Higher Education and the Referendum on Scottish Independence

During the course of the referendum campaign, the Scottish government argued that free tuition for Scottish and EU students symbolised Scotland's preference for universal services and was intrinsically fairer than the ‘marketised’ systems operating in the rest of the UK. Invoking principles of both social justice and pragmatism, three distinct critiques of the Scottish government's higher education policy were mounted and adopted by different policy actors for different political purposes. Following a discussion of these arguments, this article concludes that a more nuanced discussion of higher education policy in Scotland is required, focusing not just on the absence of tuition fees but also on the distribution of debt and allocation of funds across the entire education system. We also note that the focus on tuition fees policy suggests that higher education systems across the UK are set on a process of divergence, whereas there are strong pressures towards policy convergence in areas such as research policy and internationalisation.     

Late Victorian Poets

Who's a Pervert?

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford University Press, £35.00 &; £9.95. Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions, Pandora, £17.00.

Border Zone Travellers

John B. Allcock and Antonia Young (eds), Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans, Bradford University Press, £11.00.

Canonising H.D.

Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse, Harvester, £35.

Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, Cambridge University Press, £37.50.

Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (eds), Signets: Reading H.D., University of Wisconsin Press, £14.00

Lawrence Among the Women

Carol Siegel, Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women's Literary Traditions, University Press of Virginia, £19.95 or $29.95.     

Chronicles of an information company

The birth and growth of a US West Coast information company is chronicled from its beginning as a part-time partnership to its status five years later as a small but profitable corporation providing information services to Government agencies as well as graduate students. Documentation Associates provides a search and retrieval service that includes brokering on-line data-base searches, and the investment required to set up and maintain this kind of operation is described. Some information-broker policies are discussed, e.g. service types, pricing methods, and the reasons for the wide disparity in data-base search prices are examined. The policies of Documentation Associates in the operation of its broker service are presented.     

Providing an Integrated Response to Family Violence: Governance Attributes of Local Networks in Victoria

The establishment of integrated responses to family violence represents a significant implementation challenge for locally‐based networks. This research reports on the experiences of integrated family violence committees in Victoria, and the features of their governance associated with perceived effectiveness in committee functioning. There were consistent regional differences in the perceived effectiveness of committees. The main challenge for effective service integration was establishing and maintaining effective partnerships. There were substantial differences in the capacities of the committees to meet the challenges of integration, and the research points to the need for a stronger guidance and support role by central agencies.     

An interlaboratory study to evaluate the utility of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and gas chromatography-infrared spectroscopy spectral libraries in the forensic analysis of fentanyl-related substances

Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl account for over 71,000 of the approximately 107,000 overdose deaths reported in the United States in 2021. Fentanyl remains the fourth most identified drug by state and local forensic laboratories, and the second most identified drug by federal laboratories. The unambiguous identification of fentanyl-related substances (FRS) is challenging due to the absence or low abundance of a molecular ion in a typical gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis and due to a low number of fragment ions that are similar among the many potential isomers of FRS. This study describes the utility of a previously reported gas chromatography-infrared (GC-IR) library for the identification of FRS within a blind, interlaboratory study (ILS) involving seven forensic laboratories. Twenty FRS reference materials, including those with isomer pairs in the library, were selected based on either their presence in the NIST library and/or some similarity of the mass spectra information produced. The ILS participants were requested to use the Florida International University (FIU) GC-MS and GC-IR libraries supplied by FIU to search for matches to their unknown spectra generated from in-house GC-MS and GC-IR analysis. The laboratories reported improvement in the positive identification of unknown FRS from ~75% using GC-MS alone to 100% correct identification using GC-IR analysis. One laboratory participant used solid phase IR analysis, which produced spectra incompatible with the vapor phase GC-IR library to generate a good comparison spectrum. However, this improved when searched against a solid phase IR library.