An Unfinished Reflexive Journey: Social Work Students' Reflection on their Placement Experiences

The fieldwork placement is recognized as one of the major componentsof social work education and a major determinant of its quality.A key aspect of the learning process in the fieldwork placementis the exposition of practice encounters to the students’critical reflection. Given the importance of the process of‘reflection’ or ‘reflective learning’,a qualitative study based on the reflective logs of social workstudents was conducted to explore the meaning of social workfield education and the learning experiences of social workstudents during their placement. The study findings revealedthat disturbing events experienced by students in their fieldworkwere a catalyst to their reflective process. Meanwhile, theirundue concern with knowledge and skills application within acircumscribed knowledge frame suggests the dominant influenceof scientism and competence-based practice in social work, inwhich learning outcomes and instrumental and technical reasoningare highly emphasized. Discovery of ‘self’ was alsothe major premise in the students’ reflection logs, inwhich a majority of them took their prevailing self-identityas a constant state to be verified in interaction with othersin the fieldwork placement. Reflexivity is manifested in askingfundamental questions about assumptions generated by formaland practice theories; it addresses the multiple interrelationsbetween power and knowledge, and acknowledges the inclusionof self in the process of knowledge creation in social workpractice. Its realization in social work education requiresthe social work educators’ reflexive examination of thedynamics that influence the construction of curriculum, whichin turn construct our prospective social workers.     

Notional defined contributions (NDC): Solvency and risk in Spain

The aim of this article is twofold: to demonstrate the actuarial imbalance in the Spanish pension system in its current form; and to measure the degree of aggregate economic risk to which pensioners are exposed when applying formulas for the calculation of retirement pensions based on notional accounts. The model used generates scenarios for various periods encompassing some 10,000 different permutations of the macroeconomic indices needed to calculate such parameters as initial pension, earnings replacement rate, or internal rate of return and value at risk. The findings are analysed both objectively and subjectively. The main conclusions are that if the projections for the macroeconomic indices used bear only a minimal resemblance to reality, the pension system will accumulate further financial imbalance in the future that will force it either to reduce initial pensions considerably or to make some radical adjustments to the parameters. In terms of risk, for beneficiaries with high risk aversion the preferred formulas would be those based on future variations in wages with a constant pension amount in real terms; on the other hand, those less averse to risk would prefer formulas that generate a smaller initial pension but one which grows in real terms with subsequent changes in wage levels.     

Improvements over the duplicate performance method for outlier detection in categorical multivariate surveys

Summary The detection of errors and outliers is an important step in data processing, especially those errors arising from data entry operations because they are of the entire responsability of the data processing staff. The duplicate performance method, is commonly used as an attempt to detect such type of errors. It implies typically typing twice the same data without any special precedence. If the errors are uniformly distributed among individuals, retyping a fraction of the total will also remove typically the same fraction of the errors. A new method is presented, which is able to improve that procedure by sorting the records putting first the most unlikely ones. The ability of the present methodology has been tested by a Monte Carlo simulation, using an existing database of categorical answers of housing characteristics in Uruguay. At first, it has been randomly contaiminated, and after that, the proposed procedure applied. The results show that if a partial retyping is done following the proposed order about 50 % of the errors can be removed while keeping the retyping effort between 4 and 14% of the dataset, while to attain a similar result with the standard methodology 50% (on, average) of the database should be processed. The new ordering is based upon the unrotated Principal Component Analysis (PCA) transformation of the previously coded data. No special shape of the multivariate distribution function is assumed or required.     

Some issues related to the topological aggregation of preferences

This paper deals with the topological approach to social choice theory initiated by Chichilnisky. We study several issues concerning the existence and uniqueness of Chichilnisky rules defined on preference spaces. We show that on topological vector spaces the only additive, anonymous, and unanimous aggregation n-rule is the convex mean. We study the case of infinite agents and show that an infinite Chichilnisky rule might be considered as the limit of rules for finitely many agents. Finally, we show that under some restrictions on the preference space, the existence of a Chichilnisky rule for every finite case implies the existence of a weak Chichilnisky rule for the infinite case.     

Notes on L(1,1) and L(2,1) labelings for n-cube

Suppose \(d\) is a positive integer. An \(L(d,1)\) -labeling of a simple graph \(G=(V,E)\) is a function \(f:V\rightarrow \mathbb{N }=\{0,1,2,{\ldots }\}\) such that \(|f(u)-f(v)|\ge d\) if \(d_G(u,v)=1\) ; and \(|f(u)-f(v)|\ge 1\) if \(d_G(u,v)=2\) . The span of an \(L(d,1)\) -labeling \(f\) is the absolute difference between the maximum and minimum labels. The \(L(d,1)\) -labeling number, \(\lambda _d(G)\) , is the minimum of span over all \(L(d,1)\) -labelings of \(G\) . Whittlesey et al. proved that \(\lambda _2(Q_n)\le 2^k+2^{k-q+1}-2,\) where \(n\le 2^k-q\) and \(1\le q\le k+1\) . As a consequence, \(\lambda _2(Q_n)\le 2n\) for \(n\ge 3\) . In particular, \(\lambda _2(Q_{2^k-k-1})\le 2^k-1\) . In this paper, we provide an elementary proof of this bound. Also, we study the \(L(1,1)\) -labeling number of \(Q_n\) . A lower bound on \(\lambda _1(Q_n)\) are provided and \(\lambda _1(Q_{2^k-1})\) are determined.     

Building a new international is necessary and urgent

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin was one of the most creative Marxists, but also an orthodox, as his appeal for a new international proves, consistent with his defense of the socialist revolution against a decaying capitalist system, which threatens with the extinction of human civilization. However, in a contradictory way, if in the past the material conditions did not exist, they exist today, materializing in a distorted manner by capitalism, the organization of a revolutionary international leadership has never been so non-existent. This article begins by demonstrating the systemic conditions that require the proletariat to build a new International, the reasons for the current difficulty in achieving it; and, from the analysis of the most successful experience to date, the Third International, lessons are drawn for a future Fifth International.     

On the asymptotic behaviour of location-scale invariant Bickel–Rosenblatt tests

Location-scale invariant Bickel–Rosenblatt goodness-of-fit tests (IBR tests) are considered in this paper to test the hypothesis that f, the common density function of the observed independent d-dimensional random vectors, belongs to a null location-scale family of density functions. The asymptotic behaviour of the test procedures for fixed and non-fixed bandwidths is studied by using an unifying approach. We establish the limiting null distribution of the test statistics, the consistency of the associated tests and we derive its asymptotic power against sequences of local alternatives. These results show the asymptotic superiority, for fixed and local alternatives, of IBR tests with fixed bandwidth over IBR tests with non-fixed bandwidth.     

An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries

We introduce an extension of the Esteban and Ray [Econometrica, 62:819–851 1994] measure of polarization that can be applied to density functions. As a by-product we also derive the Wolfson [Am. Econ. Rev., 84:353–358 1994] measure as a special case. This derivation has the virtue of casting both measures in the context of a (statistically) unified framework. We study the polarization of the distribution of household income for five OECD countries (LIS database): US, UK, Canada, Germany and Sweden. The present paper is essentially based on Esteban, Gradín and Ray [9], published as #218 in the working papers series of the Luxembourg Income Study. Changes have been kept to a minimum. We have provided a brief reference to the literature on polarization measurement that has appeared since then and have updated the data of our application.     

Goodness-of-fit tests for parametric models in censored regression

The authors propose a goodness-of-fit test for parametric regression models when the response variable is right-censored. Their test compares an estimation of the error distribution based on parametric residuals to another estimation relying on nonparametric residuals. They call on a bootstrap mechanism in order to approximate the critical values of tests based on Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises type statistics. They also present the results of Monte Carlo simulations and use data from a study about quasars to illustrate their work.