Rand may refer to a number of places, people, organizations, and acronyms.

Places named Rand include:

• Rand, New South Wales, a small town in Australia
• Rand, Lincolnshire, a small village in Lincolnshire, England
• Rand, Colorado, a small unincorporated community in Jackson County, Colorado, U.S.
• Rand Mining District, an area in Kern County, California, containing, inter alia, the town of Randsburg
• The Witwatersrand, a ridge that runs through Gauteng, South Africa, which includes the East Rand and West Rand

People named Rand include:

• Ayn Rand, American writer and philosopher
• Austin L. Rand, Canadian zoologist
• Mary Rand, British athlete and Olympic champion
• Paul Rand, American graphic designer
• Ivan Rand, Supreme Court of Canada justice who introduced the Rand formula
• William H. Rand, founder of Rand McNally
• Sally Rand, actor and dancer
• Shuli and Michal Batsheva Rand, husband and wife, Israeli actors
• Rand Butcher, Intensive Care Nurse, Australia

Fictional characters named Rand include:

• Rand al'Thor, the main character in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy fiction series
• Janice Rand, a character in the Star Trek universe
• Atton Rand, a character from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II
• a character from the fictional Third Robotech War
• Daniel Rand, a Marvel Comics character known as Iron Fist

Companies and organizations named Rand include:

• The RAND Corporation, an American think-tank
• Remington Rand, an American computer firm and general manufacturer
• Sperry Rand, an American equipment and electronics company
• Ingersoll-Rand, a diversified American industrial firm
• Rand McNally, an American map publisher and printer

RAND or Rand is also used as an abbreviation or acronym for:

• In computer science, any of a number of pseudorandom number generator functions
• Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing, a type of licensing used during a standardisation process

Rand may also refer to the following:

• South African rand, the national currency of South Africa (abbreviation: R, ISO-4217-Code: ZAR)
• Rand index, a technique for measuring the similarity between two data clusters
• Rand formula, a formula in Canadian labor law
• Rand, Slang for courtesan

See also

• James Randi, American stage magician and skeptic
• Krugerrand, a South African gold coin
• Randlord, a term used to denote the entrepreneurs who controlled the diamond and gold mining industries in South Africa in its pioneer phase

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The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations. It is known for rigorous, often-quantitative, and non-partisan analysis and policy recommendations.^{[1] [2] [3]}

RAND has approximately 1,600 employees and four principal locations: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Washington, D.C. (currently located in Arlington, Virginia); Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (adjacent to Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh); and Cambridge, United Kingdom (RAND Europe). RAND has several smaller offices in the United States as well, including the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha.

RAND is also the home to the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School, one of the original graduate programs in public policy and the first to offer a Ph.D. The program is unique in that students work alongside RAND analysts on real-world problems. The campus is at RAND's Santa Monica research facility. The Pardee RAND School is the world's largest Ph.D.-granting program in policy analysis.

According to RAND's own account of its history, the corporation's acronymic name is a contraction of the phrase "research and development."[1]

Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the United States Army Air Forces as Project RAND, under contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in May 1946 they released the Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship. In May 1948, Project RAND was separated from Douglas and became an independent non-profit organization. Initial capital for the split came from the Ford Foundation.

Mission statement

RAND was incorporated as a non-profit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its self-declared mission is "to help improve policy and decision making through research and analysis", using its "core values of quality and objectivity."

Achievements and expertise

The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and the United States' space program, in computing and in artificial intelligence. RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also pioneered the development and use of wargaming.

Current areas of expertise include: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, infrastructure, energy, environment, corporate governance, economic development, intelligence policy, long-range planning, crisis management and disaster preparation, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy, and transportation.

RAND designed and conducted one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance between 1974 and 1982. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, funded by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established an insurance corporation to compare demand for health services with their cost to the patient.

According to the 2005 annual report, "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."

The RAND Corporation posts all of its unclassified reports, in full, on its website www.rand.org.

Notable RAND participants

• David L. Aaron — Deputy National Security Advisor under Carter and drafter of the NATO treaty
• Henry H. Arnold — General, United States Air Force — RAND founder
• Kenneth Arrow — economist, Nobel Laureate, developed the impossibility theorem in social choice theory
• Bruno Augenstein — V.P., physicist, mathematician and space scientist
• Paul Baran — one of the developers of packet switching which was used in Arpanet and later networks like the Internet
• Barry Boehm — software economics expert, inventor of COCOMO
• Harold L. Brode — physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
• Bernard Brodie — Military strategist and nuclear architect
• David S. C. Chu — Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, 2001–present
• Samuel Cohen — inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
• Franklin R. Collbohm — Aviation Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder and former director and trustee
• George Dantzig — mathematician, creator of the simplex algorithm for linear programming
• Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. — President, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
• Daniel Ellsberg — leaker of the Pentagon Papers
• Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
• James J. Gillogly — cryptographer and computer scientist
• Cecil Hastings — programmer, wrote software engineering classic, Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955)
• William E. Hoehn — Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Sam Nunn, Visiting Professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the Coca-Cola Foundation Eminent Practitioner in Residence at Georgia Institute of Technology
• Brian Michael Jenkins — terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
• Herman Kahn — theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
• Zalmay Khalilzad — U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
• Lewis "Scooter" Libby — Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
• Ray Mabus — Former ambassador, governor
• Harry Markowitz — economist, developed the Portfolio Selection model that is still widely used in modern finance
• Margaret Mead — U.S. anthropologist
• John Forbes Nash, Jr. — Nobel prize-winning mathematician
• John Von Neumann — mathematician, pioneer of the modern digital computer
• Allen Newell — artificial intelligence
• Paul O'Neill — Chairman in the late 1990s
• Edmund Phelps — winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics
• W.V. Quine — famous philosopher
• Arthur E. Raymond — Chief Engineer, Douglas Aircraft Company — RAND founder
• Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991–1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
• Michael D. Rich — RAND Executive Vice President, 1993–present
• Leo Rosten — academic and humorist
• Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981–1986 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
• Robert F. Salter — advocate of the vactrain maglev train concept
• Paul Samuelson — economist, Nobel Laureate
• Thomas C. Schelling — economist, winner of 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics
• James Schlesinger — former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
• Herbert Simon — Nobel prize-winning economist
• Peter Szanton — the policy analyst and former President of New York Rand
• Katsuaki L. Terasawa — economist
• James Thomson — RAND CEO, 1989–present
• Albert Wohlstetter — Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
• Roberta Wohlstetter — Policy analyst and military historian

Governance

The organization's governance structure includes a board of trustees. Current members of the board include: Frank Carlucci, Lovida Coleman, Timothy Geithner, Rita Hauser, Karen House, Jen-Hsun Huang, Paul Kaminski, Lydia H. Kennard, Ann Korologos, Philip Lader, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Ronald Olson, Paul O'Neill, Michael Powell, Donald Rice, James Rohr, James Rothenberg, Ratan Tata, James Thomson, and Marta Tienda.

Former members of the board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Newton Minow, Brent Scowcroft, Amy Pascal, John Reed, Charles Townes, Caryl Haskins, Walter Wriston, Frank Stanton, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, Harold Brown, Robert Curvin, Pedro Greer, Arthur Levitt, Lloyd Morrisett, and Jerry Speyer.

Criticisms of RAND

The RAND Corporation has been associated with militarism and the military-industrial complex.

Many of the events in which RAND plays a part are based on assumptions which are hard to verify because of the lack of detail on RAND's highly classified work for defense and intelligence agencies. Some RAND participants who have gone on to large roles in the military-industrial complex are often believed to have had a role in shaping RAND research. See .

Game theory was studied and promoted by the RAND Corporation as a way to model human behavior and influence government policy. As noted in The Trap, when RAND's analysts tried the games on their own secretaries, they disobeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents, choosing to co-operate every time. This did not, in the eyes of the analysts, discredit the theory, but instead proved that the secretaries were unfit subjects.

Due to the nature of its work, the RAND corporation also frequently plays a role in conspiracy theories.

Trivia

• U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay quipped that RAND meant "Research And No Development".
• The film Dr. Strangelove made a jab at RAND, with the title character mentioning a study conducted by the "BLAND Corporation."
• While the RAND Corporation has produced many notable publications, one of its best-selling books is A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.
• In the show The Simpsons (season 6, episode 2F07 "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy"), the character Milhouse quotes the RAND Corporation as being involved in a conspiracy with other fictional groups to eliminate the meal of dinner.
• Among the inventions emanating from the RAND Corporation are the windsurfer and packet switching.
• In the show King of the Hill, Dale Gribble says that the RAND corporation is involved with unknowingly tattooing barcodes on American citizens.
• A RAND researcher was selected to be the lunar module pilot for Apollo 7.
• A RAND researcher designed the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on the original Star Trek TV show.
• A 1994 RAND publication, U.S. Nuclear Strategy for the Post-Cold War Era, noted: "The dependence of the West and Japan on Persian Gulf oil and the power and wealth that comes from controlling that oil guarantee the U.S. interest in that part of the world for as far into the future as anyone can see."

See also

• A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (published by RAND)
• Brookings Institution
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Trilateral Commission
• James Q. Wilson (board of directors)
• Kepner-Tregoe

References

External links

• RAND website
• Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School
• James Q. Wilson's address on the occasion of RAND's 50th Anniversary http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=99766
• RAND And The City — a critical history of RAND from the Santa Monica Mirror. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• * Maps and aerial photos for Coordinates:
• Maps from , Google Maps, Live Search Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or MapQuest
• Topographic maps from TopoZone or TerraServer-USA
• Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, Todd C. Helmus, Christopher Paul, Russell W. Glenn