Social Services Management Solution

The modern privately run social services agency exists within a complex regulatory framework that requires detailed recordkeeping. In such an environment, paperwork tracking is best managed by a centralized enterprise data management system. While commercial applications that perform this function exist, they are frequently bundled with software for other business functions. Such additional software can be helpful, but it frequently duplicates the functionality of other enterprise software for these businesses, which is financially inefficient. This project developed a similar system using the ASP.NET 4.5 framework that is designed to provide a standalone solution to recordkeeping requirements. It followed a typical agile development cycle. Software requirements were gathered, design documents were drafted, and the application was developed. It was deployed to the Microsoft Azure cloud for testing. The results indicate that it could be a viable alternative to the bundled offerings available in the market with some additional development and tweaking for Microsoft Azure in future iterations

The Dangerous Listener: Unforseen Perils in Intensive Interviewing

We suggest that interviewers become dangerous by the simple act of listening. In dangerous listening, there is a looking-glass effect through which the listener deflects the new or repressing self and reveals the old. The heart of danger is the interviewee\u27s self reflected back from the interviewer\u27s relationship to the past self. The data are drawn from two sets of intensive interviews, one with female mental patients-to-expatients in the 1950s in California (see Warren, 1987), and one with ex-Vietnam veterans on a trauma ward at a Veterans\u27 administration hospital (see Karner, 1994). In listening, the narrator and the interviewer become participants in witnessing a violation of a social or personal norm. After such an accounting, the listener is seen as the symbolic repository for the narrator\u27s troubled past, constituting a threat of judgment or exposure. These dangers of listening are not only those special biomedical and social dangers involved in the rhetoric of human subjects regulations, they are dangers of an everyday life world in which selves change, and change again

Oxygen Fugacity of the Upper Mantle of Mars. Evidence from the Partitioning Behavior of Vanadium in Y980459 (Y98) and other Olivine-Phyric Shergottites

Using partitioning behavior of V between olivine and basaltic liquid precisely calibrated for martian basalts, we determined the redox state of primitive (olivine-rich, high Mg#) martian basalts near their liquidus. The combination of oxidation state and incompatible element characteristics determined from early olivine indicates that correlations between fO2 and other geochemical characteristics observed in many martian basalts is also a fundamental characteristic of these primitive magmas. However, our data does not exhibit the range of fO2 observed in these previous studies.. We conclude that the fO2 for the martian upper mantle is approximately IW+1 and is incompatible-element depleted. It seems most likely (although clearly open to interpretation) that these mantle-derived magmas assimilated a more oxidizing (>IW+3), incompatible-element enriched, lower crustal component as they ponded at the base of the martian crust

Racing climate change: Collaboration and conflict in California's global climate change policy arena

Media accounts routinely refer to California's Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32), the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, as "landmark" climate change legislation. On its surface, this label is an accurate reflection of the state's forward-thinking stance across many environmental issues including pesticides, toxic substances, solid waste, and air quality. For all its promise, however, AB 32 can also be considered a low point in the landscape of conflict between state environmental regulators and California's environmental justice movement. While the legislation included several provisions to address the procedural and distributive dimensions of environmental justice, the implementation of AB 32 has been marked by heated conflict. The most intense conflicts over AB 32 revolve around the primacy of market mechanisms such as "cap and trade." This article examines the drivers and the manifestations of these dynamics of collaboration and conflict between environmental justice advocates and state regulators, and pays particular attention to the scalar and racialized quality of the neoliberal discourse. The contentiousness of climate change politics in California offers scholars and practitioners around the world a cautionary tale of how the best intentions for integrating environmental justice principles into climate change policy do not necessarily translate into implementation and how underlying racialized fractures can upend collaboration between state and social movement actors. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Radiometric age constraints for glacial terminations IX and VII

Buried sedimentary aggradational sections deposited between 800 ka and 600 ka in the Tiber River coastal alluvial plain have been studied using borecores from around Rome. 40Ar/39Ar ages on sanidine and/or leucite from intercalated tephra layers and paleomagnetic investigation of clay sections provide geochronological constraints on the timing of aggradation of two of these alluvial sections, and demonstrate that they were deposited in response to eustatic sea level rise caused by glacial terminations IX and VII. 40Ar/39Ar age data indicate ages of 802 ± 8 ka and 649 ± 3 ka for glacial terminations IX, and VII, respectively, providing a rare test, beyond the range of U-series dating for corals and speleothems (~500 ka), of the astronomically calibrated timescale developed for oxygen isotope records from deep sea cores

40Ar/39Ar and 14C geochronology of the Albano maar deposits: Implications for 2 defining the age and eruptive style of the most recent explosive activity at Colli 3 Albani Volcanic District, Central Italy

New 40Ar/39Ar and 14C ages have been found for the Albano multiple maar pyroclastic units and underlying 25 paleosols to document the most recent explosive activity in the Colli Albani Volcanic District (CAVD) near 26 Rome, Italy, consisting of seven eruptions (Albano 1 27 ^ = ^ oldest). Both dating methodologies have been applied on several proximal units and on four mid-distal fall/surge deposits, the latter correlated, according to two 28 current different views, to either the Albano or the Campi di Annibale hydromagmatic center. The 40Ar/39Ar 29 ages on leucite phenocrysts from the mid-distal units yielded ages of ca. 72 ka, 73 ka, 41 ka and 36 ka BP, 30 which are indistinguishable from the previously determined 40Ar/39Ar ages of the proximal Albano units 1, 2, 31 5 and 7, thus confirming their stratigraphic correspondence. 32 Twenty-one 14C ages of the paleosols beneath Albano units 3, 5, 6 and 7 were found for samples collected 33 from 13 proximal and distal sections, some of which were the same sections sampled for 40Ar/39Ar 34 measurements. The 14C ages were found to be stratigraphically inconsistent and highly scattered, and were 35 systematically younger than the 40Ar/39Ar ages, ranging 36 ^ from 35 ka ^ to 3 ka. Considering the significant consistence of the 40Ar/39Ar chronological framework, we interpret the scattered and contradictory 14C ages 37 to be the result of a variable contamination of the paleosols by younger organic carbon deriving from the 38 superficial soil horizons. 39 These results suggest that multiple isotopic systems anchored to a robust stratigraphic framework may need 40 to be employed to determine accurately the geochronology of the CAVD as well as other volcanic districts. 4