This paper describes the results of an observational study of the information seeking behaviour of Members of Parliament. It is argued that political life functions on a flow of information and that information itself is a prime resource. The study sought to determine the characteristics that impact upon the manner in which information is sourced and used by parliamentarians. For this project a shadowing methodology was adopted. The conclusions drawn include that UK Members of Parliament are subject to a range of triggers of information seeking, in an information rich environment where the amount of information presents decision makers with difficulties. Public accountability results in demands from a wide variety of individuals, groups and associations. MPs are also expected to be knowledgeable about a wide variety of issues, while information need is frequently unpredictable and reactive. Members must be efficient information gatherers and managers and they must be flexible in their attitudes to information seeking, while retaining the capacity to critically appraise the quality of sources.

One hundred fifteen tornadoes are known to have occurred in association with humcane Beulah. The total was far greater than the number reported with any previous North Atlantic tropical cyclone in history. The spatial distribution of the tornadoes with reference to the hurricane center was examined, and it is shown that the best relationships on location of the hurricane-tornado within the parent cyclone are obtained with respect to true azimuth and are superior to those obtained using an orientation from a heading along the tropical cyclone track. With few exceptions, the tornadoes associated with hurricane Beulah occurred outside the area of known hurricaneforce winds. The period of the day, the orientation of the Texas coastline in relation to the hurricane's path, and the length of time Beulah lingered near the coast may have contributed to the record.number of occurrences of hurricanetornadoes.

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To-day intracardiac surgery is firmly established. Scarcely a week passes without some new procedure being described which involves deliberately preventing blood from passing through the chambers and valves of the heart. In some of these operations, when considerable time is required for their completion, a partial solution has been found in the employment of by-pass techniques. These methods demand extensive vascular surgery to connect the apparatus to the patient, and large volumes of blood must be added to the circulation because of the extracorporeal pumping and oxygenation. As the result, the hazards of by-pass techniques are not negligible.Various attempts have been made to perform the shorter intracardiac operations without the use of an extracorporeal circulation. In general, the principle used has been to arrest the inflow of blood to the heart during the time necessary to complete the operation. This has involved the arrest of the cerebral circulation, and the limiting factor has been the survival time of the cerebral tissues in the absence of circulation. Bigelow demonstrated in dogs that there is a linear relationship between body temperature and oxygen consumption so that it was possible to halve the oxygen uptake by lowering the temperature to 280 C. From this fact was evolved the technique of hypothermia for prolonging the safe period of circulatory arrest. It is usually accepted that the lowest temperature that can be reached without the risk of spontaneous ventricular fibrillation is 28°C., and many presentday workers prefer to maintain the temperature above 300 C. With this limitation, the longest permissible period of circulatory occlusion under hypothermia is eight minutes.* It has generally been stated that the cause of cerebral damage in circulatory arrest is oxygen lack, but Crowell, Sharpe, Lam, Bright, and Read (1955) showed that a second mechanism was important in dogs. They demonstrated large numbers of small clots in the blood during circulatory arrest, and showed that if the animals were heparinized before ventricular fibrillation the period of safe arrest could be doubled. In a control series of dogs, when circulatory arrest was produced by ventricular fibrillation, the permanent survival rate was 23 % after five minutes of fibrillation. In a second series, where the animals were heparinized before fibrillation was induced, the survival rate rose to 92% with only one death due to inhaled vomitus. CIRCULATORY ARREST AND CEREBRAL DAMAGEThey postulate that, during circulatory arrest and as the result of asphyxia, the coagulation time falls and intravascular clotting occurs.

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