Michael J. Fabricant and Robert Fisher: Settlement Houses Under Siege: The Struggle to Sustain Community Organisations in New York City

This is a fascinating book - clear, incisive, a lesson for our times. It focuses on the history and recent experience of Settlement Houses in New York and uses this as a vehicle for an analysis of the political economy of welfare agencies. I wanted to send copies to politicians and policy makers worldwide who, whilst claiming to support social inclusion, community regeneration and equal opportunities, formulate policies that fragment societies and oppress poor and vulnerable people.

Medien in der Wissenschaft, Bd. 46: E-Strategy

Die nachhaltige Verankerung von digitalen Medien und Services für Forschung und Lehre ist weiterhin eine große Herausforderung. Unterschiedliche Aktivitäten haben an vielen Hochschulen zu einer Nutzung von digitaler Technologie geführt, ihre flächendeckende Nutzung bleibt jedoch vielfach weiterhin eine einzulösende Vision. Die hierzu ergriffenen Maßnahmen fokussieren einzelne Bereiche, etwa die Kompetenzentwicklung von Lehrenden oder infrastrukturelle Maßnahmen. Es zeigt sich, dass die systematische Integration von digitalen Medien und Services an einer Hochschule ohne die Formulierung einer umfassenden Strategie kaum gelingen wird. In diesem Sammelband beschreiben ausgewählte Autoren die strategischen Bemühungen ihrer Universitäten. Dabei kommen sowohl traditionelle (Präsenz-)Hochschulen wie auch Fern-Universitäten zu Wort. Das Buch richtet sich damit gleichermaßen an Mitglieder des Hochschulmanagements sowie an Entscheider im IKM-Bereich.

Book Review of “Indigenous Social Work around the World. Towards Culturally Relevant Education and Practice”, 2008, edited by Mel Gray, John Coates and Michael Yellow Bird

One could be seduced into a critique of this volume that focuses on its potential to overstate the momentum for a shift in Western social work ideology when faced with the conundrum of cultural difference. One could posit that the discussion is too broad, the topics covered too numerous, the opportunity for detail missed, the urgency of the messages unnecessarily exaggerated, the “proof” not beyond anecdote and so forth. I reject this temptation to conform to the dominant professional dynamic most emphatically and offer that what Gray, Coates and Yellow Bird have presented to the social work field in this volume is the first tangible step towards an alternative paradigm for an occupation afflicted with unsustainable hypocrisy and thus at the brink of irrelevancy.

Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia

Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between ad 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions. Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period ad 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

The heatwaves in Switzerland in summer 1947

In 1947, Switzerland was affected by a heat period of large spatial and temporal extent and rare occurrence. The heatwaves of 1947 can be compared with the events of 2003 in terms of intensity and duration. The summer of 1947 is studied based on the analysis of MeteoSwiss station data as well as the “Twentieth Century Reanalysis” (20CR) data set. Heatwaves were defined as six consecutive exceedances of the local 90th percentile of temperature. Five different heatwaves were identified which struck Switzerland during the summer of 1947. The most intense heatwave event is analysed in more detail. The meteorological situation was characterized by a high-pressure bridge over Central Europe. Based on a comparison with literature and with observations, the applicability of the 20CR dataset for the meteorological analysis of heatwave events could be demonstrated. The representation of the heat period in summer 1947 in 20CR is satisfactory when compared with station data, albeit with a temperature bias due to differences in topography. Hence, heatwaves cannot be defined using an absolute threshold. We conclude that 20CR is applicable for an overview of the meteorological patterns characterizing a heat wave but may not reproduce local details.