Redefining Self-Help: Policy and Practice

Redefining Welfare: Australian Social Policy and Practice

The present paper outlines and analyzes Australia’s welfare reform policies as they have been implemented over the past decade. While there have been numerous social policy initiatives over this period, welfare reform provides an interesting site for analysis and review. This suite of policies and programs is of particular importance from several standpoints. First, its target groups – those ne...

Self-help organizations for alcohol and drug problems: toward evidence-based practice and policy.

This expert consensus statement reviews evidence on the effectiveness of drug and alcohol self-help groups and presents potential implications for clinicians, treatment program managers and policymakers. Because longitudinal studies associate self-help group involvement with reduced substance use, improved psychosocial functioning, and lessened health care costs, there are humane and practical ...

Redefining the practice of dentistry.

A s part of my work for CDA on the future of our profession, I wrote possible scenarios for Canadian dentistry. These are works of complete fiction and I am always afraid that the groups I present these scenarios to will think I consumed a banned substance. Happily, many colleagues to whom I have presented the scenarios, while not believing that any of them will come true in their entirety, see...

Self-Practice Imitation Learning from Weak Policy

Imitation learning is an effective strategy to reinforcement learning, which avoids the delayed reward problem by learning from mentor-demonstrated trajectories. A limitation for imitation learning is that collecting sufficient qualified demonstrations is quite expensive. In this work, we study how an agent can automatically improve its performance from a weak policy, by automatically acquiring...

Redefining staff roles and responsibilities can help reduce turnover time.