Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England

© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below.This article considers professional youth work in England. It reflects on youth work's persistently anomalous position in the division of labour. Since their achievement of a contested professional status in the 1960s and 1970s, youth workers have pursued an occupational ideology that draws principally on a romantic humanism. Until recently, this provided a relatively stable basis to their practices. Under a dominant contemporary neo-liberalism, influential in different ways across Europe, youth work has been subjected to a range of managerialist practices that have further exposed its ambiguity as a profession. Austerity policy, enacted under the Coalition government, has further weakened professional youth work's position in the welfare division of labour. The article points to resistance to austerity on the part of some youth workers and speculates on the possible future of professional youth work in a policy regime that has little sympathy for the public professions

Sunflowers of Convex Open Sets

A sunflower is a collection of sets $\{U_1,\ldots, U_n\}$ such that the pairwise intersection $U_i\cap U_j$ is the same for all choices of distinct $i$ and $j$. We study sunflowers of convex open sets in $\mathbb R^d$, and provide a Helly-type theorem describing a certain "rigidity" that they possess. In particular we show that if $\{U_1,\ldots, U_{d+1}\}$ is a sunflower in $\mathbb R^d$, then any hyperplane that intersects all $U_i$ must also intersect $\bigcap_{i=1}^{d+1} U_i$. We use our results to describe a combinatorial code $\mathcal C_n$ for all $n\ge 2$ which is on the one hand minimally non-convex, and on the other hand has no local obstructions. Along the way we further develop the theory of morphisms of codes, and establish results on the covering relation in the poset $\mathbf P_{\mathbf{Code}}$

Punishing Pimps and Johns: Sex-Trafficking and Utah\u27s Laws

This article will focus on the problem of women being forced into prostitution and then coerced into staying, also known as sex trafficking. This Article will focus specifically on what Utah can do to improve its approach to sex trafficking, in light of actions taken by other states and nations. Part II of this article provides background and definitions of sex trafficking and the players involved. Part III discusses the legal history of the criminalization of sex trafficking. Part IV talks about incidents of sex trafficking in Utah. Part V discusses the current laws against sex trafficking in Utah. Part VI then provides recommendations for how Utah could change its laws to better focus on demand, treat victims as victims, and better combat the problem

Conditioned-stimulus-elicited emotion and outcome expectation have dissociable effects on reward seeking, and are differentially affected by personality: implications for addiction

A better understanding of the psychological mechanisms underpinning addiction will facilitate its remediation. Some evidence suggests that the emotional properties of drug-paired stimuli themselves drive drug-procurement, while other evidence indicates that the expectation of reward elicited by the stimuli is sufficient to control drug-seeking. The current series of experiments aimed to explicate these seemingly contradictory data, by characterising the roles played in reward seeking by conditioned-stimulus-elicited emotion and expectation in non-dependent samples, before assessing their contribution in smokers. Further data suggest a role of personality in addictive behaviours, thus personality was assessed as a moderator of reward-seeking. Variations of a Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer design, which tests the ability of reward-associated stimuli to modulate reward seeking, together with questionnaires of personality were applied. It was shown that outcome expectation was consistently necessary for cue-potentiated monetary-reward seeking, and similarly in smokers, cigarette outcome expectation was sufficient for cue-potentiated cigarette-reward seeking. Tentative evidence for the role of conditioned-stimulus emotional value in monetary-reward seeking was found, although this latter result requires scrutiny through additional research. Moderating influences of Extraversion and Neuroticism were found for cue-elicited emotion and outcome expectation, respectively. It is therefore proposed that reward expectancy is necessary for conditioned stimuli to control behaviour. The emotional properties of reward-predictive stimuli may be important for reward seeking in the absence of addiction, but when addiction to reward is present, control of reward seeking can occur via reward expectation only. Data from the role of personality, in moderating the effects of stimulus-elicited emotion or outcome expectation on reward-seeking behaviour, suggest that the control of behaviour by emotion may be facilitated by Extraversion, due to its propensity towards emotional processes, whereas control by expectation may be facilitated by Neuroticism, due to its inclination towards predictive learning

Punishing Pimps and Johns: Sex-Trafficking and Utah\u27s Laws

This article will focus on the problem of women being forced into prostitution and then coerced into staying, also known as sex trafficking. This Article will focus specifically on what Utah can do to improve its approach to sex trafficking, in light of actions taken by other states and nations. Part II of this article provides background and definitions of sex trafficking and the players involved. Part III discusses the legal history of the criminalization of sex trafficking. Part IV talks about incidents of sex trafficking in Utah. Part V discusses the current laws against sex trafficking in Utah. Part VI then provides recommendations for how Utah could change its laws to better focus on demand, treat victims as victims, and better combat the problem

Path Integration Changes as a Cognitive Marker for Vascular Cognitive Impairment?—A Pilot Study

Path integration spatial navigation processes are emerging as promising cognitive markers for prodromal and clinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, such path integration changes have been less explored in Vascular Cognitive Impairment (VCI), despite neurovascular change being a major contributing factor to dementia and potentially AD. In particular, the sensitivity and specificity of path integration impairments in VCI compared to AD is unclear. In the current pilot study, we explore path integration performance in early-stage AD and VCI patient groups and hypothesize that: (i) medial parietal mediated egocentric processes will be more affected in VCI; and (ii) medial temporal mediated allocentric processes will be more affected in AD. This cross-sectional study included early-stage VCI patients (n = 9), AD patients (n = 10) and healthy age-matched controls (n = 20). All participants underwent extensive neuropsychological testing, as well as spatial navigation testing. The spatial navigation tests included the virtual reality “Supermarket” task assessing egocentric (body-based) and allocentric (map-based) navigation as well as the “Clock Orientation” test assessing egocentric and path integration processes. Results showed that egocentric integration processes are only impaired in VCI, potentially distinguishing it from AD. However, in contrast to our prediction, allocentric integration was not more impaired in AD compared to VCI. These preliminary findings suggest limited specificity of allocentric integration deficits between VCI and AD. By contrast, egocentric path integration deficits emerge as more specific to VCI, potentially allowing for more specific diagnostic and treatment outcome measures for vascular impairment in dementia

Art Therapy Provides Relief to New and Expecting Mothers

Throughout pregnancy, during childbirth, and after childbirth, new and expecting mothers often experience a great amount of anxiety and depressive symptoms that can be classified into three divisions: prenatal anxiety, fear of childbirth, and postpartum depression. Often these symptoms are overlooked and unresolved due to their short time span and being specifically linked to childbirth. However, these symptoms cause a lesser quality of life for the mother that can highly impact the mother and her newborn short-term and long-term. Art therapy techniques, explained by the Expressive Therapy’s Continuum, have proved beneficial in the aid of alleviating depression and anxiety symptoms in new and expecting mothers