The purpose of this study was to examine participants' perceptions on the effectiveness of the "Parents in Partnership" program (PIP) of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Parents in Partnership (PIP) is a collaborative effort between the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and parent partner paraprofessionals toward facilitation of safe reunification and permanency through education, support and mentoring of birth parents. The program's sole goal is the timely and safe reunification of children and their families. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with fourteen participants in the PIP program. Both mentors and mentees were interviewed.

published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Ecological planning relies on a keen awareness of relationships between biophysical and social processes, then uses this knowledge for decision making in accommodating for human needs. The value of this planning process allows for design intervention while also ensuring a sustained use of the landscape, with these insights blending skill and artistry into place-making. In the 1960s, environmental concerns galvanized a generation of landscape architects who first codified ecological planning as a rationale for decisions with environmental stewardship. While this is the accepted canon, in the early 20th century during a period of experimentation and exploration, the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm was using ecological principles as foundations for landscape architecture practice. This thesis challenges current discourse and accepted history, presenting evidence that the Olmsted Brothers' work in the 1920s predated many modern ecological theories and applications, and is an important addition to the historiography of ecological planning. This thesis largely focuses on Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. as the central historical figure, offering a more in-depth understanding of the evolution of the firm, and fills the gap of the Olmsted legacy. As the children of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957) along with his brother John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920) co-founded the Olmsted Brothers and created one of the most prolific landscape architecture practices, developing projects in all aspects of landscape design. The Olmsted Brothers' work in California accounts for over 200 projects, and ranks among the highest number of their 5000 designs developed in the United States. In the early 20th century, the city of Los Angeles offered significant ecological, cultural, and technological challenges for the firm, with the city's unbridled urbanization and proliferate use of water and automobility. Rich in solutions, the firm's built and proposed designs over the course of 20 years revealed the discipline of landscape architecture in its richest and most scalar form. From small scale gardens, residential communities, park and parkway systems, to open space and watershed planning, the Olmsted Brothers created public spaces that worked in relationship to the ecology of the region during a critical juncture in the history of regional planning in Southern California. A range of methods were utilized in this thesis. Primary data provided both qualitative and quantitative material for study and was extracted from letters, reports and writing, drawings, photos, plans and maps. Over 20,000 primary documents, written by the firm's principals, provided the basis for analysis, and in a new way, this thesis interprets not only the written documents, but related construction documents developed from 1914 - 1931. As part of its data collection, an original contribution of this study is a comprehensive corpus of Olmsted Brothers source material from their work in Los Angeles. Methodologies sought to modify these documents into a spatial understanding of their work through digital analysis and re-creation of designs. The Olmsted Brothers' design solutions provide insights into today's ongoing concerns about water management, sustainable urban planning, and multifunctional landscapes. Their design proposals solved multiple problems with the design, accounting for not only vast geography, but complex cultural and natural systems within it. The value of their ideas reflects landscape architecture solutions as hybrid, dynamic, and strategic, offering 21st century practitioners paradigms in an ever-changing ecology.

No description available.

The objective of this study was to improve treatment provided to multi-cultural families in the welfare system by improving training and awareness in regards to cultural sensitivity.

Estudo experimental sobre a alterabilidade de basaltos das fundações da Usina Hidrelétrica de Três Irmãos constou da execução de ensaios de alteração, por ciclos de saturação e secagem, e de abrasão \"Los Angeles\" efetuados após ensaios de alteração. O ensaio de abrasão \"Los Angeles\" foi adotado como parâmetro mecânico auxiliar na quantificação da desagregação. Análises granulométricas também foram utilizadas com o mesmo objetivo. Foram executados, ainda, ensaios físico-mecânicos e análises petrográficas para a caracterização tecnológica das amostras. A distribuição dos valores de perda de massa por alteração e por abrasão, em função do tempo (ciclos), e as distribuições granulométricas apresentadas após esses ensaios, permitiram avaliar com clareza a desagregabilidade das amostras. Aos resultados das perdas de massa por alteração e por abrasão foram aplicados critérios de cálculo sugeridos por diferentes autores, para fixar índices de alterabilidade de rochas. Os índices adotados permitiram estabelecer a seqüência de alterabilidade dos basaltos estudados. A partir dos resultados obtidos no estudo, foi possível, ainda, estabelecer uma proposta de procedimento para avaliar a alterabilidade de rochas, com contribuição para normalização de ensaios de alteração. / An experimental study on the alterability of basalts from Três Irmãos Hydroelectric Dam foundation was performed by means of alteration test, and \"Los Angeles\" abrasion tests carried out after the samples have been submitted to alteration test. L.A. test was adopted as a mechanical parameter in order to quantify the disaggregation. Grain size analyses were also used as a complementary quantification form. Additionally, some physico-mechanical standard tests and petrographical analyses were done for the technological characterization of the various samples. The distribution of values of mass loss due to alteration and abrasion, with the time (cicles), and the grain size distribution presented, after those tests, allowed the evaluation of disaggregation of the studied samples. Several criteria of calculations, as suggested by different authors, were used to define alterability indexes. The indexes adopted allowed to evaluate properly the alterability of the studied basaltic rocks. The results here obtained provided conditions to stablish a proposition of a standard procedure to evaluate rock alterability through experimental tests.

O filme Short Cuts - Cenas da Vida (1993), do diretor norte-americano Robert Altman (1925-2006), foi baseado numa coletânea de contos do escritor Raymond Carver (1938- 1988). Nosso trabalho tem por objetivo o estudo dos modos pelos quais são figurados, no filme de Altman, os processos de virtualização da realidade e de fragmentação sóciohistórica (bem como suas possíveis causas) reinantes na sociedade contemporânea norteamericana e facilmente reconhecíveis em outras sociedades do mundo globalizado, inclusive na brasileira. Short Cuts se passa nos subúrbios da cidade de Los Angeles, metrópole socialmente fragmentada, caracterizada pela invasão da mídia em todos os domínios e assolada pela violência. Procuramos fazer um levantamento da fortuna crítica escrita sobre o filme e percebemos que os críticos se mostraram parcialmente equivocados em suas interpretações pela utilização de categorias inapropriadas para interpretá-lo, posto que ele está estruturado com base em preceitos épicos, ao invés de dramáticos, como a maioria da crítica pressupôs. Em seguida, tentamos analisar, a partir da tradição seguida por teóricos como Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Peter Szondi e Susan Willis, dentre outros, determinados aspectos do filme que demonstram não apenas a ideologia dominante e as crises cíclicas enfrentadas pelo sistema capitalista de produção, como também o desejo pela coletividade. Altman, valendo-se de técnicas como a rima visual e a filmagem através de superfícies, procura mostrar as conexões inevitáveis entre personagens que acreditam estar isoladas umas das outras, demonstrando, assim, o caráter ideológico da virtualização e da fragmentação. / Directed by Robert Altman (1925-2006), the film Short Cuts (1993) was based on a compilation of short stories written by Raymond Carver (1938-1988). Our work\'s objective is to study the means through which the processes of reality\'s virtualization and sociohistorical fragmentation, largely diffused in contemporary societies, are figured in Altman\'s film. Short Cuts is set on the suburbs of Los Angeles, a socially fragmented metropolis, characterized by the media invasion in all domains and fraught with violence. We have attempted to gather some thoughts that the critics have expressed toward the film, and we have noticed that their interpretations have proven to be partially mistaken, due to the use of improper categories to interpret it, considering that Altman\'s film is structured upon epic categories rather than dramatic ones, unlike most critics presupposed. We have also tried to analyze, based on the tradition followed by theoreticians such as Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Peter Szondi and Susan Willis, to name a few, certain aspects of the film that not only demonstrate the dominating ideology and the cyclic crises faced by the capitalist mode of production, but also the desire for collectivity. Through techniques such as the visual rhyme and the filming through surfaces, Altman attempts to show the inevitable connections between characters who believe to be isolated from each other, thus demonstrating the ideological essence of both virtualization and fragmentation.

The scope of this analysis encompasses the feasibility of establishing a vascular diagnostics laboratory at Downtown hospital.

Researchers on the Northwest Coast (NWC) are often interested in complex questions regarding social organization, resource intensification, resource control, and impacts of environmental change on resources and in turn human groups. However, the excavation strategies used on the NWC often do not provide the spatial and chronological control within a site that is necessary to document their variability and answer these research questions. The Čḯxwicən site has the potential to address some of the limitations of previous Northwest Coast village site excavations because of its unique and robust sampling strategy, the wide expanse of time that it was occupied, and the multiple house structures present. An on-going project is examining changing human ecodynamics over the breadth of site occupation, focusing on zooarchaeology and geoarchaeological records. This site, located on the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Port Angeles, WA was excavated in 2004 as part of a Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) undertaking to build parts for the Hood Canal Bridge Large scale excavation (261.4 m3 528 m2) generated enormous quantities of faunal remains. Radiocarbon dates and historic records show occupation extends from 2750 cal. BP to the early 20th century. Statistical sampling methods provide an empirical way to maximize the amount of information obtained with the least amount of effort. My thesis addressed the utility of Sampling to Redundancy (STR) as a statistical sampling method for sampling faunal remains from large village sites. My project has documented the variability of fish family representation across time and space in one part of the Čḯxwicən village, while minimizing the time and effort required to do so. This thesis applies STR to "S" (> 1/4 in.) 10 Liter bucket samples from eight excavation units and a total of 26 separate unique temporal and spatial contexts. I focused on 1/4 in. samples for my study for a particular reason. Previous fish faunal studies have focused on effects of mesh size on fish representation; and emphasized the need to use fine mesh (e.g., 1/8 in. or finer) to document small-bodied fishes. This focus on fine mesh typically means that only limited volumes of matrix are studied, which in turn may mean that remains of rarer, large- bodied fishes are under- represented. The on-going research project has focused on buckets screened to 1/8 in. mesh (called "C" buckets). I used STR to sample additional volumes of matrix screened to 1/4 in. to examine whether expanding the volume studied would affect fish representation, which was a second goal of my project. Overall, I studied remains from 269 "S" buckets out of a total of 419 buckets, or 47% of the buckets. STR was most helpful for six of the high bone abundance and density contexts, where I analyzed less than 50% of the total buckets, was moderately helpful for 14 contexts, and not at all helpful for the six contexts with low fishbone abundance, where I analyzed 100% of the buckets. This analysis took me a total of 154 hours, and based on the percentage of material analyzed, 174 hours were saved. As to the second project goal, to assess whether adding fish remains documented from additional matrix volume affected fish representation, I found the differences were minimal. Both for my study units as a whole, and for each time period, adding the fish records from the "S" buckets did not alter the main trends in fish representation as documented by the larger study, using a smaller volume. To further examine whether the added volume from >1/4 in "S" buckets affected results, I explored specific research questions that are relevant to the larger project regarding environment-animal interactions and fishbone deposition and bone condition inside and outside of a house structure. Adding the "S" bucket samples did not affect fish representation or fishbone distribution and condition, which affirms that the sampling strategy used in the larger research project was sufficient in most cases to characterize the fish record at the site. My approach to STR has focused on fish remains that were previously excavated from a Pacific coastal village site with dense archaeological deposits. STR could be employed in other types of archaeological settings in a range of environments (coast or interior) representing a range of cultural contexts (from hunting camps to urban centers) to establish sample redundancy after an excavation is complete. STR could be used during on-going excavation. Further research is required to explore the implications of STR in these settings, however it is likely that the success of STR in other contexts will be dependent on the density and overall abundance of remains, the diversity or material types being studied, as well of course in the range and specificity of questions in each case.

Thesis (D.Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes abstract and prospectus. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-162).