Protection Act 9 and the Access to Medical Records Act 10 all establish a right of access by individuals to reports relating to themselves provided by medical practitioners, and data about them. Access can only be denied where the information may cause serious harm to the physical or mental health condition of the patients or any other person, or where giving access would disclose information r...

This paper offers some rules of thumb that practicing social workers can use for case studies that aim to construct, albeit not fully and never entirely reliably, models designed to help predict what will happen if they intervene in specific ways to help this particular client, here and now. We call these 'ex ante case-specific causal models'. 'Ex ante' because they are for before-the-fact pred...

We propose two simple probability models to compute the probability of an influenza pandemic. Under a random walk model the probability that all pandemics between times 0 and 300 occur by time 150 is 1/2. Under a Poisson model with mean interarrival time of 30 years the probability that no pandemic occurs during at least 60 years is 14%. These probabilities are much higher than generally percei...