Building the future: shaping our social work identity newly qualified social worker conference was held on 31 May 2018 in Edinburgh. Delivered with the University of Edinburgh (in partnership with the Higher Education Heads of Social Work Group), Iriss, Scottish Social Services Council, the Scottish Association of Social Work, Social Work Scotland and the Scottish Government, it provided an opportunity for newly qualified social workers to come together to connect and reconnect.

In this episode, Martin Kettle of Glasgow Caledonian University gives an overview of research on newly qualified social worker perceptions of social work education and practice.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes

On 27 March 2020 Iriss spoke to Eona Craig, Chief Executive of Articulate Cultural Trust about its work to support care experienced young people, and how the organisation has managed to continue to deliver services in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Articulate works with often socially isolated care experienced young people in Scotland, challenging loneliness, supporting connectivity and promoting physical and mental well-being.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes.

I have a short Mercatus policy brief on that topic, co-authored with Trace Mitchell.  Excerpt: Risk from reopening cannot fall to zero, but investments in safety by employers can bring real gains in many cases. Ideally, a plan should both minimize risk and encourage employers’ safety investments. In essence, policymakers should (1) limit liability in […]

The post Limiting liability for a resumption of business activity appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Netflix's wildly popular "Tiger King" documentary series has been progressively sweeping the nation since it first aired on March 20. As an outrageous, binge-worthy drama released when self-isolation and uncertainty were spreading around the world, the show certainly came at the right time to provide an escape from the news. Overnight, it seemed, conversations that didn’t revolve around the coronavirus or Joe Exotic were hard to come by. Photos of celebrities who’d visited the zoos were flooding the internet, Joe Exotic’s power-ballads were hitting it big on Spotify and even President Donald Trump was fielding questions about the gun-toting zookeeper[...]

As there have been countless cases of Zoombombing in the recent weeks, the security in the video conferencing platform Zoom has been doubted by its users. In response to this, Zoom finally announced on Thursday that they will be implementing and offering end-to-end encryption.

With the acquisition of Keybase, a New York-based startup specializing in encrypted messaging and cloud services, Zoom will finally be able to make good on its claims of offering end-to-end encryption.

“We are excited to integrate Keybase’s team into the Zoom family to help us build end-to-end encryption that can reach current Zoom scalability,” CEO Eric Yuan said in a Zoom blog post on Thursday.

Unfortunately, not all Zoom users will benefit from the company’s new move, as the end-to-end encryption feature will only be available to users who have paid plans (which start at $14.99/month, by the way) on the video conferencing platform.

If a meeting’s host has enabled this feature, participants will be barred from joining by phone and cloud-based recording will be disabled. In Thursday’s blog post, Yuan emphasized that the feature will not store the encryption key on Zoom’s servers, so the company will not be able to see any part of the call.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Zoom/ Wikimedia Commons)

Do you understand the power of backlinks? No, do you truly understand? Well I have a search engine optimization guide here for you that will show you how to get crazy traffic to your website. Make sure that read this entire article to learn all the dirty tricks!

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider yet another case regarding whether employers can decline to cover contraceptives in their health care plans. Reproductive rights groups warn that depending on the outcome of the case, tens of thousands of American women could lose vital contraceptive coverage. The case, Little Sisters of the Poor and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, involves a 2017 Trump administration rule change that significantly broadened who can claim an exemption to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) contraceptive coverage mandate. The 2017 rule change, issued without a notice of proposed rulemaking or public comment opportunity, expanded the scope of religious exemptions and added an additional moral exemption claim. States had successfully challenged the rule, calling it a violation of the constitution, federal anti-discrimination law, and the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). A federal appeals court issued an injunction, preventing the Trump administration from enforcing the rule until the case was decided. Both the district court and the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed that states were likely to succeed on their APA claim. The court will now consider whether the Little Sisters of the Poor have standing and whether the Trump administration lawfully exempted religious objectors from the […]

The post Review: Struman Optics Cinematic Lenses for Smartphones appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Lee Herbet.

The argument of whether smartphones can take good photos or not has been settled – they can! In this article, we are going to have a look at a set of lenses for smartphones from an Australian company, Struman Optics. While there are many lenses for smartphones on the market, I found a manufacturer that […]

The post Review: Struman Optics Cinematic Lenses for Smartphones appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Lee Herbet.

The latest episode of the "She Roars" podcast features Wendy Kopp, Class of 1989, reflecting on her experience as a groundbreaking social entrepreneur — which she has been since long before the term was invented.

What sort of person can’t decide who to vote for, but can rate how much they like whatever they’re hearing out of five, and wants to sit there tapping a button accordingly?

As the general election scuttles closer, the campaign grows more confusing by the moment, so it’s good that last week’s seven-way leaders’ debate brought some much-needed mayhem to the situation. Not so long ago we were bemoaning the lack of choice in a two-party system. Now we’ve got option paralysis.

It had its moments. Nigel Farage complained about foreigners with HIV who enter Britain and immediately start wolfing down expensive medicine: greedy as well as sick. You’d think Farage might welcome immigrants with grave illnesses on the basis that they’re less likely to hang around as long, but apparently not. Say what you like about him – say it, write it down, daub it in 3ft-high cherry-red letters up the side of a prominent overpass on his regular commute if you must – but it’s undeniably refreshing to see a politician determined to speak his mind, indifferent to the absurd constraints of spin or basic human empathy. Never mind HIV sufferers – how much is Britain spending on refugees with cancer? Maybe he could put that statistic on a sandwich board and patrol the country in it, perhaps while ringing a bell and loudly commanding passersby to picture a nation under his command.

People are growing increasingly impatient over the coronavirus lockdown, and politicians are now debating whether to loosen measures. From a scientific point of view this is a disaster. Measures should actually be tightened until we know more about the virus.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and believe that strong policy measures, such as shop closures and curfews, are necessary. They also believe that their government and their country’s citizens are not doing enough and underestimate the degree to which others in their country support strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. The perception of a weak government and public response is associated with higher levels of worries and depression. Using both cross-country panel data and an event-study, we additionally show that strong government reactions correct misperceptions, and reduce worries and depression. Our findings highlight that policy-makers not only need to consider how their decisions affect the spread of COVID-19, but also how such choices influence the mental health of their population.

One EU country after the other is moving to restrict public life. The Dutch government has opted for less drastic measures, hoping for herd immunity and relying on the common sense of its people. But the country has still had to make adjustments to its policies.

Banks usually hold large amounts of domestic public debt which makes them vulnerable to their own sovereign’s default risk. At the same time, governments often resort to costly public bailouts when their domestic banking sector is in trouble. We investigate how the interbank network structure and the distribution of sovereign debt holdings jointly affect the optimal bailout policy in the presence of this "doom loop". Rescuing banks with high domestic sovereign exposure is optimal if these banks are sufficiently central in the network, even though that requires larger bailout expenditures than rescuing low-exposure banks. Our findings imply that highly central banks can use exposure to their own government as a strategic tool to increase the likelihood of being bailed out. Our model thus illustrates how the "doom loop" exacerbates the "too interconnected to fail" problem in banking.

The outbreak of the coronavirus has dealt a shock to the global economy with unprecedented speed as it continues to spread across the world. Here is a look at some of the latest developments Wednesday related to the global economy, particular economic sectors, and the workplace.

We develop a multi-risk SIR model (MR-SIR) where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”, “the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.

We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key sufficient statistics. Using tax changes and scanner data, we estimate relatively elastic demand and limited substitution between e-cigarettes and combustible cigarettes. In sample surveys, historical smoking declines for high- and low-vaping demographics were unchanged after e-cigarettes were introduced; this demographic shift-share identification also suggests limited substitution. We field a new survey of experts, who report that vaping is almost as harmful as smoking cigarettes. In our model, these results imply that current e-cigarette taxes are far below the social optimum, but Monte Carlo simulations highlight substantial uncertainty.

You’re not normal.
What I mean is, when it comes to seeing your blog, you don’t view it like a normal, everyday reader. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
You know how looking at your significant other day in and day out makes you immune to some of his or her more distinctive traits? You no longer notice the scar or the flamboyant hand gesture. It’s human nature to take things for granted.
Let’s go against ...

The post How To Test Blog Elements For Conversion Optimization appeared first on RSS Feed Converter.

If you work in the search engine optimization sector, you’ve probably heard too many times that ‘link-building is dead’. Well, yes and no.
Yes, because links alone won’t get you far these days. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithm; weeding out unnatural links or penalizing sites with spammy content. In fact, Google’s recent Phantom Update affected both small and large websites as it targeted thin, overused, and duplicated content.
No, because links are still the lifeblood of SEO and ...

The post How To Optimize Your Website Without Link-Building appeared first on RSS Feed Converter.

In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the US government brought about a collection of fiscal stimulus measures: the 2020 CARES Act. Among other provisions, this Act directed cash payments to households. We analyze households’ spending responses using high-frequency transaction data. We also explore heterogeneity by income levels, recent income declines, and liquidity. We find that households respond rapidly to receipt of stimulus payments, with spending increasing by $0.25-$0.35 per dollar of stimulus during the first 10 days. Households with lower incomes, greater income drops, and lower levels of liquidity display stronger responses. Liquidity plays the most important role, with no observed spending response for households with high levels of bank account balances. Relative to the effects of previous economic stimulus programs in 2001 and 2008, we see much smaller increases in durables spending and larger increases in spending on food, likely reflecting the impact of shelter-in-place orders and supply disruptions. We hope that our results inform the current debate about appropriate policy measures.

Shelter in place orders (SIPOs) require residents to remain home for all but essential activities such as purchasing food or medicine, caring for others, exercise, or traveling for employment deemed essential. Between March 19 and April 20, 2020, 40 states and the District of Columbia adopted SIPOs. This study explores the impact of SIPOs on health, with particular attention to heterogeneity in their impacts. First, using daily state-level social distancing data from SafeGraph and a difference-in-differences approach, we document that adoption of a SIPO was associated with a 5 to 10 percent increase in the rate at which state residents remained in their homes full-time. Then, using daily state-level coronavirus case data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we find that approximately three weeks following the adoption of a SIPO, cumulative COVID-19 cases fell by 44 percent. Event-study analyses confirm common COVID-19 case trends in the week prior to SIPO adoption and show that SIPO-induced case reductions grew larger over time. However, this average effect masks important heterogeneity across states — early adopters and high population density states appear to reap larger benefits from their SIPOs. Finally, we find that statewide SIPOs were associated with a reduction in coronavirus-related deaths, but estimated mortality effects were imprecisely estimated.

Scientists injected CRISPR gene-editing machinery into unfertilized eggs still developing in female lizards’ ovaries.

What makes the perfect Mother's Day morning? How about a foolproof frittata and fruity cocktail recipe? Crafted by professionals, these are easy enough to allow the guest of honor to relax and let someone else handle the cooking!

The Clippers have made some trade inquiries but coach Doc Rivers and forward Paul George talk about the strength of the current roster.

The Clippers viewed their victory against Oklahoma City as an example of why they're confident to play either on Houston's terms or set their own Thursday.

Before NBA play can resume, a number of medical protocols should be in place to protect players, staff and arena workers. Medical experts say that is a problem.

As the coronavirus pandemic become grimmer, young people are considering moving home with their parents and extended family. But that presents risks.

L.A. County is offering residents a free subscription to Headspace, a mindfulness and meditation app.

Marty Blazer, an informant in the federal investigation into college basketball corruption that ensnared USC, is assisting the NCAA in its probe.

The Angels failed to land a standout starter, or even Ross Stripling, during the offseason, but manager Joe Maddon expressed confidence in second-year starters.

Utility man David Fletcher should spell Brian Goodwin in right field often, and top prospects Jo Adell and Brandon Marsh eventually will be promoted.

With the Angels optioning Jaime Barria to triple A, there's a four-way competition for the final two spots in the rotation.

Cal Petersen made his Kings season debut in a 3-0 road loss to the Devils and had 31 saves. With Jack Campbell traded, he will get more chances.

The Dodgers are tired of talking about what the Houston Astros did in 2017. They're excited about what lies ahead for the team this season.

Legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully says the coronavirus outbreak is unlike anything he's ever seen, but he finds hope in a time of despair.

"Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between" examines the lives forever changed by the building of Dodger Stadium.

Cool webcams, like the one showing Old Faithful eruptions in Yellowstone, let you visit national parks from home.

UCLA's Jalen Hill and Cody Riley were involved in a shoplifting incident in China in 2017 that created international headlines. Three years later, they've found redemption.

This trio turned commercial, residential and fashion design experience into the Transition State firm. Next up: a line of throw pillows.

San Francisco has emerged something of a bright spot in California's battle against COVID-19, but it's too early to relax, officials say.

The coronavirus has ended big budget brand deals for some influencers, but the focus has shifted to engaging with a potentially bigger audience more authentically.

The action comes on the heels of the temporary closure of all schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District and schools in most of the state's largest cities, some of which made the decision to close earlier this week.

Several University of California regents expressed deep skepticism about the use of SAT and ACT tests in admissions decisions, signaling the standardized tests may be headed for elimination as an application requirement.