Search

The paper is concerned with a method of organizing and analyzing information relating to human stocks and flows. The kind of statistical reporting system envisaged is of a traditional kind, but extended so as to record year-to-year changes of state. Life is divided into a number of sequences, each with its own set of characteristic classifications, to avoid an excessive proliferation of categories and so enable many analyses to be made with the kind of statistics already available in a number of countries. The need, for some analytical purposes, to combine classifications from different sequences is fully recognized; and this need indicates a direction in which statistical reporting systems should move in the future. The main analytical tool is a set of linear difference equations which, under suitable conditions, can be interpreted either in terms of an input-output system, as in economics, or in terms of an absorbing Markov chain, as in probability theory. A simple regression model is used to link characteristic classifications. About half the paper is taken up with numerical examples, mainly connected with the British educational system as it was in the mid-1960's. An application is also given to movements into, through and out of a psychiatric service system in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the status of Science education of the Advance Division School and the Secondary School of Scotland as of 1939. The Advance Division School pupils were non fee-paying and left school for employment at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Secondary school students may or may not have paid fees and left school at the age of seventeen or eighteen. The differences in staffing, the class syllabus, and the use of text books were discussed. Biology was added to curriculum at a later date than other sciences such as chemistry. The teaching of Science in Scotland is not static, but always finding ways to progress.