117,657 research outputs found
Social working without borders: challenging privatisation and complicity with the hostile environment
No full textSocial Workers Without Borders is a UK social work charity established in early 2016 to provide direct support to migrant children and families, and to scaffold this through the development of social work education and activism reflecting the principles of human rights and social justice. Reflecting on Social Workers Without Borders’ model of practice, Lauren Wroe, co-founder and trustee of Social Workers Without Borders, discusses the charity’s recent campaign against Capita and the implications of privatisation for asylum-seeking and migrant families, as well as for the ethical value base of the profession. Positioning Social Workers Without Borders as a voluntary network that ‘fills the gap’ in state services, the author discusses campaign strategies to defend the profession, and the families it supports, from the rolling back of state welfare and the rolling out of state hostility through the deregulated outsourcing of social care services
Beliefs about sharing illness experiences: Development of a scale and relationship with symptoms of fibromyalgia
No full textObjectivesThe aim of the current research was to evaluate, in people with fibromyalgia, the extent to which beliefs about sharing illness experiences are associated with functioning and distress, and to explore the mediating role of illness behaviours. A new scale was designed to address this.DesignThe Beliefs about Sharing Illness Experiences (BASIE) scale was developed, and initial tests of reliability and validity were conducted. A cross-sectional design was used to determine relationships, including mediation analyses.MethodsIndividuals with fibromyalgia (n = 147) and a comparison group of individuals without fibromyalgia (n = 47) completed questionnaires online. Construct validity was assessed by comparing these two groups. Convergent validity was assessed through correlations with the BASIE and measures of support-seeking and self-sacrifice. Correlation analyses were used to determine relationships with illness behaviours and outcome measures (distress and global impact). Mediation analyses were used to test the indirect effects of illness behaviours.ResultsThe BASIE was correlated with expected convergent measures and had good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .939). Individuals with fibromyalgia had significantly higher scores than the comparison group. There was a direct relationship between BASIE scores and outcomes, in terms of functioning and distress. The relationship between BASIE scores and functioning was partially mediated by personal/emotional support-seeking and all-or-nothing behaviours, and not by symptom-related support-seeking or limiting behaviours.ConclusionBeliefs about sharing illness experiences may be a key factor in maintaining cycles of distress and symptoms in people with fibromyalgia, together with all-or-nothing behaviours and personal/emotional support-seeking.<br/
Investigating the role of beliefs about emotions, emotional suppression and distress within a pain management programme for fibromyalgia
No full textIntroduction:This study aims to explore the relationships between beliefs about emotions, emotional suppression, distress and global impact (i.e. the extent to which a patient’s symptoms impact their life) in a longitudinal design with patients who are taking part in a pain management programme.Methods:A total of 40 participants with fibromyalgia took part in pain management programmes at multiple sites as part of their usual care in the National Health Service. Measures of beliefs about the unacceptability of experiencing and expressing emotions, emotional suppression, distress and global impact were completed before and after the programmes.Results:Beliefs about emotions significantly reduced following treatment, but emotional suppression did not. Changes in beliefs about emotion correlated with changes in emotional suppression. Changes in distress were related to changes in suppression and the relationship between global impact and beliefs about emotions was approaching significance.Conclusion:Emotional suppression and beliefs about emotions may play a role in the improvement in distress following treatment. However, future research should examine these variables as mediators of the effect of treatment compared to waitlist controls in a larger sample.<br/
Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid
No full textThe bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery
Automating Experiments Using Semantic Data on a Bioinformatics Grid
No full textmyGrid assists bioinformaticians in designing and executing in silico experiments using the Grid’s resources. In myGrid, much of this experimental design has been encoded as workflows. Workflows must be represented at tiered levels of detail to ensure that they can respond to changes in service availability, be customized to services in different locations, and be shared with others to varying degrees. The authors have developed workflow templates in which classes of services are composed, and a resolution mechanism by which these classes are instantiated. The specification of service classes and their resolution depends on seven kinds of service metadata. Functionally equivalent services vary widely in implementation. The authors describe workflow harmonization in which the workflow is modified to accommodate variations between substituted services. Finally, they examine the role of scientist and automated process in resolution and harmonization and discuss scope for further automation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Square Dancing with the Stars to Enhance Dynamic Hirschman Linkages?
No full textIn this Presidential Address, the author takes the reader on a reconnaissance of his life and time as a regional scientist. He points out scenery he found scintillating along the way, hoping that some may pick up the banner and chew on a few of the ideas for a while. He suggests a revisit to Albert O. Hirschman’s notion of key sectors and more empirical analysis related to Marcus Berliant’s and Masahisa Fujita’s notion of knowledge creation and transfer.Presidential Address, San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 2014 (53rd Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
COVID-19: Changing fields of social work practice with children and young people
No full textThis is a post-peer-review, pre-copy edited version of an article published in [Critical and Radical Social Work]. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Dillon, J., Evans, F., & Wroe, L. E. (2021). COVID-19: changing fields of social work practice with children and young people. Critical and Radical Social Work, 9(2), 289–296] is available online at: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/crsw/9/2/article-p289.xmlDrawing on the theoretical work of Wacquant, Bourdieu and Foucault, we interrogate how the COVID-19 pandemic has weaponised child and family social work practices through reinvigorated mechanisms of discipline and surveillance. We explore how social workers are caught in the struggle between enforcement and relational welfare support. We consider how the illusio of social work obscures power dynamics impacting children, young people and families caught in child welfare systems, disproportionately affecting classed and racialised individuals.This is not OA - author deposited the VoR but this should have been embargoed. AAM sourced 16/05/2025 and uploaded to CR. VoR removed 16/05/202
Letter from unknown writer to Jesse L. Boyce
No full textLetter to Jesse L. Boyce from unknown author (possibly Jack) about the investigation into the powder magazine located in the Grand Canyon. Some personal news is included in the letter such as the writer's marriage to the daughter of C.A. Taylor, former Supervisor of Cochise County
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