Promoting ethical practice: moral agency in a hostile environment

A reflective journey in probation and social work is the subject of this paper, during which the profession?s value base has been challenged by neo-liberal political and economic orthodoxy that has threatened to suppress social work?s �service ideal? of social justice, wellbeing and relationship. The Anglo-Saxon polities, including the UK, have been in the vanguard of these developments. Writing from the UK, the author promotes the exercise of moral agency � of praxis � associated with upholding the �service ideal? in the face of these challenges. A good practice framework is presented identifying features a practitioner can demand of practice settings if they are to provide congruity between the realities of daily practice and the �service ideal?. This framework is the outcome of the author?s own reflective journey encompassing practice, practitioner research, management, academic study, teaching and writing. A UK Advanced Award in Social Work and PhD were staging posts in its formulation. It models cross-fertilisation of teaching, learning and practice: an exemplar for the integration of social work education in the world of practice. The framework has four domains for appraising practice settings: regulatory context, values of practice, support and development of staff, knowledge creation. It is illustrated by �worked? examples from practice and research. The examples demonstrate tensions within the values, policy and practice dynamic, in which policy has become technocratic, instrumentalist and hostile to the �service ideal?. The author uses the examples to show how standards of moral agency may be actively sought by the practitioner in adverse circumstances. Our response to the modern environment challenges us to hone our understanding of what we mean by good practice and develop ethical practice because the global orthodoxy?s spectacular collapse in 2008-9 creates a space in which ethical discourse can acquire renewed influence in professional, political and economic debate

Storage of Natural Language Sentences in a Hopfield Network

This paper look at how the Hopfield neural network can be used to store and recall patterns constructed from natural language sentences. As a pattern recognition and storage tool, the Hopfield neural network has received much attention. This attention however has been mainly in the field of statistical physics due to the model's simple abstraction of spin glass systems. A discussion is made of the differences, shown as bias and correlation, between natural language sentence patterns and the randomly generated ones used in previous experiments. Results are given for numerical simulations which show the auto-associative competence of the network when trained with natural language patterns.Comment: latex, 10 pages with 2 tex figures and a .bib file, uses nemlap.sty, to appear in Proceedings of NeMLaP-

A brief guide to carrying out research about adult social care services for visually impaired people

Carrying out research about adult social care services for visually impaired people presents challenges that are not necessarily found in other fields. The purpose of this review is to draw attention to these challenges and to guide the researcher through them. It does so by drawing on the academic and grey literature. The review covers the ideological context of research in this field; definitions of visual impairment and their appropriate and inappropriate uses in research; misleading claims and reliable evidence about the size and characteristics of the visually impaired people and the reasons that these are important issues for research in the field. Challenges also cover the main topic areas of research and the methodological approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, that researchers have taken to deal with them. Issues common to both types of method cover sampling; the instruments used to collect data; the means of obtaining informed consent from visually impaired people, and organisations that can potentially assist researchers in this field

Relative authenticity : abstraction and the digital domain

This paper intends to offer a preliminary investigation of what will be referred to as the notion of ‘abstraction’ in relation to Sigmund Freud’s ideas of ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’, together with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of signification. Abstraction, then, shall be defined as one process through which a ‘signifier’ is created. The argument shall aim to trace and retrace the cognitive process of abstraction by discussing its role across different facets and layers of contemporary society, with particular attention being paid to the effects of the digital on this role. Abstractions shall be discussed regarding how they occur both in principle and in practice, and in how they might be perceived. This shall lead to a series of hypotheses concerning reflections and reactions which the omnipresence of the digital domain in every-day life might be prompting in contemporary society. The paper shall also focus on the parallel phenomena of ‘relative reality’ and ‘relative authenticity’, which can be understood as the hypothetical middle ground or gradient existing between ‘real’ and ‘fake’, and which shall be argued to be direct implications of abstraction.peer-reviewe

Towards cross-lingual alerting for bursty epidemic events

Background: Online news reports are increasingly becoming a source for event based early warning systems that detect natural disasters. Harnessing the massive volume of information available from multilingual newswire presents as many challenges as opportunities due to the patterns of reporting complex spatiotemporal events. Results: In this article we study the problem of utilising correlated event reports across languages. We track the evolution of 16 disease outbreaks using 5 temporal aberration detection algorithms on text-mined events classified according to disease and outbreak country. Using ProMED reports as a silver standard, comparative analysis of news data for 13 languages over a 129 day trial period showed improved sensitivity, F1 and timeliness across most models using cross-lingual events. We report a detailed case study analysis for Cholera in Angola 2010 which highlights the challenges faced in correlating news events with the silver standard. Conclusions: The results show that automated health surveillance using multilingual text mining has the potential to turn low value news into high value alerts if informed choices are used to govern the selection of models and data sources. An implementation of the C2 alerting algorithm using multilingual news is available at the BioCaster portal http://born.nii.ac.jp/?page=globalroundup