Children with emotional disabilities: Perceptions of siblings

This paper reports the process and findings of a study of siblings of children with emotional disabilities. The intent of the research was to engage in an exploratory study through the use of a focus group to gain a preliminary understanding of the perceptions siblings have of a brother or sister with an emotional disability and the service system. Recommendations are given to mental health professionals for working with families and siblings of children with emotional disabilities. Ideas for including siblings in working with family systems are presented.     

Scheduling Truck Arrivals at an Air Cargo Terminal

We consider the scheduling of truck arrivals at an air cargo terminal. By coordinating arrivals of cargo delivery trucks with outbound flight departure schedules, some of the shipments can be transferred directly to the departing flights, while others will be stored at the terminal's storage facility and incur extra handling and storage costs. The objective is to obtain a feasible schedule so as to minimize the total cost of operations. We formulate the problem as a time‐indexed integer program and show that, even with limited number of unloading docks at the terminal, the problem is non‐trivial (NP‐hard in the strong sense). Our solution method includes an exact solution procedure to determine an optimal unloading sequence for the shipments carried by each truck, together with a Lagrangian relaxation‐based heuristic for assigning trucks to truck docks and determining truck arrival times. We conducted computational experiments to test the performance of our solution method. Computational results show that our method can generate near‐optimal solutions efficiently. Our simulation results indicate that the scheduling approach proposed in this paper has the potential to generate significant cost savings over a first‐come, first‐served approach currently used at the air cargo terminal that we observed.     

Patterns of Advanced Manufacturing Technology Utilization and Manufacturing Capabilities

The objectives of this research are first to empirically replicate Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) utilization taxonomies identified in foregoing research, second to investigate the relationship between patterns of AMT utilization and manufacturing capabilities attainment, and third to explore differences in context, and performance across AMT groups. Theories of performance frontiers and capability progression provide the basis for our hypotheses. Data were collected from 224 U.S. manufacturing plants in industries considered to have potential utilizations of AMTs. A cluster analysis of the data yields a solution that closely resembles a previous AMT utilization taxonomy, including four groups labeled, respectively, as Traditionalists, Generalists, High Investors, and Designers. Significant manufacturing capability differences across these four groups indicate that plants that utilize a broader scope of AMTs enjoy a greater breadth of manufacturing capabilities. The implied capability attainment pattern is consistent with cumulative capability theory. However, the results suggest that cost capability is not included in the capability mix when broad‐based AMT utilization is the enabler of capability gains. A post hoc exploration of the AMT groups indicates significant differences in performance across the groups. Collectively, the results extend prior research by providing added insights into the possible rationale and impact of AMT utilization patterns.     

Bowling Alone in Taiwan? Political Trust and Civic Participation of Taiwanese and Their Appraisal of Liberal Democracy and Personal Wellbeing

Social Indicators Research - Based on a nationwide survey dataset collected by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan (2017) (N?=?2737) and adopting structural equation modelling with...     

Serve or skip: the power of rejection in online bottleneck matching

We consider the online matching problem, where n server-vertices lie in a metric space and n request-vertices that arrive over time each must immediately be permanently assigned to a server-vertex. We focus on the egalitarian bottleneck objective, where the goal is to minimize the maximum distance between any request and its server. It has been shown that while there are effective algorithms for the utilitarian objective (minimizing total cost) in the resource augmentation setting where the offline adversary has half the resources, these are not effective for the egalitarian objective. Thus, we propose a new Serve-or-Skip (SoS) bicriteria analysis model, where the online algorithm may reject or skip up to a specified number of requests, and propose two greedy algorithms: GriNN(t) and \({{\textsc {Grin}}^*(t)}\). We show that the SoS model of resource augmentation analysis can essentially simulate the doubled-server-capacity model, and then examine the performance of GriNN(t) and \({\textsc {Grin}^*(t)}\).     

专业、科学、本土化:中国社会工作十年的三个迷思

在中央政府大力倡导建立一支庞大社工队伍的形势下,中国社会工作已渐渐进入政府不同的职能部门,社会工作岗位的建设亦日见增多。在快速增长的过程中,中国社会工作的发展已突破了很多原来的限制,如教材不足、师资不够等。但是在关于社会工作作为一个专业在中国的发展的讨论中,至少有三个问题仍然不断缠扰着中国社会工作学界:社会工作的专业性、科学性、本土化。中国社会工作的发展一定要扎根于中国复杂的国情,有机地结合本土和非本土社会工作的技术和文化价值基因。     

Adapting private family time in child protective services decision-making processes

The Family Group Conference (FGC) is grounded in a rights-based framework, whereby children and their families have the right and responsibility to be primary decision-makers when child protection issues arise, and the statutory agency has the responsibility to convene the entitled members of the family network to lead the decision-making. A distinct core component of FGC—private family time (PFT)—allows families to discuss the information and formulate their responses and plans privately during conferencing. This paper describes how a large child welfare agency in the United States adapted PFT in two ways: (1) including a parent advocate (PA) and (2) abbreviating the amount of time allowed for this discussion. Given the lack of empirical research on the PFT component, this qualitative exploratory study sought to understand the functions and perceived impacts of PA-supported PFT during initial child protective services (CPS) conferences at which decisions of child removal or placement were being contemplated. PFT served multiple beneficial functions and impacted families in several positive ways: families gained greater awareness of safety concerns, felt empowered and confident in the preferred safety and service plan, became increasingly engaged and involved in the case decision-making process and ultimately felt less apprehensive.     

Drinking: Another glass ceiling? Social drinking and alcohol use among women in Korea

Korean society is experiencing a rapid increase in alcohol consumption among women. Research on women's alcohol use has focused mostly on problems and pathological symptoms associated with alcohol use. Focusing only on problems of alcohol use risks overlooking some important social phenomena where alcohol use is a medium. We examined the association between marital status, childcare responsibility, employment status and social drinking behaviour. Our aim was to examine how these factors influence women's alcohol consumption in order to provide an empirical explanation of how the traditional division of labour limits women's social drinking practices. Findings show that women are structurally excluded from social drinking behaviour due to domestic responsibilities (as a wife and a mother). In other words, social drinking has become another glass ceiling for women. Key Practitioner Message: ● Attention should be given to structural influences on women's alcohol use; ● It is important to consider gender inequality in both formal and informal domains.     

A hybrid genetic algorithm for train sequencing in the Korean railway

This article addresses the train-sequencing problem encountered in the Korean railway. It first presents a mixed integer programming model for the problem, in which the mileage must be balanced for each train route, while various field constraints must be satisfied, including overnight stay capacity and maintenance allocation restrictions. Then, it proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm as a solution approach to the problem. The proposed algorithm utilizes a modified elite group technique along with two heuristic procedures based on the mixed integer programming model. Finally, the proposed solution approach is tested with real-world data from the Korean railway. Numerical experiments under different conditions indicate that the proposed solution approach to the train-sequencing problem is promising.