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Shortly before the Second World War, a woman who had never accepted her orphan status, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed ‘Little Coco’ by her father and known as ‘Coco’ to her relatives, became the first women in history to build a world-class industrial empire. By 1935, Coco, a fashion designer and industry captain, was employing more than 4,000 workers and had sold more than 28,000 dresses, tailored jackets and women's suits. Born into a poor family and raised in an orphanage, she enjoyed an intense social life in Paris in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with artists, creators and the rising stars of her time.

Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, she was able to innovate in her methods and in her trendsetting approach to fashion design and promotion. Coco Chanel was committed and creative, had the soul of an entrepreneur and went on to become a world leader in a brand new sector combining fashion, accessories and perfumes that she would help shape. By the end of her life, she had redefined French elegance and revolutionized the way people dressed.

The purpose of this paper is to present the latest results from research and development into future optical printed circuit board (OPCB) interconnects and low‐cost assembly methods.

A novel method of high‐precision passive alignment and assembly to OPCBs was invented and a full evaluation platform developed to demonstrate the viability of this technique.

The technique was successfully deployed to passively align and assemble a lens receptacle onto an embedded polymer waveguide array in an electro‐OPCB. The lens receptacle formed a critical part of a dual lens pluggable in‐plane connection interface between peripheral optical devices and an OPCB. A lateral in‐plane mechanical accuracy of ±2 μm has been measured using this technique.

As this is a free space optical coupling process, surface scattering at the exposed waveguide end facet was significant.

This paper details a novel method of passively assembling arbitrary optical devices onto multi‐mode optical waveguides and outlines the procedure and equipment required. A lens coupling solution is also presented which reduces susceptibility of a connecting optical interface to contamination.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the research in a project aimed at developing manufacturing techniques for integrated optical and electronic interconnect printed circuit boards (OPCB) including the motivation for this research, the progress, the achievements and the interactions between the partners.

Several polymer waveguide fabrication methods were developed including direct laser write, laser ablation and inkjet printing. Polymer formulations were developed to suit the fabrication methods. Computer‐aided design (CAD) tools were developed and waveguide layout design rules were established. The CAD tools were used to lay out a complex backplane interconnect pattern to meet practical demanding specifications for use in a system demonstrator.

Novel polymer formulations for polyacrylate enable faster writing times for laser direct write fabrication. Control of the fabrication parameters enables inkjet printing of polysiloxane waveguides. Several different laser systems can be used to form waveguide structures by ablation. Establishment of waveguide layout design rules from experimental measurements and modelling enables successful first time layout of complex interconnection patterns.

The complexity and length of the waveguides in a complex backplane interconnect, beyond that achieved in this paper, is limited by the bend loss and by the propagation loss partially caused by waveguide sidewall roughness, so further research in these areas would be beneficial to give a wider range of applicability.

The paper gives an overview of advances in polymer formulation, fabrication methods and CAD tools, for manufacturing of complex hybrid‐integrated OPCBs.

Solzhenitsyn, former Zek and Nobel Laureate, found the causes of the cruelty of which the Communists were capable to lie in the Marxist‐Leninist ideology. The atheistic Communists had substituted their ideology for the values of Christianity which had stood the Russians in good stead and had perdured the test of time. The Communists were bent on stamping out religion. They arrested priests, nuns and those who practised their beliefs. Solzhenitsyn sees in religion the anodyne to Russia′s ills.

Mass‐observation as a word was first used (without the hyphen) in the New Statesman and Nation at the beginning of 1937 when we published letters about this idea; and from the beginning we really meant what we said. It is worth having a look at the word itself, because its meaning has altered somewhat over the years. By ‘Observation’, we meant, of course, observing; and by observing, inferentially, we meant primarily observing by eye, looking at situations—though also by nose, ear, touch, using all of one's senses in fact. We did not mean, in the first place, simply asking people questions. We wanted to observe what they did, not what they said they did. In those days, any attempt to study society as it really was in England was certainly pioneering, in a way that it is difficult to remember now. The Gallup Poll had just started and was treated with a good deal of caution, as is the case again at the moment! The whole idea was novel in those days. But what captured people's interest in our case was the idea of observing. I have not changed my ideas about this, alas, though I have changed many of my other ideas in the last third of a century.

RECENTLY I picked up a copy of NEW LIBRARY WORLD and browsed through it, detecting, or so I thought, a certain bias in its editorial approach towards the public librarian, and mentally discounted most of what I read until, emerging through the advertisements, I came to ‘The Shallow End’. Recognising yet another example of Parkinson's law (journalism expands to fill the space available) and style, I nevertheless, as they graphically say, ‘read on’. It was quickly borne in on me that the feelings expressed by the noxious Thrasher in the March and June issues were, with some modification and emendation, precisely what I uneasily felt in regard to the rôle of modern public library in this country. Both articles raise some very serious points and I thought I might expose some of my jaundiced qualms to the judicious discussion of others more nearly concerned.

At this time of the year, if you can't think what else to give your relatives, or your nearest and dearest, then for the sake of W H Smith and Christina Foyle, give them all books. With that maxim in mind we invited regular reviewers for the Yorkshire Boast (“Yorks band leader lost with Titanic”, remember?) to pick the best books of 1985 or thereabouts.

Ian Gilbert, chairman of the British Match Corporation, is fond of good wine, golfing and reading biographies. But his overriding love is Brazil—a country he has courted regularly since the age of 27.

If I go inside a church again, it will be feet first, screwed down under uncompromising oak. Even then, I implore all keeners and beaters of breasts to get hold of an electro‐cardiograph machine and carry out one last test: the experience could well bring on a protesting surge and revive me — apoplexy in reverse, as it were.