Medical foster care for seriously medically ill children: A growing need

This article identifies and lists the problems of children with complex medical conditions and/or complex home health case needs. Five categories of seriously chronically ill children are identified and programs to meet their needs discussed. The authors believe many of these children could benefit from foster home placements; they discuss one project in which there is collaboration between a pediatric medical center and a social service agency.     

Assessing performance in local government

The author outlines the complexity of trying to measure performance in local government and poses the questions: performance review by whom?—elected members, professional officers, outside bodies and management consultants: for whom?—ratepayers, recipients of services, central government: and for what purpose?—to cut costs, to cut services, to improve efficiency. He then outlines the various techniques used to measure and assess performance in local government.     

What influences a decision? Some results from a highly controlled defence game

A closed game is described in which one person, representing a land force commander, plays against an unknown but pre-determined threat and decides when and where to deploy reserves. The game was designed to investigate the value of various levels of intelligence data. But large changes in data have had little effect on the quality of decisions made; the dominant feature is the variation between players. The possibility that the game itself might add unnecessarily to this variation has been examined. Accepting that large variation between players may be a fact of life, a way of increasing the efficiency of highly controlled games has also been tested. A number of working hypotheses, thought to be independent of the defence context, are offered to future game designers and the question is raised as to why Operational Researchers, who claim to assist decision-taking, know so little about what influences a decision.     

Further mnemonics for the Kalman filter updating formulas

In this paper the author supplements his earlier work on the covariance matrix updating formulas of the Kalman filter by supplying mnemonics for the conditional mean updating formulas.