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Before starting to trace the development of PRECIS to its theoretical beginnings I shall describe the system briefly in its present form. This will serve not only as an introduction for those who are not familiar with the system, but will also help to explain the relevance of some of the historical sections which follow, in which we shall see how a machine‐produced alphabetical indexing system, based on a syntax derived from a study of natural language, developed out of research into principles for a new general classification.

IThe activity of the group has continued to progress with great energy and enthusiasm for practical applications of the theoretical ideas and schemes of the members, many of whom have acted as consultants to private, government and international institutions. Some of the longer‐serving members retired, but continued to attend meetings. The Group heard with great regret of the death of Mr B. I. Palmer, its Founder Chairman. An important element in the discussions from its beginning was the theoretical scheme of S. R. Ranganathan, and this was largely due to Palmer, who had returned from war service in India fired with enthusiasm for Ranganathan's ideas, and determined to interest others in developing and applying them. His collaboration with Mr A. J. Wells, another founder member, had as an early result their little monograph, The fundamentals of library classification, which has greatly influenced both teaching and practice of classification, and not only in Britain.

Music stimulation is considered beneficial for people with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. The purpose of this paper is to assess a tablet-based program to promote music-related hand responses and positive engagement (e.g. singing or moving the body with the music) in people with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

The program was implemented with 20 participants according to a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across participants. The participants were provided with a tablet whose screen worked as a sensor. During the intervention, sensor activations by hand responses led the tablet to present 10 s segments of preferred songs; an absence of sensor activation led the tablet to produce a prompt.

The participants’ mean frequencies of hand responses (i.e. sensor activations) per 5 min session increased from mostly zero during baseline to between about 9 and 20 during the intervention. The mean percentages of observation intervals with participants’ positive engagement increased from 0 to 12 during the baseline to between 13 and 55 during the intervention. The differences between baseline and intervention data were statistically significant for all participants.

A tablet-based program, such as that used in this study, may help people with advanced Alzheimer’s disease develop specific music-related responses and positive engagement.

Persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease experience increasing activity engagement failures, with consequent cognitive, social, and physical drawbacks. The purpose of this paper is to assess a technology-aided program to help these persons to independently start and carry out daily activities at the appropriate times.

The program was implemented with eight participants according to an adapted non-concurrent multiple baseline design across participants. The program provided each participant with: timely reminders about the activities to carry out, verbal instructions about the activity steps, and brief encouragements and praise.

All participants showed improvement during the program, that is, they managed to independently start the activities at the scheduled times and perform those activities with satisfactory levels of accuracy (i.e. with mean percentages of correct steps nearing or exceeding 90).

A technology-aided program, such as that used in this study, may help persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer disease engage in daily activities, with possible benefits for their cognitive functioning, social image, and physical condition.

The group has continued to meet regularly since the publication of the last bulletin and has welcomed a number of new members and visitors from both home and overseas. Many members who joined at the beginning or very early on in the Group's history still attend regularly, but several long‐standing members have also left, or ceased active participation, in the period under review. Towards the end of 1972 Mr Wells relinquished the chairmanship of the Group, due to pressure of work, and his place was taken by Mr Mills. Another departure, and one that robbed the Group of one of its most active and forceful members, was that of Jason Farradane. He left the country in 1974, and the Group presented him with a book as a memento of many enjoyable and provocative discussions stimulated by his presence at the meetings which he unfailingly attended. It was with great pleasure that he was welcomed back to a meeting while he was visiting this country in January 1976.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

In 1984, Local P‐9 of the United Food and Commercial Worker's Union (UFCW) launched a publicity campaign to protest wage cuts at the George A. Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota. This corporate campaign was followed in August, 1985, by a bitter strike. After P‐9 had been striking for nearly a year, the international officers of the UFCW placed the local P‐9 union in trusteeship, replaced its officers, and negotiated a new labor contract.

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:

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical contributions to the proxy contest literature. The theoretical work, to date, suggests that (1) the use of the proxy contest as a method of taking over a corporation depends on its cost relative to the tender offer; (2) the security voting structure and the debt/equity ratio influence the outcome of the proxy contest; and, (3) the value of a proxy contest can be estimated using the principles of option pricing theory. A review of empirical research indicates that (1) firms which are inefficiently managed are more likely to become the target of a proxy fight; (2) wealth gains accrue to shareholders of contested firms during the contest period; and, (3) incumbent management is more likely to succeed in a proxy fight but not necessarily ‘win’.

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information and the 1977 conference on the same theme both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the ‘great failures’ of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a ‘utopian dream’ ? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man‐machine) systems and machine‐assisted translation (section III), (and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities section IV).