RAND

For other uses, see RAND (disambiguation).
RAND Headquarters
RAND Headquarters

The RAND Corporation is an American 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 and commercial organizations. RAND has around 1600 employees based at six sites: Santa Monica, in California, Arlington in Virginia, Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, as well in Europe: Leiden in the Netherlands), Berlin in Germany and Cambridge in United Kingdom. In 2003, it opened the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute in Doha. Some consider the corporation's name to be a acronym from the phrase "Research ANd Development". General Curtis LeMay quipped that RAND meant "Research And No Development".

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Project RAND

RAND was set up in 1946 by the USAAF 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.

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Mission statement

RAND was incorporated as a nonprofit organization to "further promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." Its mission is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. Its core values are quality and objectivity.

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Achievements and expertise

The achievements of RAND stem from its development of systems analysis. Important contributions are claimed in space systems and America's 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, including that of RAND's education-related division — the Institute on Education and Training — are: child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, environment and energy, health, international policy, labor markets, national security, population and regional studies, science and technology, social welfare, terrorism, and transportation.

RAND oversaw one of the largest and most important studies of health insurance. 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 2004 annual report "about one-half of RAND's research involves national security issues."

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 headquarters. It is the world's largest PhD-granting program in policy analysis.

The movie 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, its best-selling book is A Million Random Digits.

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Notable RAND participants

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See also

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External links