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This paper reports on an action research study that aimed to collaboratively develop a complementary therapy care intervention to augment palliative care choices available to nursing home residents with advanced dementia.

An action research design was adopted that consisted of a series of action cycles involving collaborative exploration, problem-solving planning, development and evidence gathering. A combination of mixed methods was used when gaining data at the different stages, including face to face delivered questionnaires, observational notes, focus groups, and the objective measure of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory adapted for Nursing Homes (NPI-NH).

Care home staff and relatives considered the use of Complementary Therapy to be a helpful intervention promoting that it can reduce a sense of loneliness and provide companionship for residents experiencing distress. Analysis of NPI-NH scores showed a reduction in presenting neuropsychiatric behaviours associated with stress and distress.

Differing levels of participant group engagement may affect this study’s findings as it was noted that care home staff provided a fuller contribution to the project in comparison to relatives.

Implementation guidance is needed when implementing complementary therapy within the nursing home practice to promote consistency and successful integration of an intervention that is not provided as routine care.

The findings of this study are encouraging and demonstrate the acceptability of complementary therapies to residents with advanced dementia, where positive impacts on otherwise difficult to address dementia symptoms related to stress and distress are highlighted.

Women's Plight: Bad and Getting Worse, an article in Challenge by Barbara R. Bergman, March/April 1983 in which she argues that the Reagan's administration's budget‐cutting in humans services will worsen the economic lot of millions of Americans. It will hit hardest at women who are not under the economic protection of a relatively affluent employed male. Perhaps it is no accident that this policy is in accord with the “family policy” of the extreme right, with its belief in strengthening the subordination of women to men within the traditional family. But the fact is that there are millions of never‐married women, millions of single mothers, and millions of older women who are without a man. The present US administration's dismantling of federal programmes is going to make their already bad position more hopeless.

To determine the views of the founder of the low cost airline Go.

The article is an interview with Barbara Cassani.

Barbara Cassani, best known for founding the low‐cost airline Go in the UK, also worked on driving London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. The interview covers her opinions on a range of issues including her latest challenges.

Provides insights into the thinking of a prominent individual.

From its first patent statute, the United States awarded patents to the first person to invent. The rest of the world eventually adopted “first to file” regimes, in which the first person to file a patent application was awarded the patent. In 2013, the United States moved closer to harmonizing with the rest of the world. The America Invents Act created a “first inventor to file” system, representing the most dramatic change in US patent law in over fifty years. This chapter explores the new provisions by offering a basic operation of how they operate. It then discusses the myriad of new administrative procedures at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that were created in the America Invents Act. These procedures have the potential to challenge patents more cheaply than in litigation. The chapter discusses the various requirements and limitations of these provisions.

Public dislike of taxes led to tax revolt and tax reform. Despite the connection between tax attitudes and tax policy, relatively little is known about public attitudes toward taxes over time, and how public opinion either shapes or is shaped by changes in tax policy. We examine the link between opinion and changes in tax policy in Florida, where the public’s view of sales and property taxes was surveyed consistently from 1979-1997, a time when both taxes changed significantly. This combination of tax reform and survey data allows us to observe the pattern of public opinion before, during, and after changes in tax policy, and to draw inferences about whether public opinion leads or lags state action, while examining common explanations for individual differences in opinion. Among other things, our results indicate that the portrait of an anti-tax populace is overdrawn and that the pattern of opinion differs for each tax.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Words like “revolution” are frequently used to describe the impact of the silicon chip on industry; as far as retailing is concerned, there is no doubt that the availability of the mini and micro computer will have profound effects. In this article Gil Jones and Barbara Walman discuss first, the development of mini computers and how they are used; then what they describe as the “intriguing” prospect of how micro computers might affect the retail sector, looking both at small retailers and then at multiples. No retailer — large or small — can afford to ignore the implications of this remarkable technological development.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.

Mobile handheld devices, such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants, are inherently small and lack an intuitive and natural user interface. Speech recognition and synthesis technology can be used in mobile handheld devices to improve the user experience. The purpose of this paper is to describe a prototype system that supports multiple speech‐enabled applications in a mobile handheld device.

The main component of the system, the Program Manager, coordinates and controls the speech‐enabled applications. Human speech requests to, and responses from, these applications are processed in the mobile handheld device, to achieve the goal of human‐like interactions between the human and the device. In addition to speech, the system also supports graphics and text, i.e., multimodal input and output, for greater usability, flexibility, adaptivity, accuracy, and robustness. The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the prototype system. The Program Manager is currently designed to handle the specific speech‐enabled applications that we developed.

The paper determines that many human interactions involve not single applications but multiple applications working together in possibly unanticipated ways.

Future work includes generalization of the Program Manager so that it supports arbitrary applications and the addition of new applications dynamically. Future work also includes deployment of the Program Manager and the applications on cellular phones running the Android Platform or the Openmoko Framework.

This paper presents a first step towards a future human interface for mobile handheld devices and for speech‐enabled applications operating on those devices.