2,286 research outputs found
Views of children and young people in foster care survey: education
No full textThis paper explores the educational experiences of children and young people living in foster care in Queensland. Findings are drawn from the responses of 845 children and 1180 young people to the 2011 Views of Children and Young People in Foster Care survey, which is a rich source of information about children’s and young people’s attitudes towards and perceptions of their own education. Findings relate to educational status, key markers of educational disadvantage including suspensions and exclusions, and specific problems children and young people experience at school, as well as children’s and young people’s enjoyment of school and aspirations for the future. Information about educational support, including Educational Support Plans and support provided by Child Safety Officers and Community Visitors are also presented. Where relevant, comparisons are made between the 2011 survey results and prior surveys conducted in 2006, 2007 and 2009. Relationships between key educational measures as well as relationships to other important measures of health and placement stability are also explored.
The findings suggest that children and young people continue to experience educational disadvantage, including high rates of suspension and exclusion and a range of problems at school including problems with schoolwork, bullying and behaviour and that these difficulties can be exacerbated by the child protection system, for example, through placement instability. However, there are reasons for optimism. Children and young people are overwhelmingly likely to report that they enjoy school, expect to complete Year 12 and that their teachers generally like their schoolwork. Furthermore, over time, the proportions of young people reporting that they have an Educational Support Plan have grown, and, importantly, they are more likely to report that these plans are helpful. Analyses in relation to a number of educational variables reveal that young people with a plan they consider to be helpful fare better. Children and young people were also positive about the important role that CSOs and CVs are able to play in supporting their education.
While educational disadvantage is an enduring problem, the survey findings provide evidence of progress in key areas and suggestions for how continued improvements may be made
Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication
No full textScientific research is a competitive business – in order to secure funding, promotion and tenure researchers must demonstrate their work has impact in their field. To maximise impact researchers undertake high priority research, aim to get results first, and publish in the highest impact journals. The Internet now presents a new opportunity to the scholarly author seeking higher impact: s/he can now make their work instantly accessible on the Web through author self-archiving. This growing body of open access literature (coupled with new publishing models that make journals available for-free to the reader) maximises research impact by maximising the number of people who can read it, and making it available sooner. Open access also provides a new opportunity for bibliometric research. This thesis describes the relatively recent phenomenon of open access to research literature, tools that were built to collect and analyse that literature, and the results of analyses of the effect of open access and its effect on author behaviour. It shows that articles self-archived by authors receive between 50-250% more citations, that rapid pre-printing on the Web has dramatically reduced the peak citation rate from over a year to virtually instant and how citation-impact – now widely used for evaluation – can be expanded to include a new web metric of download impact
Foster Care
No full textBakalářská práce se zabývá pěstounskou péčí v Libereckém kraji. Cílem této práce je objasnění některých problémů týkajících se výkonu pěstounské péče. Autorka pomocí rozhovorů získává ucelený pohled na výkon pěstounské péče a zjišťuje v čem je zásadní problém stát se profesionálním pěstounem.V teoretické části se autorka zabývá vymezením pojmů pěstounská péče a pěstounské péče na přechodnou dobu. Zabývá se vývojem dítěte do školního věku, historií pěstounské, dále legislativou včetně sociálního zabezpečení pěstounů a procesem pěstounské péče od podání žádosti až po předání dítěte.V praktické části se autorka zabývá rozborem výzkumných otázek, které vedou k objasnění problematiky pěstounské péče v Libereckém kraji. Z pěti rozhovorů s dlouhodobými pěstouny a pěstouny na přechodnou dobu vytvořila pět kazuistik, které objasňují problematiku pěstounské péče z hlediska požadavků stát se pěstounem, také se zabývají problematikou průběhu povinných příprav a samotným výkonem pěstounské péče.This bachelor thesis explores foster care in Liberec Region. The aim of this thesis is to explain particular issues related to foster care. The author presents cohesive view on foster care via interviews and discovers the essential challenges of becoming professional foster parent.The theoretical part addresses the issue of defining terms related to foster care and temporary foster care. Further, it deals with child development until school age, history of foster care, legislation including social security care for foster parents and the process of foster care from initial application to surrendering the child.In the research part the author applies a set of research questions leading to explaining issue of foster care in Liberec region. The author explains foster care challenges from the perspective of requirements applied to become foster parent via five interviews with long term and temporary foster parents. Further it deals with the issues of compulsory preparation process and providing foster car
Whangai: remembering, understanding and experiencing
No full textThe Māori customary practice of whangai is often equated with adoption or foster care.
There are, however, significant differences between the institutions. Adoption or foster care, tends to be mainly focused on the interests of the child. The institution of whangai, while being cognizant of the interests of the child, is weighted more towards establishing, nurturing and cementing relationships between individuals, families and broader relational networks. In this paper we draw on the lived experiences of six people who have been raised as whangai and/or have raised whangai. We were interested in their understanding of the cultural concept of whangai, how the customary practice of whangai has changed over time, and their projected thoughts on future generations’ experience of whangai. Findings suggest that the institution of whangai remains as a strong vehicle for both the care of children and for the nurturing of whangai kinship relationships. While participants recognised that contemporary Māori social environments have contributed toward multiple manifestations of whangai, most felt it to be an institution that will be valued and carried into the future
Authors publication strategies in scholarly publishing
No full textIn this exploratory study, we analyze publishing patterns of authors from different disciplines, as part of a broader analysis of the transformation of the scholarly publishing industry. Although a growing body of literature analyses the author’s role within the process of research production,
validation, certification and dissemination, there is little systematic empirical research on publishing patterns; little therefore can be said on relevant issues within the current debate on the future of scholarly publishing such as
authors’ responses to (or even awareness of) the growing array of publication possibilities or the speed of adaptation to the increasing series of incentives by
funding agencies or academic institutions. On the basis of the analysis of three years of publications gathered in the institutional repository of Università degli Studi di Milano, we highlight trends of publication strategies and
different responses to incentive systems. Preliminary results indicate that publication outcomes and intensity differ across disciplines, while similarities occur mainly in terms of choice of preferred outcomes by seniority. Open
access is still uncommon among the authors in our sample and it is more utilized by relatively senior authors and active authors
Flowy: Designing an assistive wearable technology for children with AD(H)D that increases attention in class
No full textBehavioral treatment shows long-term success among children with AD(H)D, but is often expensive and hard to bring into practice. Flowy is a wristband that supports behavioral interventions by giving rhythmic vibrations as reminders for behavioral change.Rhythmic vibrations on the wrist have shown to have a calming effect, and can alert users to think of behavioral interventions. Different vibration patterns can foster self-regulating thoughts such as asking “Am I behaving as I intended to do?” or “Am I still focused?”. This increases the self-regulating ability of a child during individual tasks at school.Flowy is designed like a buddy for children with AD(H)D. It is like a helping friend that motivates them to study longer. It also gives the child ownership of self-regulation, because it let children create own vibration patterns for activities. This is realized by providing an app that brings the ‘buddy’ alive, explains self- regulation techniques and involves parents to monitor the process to create a positive reinforcement within the family.Strategic Product Desig
Brain meets brawn: why Grid and agents need each other
No full textThe Grid and agent communities both develop concepts and mechanisms for open distributed systems, albeit from different perspectives. The Grid community has historically focused on “brawn”: infrastructure, tools, and applications for reliable and secure resource sharing within dynamic and geographically distributed virtual organizations. In contrast, the agents community has focused on “brain”: autonomous problem solvers that can act flexibly in uncertain and dynamic environments. Yet as the scale and ambition of both Grid and agent deployments increase, we see a convergence of interests, with agent systems requiring robust infrastructure and Grid systems requiring autonomous, flexible behaviors. Motivated by this convergence of interests, we review the current state of the art in both areas, review the challenges that concern the two communities, and propose research and technology development activities that can allow for mutually supportive effort
A feasibility randomised controlled trial of the New Orleans intervention of infant mental health: a study protocol
No full textChild maltreatment is associated with life-long social, physical, and mental health problems. Intervening early to provide maltreated children with safe, nurturing care can improve outcomes. The need for prompt decisions about permanent placement (i.e., regarding adoption or return home) is internationally recognised. However, a recent Glasgow audit showed that many maltreated children “revolve” between birth families and foster carers. This paper describes the protocol of the first exploratory randomised controlled trial of a mental health intervention aimed at improving placement permanency decisions for maltreated children. This trial compares an infant's mental health intervention with the new enhanced service as usual for maltreated children entering care in Glasgow. As both are new services, the trial is being conducted from a position of equipoise. The outcome assessment covers various fields of a child’s neurodevelopment to identify problems in any ESSENCE domain. The feasibility, reliability, and developmental appropriateness of all outcome measures are examined. Additionally, the potential for linkage with routinely collected data on health and social care and, in the future, education is explored. The results will inform a definitive randomised controlled trial that could potentially lead to long lasting benefits for the Scottish population and which may be applicable to other areas of the world
Provenance-based trust for grid computing: Position Paper
No full textCurrent evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the first large-scale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suffer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which "community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for configuring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audit trails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be offered to users and will give them a competitive edge
Interphase chromosome positioning in in vitro porcine cells and ex vivo porcine tissues
No full textCopyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and 85 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel University Open Access Publishing Fund.BACKGROUND: In interphase nuclei of a wide range of species chromosomes are organised into their own specific locations termed territories. These chromosome territories are non-randomly positioned in nuclei which is believed to be related to a spatial aspect of regulatory control over gene expression. In this study we have adopted the pig as a model in which to study interphase chromosome positioning and follows on from other studies from our group of using pig cells and tissues to study interphase genome re-positioning during differentiation. The pig is an important model organism both economically and as a closely related species to study human disease models. This is why great efforts have been made to accomplish the full genome sequence in the last decade. RESULTS: This study has positioned most of the porcine chromosomes in in vitro cultured adult and embryonic fibroblasts, early passage stromal derived mesenchymal stem cells and lymphocytes. The study is further expanded to position four chromosomes in ex vivo tissue derived from pig kidney, lung and brain. CONCLUSIONS: It was concluded that porcine chromosomes are also non-randomly positioned within interphase nuclei with few major differences in chromosome position in interphase nuclei between different cell and tissue types. There were also no differences between preferred nuclear location of chromosomes in in vitro cultured cells as compared to cells in tissue sections. Using a number of analyses to ascertain by what criteria porcine chromosomes were positioned in interphase nuclei; we found a correlation with DNA content.This study is partly supported by Sygen International PLC
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