Solo parenting in New Zealand: Who are the children?

The purpose of this paper is to begin to explore some of the recent trends and attributes of sole parenting in New Zealand, but from a from a child-centered rather than a parentfocused perspective. Reports that the proportions of children living in sole parent families have significantly increased have been the source of much concern, and even ‘moral panic’, over recent quinquennia. Sole parent households made up nine per cent of all households in 1976, and were up to 19 per cent by 1991. Advocates of family values allege that the traditional family unit is breaking down, and that this will have negative consequences for society and for our children. Previous research into the issue of sole parent families has been largely based on census information, producing snapshot-like pictures of the situation at one point in time. This paper begins to offer a more thorough look into some of the trends and processes at work by adopting the benefits of a longitudinal, retrospective survey that traces cohorts of children through their childhood. By following different cohorts through their family experiences during childhood, we can begin to build up a picture about if and how experiences of sole parenting have changed over time, and can begin to speculate about the situation for today’s children

A Relational Derivation of a Functional Program

This article is an introduction to the use of relational calculi in deriving programs. Using the relational caluclus Ruby, we derive a functional program that adds one bit to a binary number to give a new binary number. The resulting program is unsurprising, being the standard $quot;column of half-adders$quot;, but the derivation illustrates a number of points about working with relations rather than with functions

Institutional mechanisms for incorporating the public in the development of sentencing policy

The development of sentencing policy has become problematic over the last thirty years or so in most western democracies. There are a number of different but related aspects to this. There is a perception that the public have steadily diminishing confidence in judges as sentencers. Survey evidence from a number of jurisdictions suggests that the public see judges as out of touch and their sentencing as overly lenient. Over the same period, prison populations in the same jurisdictions have risen steadily. In the US this has sometimes been deliberately engineered by politicians through legislation and the manipulation of sentencing guidelines, but in other jurisdictions, for example in the UK, sentencing appears to have become more punitive because judges, exercising their discretion, have sent more people to prison for longer. Professor Sir Anthony Bottoms (1995) has coined the phrase "populist punitiveness" to characterise this transformation. Law and order is at the top of the political agenda and political parties feel obliged to "talk tough" for electoral purposes. There is, however, another side to this story. Research using techniques such as focus groups and deliberative polling, shows that the pubic are not as punitive as survey data suggests. When people are given a case to deal with, provided with background information about criminal justice and allowed to engage in dialogue with each other, they are less punitive and more constructive and rational in their approach to sentencing (Hutton 2005). Under the conditions of a deliberative poll: accurate information, open debate and expert facilitation, it appears to be possible to stimulate rational debate about penal policy amongst the public. The trouble is it is not possible to reproduce these conditions at a national level. At this level, debate takes place through the mass media, the volume of information available is overwhelming and perplexing and political representatives have to try to win our votes. Indermauer and Hough (2002) have made a number of suggestions as to how we can try to change public attitudes largely through the provision and dissemination of information about sentencing and punishment to improve pubic knowledge and understanding. These are worthy aims, but the issue is not just about changing attitudes or providing better information, it is about the wider problem of the growing disenchantment with democratic politics

The Countdown Problem

We systematically develop a functional program that solves the countdown problem, a numbers game in which the aim is to construct arithmetic expressions satisfying certain constraints. Starting from a formal specification of the problem, we present a simple but inefficient program that solves the problem, and prove that this program is correct. We then use program fusion to calculate an equivalent but more efficient program, which is then further improved by exploiting arithmetic properties

Finite element analysis of a deployable space structure

To assess the dynamic characteristics of a deployable space truss, a finite element model of the Scientific Applications Space Platform (SASP) truss has been formulated. The model incorporates all additional degrees of freedom associated with the pin-jointed members. Comparison of results with SPAR models of the truss show that the joints of the deployable truss significantly affect the vibrational modes of the structure only if the truss is relatively short

A Basic Framework for Evaluating Value Added Tax Expenditures

The label tax expenditure provides a strong indication as to what the term is intended to apply to any use of the tax system designed to provide a financial benefit. As such, a tax expenditure can be rather generally considered to be any special provision in the tax system which allows for a reduction in the amount of tax which would otherwise be due. The key term in that definition is special provision; any reduction resulting from a normal provision would, then, not be considered a tax expenditure. The starting place for any evaluation of tax expenditures is to then determine which the normal provisions are and which the special provisions are for the tax system.Financial Sector, Fiscal Policy, Tax Expenditures