Voice, Perspective, Truth, and Justice: Race and the Mountain in the Legal Academy

Sedan tidigt 90-tal har det pågått en diskussion om den evidensbaserade praktikens vara eller inte vara inom socialtjänsten. Evidensbaserad praktik är en metod där den bästa tillgängliga evidensen, den egna erfarenheten samt klientens preferenser utgör grunden för professionella beslut. För att möjliggöra en sådan praktik måste bedömningar och dokumentation inom socialtjänsten utföras mer standardiserat. Förespråkarna, däribland Socialstyrelsen, menar att arbetets och insatsers effekt måste kunna mätas för att förbättras. Importen av evidensbaserad praktik i socialtjänst är dock förknippat med en rad svårigheter och vissa menar att det är ett hot mot de professioner som finns inom det sociala arbetet. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka vilken inställning yrkesverksamma socialsekreterare har till evidensbaserad praktik. I det här arbetet utgår vi ifrån Lipskys gräsrotsbyråkrati för att undersöka socialsekreterarnas inställning. Teorin ger möjlighet att förklara organisationers beteende utifrån enskilda socialsekreterares yrkesutövning och inställningar. Studien är kvantitativ och data har samlats in via en enkät. Fyra socialkontor deltog i studien, tre från Stockholm och ett från Katrineholm. Totalt besvarade 67 socialsekreterare enkäten och resultaten från undersökningen är ganska lika resultat från tidigare forskning. Resultatet blev en ganska tydlig positiv inställning till evidensbaserad praktik, eller åtminstone till delar av evidensbaserad praktik. En möjlig förklaring till detta är socialsekreterarnas upplevda arbetsbelastning, där hög arbetsbelastning ger en mer positiv inställning till evidensbaserad praktik

The Investigation of Identity Construction: a Foucauldian Reading of Sam Shepard's Buried Child

Shepard is peculiarly powerful in his symbolic family problem plays: True West, Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class. He allegorizes the American experience and undermines the myth of America as the New Eden. The present study seeks to critically explore Sam Shepard's Buried Child in terms of Foucauldian conception of identity construction. Shepard is depicting a dystopian world with its bewildered characters; however he has still got a romantic view of individuals trying to grapple with the society in order to get unity and order. This Shephardian attitude towards human beings is seemingly a free agent that overlaps the Foucauldian view which establishes a philosophy focusing on the relationship between the self and the society. The present essay attempts to demonstrate the complicated relationship between the self and the opposing forces

Evaluation and comparison of bivariate and multivariate statistical methods for landslide susceptibility mapping (case study: Zab Basin)

Landslides are among the great destructive factors which cause lots of fatalities and financial losses all over the world every year. Studying of the factors affecting occurrence of landslides in a region and zoning the resulting damages will certainly play a crucial role in mitigating such phenomena. In this research, through geological maps and field studies, we primarily prepared a map for landslide distributions in Zab basin-an area of 520 km 2 in the southwest mountainsides of West Azerbaijan Province. By applying other source of information such as the existing thematic maps, we studied and defined the factors (slope, slope aspect, distance to road, distance to drainage network, distance to fault, land use and land cover, geological factors, horizontal gravity acceleration of earthquakes, and climatic condition of the studied area) that affect occurrence of the landslides. To get better precision and higher speed and facility in our analysis, all descriptive and spatial information were entered into geographic information system (GIS) system and Ilwis software. We also used Satellite images (Landsat ETM + and SPOT 5), producing land cover and landslide-inventory maps, respectively. After preparation of the influential parameters on landslides, we drew the zoning maps of slide hazard via four different statistical methods and then evaluated and compared them. By analyzing the obtained index and by comparing landslide distribution map and zoning map of landslide susceptibility prepared by each of the methods in GIS environment, we found that bivariate method of information value analysis, bivariate method of density-area, multivariate method with linear regression analysis, and multivariate method of discriminate analysis take priority, respectively. Finally, as this research shows, despite their simplicity, bivariate statistical methods have more acceptable precision than multivariate methods, and consequently, they are more compatible with landslide susceptibility of the region. From the results, lithology, slope, annual rainfall, land cover, slope aspect, distance to waterway, distance to road, horizontal gravity acceleration, and distance to fault are very influential to landslides in the region

A field study of wind over a simulated block building

A full-scale field study of the wind over a simulated two-dimensional building is reported. The study develops an experiment to investigate the structure and magnitude of the wind fields. A description of the experimental arrangement, the type and expected accuracy of the data, and the range of the data are given. The data are expected to provide a fundamental understanding of mean wind and turbulence structure of the wind field around the bluff body. Preliminary analysis of the data demonstrates the reliability and completeness of the data in this regard