This review will outline the role of visiting cardiac surgical teams in low- and middle-income countries drawing on the collective experience of the authors in a wide range of locations. Requests for assistance can emerge from local programmes at a beginner or advanced stage. However, in all circumstances, careful pre-trip planning is necessary in conjunction with clinical and non-clinical local partners. The clinical evaluation, surgical procedures, and postoperative care all serve as a template for collaboration and education between the visiting and local teams in every aspect of care. Education focusses on both common and patient-specific issues. Case selection must appropriately balance the clinical priorities, safety, and educational objectives within the time constraints of trip duration. Considerable communication and practical challenges will present, and clinicians may need to make significant adjustments to their usual practice in order to function effectively in a resource-limited, unfamiliar, and multilingual environment. The effectiveness of visiting trips should be measured and constantly evaluated. Local and visiting teams should use data-driven evaluations of measurable outcomes and critical qualitative evaluation to repeatedly re-assess their interim goals. Progress invariably takes several years to achieve the final goal: an autonomous self-governing, self-financed, cardiac programme capable of providing care for children with complex CHD. This outcome is consistent with redundancy for the visiting trips model at the site, although fraternal, professional, and academic links will invariably remain for many years.

Using the records of British firms that supplied nearly 90 percent of world trade in cotton spinning machinery, we track the evolution and diffusion of spinning technology over more than 50 years. In contrast to scenarios in which modern technologies supplant older methods, we observe two paradigms in competitive coexistence, each one supporting ongoing productivity growth through complementary improvements in machinery, organization, and workforce skills. International productivity differences were magnified under the skill-based mule, British spinners being the world's best. Global diffusion of ring spinning was driven by advances in fiber control, a “directed” technological response to the expansion of world trade.

We performed a review of the international literature, Royal College of Psychiatrists guidelines and Irish legislation concerning psychiatric trainees and their experience of violence. Physical violence in the workplace was reported by 16% of trainees in Ireland and 67% of specialist registrars in the UK; 72% of trainees in Belgium reported verbal violence. Personal characteristics of trainees which increase the risk of experiencing violence are under-researched, although it is observed that the duration of clinical experience seems to be somewhat protective. the advent of community psychiatry brings new risks to trainees. the Royal College of Psychiatrists issued guidelines and reports that are useful in developing facilities and promoting trainee safety. Although legislation provides some protection to trainees, it also places responsibility on them as employees.

The Journal of Economic History completed another successful year in 2002/03, marked (for a change) by an absence of dramatic change. Most contributors and some book publishers have by now adapted to our tripod office system: North American materials go to Wright at Stanford, all other geographic areas go to Harley at Western Ontario, with Susan Isaac handling production editing tasks at Florida State. If your paper or book does not fit neatly into this classification system, you can send it wherever you want, but we reserve the right to reallocate afterwards.

Published in 1991, Robert J. Steinfeld's The Invention of Free Labor was something of a milestone in the relationship between the fields of legal and economic history. Through a detailed comparative study of employment law in England and America across several centuries, Invention showed that meaning of “free labor” was by no means self-evident to historical players. The clearest evidence for this proposition is that law and practice were very different in two self-proclaimed free-labor societies, England and the U.S. North. In England criminal prosecutions for breach of employment were common until 1875, whereas they had all but disappeared in America by the time of the Revolution. Beyond its substantive conclusions, Invention was noteworthy as a rare example of legal history that looked to empirical evidence from outside the courtroom in an effort to understand the law in historical context.

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. The paper analyzes this development, attributing it to the confluence of diffusion of a general-purpose-technology (electrification) with a regime change in the industrial labor market.