Social Work in Rural New South Wales School Settings: Addressing Inequalities Beyond the School Gate

Children and young people in rural Australia experience disadvantage compared with metropolitan counterparts, with low educational attainment and disengagement from schooling being linked to poorer health outcomes. Schools are an existing contact point between individuals and health services. However, these health services are often overburdened and have limited scope to address broader social issues and teaching staff are focused on achieving curriculum outcomes. Embedding social workers within schools may provide an avenue for supporting students, yet social workers are rarely present in New South Wales public schools. This paper describes a study to determine teachers’ understanding of the socioeconomic issues faced by school students, and the role of the social work profession in addressing such issues as part of the early stages of establishing a Social Work in Schools (SWiS) project. Eighteen semistructured interviews were undertaken with teachers across four rural Australian schools. Participants identified their awareness of potential risk factors that could lead to educational disengagement, reflected on their own limitations in dealing with these broader health presentations given their teaching focus, and provided insights into their understanding of the potential role of social workers.     

Postmarital Living Arrangements in Historically Patrilocal Settings: Integrating Household Fission and Migration Perspectives

This study integrates theory and research on household fission (or partition) and migration to better understand living arrangements following marriage, especially in historically patrilocal and primarily agricultural settings. Using panel data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study to analyze the sequential decision-making process that influences men’s living arrangements subsequent to first marriage, we demonstrate the importance of distinguishing among extended family living, temporary migration, and the establishment of an independent household. We find that community economic characteristics, such as access to markets or employment, as well as household wealth affect the initial decision to leave the natal home. Household resources and use of farmland, along with the young men’s own education, media exposure, travel, and marital behavior, influence the decision to make the departure from the natal home permanent. Our findings explain why previous results regarding household fission and those focused on migration have provided such mixed results, and we establish a new framework for thinking about how families and individuals manage living situations.     

Could I do something like that? Recruiting and training foster carers for teenagers “at risk” of or experiencing child sexual exploitation

Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is a category of child abuse that was historically created to recognize the victimhood of children and young people, illuminating the ways that their evolving capacity to consent to sex is manipulated and undermined. Using evidence from the evaluation of specialist foster care provision and a CSE training course for foster carers, this paper considers how training might be used to widen the pool of potential foster carers for children affected by CSE and identifies qualities displayed by effective carers. It argues that improving the recruitment of foster carers can create safer home environments for teenagers at risk of or experiencing sexual exploitation and reduce the risk of further harm and that informed and effective foster care provision is crucial to prevent both the sexual exploitation of looked‐after teenagers and placement breakdowns that can ultimately increase risk.     

Standard errors in the multinomial logit model

Asymptotic stmdard errors in the multinomial log it model are derived for efficient estimates of (A) the probability of choosing an alternative , (B) the change in the probability of choosing an alternative given a change in an explanatory variable , (C) the expected response, and (D) the change in the expected response given a change in an explanatory variable. An empirical example illustrates the usefulness of the concepts developed here.     

Comparing a survey and a conjoint study: the future vision of water intermediaries

This paper compares and contrasts two methods of obtaining opinions using questionnaires. As the name suggests, a conjoint study makes it possible to consider several attributes jointly. Conjoint analysis is a statistical method to analyse preferences. However, conjoint analysis requires a certain amount of effort by the respondent. The alternative is ordinary survey questions, answered one at a time. Survey questions are easier to grasp mentally, but they do not challenge the respondent to prioritize. This investigation has utilized both methods, survey and conjoint, making it possible to compare them on real data. Attribute importance, attribute correlations, case clustering and attribute grouping are evaluated by both methods. Correspondence between how the two methods measure the attribute in question is also given. Overall, both methods yield the same picture concerning the relative importance of the attributes. Taken one attribute at a time, the correspondence between the methods varies from good to no correspondence. Considering all attributes together by cluster analysis of the cases, the conjoint and survey data yield different cluster structures. The attributes are grouped by factor analysis, and there is reasonable correspondence. The data originate from the EU project 'New Intermediary services and the transformation of urban water supply and wastewater disposal systems in Europe'.     

嵌入式智能滑动轴承研究

针对目前的滑动轴承状态监测系统传感器在现场安装位置受限,离信号源头较远,不容易获得可靠的状态信息, 文章提出一种新型的智能轴承结构,在滑动轴承上嵌入温度、转速、振动等传感器,并在DSP上实时处理轴承的工作状 态信息。嵌入式的智能传感器安装在轴承外圈,更接近于信号的源头,因此智能轴承的传感器能获得比滑动轴承更准确 的状态信息,因DSP信号处理部件与传感器紧密配合,在实时处理信号方面更有优势。经实验验证,智能轴承比传统的 轴承状态检测系统更能有效地提取状态信息和故障诊断信息。     

Developing habitat models for waterbirds in urban wetlands: a log-linear approach

Up to 95% of wetlands in southwestern Ontario, Canada, have been drained and converted to other land uses since the mid-1800s. Remaining wetlands now exist within a mosaic of urban and agriculture land cover and may resemble “islands” from the point of view of species that need this habitat. We investigated the relationships between waterbirds and wetland size, isolation, and adjacent forest cover and roads in 19 wetlands within and adjacent to London, Ontario. Waterbirds were grouped into resource-based guilds: Dabblers, Divers, Waders, and Gulls and Terns (because of small samples, the Passerine and Raptor guilds were dropped from the statistical analyses). Because of the high degree of multicollinearity between variables, we used log-linear analysis to develop models that explained variations in species richness in the waterbird guilds. The log-linear technique provided quantification of environmental effects in a richer way than previous research as the interplay between biophysical factors found in reality are partially captured by the inclusion of interaction in the habitat models. All of the models incorporated the biophysical variables of wetland size and adjacent wetland area, forest cover, and roads. Waterbirds in these urban and near-urban landscapes appear to be using all wetlands available to them, no matter how small or how disjunct the wetland. This has implications for wetland evaluations that may not rate wetlands in human-dominated landscapes highly enough to be protected from development.