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The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for predicting the movements of Chinese medicinal material price indexes using news based on text mining.

A research framework and three major methods, namely, domain dictionary construction, market convergence time calculation and dimensionality reduction integrating semantic analysis, are proposed for the approach. The proposed approach is applied in practice for predicting the price index movements of the top ten Chinese medicinal materials that receive the greatest media attention.

A set of experiments performed herein show that a predictive relationship exists between the news and the commodity market and that each of the three major methods improves the forecasting performance.

Because the field of Chinese medicinal materials lacks a corpus that can be used for sentiment analysis, the accuracy of a trained automatic sentiment classifier is lower than obtained by a manual method, which can cause the calculated convergence result to be inaccurate, thus affecting the final prediction model. The manual method of having people label news decreases the proposed method’s aspects of being intelligent and automatic.

Using the method proposed herein to predict the trends in Chinese medicinal materials prices helps farmers arrange a reasonable planting plan to pursue their best interests.

The method proposed herein to predict the trends in the prices of Chinese medicinal materials is conducive to the government arranging planned drug availabilities in order to avoid disasters in which herbs are looted.

The produced prediction result is meaningful in supporting farmers and investors to make better decisions in growing and trading Chinese medicinal material, which leads to financial returns on investments and the avoidance of severe losses.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Factors which influence consumer spending, among the most sought after in any field of market research, things people buy and why, is valuable data on which much industrial planning, advertising techniques and marketing is based, but in no other field of trade is consumer preference so closely related to pure economics, i.e., value received in money terms, as in food. With most other commodities, from clothes to cars, hair‐do's to houses, factors affecting consumer choice have different results; appearance, aesthetic quality and neighbourly competition, all play a part, though appearance in a few foods is not entirely without significance, e.g., white bread. Present high levels of consumer spending are said by politicians to be a danger to the country's economy; a more prosaic thought would be that Government spending, or squandering, constituted the greater threat. In the main, factors which influence household food expenditure are essentially down to earth—palatability, digestibility, keeping quality and how far a food will go in the preparation of meals, its value in money terms. The king‐pin in all market research on food must be the woman of the house; it is her laying out of the household purse that determines the amount of food expenditure and the varieties purchased week by week. A housewife's choice, however, is a complex of her family's likes and dislikes, rarely her own, and also determined by the amount allocated from her purse for this part of the household budget and the number of mouths she has to feed. Any tendency to experiment, to extend the variety of food, is only possible with a well‐filled purse; with a large family, a common complaint is of monotony in the diet. A factor of immense importance nowadays is whether the housewife is employed or not, and whether whole‐time or part‐time, and which part of the day she can be in her own home. To this may be attributed, as much as anything, the rise in consumption of convenience foods. Fortunately for the purposes of reasonable accuracy in the results of enquiries, housewives form a class, reliable and steady, unlikely to be contaminated by the palsied opinions of the so‐called lunatic fringe in this unquiet age. Any differences in food choice are likely to be regional, and settled dietary habits, passed on from one generation to another. Statistics from the National Food Surveys show the extent of these, and also consumer preferences as far as food commodity groups are concerned. The Surveys have been running long enough to show something of consumer trends but, of course, they do not exhibit reasons—why consumers buy and use certain foods, their attitudes to food marketing practices, and, in particular, to advertising. Advertising claims, misleading undoubtedly but within the law, have long been a source of controversy between those who worship at the shrine of truth and others less particular. Elsewhere, we review a special study of consumer reactions to aspects of the grocery trade in the U.S.A., and note that 32 per cent do not accept advertisements as being true, but 85 per cent find them interesting and informative. Advertising practices are probably subject to less statutory control in the United States than here, and the descriptions and verbiage certainly reach greater heights of absurdity, but the British housewife is likely to be no more discerning, able “to read between the lines”, than her counterpart in that country. A major difference, however, is that in Britain, more houswives prepare and cook meals for their families than in the United States. The greatest importance of advertising is in the introductory phase of a commodity; new and more vigorous advertising is necessary later to delay the onset of the decline phase of the commodity's life cycle; to ensure that sales can be maintained to prevent rises in supply costs. Advertising helps considerably in the acceptance of a branded food, but housewives tend to ignore cut‐throat competition between rival brands, and what weans a consumer from a brand is not competition in advertising, nor even new and more attractive presentation, but reduction in real price. The main pre‐occupation of the woman of the house is food adequacy, and especially that her children will have what she considers conforms to a nutritious diet, without argument or rebellion on the part of her progeny and without distinction. She knows that bulk foods, carbohydrates, are not necessarily nutritious, although her ideas of which foods contain vitamins or minerals or other important nutrient factors tends to be hazy. She does not pretend to enjoy shopping for food and therefore tends to follow a routine; it saves time and worry. Especially is this so with young married women, who may have to take small children along. Each housewife has her own mental standard of assessing “value”, and would have difficulty in defining it. Nutritional value forms part of it, however, in most women, who connote their food provision with health. The greatest concern is not necessarily positive health, but prevention or reduction of obesity, which is seen among adult members of the family, especially growing girls, as an adverse effect on their appearance, and the types of clothes they can wear. A few of the more intelligent families have an indefinable fear of ischaemic heart disease and its relation to food. When they take positive steps to control the diet for these purposes, they are quite frequently in the wrong direction and rather confused even when this is done on medical advice.

My object in compiling this bibliography has been to list reference materials that will be useful to pharmacy students, faculty, and reference librarians working with them. While the bibliography is not intended to be comprehensive, I have covered the essential reference sources as well as some additional titles which are certainly desirable. Some of the books have been around for many years and are now in new editions; others are just appearing on the scene. I included periodicals only when they served a special purpose such as to offer a source of statistical or marketing information. Several of the references could have appeared in more than one place and, in the interest of brevity, I arbitrarily chose the category that seems most appropriate to me.

There have been several developments during the past year that will aid biologists in their constant battle to keep up with the scientific and technical literature. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has introduced three new online services that are designed for current awareness and retrospective searches: ISI/CompuMath — access to pure and applied math literature; ISI/ISTP&B — index to scientific proceedings and books; and ISI/BIOMED — research front specialties in biomedicine.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

Millions of the British people have for some years now been struggling valiantly to live with hard times, watching them day by day grow worse but always hopefully that the cloud had a silver lining; that one day, reason and a sense of direction would prevail. Tyranny in many forms is a feature of history; the greatest epics have been risings of ordinary people to overthrow it. The modern form of tyranny is that of Money; the cruel and sinister ways in which it can be obtained and employed and the ineffectiveness of any measures taken to control the evils which result. Money savings over the years and the proverbial bank book, once the sure safeguard of ordinary people, are whittled away in value, never to recover. Causes always seemed to be contained within the country's own economy and industrial practices, and to this extent should have been possible of control. The complex and elaborate systems constructed by the last Government were at least intended for the purpose, but each attempt to curb excessive demands for more money, more and more for doing less and less— the nucleus of inflation—produced extreme reactions, termed collectively “industrial strife”. Every demand met without compensatory returns in increased work, inevitably led to rises in prices, felt most keenly in the field of food and consumer goods. What else would be expected from such a situation?

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a complete medical healthcare system that encompasses acupuncture, acupressure, moxibustion, herbal medicine, diet, tui na massage, and exercises (tai chi and qigong) among other traditional therapies. It uses herbs and natural resources to produce the traditional medicines and focuses on maintaining the balance between body and mind. As such, many aspects of TCM can be considered as green and sustainable. While there is market demand for TCM in some countries and among some communities, some others are still not aware of TCM. Moreover, there are fewer discussions in the academic platforms on TCM. This case highlights the scenario of TCM based on Malaysia’s perspective and discusses its challenges and prospects.