On the generalized constrained longest common subsequence problems

We investigate four variants of the longest common subsequence problem. Given two sequences X, Y and a constrained pattern P of lengths m, n, and ρ, respectively, the generalized constrained longest common subsequence (GC-LCS) problems are to find a longest common subsequence of X and Y including (or excluding) P as a subsequence (or substring). We propose new dynamic programming algorithms for solving the GC-LCS problems in O(mn ρ) time. We also consider the case where the number of constrained patterns is arbitrary.     

On the Bandpass problem

The complexity of the Bandpass problem is re-investigated. Specifically, we show that the problem with any fixed bandpass number B≥2 is NP-hard. Next, a row stacking algorithm is proposed for the problem with three columns, which produces a solution that is at most 1 less than the optimum. For the special case B=2, the row stacking algorithm guarantees an optimal solution. On approximation, for the general problem, we present an O(B ²)-algorithm, which reduces to a 2-approximation algorithm for the special case B=2.     

Treatment for Hoarding Behaviors: A Review of the Evidence

This article reviews the empirical literature on treating clients with hoarding behaviors, including psychosocial treatments, mainly cognitive behavioral, and pharmacotherapy. Standard treatments used for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) such as medication and/or behavior therapy have been associated with poor treatment response for those with hoarding. Recent prospective pharmacotherapy research suggests that serotonergic medication may be helpful to OCD patients with or without hoarding. A multi-component cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) designed specifically for hoarding has shown promising results especially in trials of individual therapy with periodic home visits. Social work researchers have played a prominent role in the development and testing of this CBT intervention and development of instruments to assess hoarding treatment outcomes. This CBT intervention has demonstrated modest success when delivered individually in an open trial and a waitlist-controlled trial, and in quasi-experimental studies of group treatment modalities, including in-person and web-based groups as well as bibliotherapy-based support groups. Overall, evidence supports the use of specialized CBT methods to improve hoarding symptoms. Future testing may include controlled trials with more diverse samples.     

The Role of Systematic Reviews and the Campbell Collaboration in the Realization of Evidence-Informed Practice

Evidence-informed practice asks practitioners and policy-makers to integrate current best evidence with client context in order to provide meaningful and potentially effective services across a range of presenting problems. Done correctly, systematic reviews are a crucial part of this process, providing social workers and other helping professionals with transparent, rigorous, and informative syntheses of research in a given area. This paper makes clear the need for systematic reviews in social work, briefly explains what systematic reviews are and how they are made, and describes the role of the Campbell Collaboration in creating a world library of systematic reviews.     

There are Some Things I Don’t Want to Know: Leichsenring and Rabung’s Long Road to the 2008 JAMA Report

Psychodynamic practitioners have been slow to evaluate their outcomes empirically and to disseminate these findings publicly. This historic stance is changing, with psychoanalytic leaders now calling for more empirical research and with important, recent contributions. This response lauds the JAMA paper as a developmental achievement among dynamic theorists, and as an example of the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship which is needed. The author offers a critique and raises questions about what constitutes the treatment in these quite disparate treatments, spanning 25 years. It compares their findings to those of a current, clinic-based longitudinal study (N = 1,050), and asks if this latter study’s findings might challenge or at least complicate some of the strong assertions Leichsenring and Rabung make.     

Contraction consistent stochastic choice correspondence

We model a general choice environment via probabilistic choice correspondences, with (possibly) incomplete domain and infinite universal set of alternatives. We offer a consistency restriction regarding choice when the feasible set contracts. This condition, ‘contraction consistency’, subsumes earlier notions such as Chernoff’s Condition, Sen’s α and β, and regularity. We identify a restriction on the domain of the stochastic choice correspondence (SCC), under which contraction consistency is equivalent to the weak axiom of revealed preference in its most general form. When the universal set of alternatives is finite, this restriction is also necessary for such equivalence. Analogous domain restrictions are also identified for the special case where choice is deterministic but possibly multi-valued. Results due to Sen (Rev Econ Stud 38:307–317, 1971) and Dasgupta and Pattanaik (Econ Theory 31:35–50, 2007) fall out as corollaries. Thus, conditions are established, under which our notion of consistency, articulated only in reference to contractions of the feasible set, suffices as the axiomatic foundation for a general revealed preference theory of choice behaviour.     

Examining Community Life “in the Making”: Emile Durkheim’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Moral Education</Emphasis>

Although often overlooked in sociological circles, Emile Durkheim’s (1902–1903) Moral Education provides an important cornerstone in the quest to understand community life. Not only does Moral Education give a vibrant realism to the sociological venture in ways that Durkheim’s earlier works (1893, 1895, 1897) fail to achieve, but in addressing discipline, devotion, and informed reasoning as humanly engaged, collectively accomplished fields of activity Emile Durkheim also provides an exceptionally consequential baseline analysis of human knowing and acting. Notably as well, focusing on the organizational, intersubjectively achieved features of elementary education, Durkheim’s Moral Education lays bare the interactional nature of the moral order of community life. Indeed, as a sustained analysis of the way of life of a group of people collectively participating in the educational process, this text addresses the most basic features of people’s relations to one another and the broader society in which they find themselves. Much more than an account of childhood socialization, Durkheim’s Moral Education also presages the more thoroughly humanist sociology that Durkheim develops in The Evolution of Educational Thought (1904–1905), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) and Pragmatism and Sociology (1913–1914).     

Charles A. Ellwood and the End of Sociology

Charles A. Ellwood was one of the larger than life figures of early American sociology. Into the 1930s he was recognized as the ‘father’ of sociological social psychology. His work theoretically and methodologically paved the way for Symbolic Interactionism. He also saw sociology as a means to an end, that is, to make the world a better place. True sociology could only be thought of in that light. By the 1920s however, sociology was changing. The advent of scientism and statistics amplified factions within the disipline. William F. Ogburn and his students began to push sociology away from the ideas of people such as Ellwood, Ross, Small and many of the early American sociologists. By 1930 a full scale battle was ensuing which Ellwood would lose. The following is an account of Ellwood’s fight with scientism through his publications and correspondence.     

Industrial Society: Requiem for a Concept

This paper traces the historical development as well as the analytical and ideological uses of “industrial society” as an object of knowledge. The binary opposition traditional society/industrial society and the latter tripartite division traditional, industrial, post-industrial society have been central to the development of sociology as a discipline. Like all analytical concepts “industrial society” is both a way of seeing and not seeing. It focuses attention on some social attributes and processes rather than others. The first objective of this paper is to evaluate whether or not this object of knowledge focuses attention on crucial aspects of social life, or whether, instead, it shrouds and distorts more than it reveals. The second objective is to evaluate the ideological import of the concept. Did it, and does it still, provide a realistic and achievable model of the way we ought to live together?