Dress and age: the intersection of life and work

In this article I outline the influences, intellectual and personal, that have led me to the subject of dress and age, a topic that I have explored with great enjoyment over the last decade. These have their roots in earlier academic and personal interests, and one of the aims of the article is to show how these different spheres of life and work intersect. I discuss this under three broad headings: intellectual and academic influences; longterm personal interests, particularly in history and the aesthetics of dress; and the impact of becoming an older woman

Consumer goods guarantees in the DCFR

This article examines the provisions on consumer guarantees as contained in the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR). It will be argued that while some of these provisions may seem sensible at first sight, there appears to be no clear justification for their adoption. Drawing on the wider literature on the function of consumer guarantees, it will be suggested that the DCFR provisions have failed to take into account relevant empirical findings and that some of these provisions cannot be supported on the basis of this literature. The limited influence of the DCFR provisions on consumer guarantees on the Acquis review is noted

CESL, cross-border transactions and domestic law : why a dual approach could work (although CESL might not)

This article explores the case for legislation that focuses specifically on cross-border consumer transactions in the internal market. It argues that the existence of two parallel regimes (domestic and cross-border) is a positive step because the cross-border environment gives rise to different problems than the domestic context. It develops a notion of 'cross-border' that is different from that in Common European Sales Law (CESL), before considering the arguments for and against this approach. The positive view of a regulation focusing on cross-border transactions is combined with the argument in that the substantive provisions of CESL would need to be redrafted so as to fully address all the specific issues that arise in the cross-border context. Moreover, a cross-border CESL should be automatically applicable, i.e., not optional. It concludes that the step taken towards a cross-border regulation is a positive one, but that further work on the substance of a CESL is needed.

Community Pharmacy: an untapped patient data resource

As community pharmacy services become more patient centred they will be increasingly reliant on access to good quality patient information. This paper describes how the information which is currently available in community pharmacies can be used to enhance service delivery and patient care. With integration of community pharmacy and medical practice records on the horizon the opportunities this will provide are also considered. The community pharmacy held patient medication record, which is the central information repository, has been used to identify non-adherence, to prompt the pharmacist to clinically review prescriptions, identify patients for additional services and to identify those patients at greater risk of adverse drug events. Whilst active recording of patient consultations for treatment over the counter may improve the quality of consultations and information held, the lost benefits of anonymity afforded by community pharmacies needs to be considered. Recording of pharmacy staff activities enables workload to be monitored, remuneration to be justified and critical incidents to be learned from but is not routine practice. Centralisation of records between community pharmacies enables practices to be compared and consistent problems to be identified. By integrating pharmacy and medical practice records, patient behaviour with respect to medicines can be more closely monitored and should prevent duplication of effort. When using patient information stored in a community pharmacy it is however important to consider the reason why information was recorded in the first instance and whether it is appropriate to use it for a different purpose without additional patient consent. Community pharmacies currently have access to large amounts of information which if stored and used appropriately can significantly enhance the quality of provided services and patient care. Integrating records increases opportunities to enhance patient care yet further. Whilst community pharmacies have significant amounts of information available to them this is frequently untapped

Locality-preserving allocations Problems and coloured Bin Packing

We study the following problem, introduced by Chung et al. in 2006. We are given, online or offline, a set of coloured items of different sizes, and wish to pack them into bins of equal size so that we use few bins in total (at most $\alpha$ times optimal), and that the items of each colour span few bins (at most $\beta$ times optimal). We call such allocations $(\alpha, \beta)$-approximate. As usual in bin packing problems, we allow additive constants and consider $(\alpha,\beta)$ as the asymptotic performance ratios. We prove that for \eps>0, if we desire small $\alpha$, no scheme can beat (1+\eps, \Omega(1/\eps))-approximate allocations and similarly as we desire small $\beta$, no scheme can beat (1.69103, 1+\eps)-approximate allocations. We give offline schemes that come very close to achieving these lower bounds. For the online case, we prove that no scheme can even achieve $(O(1),O(1))$-approximate allocations. However, a small restriction on item sizes permits a simple online scheme that computes (2+\eps, 1.7)-approximate allocations