Out of the Margins

This chapter starts from the observation that, to address the destitution of any community successfully, the sociopolitical interactions that exist around that community need to be addressed as well. It offers three reasons why youth development policies for young Roma who live in poverty may have an impact on these interactions by changing patterns of social mobility among children and adolescents to facilitate greater, large-scale change. These policies may be pivotal in bringing about new experiences and perceptions of Roma identity. And finally, they may inform and help expand international actions on Roma. By studying the opportunities inherent in youth development initiatives, researchers may gain a deeper understanding not only of the dynamics of exclusion and marginalization facing many Roma but also of the potential positive change within and around their communities.

UKRAINIAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY ARCHIVE (2000–2020): TRANSFORMATION OF CONTENT

The purpose of the article is to present the process of formation of a biographical resource, to depict the current state of its updated version - the electronic Ukrainian National Biographical Archive (UNBA) to analyze the changes that occurred during 2000-2020 in the formation of the biographical array of the database (DB) "Personalities" - a fundamental component of the electronic UNBA. The methodology consists of a combination of general scientific methods of analysis of theoretical material and statistical and comparative methods of analysis of specific empirical data, their systematization, and generalization. The scientific novelty of the study is characterized by obtaining unique information about the dynamics of the distribution of UNBA personnel - important figures of Ukrainian culture - by thematic headings, chronological periods, gender distribution. Conclusions. Formed by UNBA, today is the largest national electronic biographical resource. The emergence of modern sources in Ukraine, which open to the reader new, undeservedly forgotten, silent for various reasons, contributes to a large-scale change in the volume of biographical resources. Qualitative processing of these sources significantly multiplies the UNBA register, significantly increases its informative aspect. The analysis showed the versatility of the presented information on its thematic, chronological, gender distribution. In addition, it identified problems that should be taken into account when further filling the resource, in particular the significant uneven distribution of personnel by domain and article, incomplete chronological information about births, deaths, and burials, insufficient attention to biographical sources before the XIX century.

Multi-Resolution Supervision Network with an Adaptive Weighted Loss for Desert Segmentation

Desert segmentation of remote sensing images is the basis of analysis of desert area. Desert images are usually characterized by large image size, large-scale change, and irregular location distribution of surface objects. The multi-scale fusion method is widely used in the existing deep learning segmentation models to solve the above problems. Based on the idea of multi-scale feature extraction, this paper took the segmentation results of each scale as an independent optimization task and proposed a multi-resolution supervision network (MrsSeg) to further improve the desert segmentation result. Due to the different optimization difficulty of each branch task, we also proposed an auxiliary adaptive weighted loss function (AWL) to automatically optimize the training process. MrsSeg first used a lightweight backbone to extract different-resolution features, then adopted a multi-resolution fusion module to fuse the local information and global information, and finally, a multi-level fusion decoder was used to aggregate and merge the features at different levels to get the desert segmentation result. In this method, each branch loss was treated as an independent task, AWL was proposed to calculate and adjust the weight of each branch. By giving priority to the easy tasks, the improved loss function could effectively improve the convergence speed of the model and the desert segmentation result. The experimental results showed that MrsSeg-AWL effectively improved the learning ability of the model and has faster convergence speed, lower parameter complexity, and more accurate segmentation results.

The Relevance of Inequality Research in Sociology for Inequality Reduction

Social inequality is a central topic of research in the social sciences. Decades of research have deepened our understanding of the characteristics and causes of social inequality. At the same time, social inequality has markedly increased during the past 40 years, and progress on reducing poverty and improving the life chances of Americans in the bottom half of the distribution has been frustratingly slow. How useful has sociological research been to the task of reducing inequality? The authors analyze the stance taken by sociological research on the subject of reducing inequality. They identify an imbalance in the literature between the discipline’s continual efforts to motivate the plausibility of large-scale change and its lesser efforts to identify feasible strategies of change either through social policy or by enhancing individual and local agency with the potential to cumulate into meaningful progress on inequality reduction.

Capability building for large-scale transformational change: learning from an evaluation of a national programme

BackgroundThe Long Term Plan presents an ambitious vision for England’s National Health Service which will require a sustained programme of transformational change. The Virtual Academy of Large-Scale Change (VALSC) was developed to build capability in health and care system teams involved in transformation or redesign programmes.MethodsTo evaluate the VALSC, quantitative and qualitative data were collected and reviewed against the Kirkpatrick model. Quantitative data were collected via end-of-session surveys to assess individual knowledge before and after participating in capability-building interventions. Qualitative data were also collected and included post-intervention surveys and interviews. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using an inductive approach to identify themes that were subsequently assessed against the Kirkpatrick model.ResultsResults suggest that the VALSC programme has helped build capability for large-scale change in terms of learning, behaviour change and impact. Participants’ ipsative self-assessment of knowledge demonstrated a significant change (p<0.001) and qualitative data suggested three broad themes in which the VALSC made an impact. First, participants were empowered with transformation and change skills which they applied to local health and care challenges. Second, VALSC helped strengthen connections within and between transformational change teams. Third, VALSC helped transformational change teams to engage more effectively with their stakeholders.ConclusionsThe VALSC developed knowledge, skills, behavioural change and application impact that built capability in individuals and teams. Therefore, continuing to develop capability-building offers that empower and build agency in front-line staff working on service transformation and equip them with approaches, methods and tools to increase their chances of success, is recommended.

Reconfiguring Quotation over Time and the System-Internal Rise of BE like

Recent work on first person dialogue in conversation (“direct quotation”) assumes that quotation is undergoing rapid and large-scale change as a consequence of the emergence of BE like. In this chapter I merge archival and contemporary materials to explore the parameters of change across two longitudinal speech collections. My concern is the role of grammatical constraints on quotation, alongside evolution of the functional, pragmatic, and lexical repertoires. Drawing on parallel data from two varieties of English, I present a comparative variationist analysis of direct quotation, spanning the late nineteenth century to the present. Analysis reveals a longitudinal and multifaceted trajectory of change, resulting in a highly constrained variable grammar in which contextual factors can be seen to evolve and specialise. There is no evidence that recent changes are the result of new quotatives; rather, the system-internal evolutionary pathway that set the scene for BE like is laid bare.

Programme theory and linked intervention strategy for large-scale change to improve hospital care in a low and middle-income country - A Study Pre-Protocol

In low and middle-income countries (LMIC) general hospitals are important for delivering some key acute care services. Neonatal care is emblematic of these acute services as averting deaths requires skilled care over many days from multiple professionals with at least basic equipment. However, hospital care is often of poor quality and large-scale change is needed to improve outcomes. In this manuscript we aim to show how we have drawn upon our understanding of contexts of care in Kenyan general hospital NBUs, and on social and behavioural theories that offer potential mechanisms of change in these settings, to develop an initial programme theory guiding a large scale change intervention to improve neonatal care and outcomes. Our programme theory is an expression of our assumptions about what actions will be both useful and feasible. It incorporates a recognition of our strengths and limitations as a research-practitioner partnership to influence change. The steps we employ represent the initial programme theory development phase commonly undertaken in many Realist Evaluations. However, unlike many Realist Evaluations that develop initial programme theories focused on pre-existing interventions or programmes, our programme theory informs the design of a new intervention that we plan to execute. Within this paper we articulate briefly how we propose to operationalise this new intervention. Finally, we outline the quantitative and qualitative research activities that we will use to address specific questions related to the delivery and effects of this new intervention, discussing some of the challenges of such study designs. We intend that this research on the intervention will inform future efforts to revise the programme theory and yield transferable learning.

Mudança de larga escala na política ambiental: análise da realidade brasileira

The Brazilian presidential elections of 2018 brought large-scale changes in the Brazilian environmental policy subsystem. The purpose of this article is to analyze these changes through the lenses of the Advocacy Coalition Framework - ACF. First, we introduced some of the main characteristics of this subsystem, then we presented a hemerographic analysis to describe and analyze the effects of four recent shocks in this subsystem. Two of these shocks were external: (i) the election of a new political elite in power that brought a clear discourse of denial of the relevance of environmental policy and (ii) calamitous environmental events that occurred in Brazil in 2019. The other two shocks were internal: (i) the capture of key positions and resources by dominant coalition members and (ii) the rise of conflict and polarization among the coalitions in the subsystem. The results showed: (i) the rise of a hyper-adversarial environmental policy subsystem; (ii) a realignment between non-dominant coalitions in a cooperative direction; (iii) the imposition of clear barriers to negotiation; (iv) changes in the use of scientific information by more politicized discourses with a high degree of bias. The article contributes to the understanding of the processes of institutional change in environmental policy, especially in contexts of large-scale change generated by increasing electoral polarization and fierce political disputes. It also contributes to the analysis of the limits and possibilities of the ACF in the Brazilian environmental agenda.

A socio­linguistic perspective on the (quasi-)modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English

This article examines the distribution and socio­linguistic patterning of (quasi-)modals which express strong obligation/necessity, namely must, have to, have got to, got to and need to, in Australian English. Variationist studies in other varieties of English have had contrasting findings in terms of distributions of root forms, as well as their conditioning by social and linguistic factors. The corpus analysis suggests real-time increased use of need to and decrease in have got to through comparison to earlier findings. The variationist analysis shows quasi-modals have to, have got to and got to as sensitive to speaker age and sex, and a recent increase of have to via apparent time modelling. Linguistic conditioning relating to the type of obligation and subject form is also found. The study contributes to socio­linguistic understanding of this large-scale change in English and the place of Australian English amongst other varieties.