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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of published literature on behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) nursing in Japan and to highlight challenges that need to be resolved.

The criteria for retrieval of literature were as follows: a BPSD study conducted by a nurse in Japan, and it must have been published. Papers without conference proceedings and peer reviews and literature without English titles and abstracts were excluded. The PRISMA (preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses) was referenced.

Based on the analysis of 20 studies meeting the criteria, nurses tended to manage BPSD when all three of the following were clearly defined: attempts to understand BPSD, the provision of nursing intervention to improve the quality of care and clarification of the perception of BPSD. There were eight studies that implemented surveys considered to be helpful for nurses to understand BPSD with the aim of clarifying the symptomatic factors, meaning of each behaviour, etc. In the eight studies, nurses directly coped with BPSD in various ways. Four studies reported on how nurses perceive the associated behaviours and symptoms of BPSD patients.

This study suggests that not only implementing interventions but also aiming at improving nurses’ understanding of BPSD and their level of knowledge are crucial to promote BPSD nursing in Japan.

Focusing on small houses has become one of the recent trends in housing design in Japan, as has been observed in many house design works. Periodical coverage can tell that the number of such works has clearly been increasing since the 90s, as compared with the 70s and 80s. The trend of small houses was also observed in the 50s. In those postwar years of economic growth, it was driven by the conditions of the time, such as supply and housing shortages and urban centralization. Today’s social conditions are significantly different from those in the 50s, and naturally, the whole concept of small houses has greatly changed from the past.

In this research, we evaluate the experiments of small houses, from the view of the idea of sustainability and open building concept. Specifically, the study compares the small houses of the 50s and those after 1990 to examine their differences or similarities in terms of size, structure and building systems. And thus clarify how industrialization and standardization reflect on these experiments.

The former period, most were constructed on wood, with traditional construction method. The purpose of design was rather how to adapt the industrialization to the traditional construction and how to realize the modern way of living in the smallest space, than fulfillment of flexibility. Moreover, low cost was also included in the design purpose. In latest examples, the “small” means “small building area” rather than “small space for life and minimal cost for construction” The experimental projects were conducted by the intention exploring new possibilities and diversities of space design, with various highly industrialized materials. The small houses after 1990 can be regarded as experimental efforts to explore new approaches to skeletons within the context of urban tissue.

The microwave heating technique can be used in the production of iron for productivity improvement when the consumption of low-quality iron ore increases. Iron-containing dust agglomerates are an important source of iron; however, the crushing strength of raw agglomerates is low, which decreases the yield owing to breaking. Therefore, they need to be dried using a “band dryer” to reduce the amount of excess water and improve their crushing strength. This paper aims to present the structure of an antenna that efficiently provides microwave energy to the agglomerate layer inside the band dryer.

Electromagnetic field analysis and experiments that simulate inside the band dryer were performed to evaluate the radiation efficiency of the slot antenna for microwave heating of the agglomerate layer in the presence of a metal conveyor.

The results show that slot height should be larger than the antenna position from the metal conveyor and smaller than the sum of the antenna position and quarter of the guide wavelength, to maximize the radiation efficiency of the antenna. By satisfying this condition, the radiation efficiency was higher than 75 per cent in the experiments.

This paper presents for the first time the optimum relation between slot height and antenna position to apply the microwave heating technique to iron-containing agglomerates in a band dryer.

This study investigated the relationship between generalised trust and psychological well-being in college students, considering the social support obtained from their social networks via Twitter and face-to-face (FTF) interactions. Initially, the authors planned to collect data at the beginning of the first semester in 2019 for fine-tuning the model as a pilot study, and in 2020 for the main study. However, due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the data helped authors to analyse changes in young people's psychological situation before and during the pandemic in Japan.

The study conducted a self-report survey targeting college students in the Kanto region in Japan. Data were collected from mid-May to the end of June 2019, as well as in early to mid-June 2020, with 304 and 584 responses, respectively. The collected data were analysed using structural equation modelling and a multiple regression analysis.

The findings using the 2019 data set indicated that (a) students mostly used Twitter for information gathering and sharing of hobbies, and they received both informatics and emotional support from Twitter, and from FTF interactions; (b) there were direct positive effects of generalised trust and social skills on their psychological well-being; and (c) students with lower levels of generalised trust tended to interact with very intimate individuals using Twitter to obtain social support, which did not have any effects on their improvement of psychological well-being. From the 2020 data set, the authors also found that, like 2019, generalised trust and social skills had direct effects on the improvement of psychological well-being. Additionally, we observed that students spent more time using Twitter and received more emotional support from it, as most people tried not to meet other people in person due to the first State of Emergency in Japan. Similarly, the authors found that in 2019, only social support from very intimate partners via FTF communication had slightly significant effects on improving their psychological well-being, whereas in 2020, their expectation for social networks via FTF had decreased their levels of psychological well-being, but their social support from Twitter had slightly significant effects on their improvement of psychological well-being. One of the main reasons for this might be due to the challenge of meeting with others in person, and therefore, social support from Twitter partially played a role that traditionally was only beneficial through FTF communication.

We understand that this is one of the few social psychological studies on social media that collected data both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides unique evidence in demonstrating how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed college students communication behaviours.

The aim of the research is to examine in depth the relationship between financial support, entrepreneurship and economic growth in emerging African economies.

The study adopts the system-generalized methods of moments (sys-GMM) technique for data analysis and hypothesis testing on a sample of 34 African emerging economies (340 observations) from 2010 to 2019.

The results show that there is significant positive correlation between financial support, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Moreover, entrepreneurship served as a partial mediator between financial support and economic growth in African emerging economies.

This research suggests that African governments should focus on entrepreneurial systems, which are essentially networks driven by the pursuit of individual opportunities and the promotion of new business creation; and introduce other forms of financial assistance, such as loans, loan guarantees, interest subsidies, technical assistance, insurance, etc.

The main novelty of the paper is that the authors empirically investigate the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the association between financial support and economic growth in 34 African emerging economies.