Social Work, Risk, Power

Contemporary ideas and strategies of both \'risk\' and \'power\' are significant and dynamic influences in social theory and social action, and they can therefore be expected to have a substantial impact on the ways in which social work is constituted, practiced and evaluated. In this article, I shall articulate distinct conceptualisations and debates about each of these, before considering their inter-relationships and the implications of these for our thinking about what social work is, and what it should be. Firstly, I will consider social work\'s contested and problematic place within the broader welfare domain. It is recognised as being a form of activity which inhabits an ambiguous and uncertain position at the interface between the individual and the social, and between the marginalised and the mainstream. Building on this, \'power\' will be shown to infuse social work ideas and practices in a number of distinct dimensions, linking and bridging \'personal\', \'positional\' and \'relational\' domains. This discussion will be juxtaposed with a discussion of \'risk\' and the part it has come to play in shaping and infusing social work practices, especially but not exclusively with children. The deconstruction of contemporary understandings and uses of risk as a central and \'authoritative\' feature of assessment and decision-making will inform the argument that it can be viewed as a vehicle for the maintenance and legitimation of power relations which disenfranchise and oppress those who are most vulnerable. In conclusion, I will summarise the ways in which conventional understandings and inter-related material realities of power and risk are often hierarchical, uni-directional and oppressive; and on this basis, how they can be laid open to challenge. The reconceptualisation and remaking of power relations will be shown to have direct consequences for the ways in which risk is defined and addressed as a social work \'problem\'.Social Work, Risk, Power, Social Justice, Authority, Legitimacy Left_arrows

Career development tips for today's nursing academic: bibliometrics, altmetrics and social media

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Aims: A discussion of bibliometrics, altmetrics and social media for the contemporary nursing scholar and academic researcher. Background: Today's nursing academic faces myriad challenges in balancing their daily life and, in recent years, academic survival has been increasingly challenged by the various research assessment exercises that evaluate the performance of knowledge institutions. As such, it is essential that today's nursing academic keep up to date with the core competencies needed for survival in a modern research career, particularly the intersecting triad of bibliometrics, altmetrics and social media. Design: Discussion paper. Data sources: Published literature and relevant websites. Implications for nursing: The rise of social media and altmetrics has important implications for contemporary nursing scholars who publish their research. Some fundamental questions when choosing a journal might be ‘does it have a Twitter and/or Facebook site, or a blog (or all three)’; and ‘does it have any other presence on social media, such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube, ResearchGate and so on?’ Another consequence of embracing social media is that individual academics should also develop their own strategies for promoting and disseminating their work as widely as possible. Conclusion: The rising importance of social media and altmetrics can no longer be ignored, and today's nursing academic now has another facet to consider in their scholarly activities. Despite the changing nature of research dissemination, however, it is still important to recognize the undoubted value of established knowledge dissemination routes (that being the peer-reviewed publication)

Commentary: JWST near-infrared detector degradation— finding the problem, fixing the problem, and moving forward

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST will be an infrared-optimized telescope, with an approximately 6.5 m diameter primary mirror, that is located at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. Three of JWST’s four science instruments use Teledyne HgCdTe HAWAII-2RG (H2RG) near infrared detector arrays. During 2010, the JWST Project noticed that a few of its 5 μm cutoff H2RG detectors were degrading during room temperature storage, and NASA chartered a “Detector Degradation Failure Review Board” (DD-FRB) to investigate. The DD-FRB determined that the root cause was a design flaw that allowed indium to interdiffuse with the gold contacts and migrate into the HgCdTe detector layer. Fortunately, Teledyne already had an improved design that eliminated this degradation mechanism. During early 2012, the improved H2RG design was qualified for flight and JWST began making additional H2RGs. In this article, we present the two public DD-FRB “Executive Summaries” that: (1) determined the root cause of the detector degradation and (2) defined tests to determine whether the existing detectors are qualified for flight. We supplement these with a brief introduction to H2RG detector arrays, some recent measurements showing that the performance of the improved design meets JWST requirements, and a discussion of how the JWST Project is using cryogenic storage to retard the degradation rate of the existing flight spare H2RGs