An Insight Approach to Marital Therapy

The trend in marital therapy has traditionally been away from insight approaches and toward action-oriented methods, such as manipulating the couple system or teaching partners to negotiate. This paper presents a form of insight therapy based upon systems theory and suggests that this orientation has much to offer. The first part describes general categories of relationship problems with which a couples therapist must deal. The second part takes each of these problem types and suggests how a therapist with the present systems-interpretive approach might proceed. The goal is a shared understanding by partners of their marital system.     

An empirical excursion into the quicksand of vehicle replacement

The rapid increase of physical distribution costs relative to other categories has resulted in a renewed interest in the analysis of transport operations. One of the most common problems is that of vehicle replacement, and in this paper we present an analysis of real data. The methodology is developed paying due regard to the role of quantitative analysis in the decision-making process, and the sort of data which is readily available in most transport departments. A traditional discounted cost model is presented and this is followed by a productivity-based analysis, which is shown to be an improvement. The latter generates optimal solutions and is flexible enough to carry out considerable sensitivity analysis.     

Record values and the geometric distribution

Suppose {X_n, n≥1} is a sequence of independent and identically distributed discrete random variables having the common distribution function F(x). The exact distribution of the n-th record value is given under the assumption that F(x) has the geometric distribution. Various properties of the record values and some new characterizations of the geometric distribution are presented.