Does Social Work Education Have an Impact on Social Policy Preferences? A Three-Cohort Study

This article examines the impact of social work education on the social policy preferences of social work students through a panel study of three cohorts of students at three universities in two countries - the United States and Israel. The findings of the study indicate that though the initial policy preferences of the students at the beginning of their studies at the three universities differed, by the end of their studies, the students\u27 preferences were similar and supportive of the welfare state model

Tightest Admissible Shortest Path

The shortest path problem in graphs is fundamental to AI. Nearly all variants of the problem and relevant algorithms that solve them ignore edge-weight computation time and its common relation to weight uncertainty. This implies that taking these factors into consideration can potentially lead to a performance boost in relevant applications. Recently, a generalized framework for weighted directed graphs was suggested, where edge-weight can be computed (estimated) multiple times, at increasing accuracy and run-time expense. We build on this framework to introduce the problem of finding the tightest admissible shortest path (TASP); a path with the tightest suboptimality bound on the optimal cost. This is a generalization of the shortest path problem to bounded uncertainty, where edge-weight uncertainty can be traded for computational cost. We present a complete algorithm for solving TASP, with guarantees on solution quality. Empirical evaluation supports the effectiveness of this approach.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.1148

Social Work Education as Professional Socialization: A Study of the Impact of Social Work Education Upon Students\u27s Professional Preferences

Professional socialization in social work is the subject of the panel study described in this article. It focuses upon the impact of different social work education programs upon the professional preferences of students in the United States and Israel. The findings indicate that significant change with regard to some of the variables did occur between the beginning and completion of studies. This generally took the form of a decline in preferences though a number of cross-culture differences were observed. The implications of the findings for the issue of professional socialization in social work are discussed

Polynomial-Time Verification and Testing of Implementations of the Snapshot Data Structure

We analyze correctness of implementations of the snapshot data structure in terms of linearizability. We show that such implementations can be verified in polynomial time. Additionally, we identify a set of representative executions for testing and show that the correctness of each of these executions can be validated in linear time. These results present a significant speedup considering that verifying linearizability of implementations of concurrent data structures, in general, is EXPSPACE-complete in the number of program-states, and testing linearizability is NP-complete in the length of the tested execution. The crux of our approach is identifying a class of executions, which we call simple, such that a snapshot implementation is linearizable if and only if all of its simple executions are linearizable. We then divide all possible non-linearizable simple executions into three categories and construct a small automaton that recognizes each category. We describe two implementations (one for verification and one for testing) of an automata-based approach that we develop based on this result and an evaluation that demonstrates significant improvements over existing tools. For verification, we show that restricting a state-of-the-art tool to analyzing only simple executions saves resources and allows the analysis of more complex cases. Specifically, restricting attention to simple executions finds bugs in 27 instances, whereas, without this restriction, we were only able to find 14 of the 30 bugs in the instances we examined. We also show that our technique accelerates testing performance significantly. Specifically, our implementation solves the complete set of 900 problems we generated, whereas the state-of-the-art linearizability testing tool solves only 554 problems

What Kind of Social Policy do Social Work Students Prefer? A Comparison of Students in Three Countries

The goal of this article is to contribute to our understanding of the way in which students at the very beginning of their social work training view the sources of social problems and the way in which society should deal with these problems. This is part of an effort to determine the contemporary role of social change in the thinking of social workers in different national settings. Traditionally, social work has regarded social change as one of its primary professional objectives. Ever since the settlement houses were first established in the late years of the 19th century, many social workers have indeed been actively involved in social action aimed at bringing about social reform for the betterment of deprived segments of society. These efforts first took place in a period during which the term welfare state had yet to be coined and the notion of state responsibility for social protection for the poor was not widely accepted. Nevertheless, the conviction of these early social workers that social conditions were the prime cause of deprivation and poverty led them to actively seek improved social legislation and programs (Addams, 1910: Leighninger and Midgley, 1997)

Did Government Benefits Help Israeli Households Avoid Hardship during COVID-19? Evidence from a National Survey

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Israel quickly introduced aggressive social distancing measures to curb the virus spread and adapted its unemployment insurance program in response to rising unemployment rates. This study examines the relationship between household income and the experience of material hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, and investigates how the receipt of unemployment benefits moderated the relationship between income and material hardship. Using data from a household survey, we find a negative association between household income and the experience of material hardship. Moreover, middle-income households receiving unemployment benefits were more likely to experience material hardship than those who did not receive government support. The difference was largely not observed for low- and high-income households. These trends were similar during the early and later months of the pandemic. This study informs the efforts of policymakers to improve existing social support programs to expedite economic recovery during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Medium effects in K^+ nucleus interaction from consistent analysis of integral and differential cross sections

Self consistency in the analysis of transmission measurements for K^+ on several nuclei in the momentum range of 500-700 MeV/c is achieved with a "t_{eff}(rho)rho" potential and new results are derived for total cross sections. The imaginary part of the t_{eff} amplitude is found to increase linearly with the average nuclear density in excess of a threshold value. This phenomenological density dependence of the K^+ nucleus optical potential also gives rise to good agreement with recent measurements of differential cross sections for elastic scattering of 715 MeV/c K^+ by Li^6 and C.Comment: 11 pages, RevTeX, 2 Postscript figures, submitted Phys. Lett.

Translation, cultural adaptation, and validation of the American Skindex-29 quality of life index

BACKGROUND:Measuring the quality of life measure of patients with dermatologic diseases is an important concern. The instruments to evaluate it are commonly originally written in English and need to be translated and validated to be used in different cultures.OBJECTIVE:The purpose of this paper is to translate and validate the Skindex-29 questionnaire to Brazilian Portuguese to be used in our country as a quality of life assessment instrument in dermatologic patients.METHODS:The first step was the translation from English to Brazilian Portuguese and the back-translation by two native speakers. The translated version was then used for the second step, when three questionnaires were applied to 75 patients (43 of whom were classified as lightly affected and 32 as heavily affected by their dermatologic conditions): an identification questionnaire, the translated version of Skindex-29, and the Brazilian Portuguese version of Dermatologic Life Quality Index (DLQI). Additionally, the generic questionnaire Short Form 36 (SF-36) was applied to 41 of these patients. The last step to evaluate reproducibility was repeating the Skindex-29 questionnaire by the same researcher one week later in 44 patients.RESULTS:Reliability was observed in global Skindex-29 scale (α=0.934), and its domains emotions (α=0.926), symptoms (α=0,702), and psycosocial functioning (α=0.860). The reproducibility showed high intraclass correlations. High intra class correlations was observed, thus validating reliability.CONCLUSIONS:The Skindex-29 quality of life questionnaire was properly translated and validated to Brazilian Portuguese.Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP)Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São PauloUNIFESPSciEL