Prediction and practice in multinational strategic planning

The author of this article argues that the models which have been put forward relating to the strategic planning process in multinational companies are inadequate. Nevertheless that the organizational structures and control systems adopted by companies have allowed them to cope to some degree, the advent of the regional headquarters having played a significant role in this process where inter-regional trading is limited.The emergence of global strategies seems to be progressing at a substantial pace.     

Decline and fall: Unemployment among Britain's non-white ethnic communities 1960–1999

The declining employment fortunes of Britain's non-white communities, relative to whites, are explained. To achieve this comparison, some historical official sources of unemployment data are reviewed. The earliest known official time series on unemployment of non-whites dates back to 1960. This historical context is explored, especially the reluctance to make the early data more widely known. An unemployment series for non-white males and females from 1970 to 1999 is derived in two separate ways by splicing together official sources. These series are compared with unemployment of whites to demonstrate a relative increase in unemployment of non-whites.     

Palliative medicine in Britain

In Britain, Palliative Medicine was recognized as a subspecialty of Internal Medicine exactly 20 years after Cicely Saunders founded St Christopher's, at exactly the same time that government was at last recognizing the worth and the needs of general practice. Both had far-reaching effects and implications for patients, doctors, and the future of medicine. For Palliative Medicine it meant units wishing to train specialists going through a rigorous selection process; the development of an equally rigorous training program for the doctors who had already gained a higher qualification before starting Palliative Medicine, demonstrating the need for and benefits of palliative medicine to the sceptics in the profession and, now, continuing to recruit the staff for the steadily increasing number of new services. Today there are more Palliative Medicine consultants/specialists than there are oncologists and neurologists combined, with Hospital Palliative Care Teams in every major hospital and cancer center. With nine Chairs in Palliative Medicine, there is now a drive for research and professional education. The specialty faces major challenges, however, ranging from training to care for patients with non-malignant disease to enabling patients to die in the place of their choice-something that rarely happens today; from defining what is distinctive or unique about palliative medicine to clarifying the respective place of general practice and the specialty. Most would agree that the biggest challenge for the young, thriving specialty is how to share its principles with other doctors wherever they work.     

Living beyond the unanticipated sudden death of a partner: a phenomenological study

This research project explored grief and its impact upon men and women who have experienced the sudden and unanticipated death of his or her partner. It included what grief meant to them, how it was manifested in his or her everyday lives and how his or her partner's death had impacted upon his or her relationship with themselves, with others and the world. A Husserlian phenomenological approach was used to explore the experiences of the ten women and five men whose partner had died up to five years prior to being interviewed. The need for the surviving partner to continue to participate in everyday life placed great strain upon the internal resources of the surviving partner. The surviving partner needed to reinvent him or herself, in an attempt to become independent and regain functionality, whilst dealing with the sadness and loss that they had experienced. The surviving partner discovered that a new life order emerged that included hope, optimism, planning for the future and perhaps the prospect of a new relationship. The death of a partner left the surviving partner with a loss that would always be a part of them, with the memories of his or her relationship being maintained within them that will never be replaced by somebody else. The results of this research project reinforce the need for ongoing education of the community in grief and bereavement issues in order to increase the awareness of the support needs of the bereaved person. The length of time and amount of energy required to incorporate the experience into the survivor's life, is greatly underestimated by the community, and perhaps by some of the health and caring professionals. Colonial and hospital based bereavement support services need to be established and be proactive using outreach programs, actively offering the suddenly bereaved partner and family support and information.     

Batch sequential designs for computer experiments

Computer models simulating a physical process are used in many areas of science. Due to the complex nature of these codes it is often necessary to approximate the code, which is typically done using a Gaussian process. In many situations the number of code runs available to build the Gaussian process approximation is limited. When the initial design is small or the underlying response surface is complicated this can lead to poor approximations of the code output. In order to improve the fit of the model, sequential design strategies must be employed. In this paper we introduce two simple distance based metrics that can be used to augment an initial design in a batch sequential manner. In addition we propose a sequential updating strategy to an orthogonal array based Latin hypercube sample. We show via various real and simulated examples that the distance metrics and the extension of the orthogonal array based Latin hypercubes work well in practice.