‘It's their word against mine’: young people's attitudes to the police complaints procedure in Northern Ireland

One of the central aims of the police reform process in Northern Ireland has been to increase the legitimacy of the policing structures and police officers amongst those who are served and policed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). To meet this aim, structures have been created to ensure that the PSNI is accountable to all sections of the community for its strategy and performance, and in monitoring the attitudes and behaviour of its officers. To that end, the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), the Northern Ireland Policing Board and 26 District Policing Partnerships have been created. This paper aims to break ground by looking in some detail at young people's attitudes to and experiences of the workings of one of those new bodies, the Police Ombudsman, and to explore issues related to young people's willingness to engage with the PONI.     

Split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

We show how the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm can sometimes be speeded up by “splitting” the Hamiltonian in a way that allows much of the movement around the state space to be done at low computational cost. One context where this is possible is when the log density of the distribution of interest (the potential energy function) can be written as the log of a Gaussian density, which is a quadratic function, plus a slowly-varying function. Hamiltonian dynamics for quadratic energy functions can be analytically solved. With the splitting technique, only the slowly-varying part of the energy needs to be handled numerically, and this can be done with a larger stepsize (and hence fewer steps) than would be necessary with a direct simulation of the dynamics. Another context where splitting helps is when the most important terms of the potential energy function and its gradient can be evaluated quickly, with only a slowly-varying part requiring costly computations. With splitting, the quick portion can be handled with a small stepsize, while the costly portion uses a larger stepsize. We show that both of these splitting approaches can reduce the computational cost of sampling from the posterior distribution for a logistic regression model, using either a Gaussian approximation centered on the posterior mode, or a Hamiltonian split into a term that depends on only a small number of critical cases, and another term that involves the larger number of cases whose influence on the posterior distribution is small.     

Information systems and managerial decision making

The role of an information system is to support managerial decision processes. Some of these processes can be completely specified in advance and, as long as the specification remains acceptable to management, resolution can be done automatically, within the framework of the information system. However, in other cases, managers are involved in all stages of the decision process, which cannot be completely specified in advance. The task of the information system in these cases is to provide information to the managers engaged in making the decisions. This paper considers these problems from the point of view of the information system designer and makes recommendations about design and implementation.     

Analysis of a complex decision situation — The Simpsons/Simpsons-Sears merger proposal

Many of the decision situations that arise in modern organizations are very complex. Conventional methods of decision analysis have only limited applicability in these situations. This paper describes a method that can be used as an aid to decision making in such situations where interactions between the parties involved are an important factor. The method is illustrated by reference to a recent situation in which there was competition between a number of participants with regard to the future of the firm of Simpsons Ltd of Toronto. The analysis described illustrates the application of a step-by-step procedure that can be used by participants in the analysis of such situations.     

Some initial specifications for a strategic information system

Much of the discussion and published literature on information systems to date has been about systems concerned with the internal administration and operations of an organization. Considerably less attention has been given to the information requirements of the more strategic managerial activities of planning and policy making, in which the future directions and objectives of the organization are decided. Internal information systems in many organizations have now grown to maturity. At the same time, managers have become aware of the need for an additional component of the overall information system to support their more strategic activities. This paper considers the broad characteristics of a strategic component of an organizational information system and derives some initial specifications from which a more comprehensive design can be developed.     

Parental involvement in reading: the influence of socio-economic status and supportive home visiting

SUMMARY: This paper describes the deployment of the technique for non-professional tutoring of reading known as ‘paired reading’ on a large scale in the Kirklees Local Education Authority. From the very large amount of data generated in multi-site field trials, particular attention is focused on the relationship between supportive home visiting (if any), an index of the socioeconomic disadvantage of the catchment area of each participating school, and outcomes in term of gains on norm-referenced tests of reading. Some surprising conclusions emerge.     

An LP model for assessing congeneration strategies

A linear programming model is described which is designed to assist in the assessment of optimum operational strategies for industrial plants with cogeneration facilities. A concise format is provided for linking together basic elements such as boilers, valves, turbines and processes with steam and electricity demands with steam, fuel and electricity balance equations. The model should prove particularly useful for assessment when electricity tariffs have time-of-use energy or demand charges or when tariffs have conditions which require consideration of strategies over an extended period. The model has been applied to a paper mill which utilises pass-out turbines for cogeneration of electricity and process steam. Results indicate that savings in fuel costs of the order of 400,000 dollars per year could be obtained by implementing optimal strategies for operating the present turbines. Savings of the order of one million dollars per year could be obtained by converting the turbines to give high pressure pass-out steam and then operating optimally.