Good Practice in the Education of Children in Residential Care

Correspondence to The Directors, New Horizons (Child Care) Ltd., Unit B, Silkmoor, New Street, Frankwell, Shrewsbury, Shropshire SY3 8LN, UK. E-mail info{at}new-horizonschildcare.co.uk Summary Research shows that the education of children in residentialcare is generally poor, in terms of both process and outcome.This has highlighted the uncertainty over how best to educatethese children and a pessimism over what they can achieve. Drawingupon the findings of an evaluation of a children’s home,this paper argues that children in residential care can havegood educational outcomes. It also shows that it is possibleto identify the processes by which these outcomes can be broughtabout. However, this largely positive assessment is predicatedupon education being defined broadly in respect of ‘process’and ‘outcome’. Moreover, it is important not tounderestimate the formidable challenges inherent in this work.While the multi-agency nature of this work gives rise to oneof the most significant, it has to be recognized that responsibilityfor the education of children in residential care falls primarilyto children’s homes. If children’s homes are tomeet the increasing expectations that are being made of them,national and local government will have to undertake a radicaltransformation of residential childcare, especially in termsof attitudes towards, and resources invested in, this sector.Central to this is the establishment of a qualified and properlysupported workforce.     

Informant accuracy in social-network data V. An experimental attempt to predict actual communication from recall data

This paper seeks to discover whether the known inaccuracy of informant recall about their communication behavior can be accounted for by experimentally varying the time period over which recall takes place. The experiment took advantage of a new communications medium (computer conferencing) which enabled us to monitor automatically all the interactions involving a subset of the computer network. The experiment itself was administered entirely by the computer, which interviewed informants and recorded their responses. Variations in time period failed to account for much of the inaccuracy, which continues, as in previous experiments at an unacceptably high level. One positive finding did emerge: although the informants did not know with whom they communicated, the informants en masse seemed to know certain broad facts about the communication pattern. All other findings were negative. For example, it is impossible to predict the people an informant claimed to communicate with but did not; and it is impossible to predict who the five people are that an informant forgot to mention that she or he had communication with. Thus, despite their presumed good intentions, our findings here confirm what we have learned from six previous experiments: What people say about their communications bears no resemblance to their behavior. This suggests that other forms of data gathering, based on questions which require that informants recall their behavior, may well be suspect.     

Mathematical Methods in Combatting Terrorism

This document is a preliminary report on the role that mathematical and statistical methods might play in the defense against terrorist attacks. In no way does this replace the efforts of law enforcement agencies or intelligence activities. The hope is that mathematical techniques can make their efforts more efficient. The ideas enumerated here utilize the notion of probabilistic risk analysis, which was developed for the purpose of assessing the safety of nuclear reactors, as well as randomization and game theory. More extensive work in these directions is contemplated for the future. The author is planning workshops to evaluate the ideas presented here and to elicit additional methodologies that may prove useful in this endeavor.     

Estimation and use of the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation to model non-normal correlated random variables

During the past .20 years, there has been growing recognition of the consequences of the randomness of crop yields and prices for farm management and agricultural policy decisions. Concomitantly, researchers have recognized the possibility and implications of the non-normality of yields and prices. This study demonstrates a method for estimating multivariate non-normality in crop yields and prices over time, using the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of corn, soya bean and wheat yields. The resulting estimates are used to simulate a multivariate distribution of crop yields.     

Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Wastes Buried in the Ground

The differences between probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) and safety analysis (SA) are discussed, and it is shown that PRA is more suitable than SA for determining the acceptability of a technology. Since a PRA by the fault tree-event tree analysis method used for reactor safety studies does not seem to be practical for buried waste, an alternative approach is suggested using geochemical analogs. This method is illustrated for the cases of high-level and low-level radioactive waste and for chemical carcinogens released in coal burning.     

Fostering diversity: Graduate study in sociology at Northwestern University

Among major graduate sociology programs, Northwestern University halances quantitative and qualitative approaches in its diverse offerings. The program is student-centered and emphasizes the participation of the student in the definition of intellectual and career objectives. The core program is compact and concentrated in the first year so that students can develop their own research interests in subsequent years, with close faculty supervision and involvement. Students who are self-motivated and have well-developed intellectual interests generally thrive at Northwestern University. He currently is working in historical and comparative sociology, and recently has published a book entitledThe Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Quantitative and Qualitative Strategies. His recent publication, “On the Politics of Speaking in the Name of Society,” was his presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems.     

PREVALENCE OF FAMILY THERAPY MODELS: A RESEARCH NOTE

A survey was undertaken to assess the prevalence of family therapy models utilized by a sample of members in the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy. Frequencies and rankings of widely recognized therapeutic frameworks are reported. Brief discussion centers on the highest ranking choice, the notion of eclecticism, and cautious interpretation of the data.     

Temperature schedules for simulated annealing

It is well known that the behaviour of the simulated annealing approach to optimization is crucially dependent on the choice of temperature schedule. In this paper, a dynamic programming approach is used to find the temperature schedule which is optimal for a simple minimization problem. The optimal schedule is compared with certain standard non-optimal choices. These generally perform well provided the first and last temperatures are suitably selected. Indeed, these temperatures can be chosen in such a way as to make the performance of the logarithmic schedule almost optimal. This optimal performance is fairly robust to the choice of the first temperature.The dynamic programming approach cannot be applied directly to problems of more realistic size, such as those arising in statistical image reconstruction. Nevertheless, some simulation experiments suggest that the general conclusions from the simple minimization problem do carry over to larger problems. Various families of schedules can be made to perform well with suitable choice of the first and last temperatures, and the logarithmic schedule combines good performance with reasonable robustness to the choice of the first temperature.     

Une Dialectique Des Migrations : Acculturation Et Transition Démographique

It is argued that two types of migration have tended to follow each other. One is a ‘colonizing’ migration corresponding to a technical, military and economic advantage of one group over another, associated at first with a demographic surge in the first group; the other is a ‘social-capillarity’ migration occurring when the first, ‘colonizing’ group has completed its demographic transition and the second has barely started. Two hypotheses concerning the outcome of this process are presented. The first — optimistic — hypothesis of economic advance in the second group, implies a return to demographic equilibrium. The second hypothesis is a catastrophic one, the implications of which are hard to predict. Finally, the need for a specific co-operative effort is underlined.