The outcomes for children in public care are generally considered to be poor. This has contributed to a focus on reducing the number of children in care: a goal that is made explicit in the provisions of the current Children and Young Persons Bill. Yet while children in care do less well than most children on a range of measures, such comparisons do not disentangle the extent to which these difficulties pre-dated care and the specific impact of care on child welfare. This article explores the specific impact of care through a review of British research since 1991 that provides data on changes in child welfare over time for children in care. Only 12 studies were identified, indicating a lack of research in this important area. The studies consistently found that children entering care tended to have serious problems but that in general their welfare improved over time. This finding is consistent with the international literature. It has important policy implications. Most significantly it suggests that attempts to reduce the use of public care are misguided, and may place more children at risk of serious harm. Instead, it is argued that England and Wales should move toward a Scandinavian system of public care, in which care is seen as a form of family support and is provided for more rather than fewer children and families.

The "invar effect" in Fe x Ni 12x alloys occurs when the Fe content approaches 65%. At this point, the magnetization falls to zero, and a martensitic structural transformation from a fcc to a bcc lattice occurs. This paper addresses the question: "What happens if the structural transformation is suppressed in an ultrathin alloy film?" We present results to this effect, showing the variation of the magnetization with changing composition in ultrathin films grown on Cu(100). We find a new low-spin, ferromagnetic phase of matter, which is a sensitive function of the atomic volume. [S0031-9007(97)

The magnetic structure of nanoscale alloy films has been probed using the magnetic x-ray linear dichroism in photoelectron spectroscopy. FeNi and CoFe epitaxial films were grown on Cu(001), in situ and using molecular beam epitaxy techniques. The magnetic x-ray linear dichroism measurements were made at the Spectromicroscopy Facility of the Third Generation Advanced Light Source. Because soft x-rays were used to generate photoemission from the 3p core levels, both elemental selectivity and magnetic sensitivity were achieved simultaneously.

Submission of data into clinical trial electronic data capture (EDC) systems currently requires redundant entry of data that already exist in the electronic medical record (EMR). Being able to automatically transfer data from the EMR to the EDC would save many hours of arduous effort, especially for multi-site data-intensive oncology trials. Standardization of the way in which data is stored and retrieved in the medical record and techniques for mining data from the unstructured narrative will provide opportunities for transferring data from EMR to EDC. As different EMRs proliferate, other technology in the form of data mining or middle tier applications are certain to provide assistance in this effort.

Soft x-ray magnetic circular dichroism ͑MCD͒ data were collected at the Co L edges from a series of epitaxial R-Co ͑RϭPr, Nd, Sm, Dy, and Ho͒ intermetallic compound films grown by sputter deposition. The Co orbital-to-spin moment ratios were extracted from the data using the MCD sum rules. An enhanced Co orbital moment, as compared to that of bulk hcp-Co, is seen in all but one of the films. The enhancement is dependent on both the average R-Co bond length and on the R species. These results suggest that a significant transition-metal ͑TM͒ orbital moment is the origin of the TM sublattice contribution to the magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy in