"The red dress or the blue?" How do staff perceive that they support decision making for people with dementia living in residential aged care facilities?

Respect for a person's right to make choices and participate in decision making is generally seen as central to quality of life and well-being. When a person moves into a residential aged care facility (RACF), however, decision making becomes more complicated, particularly if the person has a diagnosis of dementia. Little is known about how staff in RACFs perceive that they support decision making for people with dementia within their everyday practice, and this article seeks to address this knowledge gap. The article reports on the findings of a qualitative study conducted in the states of Victoria and Queensland, Australia with 80 direct care staff members. Findings revealed that the participants utilized a number of strategies in their intention to support decision making for people with dementia, and had an overall perception that "a little effort goes a long way."

Simultaneous underwater visibility assessment, enhancement and improved stereo

Vision-based underwater navigation and obstacle avoidance demands robust computer vision algorithms, particularly for operation in turbid water with reduced visibility. This paper describes a novel method for the simultaneous underwater image quality assessment, visibility enhancement and disparity computation to increase stereo range resolution under dynamic, natural lighting and turbid conditions. The technique estimates the visibility properties from a sparse 3D map of the original degraded image using a physical underwater light attenuation model. Firstly, an iterated distance-adaptive image contrast enhancement enables a dense disparity computation and visibility estimation. Secondly, using a light attenuation model for ocean water, a color corrected stereo underwater image is obtained along with a visibility distance estimate. Experimental results in shallow, naturally lit, high-turbidity coastal environments show the proposed technique improves range estimation over the original images as well as image quality and color for habitat classification. Furthermore, the recursiveness and robustness of the technique allows implementation onboard an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for improving navigation and obstacle avoidance performance.

Blue future: Maude Barlow, water rights, investor clauses, and trade deals

Maude Barlow is the chairperson of the Council of Canadians, and the founder of the Blue Planet Project. She is a recipient of Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, and a Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship. As well as being a noted human rights and trade activist, Barlow is the author of a number of books on water rights — including Blue Gold, Blue Covenant, and Blue Future. She has been particularly vocal on the impact of trade and investment agreements upon water rights. Barlow has been critical of the push to include investor-state dispute settlement clauses in trade agreements — such as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP). She has also been concerned by the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) leaked by WikiLeaks.

Beyond blue gene: Intellectual property and bioinformatics

This article considers the challenges posed to intellectual property law by the emerging field of bioinformatics. It examines the intellectual property strategies of established biotechnology companies, such as Celera Genomics, and information technology firms entering into the marketplace, such as IBM. First this paper argues that copyright law is not irrelevant to biotechnology, as some commentators would suggest. It claims that the use of copyright law and contract law is fundamental to the protection of biomedical and genomic databases. Second this article questions whether biotechnology companies are exclusively interested in patenting genes and genetics sequences. Recent evidence suggests that biotechnology companies and IT firms are patenting bioinformatics software and Internet business methods, as well as underlying instrumentation such as microarrays and genechips. Finally, this paper evaluates what impact the privatisation of bioinformatics will have on public research and scientific communication. It raises important questions about integration, interoperability, and the risks of monopoly. It finally considers whether open source software such as the Ensembl Project and peer to peer technology like DSAS will be able to counter this trend of privatisation.

Quality in group service encounters: A theoretical exploration of the concept of a simultaneous multi‐customer co‐creation process

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of service quality for settings where several customers are involved in the joint creation and consumption of a service. The approach is to provide first insights into the implications of a simultaneous multi‐customer integration on service quality. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper undertakes a thorough review of the relevant literature before developing a conceptual model regarding service co‐creation and service quality in customer groups. Findings Group service encounters must be set up carefully to account for the dynamics (social activity) in a customer group and skill set and capabilities (task activity) of each of the individual participants involved in a group service experience. Research limitations/implications Future research should undertake empirical studies to validate and/or modify the suggested model presented in this contribution. Practical implications Managers of service firms should be made aware of the implications and the underlying factors of group services in order to create and manage a group experience successfully. Particular attention should be given to those factors that can be influenced by service providers in managing encounters with multiple customers. Originality/value This article introduces a new conceptual approach for service encounters with groups of customers in a proposed service quality model. In particular, the paper focuses on integrating the impact of customers' co‐creation activities on service quality in a multiple‐actor model.