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The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into nurses' understandings of what constitutes suitable footwear for older people in care homes.

An exploratory descriptive qualitative survey was carried out of 20 registered nurses employed in six Scottish care homes for older people. Data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire that included five open-ended questions. Content analysis was used to theme footwear perceptions.

Participants had several views about what encompasses safe footwear; some were erroneous. The link between inappropriate footwear and falls was recognised by 80 per cent of respondents, but some were unclear about the features that effect or inhibit safety. No UK or international standardised guidelines were identified that advise nurses about appropriate footwear for older people.

It is unknown whether respondents represent the nurse population because findings are restricted by a small sample size. Nonetheless, the group showed variable understanding of what constitutes safe footwear for older people and links with fall prevention. Improved nurse-education about what comprises safe footwear and the links with falls prevention in older people is required. Structured guidelines to direct nurse educators about what to teach student nurses about appropriate footwear for older people may work towards reducing falls.

No guidelines to direct nurses about appropriate footwear for older people in care homes have been written. Key points have been developed.

This paper aims to investigate the role of body size on female consumers’ fashion brand image perceptions.

An experimental design was used whereby the model’s body size in a fictitious advert was digitally manipulated to create four advertising images with an underweight, slender, average and obese model size (all other factors remained constant). Through an intercept survey of German female consumers, respondents were exposed to one of the four images, and asked questions pertaining to their brand image perceptions.

The findings suggest that for older consumers, model body size has no significant impact on their brand image perceptions. For younger consumers (18-25), there was some limited evidence of how a positive brand image affects when a slender model size is used, but there was no evidence that underweight models have a more positive impact on brand image.

The sample was restricted to a single German city (Berlin) with a relatively small sample and, therefore, the generalisability of the findings may be limited. It would be interesting to repeat the study in different cultural contexts. Whilst this paper focussed on potential differences in perceptions between different age groups, future studies could consider other factors, such as fashion involvement or consumer personality on the impact of body size on brand image.

Given the potential link to low self-esteem and eating disorders, it is recommended that fashion brands cease using clinically underweight models. Brands targeting older consumers may benefit from using larger models.

There is limited research to date that looks at the role of body size on brand image, and this is one of the first studies to consider all non-product-related brand image associations, and how perceptions may differ between different age groups, with many previous studies relying on student samples.

Age has not received much attention in the literature on social movements, but it is an important part of human identity. Like other people, activists engage in age-related “identity work.” By studying age dynamics – cooperation and conflict between and among age-based groups – we can learn about collective identity and conflict. This chapter examines age-related discourse and interaction in the feminist movement in Argentina. As the movement has grown and gained momentum over the past 15 years, younger women have joined movement pioneers. Drawing on data from interviews with activists and participant observation in Buenos Aires during three periods (1998, 2001–2003, and 2011), the study examines narratives as an aspect of age-related identity work. While discourse about distance and conflict were common in the earlier periods, when the movement’s pioneers dominated, narratives about cooperation and respect surfaced in the later period as young women shared the movement with older ones. In movements with multiple age-based cohorts, age gains salience with interaction.

InTEXT Systems delivers software products and technologies for content‐based routing, retrieval, development and presentation for mission‐critical workgroup, Internet and World Wide Web applications. The organisation is backed by over 12 years of focused research and development in the areas of intelligent analysis, routing and retrieval. The tools described in this article are already in use by companies such as American Express, Wollongong, Pacific Bell, State of California and Uniplex software. A complete object‐oriented toolset covering all areas of online text management brings significant benefits to developers, through greatly reduced programming effort, and to end‐users, with intelligent interfaces helping them to cut through the information overload.

Predictions can be fun to make, and the temptation must be overwhelming if you're an “expert” in a field as dynamic as personal computing. For that matter, market analysts are paid to make projections. Thus, the PC field doesn't lack for insights into the future. If you base your plans on those predictions and projections rather than your understanding and a touch of caution, you can be led seriously astray. As with most other projections for the marketplace, PC predictions range from superb to awful. Worse yet, some supposedly objective analysts become advocates—coloring their projections with their hopes. To wrap up this year‐long look back at a decade of personal computing, the author notes a few of the failed predictions and assertions that litter the computer press. Hindsight is always easier than foresight, and some of these predictions should have been correct. Meanwhile, it's worth noting a few general areas where projections have gone wrong.

Companies' ability to build sustainable supply chains and achieve strategic sustainability objectives largely depends on their supply network characteristics and the nature of the relationships with strategic suppliers. This poses the question of how purchasing departments can help to translate this sustainability commitment into performance benefits. The authors focus the attention on buyer-supplier information sharing practices and study how the availability of information interplays with the purchasing realized absorptive capacity (PRAC) to positively impact performance (operational, environmental and social).

The study collected data from 305 procurement executives in four European countries and tested the hypotheses empirically using structural equation modeling. Mediation analysis is used to test the effect of PRAC on the relationship between buyer-supplier information sharing and performance.

The results show that increasing buyer-supplier information sharing is sufficient to obtain a positive impact on operational performance. To improve purchasing sustainability performance, companies need to develop their PRAC to adequately transform and exploit external information and identify opportunities in the environmental and social areas. Thanks to these purchasing capabilities, organizations can overcome potential trade-offs between different performance dimensions.

In the context of collaborative buyer-supplier relationships, this study is one of the first to propose purchasing knowledge management capabilities (i.e. PRAC) as a key factor to improve multiple performance dimensions. Additionally, it captures different sustainability aspects, concluding that organizations can improve purchasing operational, environmental and social performances by implementing appropriate information sharing mechanisms with suppliers and developing their PRAC.

This paper analyses the effect of a particular Active Labour Market Policy, the hiring incentives, on firms hiring policies. The effects of a programme on firms' behaviour have in fact rarely been evaluated.

The analysis is based on micro-data drawn from Rilevazione su Imprese Lavoro (RIL), conducted by Inapp in 2010, 2015 and 2018 on a representative sample of limited liability and partnership firms. The authors apply a policy evaluation framework to investigate the impact of the use of incentives in the short run. The authors infer the counterfactual policy scenario thanks to a survey question that asks about firms' behaviour in the absence of the incentives. The authors also control for firms' unobserved heterogeneity, including firm's fixed effects, and endogeneity issues, estimating a differences-in-differences model that exploit the longitudinal component of the RIL survey.

The authors find that the use of at least one incentive scheme in 2017 is associated with an increase in the share of newly hired of about 0.07 percentage point in the short run. Moreover, hiring incentives have a small positive relationship with the share of both young workers and temporary contracts. Finally, these results are robust to endogeneity issues.

The analysis provides an updated evaluation of the effectiveness of hiring incentives in Italy by focusing on firms' behaviour rather than on the evolution of individual employment. It identifies the impact by using a rich set of econometric methods as well as counterfactual analysis.

Describes the scheduling problem and JOB, then presents an extensive job shop scheduling session in which a variety of scheduling problems are encountered and overcome using JOB′s interactive scheduling option. The example shows how work orders may be created and scheduled, and the schedules evaluated, all within the framework of the JOB system. By working with typical job shop scheduling opportunities in a realistic though simulated environment, users will better understand the problems job shop schedulers actually face and will be better able to solve them.

An important aspect of the impact of the economic crisis is how pay in the public sector responds – in the face not only of the evolution of pay in the private sector but also extreme pressure on public spending (of which pay is a very large proportion) as fiscal deficits soar. What are the effects on the income distribution of cutting public sector pay rates or alternative strategies to reduce the public sector pay bill? This chapter investigates these issues using data and a tax–benefit simulation model for Ireland, a country which faces a particularly severe fiscal crisis and where innovative measures have already been implemented to claw back pay from public sector workers in the guise of a ‘pension levy’, followed by a significant cut in nominal pay rates. The SWITCH (Simulating Welfare and Income Tax Changes) tax–benefit model first allows the distributional effects of these measures, which achieved a substantial reduction in the net public sector pay bill, to be teased out. The overall impact on the income distribution is assessed. This provides empirical evidence relevant to policy choices in relation to a key aspect of household income over which governments have direct influence, while at the same time illustrating methodologically how a tax–benefit model can serve as the base for such investigation.

COMPUTER INTERFACES AND THE ISSUE OF CONNECTIVITY. Of near mythic proportions, the interaction of humans with computers has always been treated with awe, mystery, and confusion, even in these days of desktop access to Crays. People process information quite differently from machines and the differences are both startling and complementary. Computers make up for the obvious human weaknesses of retaining, storing, and recalling large quantities of information accurately. Humans on the other hand process massive amounts of diverse data rapidly, thanks to a variety of sensitive input devices that have not found their counterparts on a computer. The interface between computers and humans, for decades, has favored machine processing with commands encoded in abbreviated scripts and abrupt codes. Only recently has there been a move to use more humane means of access to automation with the introduction of symbols in the form of icons and objects displayed on a conventional CRT. How has this change in machine interfacing affected the overall implementation of computer technology? Where is this iconographic explosion leading end users?