Definition of design criteria of mechanical transfer: an interaction between engineering and health areas

This study aims to analyze the factors that justify the low use of a mechanical transfer in the context of a long-term institution. It is a device intended for internal transportation of individuals who have mobility problems. The analysis involves researchers from the fields of health and engineering in order to generate design criteria that consider the needs of caregivers and patients of this institution. To understand the reality of this site and their specificities, was used Ergonomic Work Analysis.     

Care for vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the Czech Republic

The problematic issue of care for vulnerable and disadvantaged children in the Czech Republic, highlighted in this article, stems from the large number of children in institutional care. Workers from the Department for Social and Legal Child Protection (OSPOD) may get involved if there are factors in the family jeopardising the child's healthy development that cannot be improved, and institutional care may be recommended. This article discusses factors that influence and many times complicate the worker's job and are often the reason for an adversely high number of children living without a family. Attempts to reunite children with their biological families are complicated by the fact that the family situation rarely improves. Therefore children returning to live with their own families face the same conditions they were previously removed from. A more positive option for some children placed in institutional care is adoption or long-term foster care. However, many children continue to spend their whole childhood in a care home. The authors describe the care system in the Czech Republic and point out its weaknesses and some controversial facts. They also discuss and evaluate the ‘National Action Plan’, a government policy document, which articulates aspirations and obligations for all government departments and organisations involved in the Czech childcare system.     

What do women with learning disabilities say about their experiences of domestic abuse within the context of their intimate partner relationships?

In 2001 the UK Government launched its strategy ‘Valuing People’. The strategy, underpinned by the Human Rights Act 1998 (Ministry of Justice 1998 Ministry of Justice. 1998. The Human Rights Act, London: HMSO.  [Google Scholar]), the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (Home Office 1995 Home Office. 1995. Disability Discrimination Act, London: HMSO.  [Google Scholar]) and social inclusion claimed to outline ways for services to work, to meet the needs of individuals with learning disabilities . In this qualitative study, interviews were held with five women with learning disabilities, all of whom experienced domestic abuse from intimate partners. Although women sought help from services to leave their abusive partners, it was either denied or inappropriate to their needs. Women internalised the oppression of their partners and the dual abuse from services that failed them. Helpful service provision included advocacy, a domestic abuse therapy programme, and an empowerment group informed by feminist perspectives.     

Heart Trouble and Racial Group Identity: Exploring Ethnic Heterogeneity Among Black Americans

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States, and compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Blacks between the ages of 45 and 65 have the highest likelihood of dying from heart disease. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about intragroup variation among the US Black population. In this study, utilizing a nationally representative sample of Black Americans, we examine the relationship between heart trouble and racial group identity for two groups of Blacks: African Americans and Caribbean Blacks. We include two measures of racial group identity: closeness to other Blacks and Black group evaluation. Our results reveal three important patterns. First, closeness to other Blacks is suppressed by Black group evaluation. Second, at low levels of closeness to other Blacks, there is little difference between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the probability of heart trouble. However, as closeness to other Blacks increases, the probability of heart trouble increases for African Americans, but decreases for Caribbean Blacks. Finally, with respect to positive Black group evaluation, both African Americans and Caribbean Blacks benefit and experience a lower probability of heart trouble.     

Social Structural Location and Vocabularies of Participation: Fostering a Collective Identity in Urban Agriculture Activism

Contextualized within the visible inequality that permeates its local food landscape and the broader elitist food culture of California's San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland's urban agriculture movement comprises actors with rich vocabularies of motive for participation. Drawing from 25 in‐depth interviews with movement activists, I uncover a racial and social class homogeneity among participants that contributes to the formation of a collective identity but also limits the movement's outcomes in important ways. This research draws from Bourdieu's theory of class distinction and social movement theories of collective identity formation to contribute to literature on the reproduction of class and racial privilege in alternative food activism. I find that narratives for movement involvement converge on three discourses: possession of education‐derived knowledge to contend with the agroindustrial complex, the conflation of the creation of community through urban food growing with inclusivity, and a missionary‐like desire to educate others as to the benefits of growing their own food. I argue that the movement could benefit from a more diverse repertoire of action generated from a greater integration of racially and economically diverse actors working together to reorient the food system toward local food production alternatives.     

What is a family? Constructions of family and parenting after a custody transfer from birth parents to foster parents

The subject of stability for children in long‐term foster care is an emerging field within social work with vulnerable children. In Sweden, the adoption of foster children is not a common occurrence. Instead, when a child has been placed in foster care for 3 years, the local social welfare committee will consider whether the custody of the child should be transferred to the foster parents regardless of the circumstances of the birth parents, in order to secure stability and a sense of family belonging. Consequently, custody transfers raise questions such as “who is family?” and “who is a parent?” This qualitative interview study with custodians and young people who have experienced custody transfer highlights that who counts as family and as a parent is ambiguous. This article draws attention to how negotiations about family and parenthood revolve around biological, emotional, and relational dimensions. Furthermore, we show that stability for children in care has to be understood in terms of processes over time and not as the result of a single decision of custody transfer. Consequently, social workers need to take several aspects into account when they assess family belonging and stability for children in foster care.     

Fragility index of block tailed vectors

Financial crises are a recurrent phenomenon with important effects on the real economy. The financial system is inherently fragile and it is therefore of great importance to be able to measure and characterize its systemic stability. Multivariate extreme value theory provide us such a framework through the fragility index ( 11, 7 and 8). Here we generalize this concept and contribute to the modeling of the stability of a stochastic system divided into blocks. We will find several relations with well-known tail dependence measures in the literature, which will provide us immediate estimators. We end with an application to financial data.     

Validation of surrogate end points in multiple randomized clinical trials with failure time end points

Before a surrogate end point can replace a final (true) end point in the evaluation of an experimental treatment, it must be formally 'validated'. The validation will typically require large numbers of observations. It is therefore useful to consider situations in which data are available from several randomized experiments. For two normally distributed end points Buyse and co-workers suggested a new definition of validity in terms of the quality of both trial level and individual level associations between the surrogate and true end points. This paper extends this approach to the important case of two failure time end points, using bivariate survival modelling. The method is illustrated by using two actual sets of data from cancer clinical trials.