Welfare as a catalyst for development: A case study of a rural welfare programme

One of CORD's activities is the welfare programme, which started four years ago. It has two features which make it particularly interesting. First, it has introduced a level of welfare into rural areas which has not been there before. Second, it is based on a broad, developmental and holistic approach to welfare — which is what most people agree is needed, but very few actually manage to do. Welfare projects are often well meaning but small in scale, without the ability to help people out of the poverty in which they are trapped. We believe that this welfare programme acts as a catalyst for other development activities — it shows that welfare can be a wedge, a point of entry, for broader community development. It is one model for a more appropriate welfare system for the future. Compared to health, there is very little written material about alternative welfare provision. There have been fewer attempts at model building than there have been in health. And it is possible that some small projects have not been written up for others to learn from. A key aspect of innovative work in the social service and development fields is the training of new kinds of workers. This is almost always based on a recognition that existing professionals (for example, doctors, social workers, irrigation engineers, physiotherapists) •are expensive to train • are difficult to move from city-bases, and • are not necessarily good communicators with the people they are meant to serve. The South African government and the South African Council for Social Work (the body that finally controls professional social welfare) have agreed that there is a need for a new category of welfare worker — an assistant or auxiliary. The rules surrounding their training and supervision are such that, although it is a step in the right direction, it does not go nearly far enough. For example, every two assistants must be supervised by one social worker. In most rural areas there are no social workers, so there can be no assistants. When new categories of workers are trained, they often meet with strong resistance from two sides — existing professionals, and people in communities. In the welfare field, the strongest resistance will probably come from the professionals. We think that this welfare programme shows how the work of the professionals can mesh together with the work of people with less formal training, so that they can help each other to deliver better services to more people. The welfare context The welfare programme needs to be set against the context of existing welfare services in South Africa. The South African welfare system is inappropriate and inadequate — this is recognised by people in government, people working in the private welfare sector, and is certainly recognised at community level. The problems that are very evident are: • welfare spending and social services have been biased in favour of white provision • the system has not been properly planned • there is a heavy bias in favour of urban areas, and a serious neglect of rural welfare • where social work posts do exist in rural areas, they are difficult to fill. • the privatisation of welfare which is being encouraged by government (along with the privatisation of health, education, transport and other social goods) will mean that the well-off people will be able to buy better private services, but poorer people will have less access to even poorer public services. There is an emerging consensus across the country that if the welfare system is to have a contribution to make to the 'new South Africa' it will have to become: • more developmentally oriented • more appropriate to the conditions in which the majority of people live • more concerned with the welfare of the very poor, especially in rural areas • more accessible to people who need the services, and particularly by women and children. These principles are accepted internationally as guidelines for the provision of social services such as heath, welfare and education. In the field of primary health care in South Africa, we have many examples of model schemes which have tried to learn how to provide appropriate, affordable, accessible health services. Many of these have been written about; some indeed are known internationally. All these case studies are vital to the development of better health services in future. In most rural areas, and in the majority of peri-urban informal settlements, we are not talking of a situation where services could be improved by adding more professionals — we have a situation where there is virtually no access to welfare services at all. The interview that follows is presented as a case study of an innovative welfare programme

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe