MOST readers will, by now, have made themselves familiar with the Minister of Health's Plans for developing the health and welfare services over the next ten years as outlined in the Blue Book* presented to Parliament. Mr. Powell himself spoke about it at length at the Association of Municipal Corporations' Conference in Morecambe on April 13th. No doubt there will be critic'" especially of the...

The bin packing problem is a well-studied combinatorial NP-hard problem. In the bin packing problem, a sequence of items are packed into bins, the packed items in a bin do not overlap. The objective is to minimize the number of used bins. The size of each item should be no more than the size of a bin. (Zhang, 2011) The algorithms can be divided into two categories: offline algorithm, requiring ...

The Y2K threat provides an excellent case study of organizational perception of and adjustment to risks. Utilizing qualitative data collected from focus group interviews with thirteen health care organizations, this paper examines hospital risk perception and preparedness for the Y2K computer problem. The potential for a date-specific failure of technological systems required hospitals to ident...

There has been a lot of noise about the millennium bug, but little hard data. Many organisations have spent a fortune on the problem but refuse to share their findings. Governments tell their citizens not to panic while making panicky contingency plans in private. Few of the ‘experts’ in the field are willing to predict the outcome. Here I report the results of an examination of the systems use...