The Support Code: An Inclusive Partnership in Safety

The Family Service Units is a national charity working in some of the most deprived areas of the country. This paper is concerned with one part of its work, The Connections Project. This project aims to develop non-punitive anti-bullying partnerships between young people, schools, adults in the community and other agencies. This article focuses on a particular aspect of this project, the Support Code, which seeks to promote an ethos of proactive mutual support. The development is described and the teachers' reactions are explored. Though this work is currently being undertaken in primary schools, much is applicable to the early years of secondary education too.     

From retrieval to robotics: The national science foundation's support of information research

This article describes how the National Science Foundation's support of information research has evolved from NSF's original mission of improving the dissemination of scientific and technical information to its present interest in information robotics and intelligent systems. The pattern of grant support, since a major reorganization of the information science division in 1978, is analyzed in terms of the institutions, the investigators, and the disciplines that have been major grant recipients.     

International Education and Training at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausées/La Formation a l'international a l'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées

The programme of the Département de la Formation Internationale at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chausées (ENPC) was created in 1981 to address the ever‐increasing international role of today's engineer in the scientific, economic and social spheres. Each year, 75 ENPC students spend at least 3 months abroad, mainly in Europe. ENPC has double degree programmes in engineering studies with three European partners in Germany and Spain: TU Munich and TU Berlin; Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Twenty per cent of the student curriculum is devoted to language study; the students are required to study English plus one of the following languages: German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese or Chinese. French courses for foreign students are also provided. Language teaching aims to provide students not only with the linguistic skills necessary for communication, but also to make them more sensitive to other cultures as well as their own.     

Leisure time physical activity in Australian women: relationship with well being and symptoms

This paper explores the association between moderate levels of physical activity (PA) and health benefits in well being and symptoms such as tiredness, back pain, and constipation. Participants in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, 14,502 young women (ages 18-23 years), 13,609 middle-age women (45-50 years), and 11,421 older women (ages 70-75 years), answered questions about vigorous and less vigorous exercise (used to determine a physical activity score), well being (SF-36), symptoms, and medical conditions. There were significant associations between the PA score and SF-36 in each cohort. Odds ratios (OR) for a range of symptoms and conditions were lower for women who reported low to moderate activity than for sedentary women, for example, for young women or for constipation = 0.76 (CI, 0.65-0.89), for middle-age women or for tiredness = 0.70 (0.63-0.78). There was no threshold of PA at which health benefits increased significantly. Although cross-sectional, the findings suggest that low-to-moderate levels of exercise are associated with a range of health benefits for women of all ages. These preliminary findings will be followed up during the longitudinal study.