Personal Network Correlates and Predictors of Homelessness for Injection Drug Users in Baltimore,Maryland

Injection drug users are at high risk for homelessness and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. This study sought to examine incidence rates and the social and economic antecedents of homelessness of impoverished inner-city injection drug users. Of the 569 participants, from a nontreatment sample who participated HW prevention study, intelViewed at baseline, 324 (57%) were reintelViewed 5.2 months late!: At baseline 48% of the participants reported that they had been homeless in the past 10 years. Of the 324, 18% reported that at both intelViews they had been homeless within the prior 6 months, 12% reported homelessness at baseline but not at follow-up, and 8% reported homelessness at follow-up but not at baseline. At baseline personal social support network characteristic of size of material aid and size of sex network was found to be associated with self-reports of homelessness. Baseline reports ofpresence of mother in personal network, size of material aid network, and network density were found to be associated with reports of homelessness at follow-up. These result suggest the need for alternative approaches to addressing issues of homelessness injection drug users.     

Six-Month Follow-Up Changes for TANF-Eligible Clients Involved in Kentucky's Targeted Assessment Program

ABSTRACT

Welfare reform has been successful in helping clients achieve self-sufficiency. However, some individuals experience problems associated with basic needs, physical health, mental health, substance abuse, and intimate partner violence (IPV) that can impede transitioning from welfare to work and/or interfere with parental responsibilities. The Targeted Assessment Program (TAP) was created more than a decade ago to identify and address these problems and help clients move off the welfare rolls in Kentucky. Self-reported interview data were used to examine changes and effect sizes between baseline assessment and 6-month follow-up from a sample (n = 322) of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families-eligible clients participating in Kentucky's TAP. Using McNemar's test for correlated proportions, paired-sample t-tests, and measures of effect size, significant changes with varied effect sizes were found for selected basic needs, as well as physical health, mental health, substance use, and IPV barriers. Findings suggest that social service practitioners could incorporate strengths-based case management and motivational interviewing into their practice. Further research is suggested utilizing longitudinal and controlled studies on evidence-based practice that address pretreatment and assessment strategies involving case management and motivational interviewing.     

The image of the Warsaw Pogrom of 1881 in late nineteenth‐century Polish literature

This article interprets how the Christmas 1881 Warsaw Pogrom was depicted in Polish literature, using novels and short stories written soon after this incident as the source. It considers Eliza Orzeszkowa's “O ?ydach i kwestii ?ydowskiej,” written soon after the pogrom, in which she tried to analyse the reasons for what had happened in Warsaw. Other sources it examines are Konopnicka's short story “Mendel Gdański” and Boles?aw Prus's Lalka, which is often considered the best Polish novel of the nineteenth century. In analysing these sources, the article considers the varying responses to the pogrom, which was a kind of shock, since Polish liberals considered their part of the tsarist empire exempt from the anti‐Jewish excesses that had occurred in earlier months in southern Russia. However, the outbreak of violence in the Polish capital inevitably meant a closer re‐examination of the Polish context and its often complex Jewish–gentile relationship.     

Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest

The influence of Foucault on studies of social movements, dissent and protest is not as direct as might be imagined. He is generally regarded as focusing more on the analysis of power and government than forms of resistance. This is reflected in the governmentality literature, which tends to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of government. However, Foucault's notion of ‘counter-conducts’ has much to offer the study of dispersed, heterogeneous and variegated forms of resistance in contemporary global politics. Using the protests that have accompanied summits including Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen to illustrate an analytics of protest in operation, this article shows how a Foucauldian perspective can map the close interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.     

Dirty writing

On 16 August 2006 we watched Life of Grime: New York on Australia’s Channel 10 television network. The camera followed a group of ‘grime professionals’ cleaning up the streets of New York. They cleaned rats, dogs and other peoples’ dirt. One guy struck us as particularly interesting. His job was cleaning the streets after suicides. His latest assignment was someone who had recently jumped from an apartment block of 17 floors, a woman. He enjoyed scrubbing the railing which caught her flesh as she fell, the blood fresh on the sidewalk. As he hosed down the street with complete detachment from the dirt he was cleaning, the blood just ran, slipping away – life having already slipped away. The debris was fresh and easy to remove. Stale dirt, hardened blood, crusty flesh is harder to brush away and with it better hydraulics are required to sterilize the streets, he told us. Maybe writing is like this. Ignoring the material(ity) of the dirt. Pretending that it didn’t come from real people. Forgetting the damaged lives that produce the dirt. Removing the dirt from view. And our dirt is so encrusted, so hard to sanitize despite our massive cleaning efforts.     

Role clarity,work overload and organizational support: Multilevel evidence of the importance of support

The present study extended the demands-control-support model used in occupational stress research in two ways. First, it hypothesized that role clarity (i.e. role ambiguity), like control, would moderate the relationship between demands and psychological strain. Second, the study assessed support (from leaders) as a macro characteristic of the work-group environment. Data were drawn from a large study of US army soldiers, the study sample consisting of 1786 lower enlisted male soldiers. The inclusion of support as a work-group characteristic lead to a multilevel test of the model. A three-way multilevel interaction among work demands, role clarity and support was observed. As predicted, the relationship between demands and psychological strain was moderated by role clarity; however, this moderating relationship was found only when work-group support was high.     

Reducing project duration at minimum cost: A time-cost tradeoff algorithm

The problem of reducing project duration efficiently arises frequently, routinely, and repetitively in government and industry. Siemens [1] has presented an inherently simple time-cost tradeoff algorithm (SAM—for Siemens Approximation Method) for determining which activities in a project network must be shortened to meet an externally imposed (scheduled) completion date (which occurs prior to the current expected completion date). In that paper the network activities of the example problem all have constant cost-slopes. Siemens mentions that the algorithm can be used where the activities have (convex) nonlinear cost-slopes—instead of just one cost-slope and one supply (time available for shortening) for each activity, there can be multiple cost-slope/supply pairs for each activity. This technique is illustrated in this paper. Also illustrated here is an improvement suggested by Goyal [2]. In step 12 of the original algorithm Siemens suggests a review of the solution obtained by the first eleven steps to eliminate any unnecessary shortening. Goyal's modification does this systematically during application of the algorithm by de-shortening (partially or totally) selected activities which were shortened in a prior iteration. He claims that, empirically at least, the technique always yields an optimal solution. Our experience verifies this claim (given the assumption of convex cost functions). The authors have modified the original algorithm so that the requirement for convex cost functions can now be relaxed. Unfortunately, this modification is made only at the expense of simplicity. To further complicate matters we found that Goyal's technique does not always yield an optimal solution when concave functions are involved and thus still another modification was required. These are discussed in detail below. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the algorithm to situations involving discrete time-cost functions.     

Rethinking Risk Assessment for Public Utility Safety Regulation

To aid in their safety oversight of large‐scale, potentially dangerous energy and water infrastructure and transportation systems, public utility regulatory agencies increasingly seek to use formal risk assessment models. Yet some of the approaches to risk assessment used by utilities and their regulators may be less useful for this purpose than is supposed. These approaches often do not reflect the current state of the art in risk assessment strategy and methodology. This essay explores why utilities and regulatory agencies might embrace risk assessment techniques that do not sufficiently assess organizational and managerial factors as drivers of risk, nor that adequately represent important uncertainties surrounding risk calculations. Further, it describes why, in the special legal, political, and administrative world of the typical public utility regulator, strategies to identify and mitigate formally specified risks might actually diverge from the regulatory promotion of “safety.” Some improvements are suggested that can be made in risk assessment approaches to support more fully the safety oversight objectives of public regulatory agencies, with examples from “high‐reliability organizations” (HROs) that have successfully merged the management of safety with the management of risk. Finally, given the limitations of their current risk assessments and the lessons from HROs, four specific assurances are suggested that regulatory agencies should seek for themselves and the public as objectives in their safety oversight of public utilities.