Clinician and Parent Perspectives on Parent and Family Contextual Factors that Impact Community Mental Health Services for Children with Behavior Problems

The present study employed qualitative methods to examine multiple stakeholder perspectives regarding the role of parent and family contextual factors on community child mental health treatment for children with behavior problems. Findings suggest agreement between clinicians and parents on the number, types and importance of parent and family factors in children’s mental health services; however, stakeholders differed in reports of which factors were most salient. Specifically, clinicians endorsed most factors as being equally salient, while parents described a few salient factors, with parental stress and inadequate social support being the most frequently discussed. These qualitative data further elucidate the context of community services and have implications for evidence-based practice implementation and improving community care

On the assessment of landmark salience for human navigation

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for assessing the salience of landmarks for navigation. Landmark salience is derived as a result of the observer’s point of view, both physical and cognitive, the surrounding environment, and the objects contained therein. This is in contrast to the currently held view that salience is an inherent property of some spatial feature. Salience, in our approach, is expressed as a three-valued Saliency Vector. The components that determine this vector are Perceptual Salience, which defines the exogenous (or passive) potential of an object or region for acquisition of visual attention, Cognitive Salience, which is an endogenous (or active) mode of orienting attention, triggered by informative cues providing advance information about the target location, and Contextual Salience, which is tightly coupled to modality and task to be performed. This separation between voluntary and involuntary direction of visual attention in dependence of the context allows defining a framework that accounts for the interaction between observer, environment, and landmark. We identify the low-level factors that contribute to each type of salience and suggest a probabilistic approach for their integration. Finally, we discuss the implications, consider restrictions, and explore the scope of the framework

Risk assessment and management of individuals convicted of a sexual offence in the UK

The UK has seen changes in sexual abuse policy and practice over the last 10 – 15 years that have been driven by austerity, risk management, public protection and the socio-political climate; these changes have been problematic and challenging as well as positive and proactive. In recent years there has been an increasing move amongst professionals, practitioners and policy makers stating to think of sexual abuse as more than just a criminal justice issue, but reframing it as a public health and criminal justice issue; although this has not filtered down to the public and the media yet. This article will look at the current status of sexual abuse policy and practice in the UK, what has changed, its impact and where it is moving in the future

Relativistic Chaos in Robertson-Walker Cosmologies: The Topological Structure of Space-Time and the Microscopic Dynamics

Keywords: Robertson-Walker cosmology, relativistic chaos, mixing, Bernoulli property, time evolution, quantum fields, quantum chaos, bound states, energy functional, hyperbolic manifold, deformation space, Kleinian group, limit set, Hausdorff dimension, convex hull