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What counts as evidence of good performance, behaviour or character? While quantitative metrics have long been used to measure performance and productivity in schools, factories and workplaces, what is striking today is the extent to which these calculative methods and rationalities are being extended into new areas of life through the global spread of performance indicators (PIs) and performance management systems. What began as part of the neoliberalising projects of the 1980s with a few strategically chosen PIs to give greater state control over the public sector through contract management and mobilising ‘users’ has now proliferated to include almost every aspect of professional work. The use of metrics has also expanded from managing professionals to controlling entire populations. This chapter focuses on the rise of these new forms of audit and their effects in two areas: first, the alliance being formed between state-collected data and that collected by commercial companies on their customers through, for example loyalty cards and credit checks. Second, China’s new social credit system, which allocates individual scores to each citizen and uses rewards of better or privileged service to entice people to volunteer information about themselves, publish their ‘ratings’ and compete with friends for status points. This is a new development in the use of audit simultaneously to discipline whole populations and responsibilise individuals to perform according to new state and commercial norms about the reliable/conforming ‘good’ citizen.

This chapter outlines key areas of literature and policy that have influenced or affected our research on the comparative study of adult education. Policy influences include the growth of lifelong learning within a neoliberal framing since the 1990s and the rise of ‘evidence-based’ approaches with a narrow reliance on quantitative data. Much of our work has been inspired by the need to critique these trends, adopt broader approaches to lifelong learning and defend the more democratic traditions of adult education. Important areas of theoretical inspiration, many of which interrogate these policy developments, are also outlined. The critical reinterpretation of historical adult education practices is another important area of work and inspiration. In relation to sustainability, we have been influenced particularly by the capabilities approach.

This paper describes the different ways in which people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are talking about climate change. It demonstrates that people locate themselves in this process of change in terms of food production and exchange, and that some of the changes being witnessed are also related to the impacts of a growing cash economy on social relations.

This ethnography involved 12 months fieldwork including participant observation and interviews.

This is a qualitative study that recognises the perspective of local people for understanding culturally mediated experiences of climate change. However, data regarding rainfall and temperatures over time would be a useful addition for thinking about the extent to which the climate has in fact changed in recent years.

The implications of this paper are that the predictions made in 1990 about increases in production as a result of climate change are apparently coming true, with benefits for some food and coffee producers. But that there are complex social processes occurring at the same time as climate change that mean people’s ability to adapt is dependent on other social conditions. Maintaining ecologically sustainable methods of production and local cultural practices may enable more resilience to the impacts of climate change.

The experiences of people living in the Eastern Highlands and the ways in which people use the discourse of climate change are yet to be acknowledged in policy circles or socio-cultural anthropology literature. This paper presents a partial account of how people in Papua New Guinea are experiencing and talking about change.

This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article.

The essays are invited and peer‐reviewed contributions from scholars in organizational studies and anthropology.

The scholars invited to comment on the original article have seen its value, and their contributions ground its content in contemporary issues and debates.

The original article was deemed “original” for its time (1987), anticipating as it did considerable reclamation of ethnographic methods in organizational studies in the decades that followed it. It was also deemed of value for our times and, in particular, for readers of this journal, as an historical document, but also as one view of the unsung role of anthropology in management and organizational studies.

Industrial robots are extensively used in the robotic assembly of rigid objects, whereas the assembly of flexible objects using the same robot becomes cumbersome and challenging due to transient disturbance. The transient disturbance causes vibration in the flexible object during robotic manipulation and assembly. This is an important problem as the quick suppression of undesired vibrations reduces the cycle time and increases the efficiency of the assembly process. Thus, this study aims to propose a contactless robot vision-based real-time active vibration suppression approach to handle such a scenario.

A robot-assisted camera calibration method is developed to determine the extrinsic camera parameters with respect to the robot position. Thereafter, an innovative robot vision method is proposed to identify a flexible beam grasped by the robot gripper using a virtual marker and obtain the dimension, tip deflection as well as velocity of the same. To model the dynamic behaviour of the flexible beam, finite element method (FEM) is used. The measured dimensions, tip deflection and velocity of a flexible beam are fed to the FEM model to predict the maximum deflection. The difference between the maximum deflection and static deflection of the beam is used to compute the maximum error. Subsequently, the maximum error is used in the proposed predictive maximum error-based second-stage controller to send the control signal for vibration suppression. The control signal in form of trajectory is communicated to the industrial robot controller that accommodates various types of delays present in the system.

The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller have been validated using simulation and experimental implementation on an Asea Brown Boveri make IRB 1410 industrial robot with a standard low frame rate camera sensor. In this experiment, two metallic flexible beams of different dimensions with the same material properties have been considered. The robot vision method measures the dimension within an acceptable error limit i.e. ±3%. The controller can suppress vibration amplitude up to approximately 97% in an average time of 4.2 s and reduces the stability time up to approximately 93% while comparing with control and without control suppression time. The vibration suppression performance is also compared with the results of classical control method and some recent results available in literature.

The important contributions of the current work are the following: an innovative robot-assisted camera calibration method is proposed to determine the extrinsic camera parameters that eliminate the need for any reference such as a checkerboard, robotic assembly, vibration suppression, second-stage controller, camera calibration, flexible beam and robot vision; an approach for robot vision method is developed to identify the object using a virtual marker and measure its dimension grasped by the robot gripper accommodating perspective view; the developed robot vision-based controller works along with FEM model of the flexible beam to predict the tip position and helps in handling different dimensions and material types; an approach has been proposed to handle different types of delays that are part of implementation for effective suppression of vibration; proposed method uses a low frame rate and low-cost camera for the second-stage controller and the controller does not interfere with the internal controller of the industrial robot.

All seventeen had graciously agreed to my proposal to gather for a small conference to seek consensus. A generous grant from the Pierian Press Foundation would cover all of our expenses for a long weekend at a resort hotel; the only condition of the grant was that we offer our results to Reference Services Review for first publication. Over the past five years each of the seventeen had in turn accepted my challenge to answer the following question:

This paper provides an overview of the role computer software plays within police forces with particular attention paid to crime analysis and investigation computer systems. A distinction is made between major crime (e.g. murder, violent assault, rape, etc.) and volume crime (e.g. domestic burglary, shoplifting, etc.). Illustrative systems that are in practical use for tackling both major and volume crime are described. Particular attention is paid to the attempts that have been made to apply artificial intelligence techniques to tackling the volume crime of burglary. A topic of current research is the use of data mining techniques for automatically detecting patterns in reported crimes. The paper concludes by looking at the problems and benefits such systems may bring.