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Given the demographics of youth served by the child welfare system, culturally responsive approaches are critical to effective social work practice and desperately needed. Like many adolescents who grow up in the child welfare system, Paul, a White adolescent male in foster care, was beset by a lack of adequate environmental resources and multiple stressors and had little hope or motivation to work on improving his situation. This article highlights the author's use of self as an African American male therapist who worked with Paul, using a Winnicottian and caring framework. Because child welfare workers are often overburdened by the demands of work, including large caseloads and clients with few to no resources, they find it difficult to consistently provide empathic and caring behaviors for their clients. The author highlights his therapeutic work and struggles with Paul and offers cultural insights and Winnicottian strategies when working with adolescents in the child welfare system who are ultimately in need of permanency and stability.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act came into existence at a time when the president’s ability to lead the public was in question, political polarization had intensified, and the media environment appeared ever more fragmented, fast-moving, and resistant to control. Under such circumstances, how can contemporary American presidents such as Barack Obama build and maintain support for themselves and their policies, particularly as controversies arise? Using case studies of major contests over how key elements of the Affordable Care Act would be framed, and analysis of how those frames fared in influential and popular U.S. news sources, Hopper examines the conditions under which the president can effectively shape public debates today. She argues that despite the difficult political and communications context, the president retains substantial advantages in framing major controversial issues for the media and the public. These presidential framing advantages are conditional, however, and Hopper explores the factors that help make presidential frames more or less likely to gain hold in the news today. More so than in the past, an element of unpredictability in this news environment means that in pursuing favorable messaging, the president and his surrogates may also generate some unintentional consequences in how issues are portrayed to the public. Presidential frames can evolve with unfolding events to take on new meanings and applications, a process facilitated alternately by supporters, opponents, and media actors. Still, media figures and political opponents remain largely reactive to presidential communications, even as some seek to publicize and exploit weaknesses in the administration’s narratives. A close look at these recent cases casts new light on the scholarly debate surrounding the president’s ability to persuasively communicate and challenges conventional wisdom that the 21st century media largely present an unmanageable news environment for the White House. Presidential Framing in the 21st Century News Media engages with current events in American politics, focusing on the Obama Administration and the Affordable Care Act, while also reflecting upon the state of the American presidency, the news media, and the public in ways that have substantial implications for all of these actors, not merely in the present, but into the future, making it a compelling read for scholars of Political Science, Media Studies, Communication Studies, and Public Policy. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

Selecting the order of verifier in a serial fusion based multi-biometric system is a crucial parameter to fix because of its high impact on verification errors. A wrong choice of verifier order might lead to tremendous user inconvenience by denying a large number of genuine users and might cause severe security breach by accepting impostors frequently. Unfortunately, this design issue has been poorly investigated in multi-biometric literature. In this paper, we address this design issue by performing experiments using three different serial fusion based multi-biometric verification schemes, in particular (1) symmetric scheme, (2) SPRT-based scheme, and (3) Marcialis et al.’s scheme. We experimented on publicly available NIST-BSSR1 multi-modal database. We tested 24 orders—all possible orders originated from four individual verifiers—on a four-stage biometric verification system. Our experimental results show that the verifier order “best-to-worst”, where the best performing individual verifier is placed in the first stage, the next best performing individual verifier is placed in the second stage, and so on, is the top performing order for all three serial fusion schemes mentioned above.

America’s strategy of containment, designed to confront postwar Soviet aggression, real and perceived, grew out of a series of disparate and seemingly unrelated conflicts. Thus the clash over the future of defeated Germany was direct, immediate and of obvious importance for vital United States interests in Europe and the world. By contrast, the communist insurgency in Greece was originally perceived as a basically domestic affair of a small country in a remote region of little strategic value. Yet the Truman Doctrine, which paved the way for containment’s gradual global implementation—Marshall Plan, Berlin airlift, NATO, wars in Korea and Indochina—was ostensibly focused primarily on Greece. After remaining a benevolent but deliberately passive observer of turmoil and violence in Greece, Washington boldly replaced Britain as the foreign patron of that small and troubled Balkan state. This study documents the transformation of United States policy toward Greece, and the birth of containment. It argues that the change was fundamentally one of perceptions of the nature of Soviet policy itself within the Truman administration, rather than of realities in Greece. In retrospect, Greece was an unlikely springboard for launching the strategy of containing Moscow’s ideology and power. The significance of the communist threat in Greece was more a matter of alarmist assumptions, loose perceptions and questionable symbolism than of hard facts and geostrategic realities. But in human affairs perceptions and symbolism are important, especially if clothed in an aura of success, as was the application of containment in Greece.

This selected overview of audiovisual (AV) speech perception examines the influence of visible articulatory information on what is heard. Thought to be a cross-cultural phenomenon that emerges early in typical language development, variables that influence AV speech perception include properties of the visual and the auditory signal, attentional demands, and individual differences. A brief review of the existing neurobiological evidence on how visual information influences heard speech indicates potential loci, timing, and facilitatory effects of AV over auditory only speech. The current literature on AV speech in certain clinical populations (individuals with an autism spectrum disorder, developmental language disorder, or hearing loss) reveals differences in processing that may inform interventions. Finally, a new method of assessing AV speech that does not require obvious cross-category mismatch or auditory noise was presented as a novel approach for investigators.

Aims: Atherosclerotic plaques vulnerable to rupture are almost always inflamed, and carry a large lipid core covered by a thin fibrous cap. The other components may include neovascularisation, intraplaque haemorrhage and spotty calcification. In contrast, stable plaques are characterised by a predominance of smooth muscle cells and collagen, and lipid core is usually deep seated or absent. This study is a proof of principle experiment to evaluate the feasibility of multiphoton microscopy (MPM) to identify aforementioned plaque components. Methods and Results: MPM is a nonlinear optical technique that allows imaging based on intrinsic tissue signals including autofluorescence and higher-order scattering. In our study, MPM imaging was performed on morphologically diverse aortic and coronary artery plaques obtained during autopsy. Various histologically verified plaque components including macrophages, cholesterol crystals, haemorrhage, collagen and calcification were recognised by MPM. Conclusions: Recognition of the distinct signatures of various plaque components suggests that MPM has the potential to offer next-generation characterisation of atherosclerotic plaques. The higher lateral resolution (comparable to histology) images generated by MPM for identifying plaque components might complement larger field of view and greater imaging depth currently available with optical coherence tomography imaging. As the next step MPM would need to be evaluated for intact vessel imaging ex vivo and in vivo. © 2017 The Authors Journal of Microscopy © 2017 Royal Microscopical Society

This article examines one informant's approach to the relationship between ideological concepts and political power. I argue that ideological representation must be understood on its own terms, rather than within a larger theory of discourse. I point toward three key qualities of every encounter with ideological representation: subjectivity, discontinuity, and commitment. The fieldwork on which this article is based occurred in Berlin, Germany, during the fall 2014. During this period, my research focused on activists committed to overturning the sanctioning policy (Sanktionspolitik), which allows case managers to dock the unemployment benefits of their clients. [ideology, subjectivity, welfare state, Germany]

This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as ‘model societies’, with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights...

The original title for this work was “Mathematical Literacy, What Is It and Why You Need it”. The current title reflects that there can be no real learning in any subject, unless questions of who, what, when, where, why and how are raised in the minds of the learners. The book is not a mathematical text, and there are no assigned exercises or exams. It is written for reasonably intelligent and curious individuals, both those who value mathematics, aware of its many important applications and others who have been inappropriately exposed to mathematics, leading to indifference to the subject, fear and even loathing. These feelings are all consequences of meaningless presentations, drill, rote learning and being lost as the purpose of what is being studied. Mathematics education needs a radical reform. There is more than one way to accomplish this. Here the author presents his approach of wrapping mathematical ideas in a story. To learn one first must develop an interest in a problem and the curiosity to find how masters of mathematics have solved them. What is necessary to be mathematically literate? It’s not about solving algebraic equations or even making a geometric proof. These are valuable skills but not evidence of literacy. We often seek answers but learning to ask pertinent questions is the road to mathematical literacy. Here is the good news: new mathematical ideas have a way of finding applications. This is known as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”

We introduce a novel application of feature ranking methods to the fault localization problem. We envision the problem of localizing causes of failures as instances of ranking program's elements where elements are conceptualized as features. In this paper, we define features as program's statements. However, in its fine-grained definition, the idea of program's features can refer to any traits of programs. This paper proposes feature ranking-based algorithms. The algorithms analyze execution traces of both passing and failing test cases, and extract the bug signatures from the failing test cases. The proposed procedure extracts possible combinations of program's elements when executed together from bug signatures. The feature ranking-based algorithms then order statements according to the suspiciousness of the combinations. When viewed as sequences, the combination of program's elements produced and traced in bug signatures can be utilized to reason about the common longest subsequence. The common longest subsequence of bug signatures represents the common statements executed by all failing test cases and thus provides a means for identifying statements that contain possible faults. Our evaluation indicates that the proposed feature-based fault localization outperforms existing fault localization ranking schemes. © 2017 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Vulnerabilities need to be detected and removed from software. Although previous studies demonstrated the usefulness of employing prediction techniques in deciding about vulnerabilities of software components, the improvement of effectiveness of these prediction techniques is still a grand challenging research question. This paper employed a technique based on a deep neural network with rectifier linear units trained with stochastic gradient descent method and batch normalization, for predicting vulnerable software components. The features are defined as continuous sequences of tokens in source code files. Besides, a statistical feature selection algorithm is then employed to reduce the feature and search space. We evaluated the proposed technique based on some Java Android applications, and the results demonstrated that the proposed technique could predict vulnerable classes, i.e., software components, with high precision, accuracy and recall.

Although research on substance use disorders (SUDs) largely focuses on the developed world, treatment programs from the developing world seldom get international attention. Focusing on India, this study was designed (1) to describe India’s treatment programs, and (2) to report Indian perspectives on critical factors related to treating SUDs. An online survey instrument was created, based on mixed-methods approach with concurrent strategies, to collect data. Participants were India’s clinicians (N = 112). Indian treatment approach suggests that SUDs must be treated by a multidisciplinary treatment team with a comprehensive plan that must include systemically focused clinical interventions in patients’/clients’ relevant relational systems. Findings may have relevance to clinicians, researchers, and policy makers globally. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

Parenting literature often focuses on parental strategies that promote positive behavioral outcomes for children, but ignores key aspects of parents’ own growth process. This article presents a critical review of current literature on parenting and highlights the importance of focusing on parents’ growth in therapy. A clinical framework to define parents’ growth is offered along with case vignettes and practical guidelines for clinicians in order to assess parents’ growth. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.