Legal Aid Clients with General Assistance Problems: A Study of Housing Conditions

The Omaha Legal Aid Society contacted the Center for Applied Urban Research to help assess the housing conditions of clients who had applied for legal aid with a Douglas County general assistance (GA) problem within the past 18 months. Legal Aid wanted to know what proportion of these clients were living in housing that was below minimum health and decency standards

Conceptual frameworks and terminology in doctoral nursing research

Aim: To define conceptual frameworks and their inherent dichotomies, and integrate them with concomitant concepts to help early nursing doctoral researchers to develop their understanding of and engage with discourse further, so that nursing can demonstrate its ability to contribute to the meta-theoretical debate of doctoral research alongside other practices and theory-based disciplines. Background: Conceptual frameworks are central to nursing doctoral studies as they map and contextualise the philosophical assumptions of the research in relation to paradigms and ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations. They shape all aspects of the research design and provide a structure for theorising. They can also be a challenge for researchers and are under-discussed in the literature. Review methods: Literature review. Discussion: The key aspects of the conceptual framework debate in terms of objectivist, subjectivist paradigms and the wider paradigm debate, including retroduction and abduction, are reviewed here together with consideration of how these apply to nursing doctoral research. Conclusion: Conceptual frameworks are pivotal to nursing doctoral research as they clarify and integrate philosophical, methodological and pragmatic aspects of doctoral thesis while helping the profession to be seen as a research-based discipline, comfortable with the language of meta-theoretical debate. Implications for research/practice: Conceptual frameworks should form the methodological foundation for all nursing doctoral research

Reconsidering the origins of protest in South Africa: some lessons from Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg

Protest politics in South Africa has a long history and has been deployed differentially in different historical moments. Whereas protests formed an important vehicle during the fight against apartheid, their rebirth and propulsion to the centre of the struggles in the post-apartheid dispensation have come as a surprise to many. A majority of these protests, so-called ‘service delivery protests’, are reported as emanating from communities’ dissatisfaction with municipal service delivery as well as problems relating to lack of communication between council and councillors on the one hand and citizens on the other. In this article, we interrogate data from five study sites located in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. While we found support for the importance of service delivery, our data contradicts many widely held assertions as regards what causes these protests. We were able to show, for example, that these so-called ‘service delivery protests’ may actually emanate from reasons that extend beyond service delivery. Since our data indicates that levels of participation in Cape Town are higher than in Pietermaritzburg on the one hand, illustrating perhaps the different provincial contexts, there is also variation between the relatively high participation rates of the ‘black African’ sites of Langa and Khayelitsha, on the one hand, and the lower rates of the ‘coloured’ site of Bonteheuwel, on the other, which we ascribe to the disengagement of the community in Cape Town, from both local and national politics.Department of HE and Training approved lis

A national certification programme for academic degrees in cyber security

With a growing need for cyber security skills, there has been a notable increase in the number of academic degrees targeting this topic area, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. However, with a widening and varied choice available to them, prospective students and employers require a means to identify academic degrees that offer appropriate and high-quality education in the subject area. This paper presents a case study of the establishment and operation of a certification programme for academic degrees in cyber security. It describes the means by which appropriate topic themes and subject areas for relevant degrees were identified and defined, leading to a certification programme that addresses degrees in general cyber security as well as notable specialisations including digital forensics and network security. The success of the programme is evidenced by 25 degrees across 19 universities having been certified to date, and a continued response to new calls for certification

Lynx UK Trust: a national stakeholder consultation: an interim consultation document

The Lynx UK Trust CIC (the "Trust") is seeking licences to conduct a highly regulated scientific trial, studying the effects of Eurasian lynx on a selected site or sites in Scotland and England. This will involve a time limited trial reintroduction of lynx to those sites in order to observe, measure and analyse the effects of lynx on various aspects of the United Kingdom's social, economic and natural environments. Public consultation is a key element of our trial reintroduction proposal. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Reintroduction Guidelines (the "IUCN Guidelines"), Directive 92/43/EEC Conservation of Natural Habitats, Wild Flora and Fauna (the Habitats Directive) (the "Directive") Article 22 and The Scottish Code for Conservation Translocations (2014) (the "Scottish Code") state that an introduction should only take place after proper consultation with the public concerned. Our consultation process has been designed to address the criteria contained within the IUCN Guidelines and the Scottish Code

Conversion of an intensified fed-batch to an integrated continuous bioprocess

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Application to Natural England for the trial reintroduction of lynx to England

England contains extensive areas of beautiful and wild natural landscapes of which the English public are justifiably proud. A highly controlled and scientific trial reintroduction of Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) (herein referred to as lynx) to a specifically selected wild area of England is the first step in a process that could see the lynx return to the nation after 1300 years of absence – a vital part of England's natural heritage. This document represents the first stage in the consultation of the national stakeholders in a trial reintroduction of lynx to England (the "Project"). The Project will bring millions of pounds of economic benefits to the English economy, improve the health of natural environments in England and, above all else, will be a symbol for the pride that the English public have in their nation's wild places. We are keen to understand your thoughts as our proposals develop over the coming months

Cost-benefit analysis for the reintroduction of lynx to the UK: main report

The EU Habitats Directive requires Member States to assess the potential and desirability of reintroducing species which have been lost, and to look at other Member States’ experiences to support such assessments. In light of these requirements, the Lynx UK Trust is proposing to undertake a trial reintroduction programme of Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) at several potential sites in the UK. As part of the preparation for any translocation or reintroduction programme, guidelines prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) state that an assessment of the anticipated costs and benefits of a reintroduction should be incorporated into planning for such programmes. On the basis of these guidelines, AECOM have been asked by the Lynx UK Trust to undertake an impartial and independent analysis of the potential economic costs and benefits to the proposed lynx reintroduction scheme in the UK based on a combination of modelling and data collected from European lynx studies. The analysis draws on the guidance for undertaking cost-benefit analysis set out by the UK government. In particular, it follows the framework set out in The Green Book which states that a cost-benefit analysis should quantify as many of the costs and benefits of a proposal in monetary terms as is feasible, including impacts for which the market does not provide a satisfactory measure of economic value. The Green Book further states that in the early stages of identifying and appraising a proposal only summary data is normally required, while at the later stages of an assessment data should be refined to become more specific and accurate. The analysis in this report is therefore proportionate to the resources involved, outcomes at stake, and the time available. As such, the results should be taken as an initial indicative estimate of the potential costs and benefits of the lynx reintroduction scheme. This approach should provide a proportionate study for the purposes of licensing a trial of the effects of the reintroduction of lynx to the UK, with further studies of the economic impact being undertaken if the trial is adopted

Band gap reduction in GaNSb alloys due to the anion mismatch

The structural and optoelectronic properties in GaNxSb1–x alloys (0<=x<0.02) grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on both GaSb substrates and AlSb buffer layers on GaAs substrates are investigated. High-resolution x-ray diffraction (XRD) and reciprocal space mapping indicate that the GaNxSb1–x epilayers are of high crystalline quality and the alloy composition is found to be independent of substrate, for identical growth conditions. The band gap of the GaNSb alloys is found to decrease with increasing nitrogen content from absorption spectroscopy. Strain-induced band-gap shifts, Moss-Burstein effects, and band renormalization were ruled out by XRD and Hall measurements. The band-gap reduction is solely due to the substitution of dilute amounts of highly electronegative nitrogen for antimony, and is greater than observed in GaNAs with the same N content