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I remember a story of two businessmen looking out of an office window at a man carrying a billboard with the message The End of the World is Nigh on it and one saying to the other,‘ it's not the message I mind, it's the way he keeps looking at his watch.’ We have always had our fair share of prophets predicting imminent doom and gloom in the patent field but they have been wrong so far and I doubt that things will change much in the next six years. Despite the massive increase in electronic handling of all forms of data, patent systems throughout the world have both age and stability on their side and I predict that for most users the patent scene in the year 2000 will be very much like it is now.

The quotation from Henry Longfellow's The Arrow and the Song: first appeared in the Target 2000 column in the first issue of the relaunched Online & CDROM Review in 1993. Since then a number of arrows have been aimed at developments that could be expected by the turn of the century. As this column was envisaged as a “floating Delphi”, this seems an appropriate point in the run‐up to the millennium to review the projections made to date. Below they have been reviewed and grouped, and it is hoped that in the coming months the authors may wish to expand or revise their original thoughts. The year, volume, issue and page numbers for the journal reference are given after the author’s name.

The Evil Queen is a staple character in many fairy tales, but perhaps one of her most famous incarnations is as Snow White's evil stepmother. In order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of gender and morality in this story, this chapter analyses three different versions of the fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the Brothers Grimm's nineteenth-century text, Disney's 1930s film adaptation, and The Snow Queen's Shadow, a contemporary novel based loosely on a mix of well-known European fairy tales. The chapter explores what, exactly, marks the Queen as evil in the different versions, how her morality interacts with questions of gender and cultural context, and how the different versions portray the relationship – and often the moral dichotomy – between the Evil Queen and Snow White.

The dramatic increase in the fraction of all Afro‐American families headed by single women accounts for approximately two‐fifths of the Afro‐Euro family income gap. Examines the empirical objections to the conclusion that family structure is a major factor behind ethnic inequality and found to be largely without merit. Also critically examines the more normative and more important objection that the family structure argument undercuts the struggle to achieve economic justice for Afro‐Americans. Argues that an emphasis on family structure does not absolve society of responsibility for inequality, nor does it imply that government activism is futile. The family structure argument recasts but does not negate the struggle for economic justice for Afro‐Americans.

Although MOOCs have become a pervasive online learning model, the problem of high dropout rates still persists. Gathering the reasons for the high dropout rate can help to improve the platform design and management of the MOOCs.

A total of 74 studies was extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus. Following the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines, the open-source program CiteSpace is employed to review and induce the studies on the antecedents of MOOC dropout.

The antecedents of the MOOC dropout rate are the psychological, social, personal, course-related, and time factors, and the unexpected hidden cost. Motivation and interaction, which have a decisive impact on the dropout rate of MOOCs, interact with each other. Interaction helps to strengthen the motivation, and appropriate course design enhances the degree of interaction.

From the perspective of a learner, the more knowledge and skills the learners acquire, the more likely they will complete the course. Possessing adequate foundational knowledge is one way to arrest the dropout rate. On the part of the MOOC platform, better course design eases the dropout rate. Further, the course duration and hidden cost in MOOCs contribute to the dropout rate.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of spin-off announcements on the parent firm’s share prices. Also, it is studied that during which period the announcement impacts the share prices significantly thereby affecting the shareholder wealth.

A sample of 76 Indian firms has been taken which announced the spin-off of their one or more divisions during 2010–2011 to 2015–2016. The authors have used the event study methodology with an event window period of −35 to +35. Estimation window of 256 (−290, −35) days is considered in the study. S&P BSE 500 is used as a market index.

The authors found that spin-offs have a significantly positive influence on the share prices of the parent firm. The authors also found that average abnormal return (AAR) of all the 76 companies taken together have been highest on day 0 and the cumulative AAR is highest for day +1. These results are in consonance with what had been concluded by Hite and Owers (1983), Cusatis et al. (1993), Miles and Rosenfeld (1983) and Rosenfeld (1984). All these studies are based on the data derived from the USA. Outcome of this study substantiates the same results when Indian spin-offs are analysed.

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of Indian spin-offs on the shareholder’s wealth.