Scraping By and Making Do: Navigating New Zealand’s Welfare System

<p>In August 2017, debate over Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei’s declaration of two-decade-old benefit fraud sparked an ongoing discussion around poverty in New Zealand that revealed the fraying edges of the country’s welfare safety net. The perception that New Zealand has a low level of poverty and a fair, coherent welfare system that ensures those “deserving” of support receive what they need is untrue. Instead, there is an extraordinary disconnect between those responsible for running New Zealand’s welfare system and the daily experience of beneficiaries and NGO workers who must navigate the complex welfare landscape to address hardship. Patching together the threads of a fraying safety net, for New Zealand’s most vulnerable, is little-appreciated work, but crucial to their survival nonetheless. In this thesis, I explore how beneficiaries and NGO workers use tactics to manage the gaps between policy, practice and need created by state strategy in order to address hardship. I examine the resilience and experiential expertise of beneficiaries and NGO workers as they work around the limitations of state bureaucracy to address high levels of poverty in New Zealand.</p>

Scraping By and Making Do: Navigating New Zealand’s Welfare System

<p>In August 2017, debate over Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei’s declaration of two-decade-old benefit fraud sparked an ongoing discussion around poverty in New Zealand that revealed the fraying edges of the country’s welfare safety net. The perception that New Zealand has a low level of poverty and a fair, coherent welfare system that ensures those “deserving” of support receive what they need is untrue. Instead, there is an extraordinary disconnect between those responsible for running New Zealand’s welfare system and the daily experience of beneficiaries and NGO workers who must navigate the complex welfare landscape to address hardship. Patching together the threads of a fraying safety net, for New Zealand’s most vulnerable, is little-appreciated work, but crucial to their survival nonetheless. In this thesis, I explore how beneficiaries and NGO workers use tactics to manage the gaps between policy, practice and need created by state strategy in order to address hardship. I examine the resilience and experiential expertise of beneficiaries and NGO workers as they work around the limitations of state bureaucracy to address high levels of poverty in New Zealand.</p>

A Multi-State Strategy for Structural Damage Detection Using Sensitivity of Weighted Transmissibility Function

In practice, a model-based structural damage detection (SDD) method is helpful for locating and quantifying damages with the aid of reasonable finite element (FE) model. However, only limited information in single or two structural states is often used for model updating in existing studies, which is not reasonable enough to represent real structures. Meanwhile, as an output-only damage indicator, transmissibility function (TF) is proven to be effective for SDD, but it is not sensitive enough to change in structural parameters. Therefore, a multi-state strategy based on weighted TF (WTF) is proposed to improve sensitivity of TF to change in parameters and in order to further obtain a more reasonable FE model for SDD in this study. First, WTF is defined by TF weighted with element stiffness matrix, and relationships between WTFs and change in structural parameters are established based on sensitivity analysis. Then, a multi-state strategy is proposed to obtain multiple structural states, which is used to reasonably update the FE model and detect structural damages. Meanwhile, due to fabrication errors, a two-stage scheme is adopted to reduce the global and local discrepancy between the real structure and the FE model. Further, the [Formula: see text]-norm and the [Formula: see text]-norm regularization techniques are, respectively, introduced for both model updating and SDD problems by considering the characteristics of problems. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a simply supported beam in numerical simulations and a six-storey frame in laboratory. From the simulation results, it can be seen that the sensitivity to structural damages can be improved by the definition of WTF. For the experimental studies, compared with the FE model updated from the single structural state, the FE model obtained by the multi-state strategy has an ability to more reasonably describe the change of states in the frame. Moreover, for the given structural damages, the proposed method can detect damage locations and degrees accurately, which shows the validity of the proposed method and the reliability of the updated FE model.

HIV situation in Russia at the beginning of implementation of state strategy aimed to combat the spread of HIV infection

The objective of the study: to determine the objectivity of statistical data on HIV infection, to analyze HIV situation in Russia at the beginning of implementation of the State Strategy Aimed to Combat the Spread of HIV Infection in the Russian Federation until 2030.Subjects and methods. The data from federal statistical surveillance forms no. 4, 8, 30, 33, and 61 were studied. The number of those died is presented as per the Rosstat data. Epidemiological and statistical analysis, expert assessment, and content analysis of publications and regulations were applied.Results. In Russia, HIV epidemic situation has stabilized; in 2019-2020, HIV-associated incidence and mortality were decreasing, and the number of deaths in patients with TB/HIV co-infection is also going down. In Russia, COVID-19 will not contribute to an increase in HIV incidence and mortality in the near future. The negative effects of the pandemic are partially offset by a sharp reduction in contacts, the stable supply of antiretroviral drugs, and the expansion of hospital-replacement technologies in specialized medical units. It is necessary to set up a unified monitoring system for HIV infection in this country. Federal statistical surveillance form no. 61 on HIV infection requires improvement and revision.

PROBLEMS OF COMPLEX DEVELOPMENT OF THE RESOURCE REGIONS, FOR EXAMPLE THE UTILIZATION OF ASSOCIATED PETROLEUM GAS

The paper identifies the main promising directions and conditions for increasing the level of efficiency in the use of associated petroleum gas in Russia. It is shown that the state strategy aimed at ensuring a 95% level of APG utilization is feasible in the development of a comprehensive system of incentives for companies, primarily in the use of the latest technologies and equipment for APG processing, as well as in fulfilling the requirements of licensing agreements.