Perceptions of Homeless Individuals Regarding Public Housing Use

Research on how homeless individuals perceive shelters, housing programs, and their agents has been limited, especially in relation to the reasons for engaging in or avoiding programs. This phenomenological study explored the perspectives of chronically homeless individuals in Wake County, North Carolina, regarding shelters and housing programs, examining their reasons for using or not using shelters or public housing. Using Glidden\u27s structuration theory as the framework, the research questions for this study were based on exploring the perceptions of homeless individuals use of public resources related to housing and shelters to better understand why some use, and perhaps more importantly, why some choose to not use these resources. Purposeful sampling was used to identify 12 chronically homeless men and women and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Data were both deductively and inductively coded and analyzed using a thematic analysis procedure. This study found that the persistence of homelessness is a result of a combination of homeless individuals\u27 perceptions of housing programs\u27 structural failures including long waiting periods for access to housing, unnecessary bureaucratic entanglements, and what they perceived as inaction or apathy on the part of program staff in response to requests for assistance. These findings are consistent with structuration theory. The implications for positive social change include recommendations to policy makers to consider the views and perceptions of homeless people in designing programs, including ways to improve access to public resources that may ultimately lead to permanent housing for homeless individuals

MINORITIES\u27 PERCEPTIONS OF CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES

The study examined minority persons’ views and experiences with Child Protective Services (CPS) in the community. This study used a qualitative design with face‑to‑face interviews with 12 participants in the community. This study used the “Post‑Positivist” data analysis, which is qualitative in evaluation and explained each participant’s subjective reality. The study found that most participants were satisfied with the results and were dissatisfied with the process in and of itself. Overall the study found that most participants felt that there was some sort of a disconnect with social workers in reference to cultural competency. Miscommunication between the social workers at agencies and parents could have played a significant role in why participants had these experiences. However, most participants felt that the agency helped with services that ultimately left the participants feeling a sense of awareness about the purpose of the agency. The study suggests that implementing a program that would allow the community to be informed of all the programs that Child Protective Services can provide be critical in aiding and empowering the members of the community and in helping reduce CPS caseloads significantly

Social workers\u27 attitudes and perceptions on cultural competence in child welfare

This study examined social workers\u27 view on cultural competence and the disproportionate rates of African American children in foster care. This study seeks to explain how cultural biases affecting social workers\u27 decisions contribute to the removal of children from their families based on social worker\u27s inability to understand or recognize cultural differences in child rearing practices

Automating Efficient RAM-Model Secure Computation

RAM-model secure computation addresses the inherent limitations of circuit-model secure computation considered in almost all previous work. Here, we describe the first automated approach for RAM-model secure computation in the semi-honest model. We define an intermediate representation called SCVM and a corresponding type system suited for RAM-model secure computation. Leveraging compile-time optimizations, our approach achieves order-of-magnitude speedups compared to both circuit-model secure computation and the state-of-art RAM-model secure computation

A national-level examination of First Nations peoples’ mental health data: Predicting mental well-being from social determinants of health using the 2017 Aboriginal Peoples Survey

IntroductionA history of colonization and assimilation have resulted in social, economic, and political disparities for Indigenous people in Canada. Decades of discriminatory policies (e.g., the Indian Act, the Residential School System) have led to numerous health and mental health inequities, which have been intergenerationally maintained. Four main social determinants of health (i.e., income, education, employment, and housing) disproportionately influence the health of Indigenous peoples. These four social determinants have also been used within the Community Well-Being (CWB) index, which assesses the socio-economic wellbeing of a community. This study sought to extend previous research by assessing how specific indicators of CWB predict self-reported mental wellbeing within First Nations populations across Canada in a national dataset with more recent data.MethodsThis study utilized the 2017 Aboriginal Peoples Survey, which includes data on the social and economic conditions of First Nations people living off reserve aged 15 years and over.ResultsResults from a factorial ANOVA indicated that perceptions of income security, housing satisfaction, higher education, and employment are associated with increased self-reported mental health among First Nations individuals living off-reserve.DiscussionThese results support the idea that individual mental health interventions on their own are not enough; instead, broader social interventions aimed at addressing inequities in various social determinants of health (e.g., housing first initiatives) are needed to better support individual wellbeing

The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement’s critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor’s propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan’s most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women

The Structure-Function Linkage Database

The Structure–Function Linkage Database (SFLD, http://sfld.rbvi.ucsf.edu/) is a manually curated classification resource describing structure–function relationships for functionally diverse enzyme superfamilies. Members of such superfamilies are diverse in their overall reactions yet share a common ancestor and some conserved active site features associated with conserved functional attributes such as a partial reaction. Thus, despite their different functions, members of these superfamilies ‘look alike’, making them easy to misannotate. To address this complexity and enable rational transfer of functional features to unknowns only for those members for which we have sufficient functional information, we subdivide superfamily members into subgroups using sequence information, and lastly into families, sets of enzymes known to catalyze the same reaction using the same mechanistic strategy. Browsing and searching options in the SFLD provide access to all of these levels. The SFLD offers manually curated as well as automatically classified superfamily sets, both accompanied by search and download options for all hierarchical levels. Additional information includes multiple sequence alignments, tab-separated files of functional and other attributes, and sequence similarity networks. The latter provide a new and intuitively powerful way to visualize functional trends mapped to the context of sequence similarity

The International Gene Trap Consortium Website: a portal to all publicly available gene trap cell lines in mouse

Gene trapping is a method of generating murine embryonic stem (ES) cell lines containing insertional mutations in known and novel genes. A number of international groups have used this approach to create sizeable public cell line repositories available to the scientific community for the generation of mutant mouse strains. The major gene trapping groups worldwide have recently joined together to centralize access to all publicly available gene trap lines by developing a user-oriented Website for the International Gene Trap Consortium (IGTC). This collaboration provides an impressive public informatics resource comprising ∼45 000 well-characterized ES cell lines which currently represent ∼40% of known mouse genes, all freely available for the creation of knockout mice on a non-collaborative basis. To standardize annotation and provide high confidence data for gene trap lines, a rigorous identification and annotation pipeline has been developed combining genomic localization and transcript alignment of gene trap sequence tags to identify trapped loci. This information is stored in a new bioinformatics database accessible through the IGTC Website interface. The IGTC Website () allows users to browse and search the database for trapped genes, BLAST sequences against gene trap sequence tags, and view trapped genes within biological pathways. In addition, IGTC data have been integrated into major genome browsers and bioinformatics sites to provide users with outside portals for viewing this data. The development of the IGTC Website marks a major advance by providing the research community with the data and tools necessary to effectively use public gene trap resources for the large-scale characterization of mammalian gene function