Listening to care-givers: The community,work and family interface

Vic Riley talks about families challenging and contesting many assumptions about their role in long-term care-giving. His reflections invite the reader to revisit narrow and restrictive images of people with learning difficulties as dependent upon their parents for the provision of care and reveal a powerful picture of changes in the organisation of family life that have taken place in one small-town community. The role of the community in facilitating such transitions cannot be underestimated in the lives of care-givers and the people with learning difficulties they support. This account provides a compelling picture of changing aspirations amongst families involved in care-giving and the reader is invited not just to read it, but to make sure it amplifies their personal understandings and assumptions.     

Obtaining Informationally Consistent Decisions When Computing Costs with Limited Information

We demonstrate the need to view in a dynamic context any decision based on limited information. We focus on the use of product costs in selecting the product portfolio. We show how ex post data regarding the actual costs from implementing the decision leads to updating of product cost estimates and potentially trigger a revision of the initial decision. We model this updating process as a discrete dynamical system (DDS). We define a decision as informationally consistent if it is a fixed‐point solution to the DDS. We employ numerical analysis to characterize the existence and properties of such solutions. We find that fixed points are rare, but that simple heuristics find them often and quickly. We demonstrate the usefulness and robustness of our methodology by examining the interaction of limited information with multiple decision rules (heuristics) and problem features (size of product portfolio, profitability of product markets). We discuss implications for research on cost systems.     

Nonparametric bootstrap of sample means of positive-definite matrices with an application to diffusion-tensor-imaging data analysis

This paper presents nonparametric two-sample bootstrap tests for means of random symmetric positive-definite (SPD) matrices according to two different metrics: the Frobenius (or Euclidean) metric, inherited from the embedding of the set of SPD metrics in the Euclidean set of symmetric matrices, and the canonical metric, which is defined without an embedding and suggests an intrinsic analysis. A fast algorithm is used to compute the bootstrap intrinsic means in the case of the latter. The methods are illustrated in a simulation study and applied to a two-group comparison of means of diffusion tensors (DTs) obtained from a single voxel of registered DT images of children in a dyslexia study.     

Power in and around nonprofit boards: A neglected dimension of governance

In this article we propose five patterns of board governance based on the distribution of power in and around boards of nonprofit organizations. The typology proposed grew out of our findings in in-depth case studies in which the dispersion of power became the critical variable for making sense of the patterns of governance observed. These governance patterns were then incorporated into a survey of boards in the voluntary sector. We present the results of this latter phase of the research by focusing on the associations between the five patterns and the background characteristics of board members, organizational and environmental variables, and board and organizational effectiveness. The results of the study suggest that power is an important while largely neglected aspect of board governance in the not-for-profit sector.     

Class Inequalities in Education and Health: A Comparative Perspective

Class inequalities in education and health in several advanced capitalist countries are examined, distinguishing between three types of inequality: access to service, use of service and outcome. The evidence provided shows that the scope and complexity of class inequality increase as one moves from consideration of access to use and then to outcome. Hence the reduction of inequality of outcome is the most difficult. The evidence shows that inequality in all three areas is marked in all countries and it also suggests that reduction of inequalities over the years has been, at best, only slight. Continuation of present policies is unlikely to change the situation substantially. More egalitarian policies, however, appear unlikely to be pursued within the power constraints of advanced capitalist societies.     

Nonprofits accommodate the information demands of public and private funders

In the absence of performance reporting standards, nonprofit organizations face difficulties in accommodating the varied and changing informational requirements of public and private funders. Clients, volunteers, management, and staff also use and demand performance information. The authors studied four human services organizations in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and their performance reporting across the management cycle, from planning through implementation and monitoring, to external reporting and auditing. The authors analyzed documentary evidence and conducted interviews with users of performance information. they conclude this article by proposing a set of general standards nonprofit organizations can use in performance reporting.     

Do Intentional Efforts to Improve Boards Really Work? The Views of Nonprofit CEOs

Commentators on the effectiveness of nonprofit boards of directors usually find them wanting in a number of ways and urge that they reform themselves. A study to ascertain how many boards actually accept this advice and intentionally attempt to change the way they operate also examines what changes boards attempt to make, what provokes their efforts, and what outcomes result.     

Security systems and renewal processes

An interesting feature of successive inter-event times in a Poisson renewal process, when observed through a superimposed (possibly random) grid, can be interpreted as an extended form of the ‘inspection paradox’. Probabilistic measures are determined and an estimation and testing procedure is outlined which could be used to examine possible departure from randomness (Poisson form). The problem arose from study of security systems and the results have important applications in that field.