Keith Cheverst, Christos Efstratiou, Nigel Davies and Adrian Friday Distributed Multimedia Research Group, Lancaster University, e-mail: [email protected]

This is a response to an article by Nigel Speight and Jane Wynne, ‘Is the Children Act failing severely abused and neglected children?’, published in this journal in March 2000. Overall, we consider the article to be polemical and inadequately argued. Many of the points made are unsubstantiated and there are errors of fact. Where does evidence based practice go if senior practitioners prefer an...

We produce infinitely many finite 2-groups that do not embed with index 2 in any group generated by involutions. This disproves a conjecture of Lemmermeyer and restricts the possible Galois groups of unramified 2-extensions, Galois over Q, of quadratic number fields.

This is a response to an article by Nigel Speight and Jane Wynne, ‘Is the Children Act failing severely abused and neglected children?’, published in this journal in March 2000. Overall, we consider the article to be polemical and inadequately argued. Many of the points made are unsubstantiated and there are errors of fact. Where does evidence based practice go if senior practitioners prefer an...

Computat ional l inguistics needs grammars for several different tasks such as comprehension of text, machine translation, and text generation. 1 Clearly, any approach to grammar 2 has potential ly something to offer computat ional linguistics, say for parsing or text generation (and, by the same token, there is a potential benefit from an application within computational l inguistics for each ...

The need for people to keep their genetic data confidential is crucial to help exploit medical advances, a key British Committee believes. Nigel Williams reports.

Opposition to animal experiments in Britain appears to be extending beyond the labs to other businesses supplying them. Nigel Williams reports.

Britain has given the green light for research on stem cells derived from human embryos. Nigel Williams reports on the discussion ahead of this controversial decision.