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"I wasn’t prepared for that" UK social worker experiences of training in and knowledge of acquired brain injury
No full textSummary Acquired brain injury is a major cause of death and disability. Due to the impact of acquired brain injury on an individual's and a family's functioning, social workers are likely to encounter individuals and families affected by the condition. This study aimed to (1) identify the existing level of knowledge and skills of social workers in working with individuals with acquired brain injury and their families and (2) examine the training needs of social workers to improve their knowledge and skills in working with those with acquired brain injury. A series of semi-structured interviews with newly qualified social workers (six), brain injury specialist social workers (nine), team leaders (two), and commissioners (three) were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings The data highlighted that social workers in England and Wales have no formal training around acquired brain injury but felt there was a need for different levels of training and guidance for social workers. Participants also discussed the need for better integration with health care and a greater focus on relational working to enact positive change for individuals and families. Applications Social work training should be embedded within prequalification training with additional postqualification training where appropriate. Work and training within social work should take an interdisciplinary approach. The authors have taken the data to develop a freely available online training program for social workers
The cost of restraint: India’s differential response to China and Pakistan as nuclear rivals
No full textArticle 5: conduct of persons or entities exercising elements of governmental authority
No full textThe conduct of a person or entity which is not an organ of the State under article 4 but which is empowered by the law of that State to exercise elements of the governmental authority shall be considered an act of the State under international law, provided the person or entity is acting in that capacity in the particular instance
“No knowledge about us without us” re-thinking individual and community development under contextual adversity
No full textUnwieldy urban knowledges
No full textThe prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or require such complex arrangements that technological augmentation becomes the subject of social knowledge rather than an emergent property of it? This commentary develops the concept of unwieldiness in order to reflect on the conflicting or paradoxical ways that knowledge and technology intersect in urban contexts
Non-renewable natural capital and the social cost of carbon in wealth accounting
No full textFossil fuels represent a significant portion of the wealth of resource-rich nations. However, their valuation as non-renewable natural capital in inclusive or comprehensive wealth accounting to indicate sustainability does not embody the external costs of climate change damages. This study consistently incorporates the social cost of carbon (SCC) into the value of depletion of non-renewable natural capital for wealth accounting of resource-rich nations. We derive shadow prices of depletion under different resource allocation mechanisms (RAMs) in the presence of externality costs from emissions, allowing for declining extraction and an unburnable natural capital stock constraint. In our application to oil, depletion is valued differently across RAMs, depending on how rent, SCC, and decarbonisation develop in the future. The sustainability implication of the choice of RAM is even more significant in the presence of SCC
Predictable serendipity: how new tools turn serendipity into systematic breakthroughs
No full textThe emergence of scientific discoveries is often seen as the most extraordinary and puzzling feature of science. Many think that discoveries arise due to serendipity or chance—that they are unexplainable or unpredictable. Existing studies have not yet explained the extent and role of serendipity in science, because they generally only study a sample of discoveries that does not allow for generalising about science. To do so, this is the first study to assess science’s major discoveries, defined as all nobel-prize and major non-nobel-prize discoveries across fields and history. By examining over 750 major discoveries, we find that discoveries commonly labelled as serendipitous are actually sparked by using—for the first time—a powerful new tool that makes the unexpected observation possible that we are not even looking for: an improved microscope revealed cells, a discharge tube uncovered X-rays, gel diffusion revealed the Hepatitis B virus and a cutting-edge spectrograph detected the first planet outside our solar system. What seems like chance is often just using an entirely new lens—just as in each of these discoveries. In other words, we show that breakthroughs that seem serendipitous follow shortly after we create the new tool, with other researchers able to arrive at the same findings using these same discovery tools. While a serendipitous moment was reported in about one in six major discoveries, there is a pattern behind the surprise: using new tools to make the breakthrough finding commonly through exploratory research. This is important because it changes how we think about discovery: we can generally better understand individual serendipitous discoveries as tool-triggered discoveries that multiple researchers can make. Crucially, new method innovations provide explanatory power to help predict discoveries—whether labelled serendipitous or not. So here we reframe discovery: because new tools are what commonly unlock surprise, we can actually strategically design and accelerate discovery, shifting it from a more passive outcome of serendipity
Complexity in institutional reform
No full textWhy is there so much institutional reform in the world? If institutions are the deep rules of the game that determine how societies are governed, collective decisions taken, and resources mobilized for public purposes, then changing them is bound to have effects that are long-run and multidimensional across politics, the economy and society. Such effects will be unpredictable. Politicians with short time horizons should flee such initiatives, but instead embrace them the world over. Why? Because politicians design reform processes around often unstated private goals that may be orthogonal, or even directly opposed, to a reform’s stated, public goals. We characterize instrumental mismatch as the gap between stated goals and the specific reform instruments politicians deploy. Such reforms lead to incongruous institutions ill-suited to their core purpose, and hence to outcomes that are bad for society. Through 13 case studies from Latin America, India, Rwanda and the UK, we test and refine the theory. High instrumental mismatch leads to incongruous institutions in all our cases. Stated goals are never achieved, but private goals are. This is by design. Incongruous institutions sometimes produce good outcomes for reformers, but not for society. Low mismatch leads to institutions that are mostly congruous. Stated goals are always achieved. This makes sense: politicians’ private goals do not conflict with reform’s stated goals, increasing reform coherence. Ex-post, such reforms are good for society but bad for reformers. Medium mismatch also produces incongruous institutions. Stated goals and private goals are sometimes achieved. Outcomes for society are generally poor – not surprising given incomplete reform design and implementation. A twelfth article mines this evidence to propose three game-theoretic models of institutional change from a complex systems perspective. Taken together, we call this the complexity approach to institutional reform
Patriarchal camouflage: women's military experiences and the 1992-1995 Bosnian War
No full textWith the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, women who joined the different army ranks, enlisting in their thousands and occupying diverse roles, were first in line for demobilisation, and their stories remained undocumented. The erasure of their experiences from the historiography of the war has had profound epistemological ramifications in shaping the post-war memorialisation landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this doctoral research project, I set out to document and analyse their life histories to co-construct with them a critical feminist historiography of the war. I develop Cynthia Enloe's concept of ‘patriarchal confusion’ into ‘patriarchal camouflage’, departing from Enloe's framing to examine the deliberate strategies through which militarised patriarchal institutions disguise short-term military goals as a reformed gender order while temporarily integrating women for war-waging purposes. I employ a combination of methods, which include archival research, oral history, and collage-making, to render visible the complexity of women war veterans' experiences, explore the factors that led them to join the military, their experiences within military structures, and the images and conceptualisation of gender that were constructed, reproduced, and resisted in this context. My findings challenge dominant narratives of military inclusion as empowerment, revealing that women join military ranks for survival and strategic reasons, exercise agency through ambiguity, and face systematic post-war erasure and devaluation that reduce them to symbolic roles. The research demonstrates that patriarchal camouflage operates through women's strategic navigation of gendered expectations, military institutions' management of gendered contradictions, and societies' silencing of women veterans. My work positions the situated knowledges of Bosnian women veterans, who have been largely overlooked in feminist literature on Bosnia and Herzegovina, as critical tools for further theorizing and developing interdisciplinary frameworks for conversations about gender, militarism, and war, and for reimagining Bosnian past/present/futures
AI and ethical AI design: a framework for minimizing bias and protecting privacy in AI algorithms
No full textArtificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a key innovation fueling modernity, but questions of equity, discrimination, and anonymity have grown in importance as the technology is applied to decision-making systems. Since the AI impacts the most important spheres of human life like the sphere of healthcare, finance, education, etc., ethical frameworks are more crucial than ever. In this paper, EAIDF is proposed to achieve this ethical goal using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with suitable mechanisms put in place to reduce bias and preserve privacy. The framework is based on three main dimensions: fairness, transparency and accountability. Fairness is addressed through the incorporation of multiple layers of bias auditing, which compare model behaviors and rectify undesirable effects during both the training and inference stages. To bring transparency, the explainable AI methods are used to explain the output of DNN meaning that the decision can be understood by developers and the stakeholders. It protects privacy by implementing Privacy-by-Design principles, which regulate safe data collecting, storage, and use along with the AI lifecycle. Whereas legacy methodologies often treat ethics as an afterthought, EAIDF approaches integrate ethical considerations from the earliest design phases, thereby ensuring that technical effectiveness and social accountability remain compatible. The proposed framework offers a scalable foundation for designing AI systems that balance innovation with ethical requirements, enabling their trustworthy deployment in critical, data-rich domains