The article by Kent Ranson on the experience of the Self Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) Medical Insurance Fund in Gujarat, on pp. 613–621 of this issue of the Bulletin, focuses on catastrophic health care expenditure and thereby underlines the importance of ensuring that community financing schemes effectively protect households from impoverishment. It may well be a hope that such scheme...

A recent literature has fomented considerable interest in multi-dimensional measurement of wellbeing and deprivation. However, increasing the number of dimensions over which various aspects of wellbeing are measured raises concerns regarding the robustness of such measures, the extent to which they relate to individual and societal preferences, and their diminishing ability to discriminate betw...

FastSLAM is a framework for simultaneous localization using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. In FastSLAM, particle filter is used for the mobile robot pose (position and orientation) estimation, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used for the feature location’s estimation. However, FastSLAM degenerates over time. This degeneracy is due to the fact that a particle set estimating the pose...