Gross total resection rates in contemporary glioblastoma surgery: results of an institutional protocol combining 5-aminolevulinic acid intraoperative fluorescence imaging and brain mapping

Complete resection of contrast-enhancing tumor has been recognized as an important prognostic factor in patients with glioblastoma and is a primary goal of surgery. Various intraoperative technologies have recently been introduced to improve glioma surgery.

Three Decades of Social Work in France: from Security within the Welfare State to a State of «Disembedded Modernity»

This article gives an overview of trends in policy on the functions and role of social work in French society over the past twenty years. The author suggests several reasons for the current feeling of crisis of professional identity among professionals and the complexities of the political demands made on social work. These are analysed as a consequence of the specific French context of decentralisation of the State and of the multitude of approaches to organisation and to professional training programs. On a broader level, it seems that French social work reflects many characteristics of “modernity” being concerned with difficulties in defining a clear identity, lack of a clear territorial and institutional base (or “disembeddedness” to borrow Giddens term) and difficulties in finding a clear voice to make its values heard in an increasingly politicised arena of public debate.

Introduction: A brief journey through the 80 year history of the International Association of Schools of Social Work

The leaders of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) have played major roles in shaping the organization over its 80 year history. This brief introduction will put their roles in the context of the organization’s history. While influenced by its presidents in significant ways, the organization’s trajectory has also been affected by the political, economic and social developments of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Significant changes have occurred in the organization and in social work education, yet, as Feustel (2006) observed, “the history of the IASSW demonstrates lines of continuity that are even more remarkable for the fact that it was caught up in the great historical ruptures of the 20th century” (p. 3).

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

Advances in understanding energy consumption behavior and the governance of its change - Outline of an integrated framework

Transforming today’s energy systems in industrialized countries requires a substantial reduction of the total energy consumption at the individual level. Selected instruments have been found to be effective in changing people’s behavior in single domains. However, the so far weak success story on reducing overall energy consumption indicates that our understanding of the determining factors of individual energy consumption as well as of its change is far from being conclusive. Among others, the scientific state of the art is dominated by analyzing single domains of consumption and by neglecting embodied energy. It also displays strong disciplinary splits and the literature often fails to distinguish between explaining behavior and explaining change of behavior. Moreover, there are knowledge gaps regarding the legitimacy and effectiveness of the governance of individual consumption behavior and its change. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to establish an integrated interdisciplinary framework that offers a systematic basis for linking the different aspects in research on energy related consumption behavior, thus paving the way for establishing a better evidence base to inform societal actions. The framework connects the three relevant analytical aspects of the topic in question: (1) It systematically and conceptually frames the objects, i.e. the energy consumption behavior and its change (explananda); (2) it structures the factors that potentially explain the energy consumption behavior and its change (explanantia); (3) it provides a differentiated understanding of change inducing interventions in terms of governance. Based on the existing states of the art approaches from different disciplines within the social sciences the proposed framework is supposed to guide interdisciplinary empirical research.

Contingent on context? Social work and the state in Australia, Britain, and the USA

The notion that social work is an international profession, operating with generally similar goals, methodologies, and common values is considered critically. Examining the political and social contexts of three countries with liberal democratic governments-Australia, Britain and the United States-the role of social work within the welfare processes of each country is compared. While social work as an identifiable professional activity shares some features, it is argued that the idea of its having a core essence needs to be tempered with a realistic assessment of the importance of contextually created difference. Recent and rapid developments in the institutional context, such as those experienced in these three countries, further underscore the limited utility of the notion of a common professional project.

The Art of Change Movement: an anti-oppressive Social Work initiative

This article presents the Art of Change Movement (Movimiento Arte del Cambio), which has developed out of a project of the Association of Social Workers Without Boundaries (Asociación Trabajadores/as Sociales Sin Fronteras), with the collaboration of the Faculty of Social Work at Universidad de Granada and of education professionals, incorporating theatrical creativity and musical expression as pedagogical and social intervention tools. The aim is for the initiative to become another instrument in the fight against oppression. Through a laboratory for collective creativity involving students and professionals from social work and other social science disciplines, the movement seeks social transformation through artistic expression, based on political commitment and sustainable development that empowers participants.

Development of multifunctional lipid nanocapsules for the co-delivery of paclitaxel and CpG-ODN in the treatment of glioblastoma

International audience

Scalar turbulent behavior in the roughness sublayer of an Amazonian forest.

An important current problem in micrometeorology is the characterization of turbulence in the roughness sublayer (RSL), where most of the measurements above tall forests are made. There, scalar turbulent fluctuations display significant departures from the predictions of Monin?Obukhov similarity theory (MOST). In this work, we analyze turbulence data of virtual temperature, carbon dioxide, and water vapor in the RSL above an Amazonian forest (with a canopy height of 40 m), measured at 39.4 and 81.6 m above the ground under unstable conditions. We found that dimensionless statistics related to the rate of dissipation of turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) and the scalar variance display significant departures from MOST as expected, whereas the vertical velocity variance follows MOST much more closely. Much better agreement between the dimensionless statistics with the Obukhov similarity variable, however, was found for the subset of measurements made at a low zenith angle Z, in the range 0°  <  |Z|  <  20°. We conjecture that this improvement is due to the relationship between sunlight incidence and the ?activation?deactivation? of scalar sinks and sources vertically distributed in the forest. Finally, we evaluated the relaxation coefficient of relaxed eddy accumulation: it is also affected by zenith angle, with considerable improvement in the range 0°  <  |Z|  <  20°, and its values fall within the range reported in the literature for the unstable surface layer. In general, our results indicate the possibility of better stability-derived flux estimates for low zenith angle ranges.

Scalar turbulent behavior in the roughness sublayer of an Amazonian forest.

An important current problem in micrometeorology is the characterization of turbulence in the roughness sublayer (RSL), where most of the measurements above tall forests are made. There, scalar turbulent fluctuations display significant departures from the predictions of Monin?Obukhov similarity theory (MOST). In this work, we analyze turbulence data of virtual temperature, carbon dioxide, and water vapor in the RSL above an Amazonian forest (with a canopy height of 40?m), measured at 39.4 and 81.6?m above the ground under unstable conditions. We found that dimensionless statistics related to the rate of dissipation of turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) and the scalar variance display significant departures from MOST as expected, whereas the vertical velocity variance follows MOST much more closely. Much better agreement between the dimensionless statistics with the Obukhov similarity variable, however, was found for the subset of measurements made at a low zenith angle Z, in the range 0°??incidence and the ?activation?deactivation? of scalar sinks and sources vertically distributed in the forest. Finally, we evaluated the relaxation coefficient of relaxed eddy accumulation: it is also affected by zenith angle, with considerable improvement in the range 0°??and its values fall within the range reported in the literature for the unstable surface layer. In general, our results indicate the possibility of better stability-derived flux estimates for low zenith angle ranges.

System identification and control of an aerobot drive system

Fast thrust changes are important for authoritive control of VTOL micro air vehicles. Fixed-pitch rotors that alter thrust by varying rotor speed require high-bandwidth control systems to provide adequate performace. We develop a feedback compensator for a brushless hobby motor driving a custom rotor suitable for UAVs. The system plant is identified using step excitation experiments. The aerodynamic operating conditions of these rotors are unusual and so experiments are performed to characterise expected load disturbances. The plant and load models lead to a proportional controller design capable of significantly decreasing rise-time and propagation of disturbances, subject to bus voltage constraints.

The social work & human services workforce : report from a national study of education, training and workforce needs

This report analyses the national curriculum and workforce needs of the social work and human services workforce. Australia’s community and health services are among the fastest growing sectors of employment in the nation but the sustainability of an appropriately qualified workforce is threatened. Yet there is little integration of education and workforce planning for the community services sector. This contrasts markedly with the health services sector, where key stakeholders are collaboratively addressing workforce challenges. Our research confirmed rapid growth in the social work and human services workforce and it also identified: • an undersupply of professionally qualified social work and human service practitioners to meet workforce demand; • the rapid ageing of the workforce with many workers approaching retirement; • limited career and salary structures creating disincentives to retention; • a highly diverse qualification base across the workforce. This diversity is inconsistent with the specialist knowledge and skills required of practitioners in many domains of community service provision. Our study revealed a lack of co-ordination across VET and higher education to meet the educational needs of the social work and human services workforce. Our analysis identified: • strong representation of equity groups in social work and related human service programs, although further participation of these groups is still needed; • the absence of clear articulation pathways between VET and higher education programs due the absence of co-ordination and planning between these sectors; • substantial variation in the content of the diverse range of social work and human service programs, with accredited programs conforming to national standards and some others in social and behavioural sciences lacking any external validation; • financial obstacles and disincentives to social work and human service practitioners in achieving postgraduate level qualifications. We recommend that: • DEEWR identify accredited social work and human services courses as a national education priority (similar to education and nursing). This will help ensure the supply of professional workers to this sector; • VET and higher education providers are encouraged to collaboratively develop clear and accessible educational pathways across the educational sectors; • DEEWR undertake a national workforce analysis and planning processes in collaboration with CSDMAC, and all social and community services stakeholders, to ensure workforce sustainability; and • COAG develop a national regulation framework for the social and community services workforce. This would provide sound accountability systems, and rigorous practice and educational standards necessary for quality service provision. It will also ensure much needed public confidence in this workforce.

The leader in you : developing your leadership potential

Leadership research demonstrates that there are serious shortcomings in the quality and competence of leaders in our organizations. The recent global financial crisis has also reminded us that, if our society and economies are to move forward sustainability, we must have the right kind of leaders and the right kind of leadership throughout our organizations. "The Leader in You: Developing Your Leadership Potential" has been framed to be useful to all individuals who are currently in leadership roles, from chief executives to frontline managers, and for those who wish to step up to a leadership role. Organizations can also utilize this book to assist their leaders to increase their leadership potential or to complement leadership development programs. If you want to search for and develop leadership qualities in yourself, then this book is for you. If you want to set a higher standard in your organization and you think leadership is a serious matter in the lives of other people, then this book is for you. In the process of self-reflection, "The Leader in You: Developing Your Leadership Potential" will enable you to develop an individual leadership profile and an individual skills profile, culminating in the development of a plan for leadership improvement. This book aims to couple these outcomes with exposure to some practical skills that leaders need to lead in every day environments. The first four chapters allow the reader to develop an understanding of the concepts that underpin leadership performance, and to undertake exercises to develop a comprehensive understanding of their values, behaviors and personality. That is, to understand who they are and why they behave the way they do. An individual leadership profile is developed at the end of these chapters. Then, the remaining chapters look at issues that leaders will face in contemporary society, and at the skills required to address them in everyday environments. An individual skills profile is developed at the end of these chapters culminating in the development of a plan for leadership improvement.