Frank Russell Company and The Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Co., Ltd., developed an asset/liability management model using multistage stochastic programming. It determines an optimal investment strategy that incorporates a multiperiod approach and enables the decision makers to define risks in tangible operational terms. It also handles the complex regulations imposed by Japanese insurance laws and practices. The most important goal is to produce a high-income return to pay annual interest on savings-type insurance policies without sacrificing the goal of maximizing the long-term wealth of the firm. During the first two years of use, fiscal 1991 and 1992, the investment strategy devised by the model yielded extra income of 42 basis points (¥8.7 billion or US$79 million).

Rural populations as small communities requiring sensitivity to rural culture have received increased attention with professional psychology's commitment to underexamined aspects of multiculturalism including geographic location. This article presents multidisciplinary approaches to service provision and training as natural models in rural and frontier communities and addresses the need for psychologists to move out of a monoculture model of training only in psychology to better serve rural consumers of mental health services. Overviews of rural health curriculum and training models as well as new health delivery options developing in nonmetropolitan areas such as prescriptive authority for psychology are provided. Suggestions are offered for state and territorial psychological associations regarding the needs of rural psychologists.

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This paper explores the impact of adjustments to the inputs on total returns, terminal wealth, and portfolio turnover in an unconstrained monthly mean-variance (MV) asset allocation over time. It is well known that MV allocations are very sensitive to small forecast errors in the means and covariances. This sensitivity is especially pronounced for errors in means. One way to control this sensitivity to forecast errors is to use Stein estimation. We examined three naive applications of Stein estimation for six individual country stock indexes, five country bond indexes and five cash indexes. This study has two major conclusions. First, any of the suggested adjustments to inputs dominate the results of an unadjusted-input MV optimization. Adjusted-input portfolios have higher mean return, less variance and greater terminal wealth than unadjusted-input portfolios. Second, these improvements become even greater with transaction costs.mean-variance optimization, stein estimation, risk tolerance, optimal portfolio, portfolio performance

The American Psychological Association's (APA) public education campaign, 'Talk to Someone Who Can Help," was professionally researched and developed to educate the public about the availability and value of psychological services. What about its application to the 12 million college students poised to become the future consumers of our health and mental health services? By sampling this population, the authors sought to extend the application of APA's public opinion research to college communities and their providers of psychological services. Results and comparisons are presented in this article, along with implications for educating and serving this specialized client population. ANDREW L. TURNER received his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1981. He is the director of the University Counseling Center at the University of Wyoming. He is also a Diplomate in Counseling Psychology (ABPP) and he teaches and holds faculty appointments in the Psychology Department and the School of Human Medicine at the University of Wyoming. KATHLEEN F. QUINN received her EdD from the University of Northern Colorado in 1998. She completed her internship at the University Counseling Center at the University of Wyoming. She is currently employed as a school psychologist in Cheyenne, WY, and is the owner of Ed/Psych Associates, a private consulting firm in Cheyenne.