Disability, Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals: Relevance, Challenges and Opportunities for DFID

[Excerpt] This report has been prepared as the final output of the Policy Project of the DFID Disability Knowledge and Research (KaR) Programme. The purpose of the Policy Project is to assist DFID to develop policies and processes to support the mainstreaming of disability and to ensure that the Disability KaR’s knowledge and research outputs are responsive to DFID’s needs and effectively communicated to DFID. The Policy Project has seen the placement of the Disability Policy Officer in DFID to provide DFID with technical support on disability issues. This report aims to build on the previous report, ‘DFID and Disability: A Mapping of the Department for International Development and Disability Issues’ (June 2004), by reviewing DFID’s progress on addressing disability issues during the last year and identifying barriers to and opportunities for taking work forward

DFID and Disability: A Mapping of the Department for International Development and Disability Issues

[Excerpt] Disability, until very recently, has been largely invisible in the development process. In 2000, DFID broke new ground when it was the first major development agency to publish a paper on the links between poverty and disability. The Issues paper, ‘Disability, Poverty and Development’ was not a statement of policy; it advocated a twin track approach of mainstreaming disability issues combined with specific initiatives to address the particular needs of disabled people. The paper has gained widespread international recognition and raised expectations that DFID was about to take a lead on the issue. However, internally, the Issues paper is not so well known. This report reveals that DFID’s disability-focused activities have been largely hidden, and that more has been achieved than has been recognised

Issues In Patient Information Transmission: Standardizing Home Health Admission

When 84 patients, current and former, complained about lack of information during the intake process within five months period, a uniform Patient Screening Tool (Appendix L) was developed to improve the admissions process to this home health agency. Intake staff is responsible for receiving accurate information from the referral sources, confirming qualifications to receive services, and initiating education about services to the patient. While the population served has a wide range in age, diagnoses, discharge settings and cultures, the majority are over 65, frail, homebound and are returning home after hospital, SNF or rehabilitation settings. Data were collected through evidence based practice research; informal surveys prior to developing the Patient Screening Tool, and clinicians’ interviews. Senge’s (1990) ‘Learning Organization theory and Ladder of Inference’ facilitated the implementation of this tool. The Ladder promotes independent thinking from all stakeholders. Direct observation and coaching encourage ongoing teaching between intake staff and nurse leader. Competency 8, evaluate patient handoffs and transitions of care to improve outcomes of Essential 3: Quality Improvement and Safety, was applied to determine the successful use of the Patient Screening Tool. Assessment of this project was not completed due to resistance to change from the source that would provide approval. The“Patient Screening Tool” and the surveys are in process. The Patient Screening Tool will be used but no follow up surveys relayed to effectiveness were approved. Limited informal discussions support the acceptance of the form as an improvement in the intake process however a formal survey has not been successfully implemented. The recommendation is to continue to encourage everyone involve in intake to use this tool to ensure seamless education and uniform accuracy of information during the patient\u27s transition period from referring setting to home health care

Single Ladies, Plural: racism, scandal and “authenticity” within the multiplication and circulation of online dance discourses

This chapter seeks to explore how cultural texts disseminated online are made and remade, challenged and championed by audiences, with the mutability inherent to all texts becoming highly visible in this environment. The entry point of this inquiry is the music video accompanying Beyoncé Knowles’s 2008 hit Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), which quickly became an Internet phenomenon, spawning numerous homages, parodies, and reinterpretations. Additionally, this popular cultural phenomenon was the subject of a social media scandal invoking issues of racism, “authenticity,” appropriation, the democratization of technology, and “expert knowledge.” This chapter will touch on a few key moments of online engagement with this event in order to try to flesh out the tangled politics inherent in cultural consumption, participation, and online identity building

Writing sociological crime fiction: you will have your day in court

In this article I share and discuss a poetic work of experimental sociological crime fiction titled “You Will Have Your Day in Court” (in Crockett Thomas, 2020c). In it I reimagine the “true crime” story of “King Con” Paul Bint, who for a period in 2009 successfully impersonated Keir Starmer, the then Director of Public Prosecutions. I first introduce my collaborative approach to writing sociological crime fiction, connections to poststructuralist philosophy and conceptualisation of research as a process of translation. After sharing the piece, I discuss thematic aspects of the work, such as the popular fascination of fraud, desire for explanations for criminal acts, and the narrative constraints placed on people who have experienced criminalisation. I also consider stylistic elements including use of narrative voice, characterisation, and narrative structure. I hope that this article is of interest to scholars aiming to marry poststructuralist thought with an experimental approach to writing sociological fiction

Rehearsal: A Configuration Verification Tool for Puppet

Large-scale data centers and cloud computing have turned system configuration into a challenging problem. Several widely-publicized outages have been blamed not on software bugs, but on configuration bugs. To cope, thousands of organizations use system configuration languages to manage their computing infrastructure. Of these, Puppet is the most widely used with thousands of paying customers and many more open-source users. The heart of Puppet is a domain-specific language that describes the state of a system. Puppet already performs some basic static checks, but they only prevent a narrow range of errors. Furthermore, testing is ineffective because many errors are only triggered under specific machine states that are difficult to predict and reproduce. With several examples, we show that a key problem with Puppet is that configurations can be non-deterministic. This paper presents Rehearsal, a verification tool for Puppet configurations. Rehearsal implements a sound, complete, and scalable determinacy analysis for Puppet. To develop it, we (1) present a formal semantics for Puppet, (2) use several analyses to shrink our models to a tractable size, and (3) frame determinism-checking as decidable formulas for an SMT solver. Rehearsal then leverages the determinacy analysis to check other important properties, such as idempotency. Finally, we apply Rehearsal to several real-world Puppet configurations.Comment: In proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 201