Armed Conflict in Ukraine and Social Work Response to It

Literature on social work demonstrates that relations between conflicts and social work constitute two paradigms – therapeutic and empowering. Each of them provides social workers with a different set of strategies and interventions.Focusing on social support to IDPs in Ukraine this paper explores the social work interventions in the aftermath of violence available for displaced people and gaps therein. It also discusses the implications for the social work profession caused by the on-going conflict in the country. Paper takes into account that modern social work comes from the fact that the displacement violates social ecology of human, causes deprivation, social exclusion, increases the risk of violence and the emergence of psychological ‘catch of dependency’ and so on. Specific consideration is given to social work strategies in different phases of displacement. The paper is based on a review of documents, semi-structured interviews with the social workers providing services for IDPs, and focus-groups with communities’ representatives.According to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine, by the August 2015 more than 1.4 million IDPs were officially registered. In brief, services providing social support to the IDPs in Ukraine can be grouped into three categories: government agencies, NGOs and volunteers (organized or chaotic). In working with IDPs, social workers can use short-term (crisis intervention, outreach work, task-oriented model of social work) and long-term intervention strategies focused on system-ecological model of social work and community development. The necessity for implication for IDPs the empowering strategies and changing public perceptions towards IDPs is evident. Issues of social work education might be reconsidered, as well as the value and perception of social work as a profession in Ukraine

Iterative disaggregation for a class of lumpable discrete-time stochastic automata networks

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Stochastic automata networks (SANs) have been developed and used in the last 15 years as a modeling formalism for large systems that can be decomposed into loosely connected components. In this work, we concentrate on the not so much emphasized discrete-time SANs. First, we remodel and extend an SAN that arises in wireless communications. Second, for an SAN with functional transitions, we derive conditions for a special case of ordinary lumpability in which aggregation is done automaton by automaton. Finally, for this class of lumpable discrete-time SANs we devise an efficient aggregation–iterative disaggregation algorithm and demonstrate its performance on the SAN model of interest. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Lumpable continuous-time stochastic automata networks

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The generator matrix of a continuous-time stochastic automata network (SAN) is a sum of tensor products of smaller matrices, which may have entries that are functions of the global state space. This paper specifies easy to check conditions for a class of ordinarily lumpable partitionings of the generator of a continuous-time SAN in which aggregation is performed automaton by automaton. When there exists a lumpable partitioning induced by the tensor representation of the generator, it is shown that an efficient aggregation-iterative disaggregation algorithm may be employed to compute the steady-state distribution. The results of experiments with two SAN models show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the highly competitive block Gauss-Seidel in terms of both the number of iterations and the time to converge to the solution. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved