254 research outputs found
Reconceptualizing social work’s person-in-environment perspective : explorations in radical environmental thought
Dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, Social Welfare, 1997
Caregiving in Sub-Saharan Africa and Older, Female Caregivers in the Era of HIV/AIDS: A Namibian Perspective
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) have created an unprecedented ‘orphan crisis’ in sub-Saharan Africa. They have had a devastating impact on elder caregivers. Over 60% of children affected by HIV/AIDS are being care for by aging, often impoverished, grandmothers (AVERT, 2015). Yet there is a dearth of empirical work on the devastating impact of this pandemic on grandmothers. This article offers an overview of the literature with respect to what is currently known about caregivers generally and, specifically, older caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in sub-Saharan Africa. It addresses emerging policy initiatives and service delivery strategies in Namibia. Finally, it offers suggestions for policy and practice
Instructional Techniques for Social Work Education
This article briefly examines the historical and cultural context of Norwegian ecological consciousness and demonstrates the viability of integrating its Deep Ecological awareness into social work curriculum and education for practice. It shall address the most salient and practical elements that Norwegian views of nature and conceptualizations of Deep Ecology have brought to global, environmental activism and emerging conceptualization of earth-based awareness. It is designed to assist educators in helping their students to become more fully cognizant that individual well-being and relationships with human and other-than-human beings is deeply influenced by internalized experiences of the natural world
Assessment of Effective Connectivity in Alzheimer’s Disease Using Granger Causality
Producción CientÃficaAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurological disorder accompanied by cognitive impairment. A complete understanding of the neurological processes involved in AD is a leading challenge in brain research. In this study, resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) activity from 36 AD patients and 26 healthy controls was evaluated by means of Granger Causality (GC), an effective connectivity measure that provides an estimation of the information flow between brain regions. Our results showed widespread increments in connectivity in delta (, 1-4 Hz) band. On the other hand, decrements in connectivity patterns were found for theta (, 4-8 Hz), beta (, 13-30 Hz), and gamma (, 30-65 Hz) bands. These findings strength the disconnection hypothesis in AD, and reveal GC as a useful parameter for AD identification.Ministerio de EconomÃa y Competitividad (TEC2014-53196-R)Junta de Castilla y León (VA059U13 y BIO/VA08/15
Theater im Gespräch
Conversation in the theatrical break is traditionally associated with the ideal of a public which, inspired by the previous stage experience, rhetorically skillfully communicates about aesthetic and socio-political issues. On the other hand, it is assumed from a critical perspective that such conversations primarily served social distinction, with a banal content. This study empirically reconstructs the practices characteristic of such situations between art communication and recreation, sociability and informal learning on a conversational basis
Comparing Rawlsian Justice and the Capabilities Approach to Justice from a Spiritually Sensitive Social Work Perspective
‘This is an electronic version of an article published in the March, 2012 special issue of the Journal of Religion and Spirituality and Social Work entitled Spirituality and Social Justice volume 31, (1-2), pp. 9-31. It is available online at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15426432.2012.647874This article examines two social justice theories, Rawlsian Justice and the Capabilities Approach of Sen and Nussbaum, in relation to congruence with four principles of spiritually sensitive social work. We find that although Rawlsian justice has valuable insights, it has some gaps for promoting spiritually sensitive practice. In contrast, the Capabilities Approach bears more promise for promoting spiritually sensitive social work as it meets all these ethical principles. Scholars could build on its insights to articulate a vision for spiritually sensitive social justice that can guide our profession’s approaches to macro practice and social polic
The potential for combining living wall and vertical farming systems with aquaponics with special emphasis on substrates
Aquaponics is a method of food production, growing fish and vegetables in a recirculating aquaculture system. Aquaponics uses the water from the fish to feed the plants in a totally natural way and like hydroponics, aquaponics is considered to be more sustainable as more plants can be grown per square metre compared to normal agriculture. However, as is the case with normal agriculture, in aquaponics plants are grown within horizontally. In aquaponics, using the UVI system, the ratio between fish tanks:filters:plant tanks is 2:1:5 which means that the plant tanks are occupying close to half of the production space. In order to reduce the spatial requirement for plants, which would make production even more sustainable, this research investigates aspects of combining living wall and vertical farming technologies in aquaponics. It is considered that by growing the plants vertically less space would be required. In this research living wall system is investigated but the main focus is on the potentials of using various inert substrates in the living wall systems for vertical aquaponics. The results showed that a pot system performs better in terms of management of the systems. With regard to substrates, horticultural grade coconut fibre and horticultural grade mineral wool outperformed other substrates
Analysis of the magnetoencephalograrn background activity in Alzheimer's disease patients with auto-mutual information
Multiway Array Decomposition Analysis of EEGs in Alzheimer’s Disease
Methods for the extraction of features from physiological datasets are growing needs as clinical investigations of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in large
and heterogeneous population increase. General tools allowing diagnostic regardless of recording sites, such as different hospitals, are essential and if combined to
inexpensive non-invasive methods could critically improve mass screening of subjects with AD. In this study, we applied three state of the art multiway array
decomposition (MAD) methods to extract features from electroencephalograms (EEGs) of AD patients obtained from multiple sites. In comparison to MAD,
spectral-spatial average filter (SSFs) of control and AD subjects were used as well as a common blind source separation method, algorithm for multiple unknown
signal extraction (AMUSE). We trained a feed-forward multilayer perceptron (MLP) to validate and optimize AD classification from two independent databases.
Using a third EEG dataset, we demonstrated that features extracted from MAD outperformed features obtained from SSFs AMUSE in terms of root mean squared
error (RMSE) and reaching up to 100% of accuracy in test condition. We propose that MAD maybe a useful tool to extract features for AD diagnosis offering great
generalization across multi-site databases and opening doors to the discovery of new characterization of the disease
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