a century of film representations that reinforce a link between illegal drug use, immorality, and crime is discussed. It appears that these themes are quite enduring.

Value – It is worthwhile to analyze illegal drug films, not just to explore the stigmatization of users, but to examine the social/political effects of these films, particularly the ways that certain kinds of negative images support drug regulation and its attendant policing.

The study of franchising as a small business growth strategy is only weakly researched and understood. This preliminary, qualitative investigation examines the experiences of 17 operational and five “failed” franchises in the UK, in translating their business concepts into a franchise format. It reveals that small firms select franchising as a growth strategy for both economic and idiosyncratic reasons, but that economic reasons tend to prevail. The findings suggest that franchising is a viable growth strategy for small firms and that per se it creates few major problems for growth‐oriented small businesses. It is argued that further research is needed, particularly into the experiences of “failed” franchises and into the problems encountered by growing small firms who do not adopt franchising as a growth strategy.

WINTER set in almost with Autumn this year, and the results have been felt in libraries. Added to the season has been the monetary position of the world and the election in our own country in particular. It was to be expected that the election would slow up the use of libraries, but such reports as reach us are to the opposite effect. There have been definite increases in work done. This is important in face of the budgetting difficulties of libraries that are prophesied. The enforced leisure of unemployment has fallen on many men of the distinctly employable and therefore of the reading class, and these are finding encouragement and at least a temporary escape from their plight in books and in reading rooms. They may even find some new occupational interest there; and all good librarians will exploit the opportunities which this time of stress affords to the utmost. It is most important to keep level‐headed over difficulties, which we hope may be temporary for libraries, and not to acquiesce in panic retrench‐ments while ceding what is necessary to the general welfare. We cannot cede much; we have never had a superfluity.

In industrial distributed control environments for automation technology, Ethernet network based solutions are gaining prominence in the traditional fieldbus application areas with the promise of standardised solutions that can support real‐time operation to a resolution of less than 1 μm. However, there are no formal standards for a real‐time Industrial Ethernet. This paper looks at some of the emerging de facto solutions and describes a novel project where clusters of real‐time transducer networks are developed and the control is tightly synchronised using the IEEE 1588 clock synchronisation standard, realising a “Time‐triggered Ethernet” solution.