The American family structure is complicated, and only becoming more so as time goes on. Finkelstein attributes this complexity, with its accompanying value confusions and inconsistencies, to the voluntary and involuntary, uprooted, migrant, immigrant, multiethnic and multicultural origins of the country itself. As people of different cultures intermarry, the complexities surrounding communications and expectations increase dramatically with each ensuing generation. These changes, coupled with the pressures of a rapidly changing world, place the American family and, therefore, American children in jeopardy. This unique volume does not just examine the troubles that American families face, or demand that changes be made. Finkelstein approaches family problems from a direct practice perspective and speaks to the implementation of needed services.

The author designs an array of family-focused programs, emphasizing wellness, strengths, and assets. She calls on communities as well as individual agencies to organize themselves to create services, from the ordinary, such as housing, day care, education and family counseling, to the very special which includes outreach preventive services for families in trouble, family foster care, adoption, and a variety of residential options for youths with severe problems. Finkelstein stresses that these programs must be family-centered, they must be linked to past family connections, and they must build connections into the future. This work will offer students and scholars in social work, child welfare, and public policy a complete overview of the systemic difficulties of the American family as well as compatible and practical programs designed to meet current family needs.

This thesis develops and analyzes a mathematical model for the reliability measures of a single-unit system subject to continuous wear due to its operating environment and randomly occurring shocks that inflict a random amount of damage to the unit. Assuming a Markovian operating environment and shock arrival mechanism, Laplace-Stieltjes transform expressions are obtained for the failure time distribution and all of its moments. Moreover, an analytical expression is derived for the long-run availability of the single-unit system when it is subject to an inspect-and-replace maintenance policy. The analytical results are illustrated, and their results compared with those of Monte Carlo-simulated failure data. The numerical results indicate that the reliability measures may be accurately computed via numerical inversion of the transform expressions in a straightforward manner when the input parameters are known a priori. In stark contrast to the simulation model which requires several hours to obtain the reliability measures, the analytical procedure computes the same measures in only a few seconds.

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Ellen Finkelstein is the author of more than 20 books on AutoCAD(r), PowerPoint(r), and Flash(r). Gurdy Leete has more than 20 years experience in computer animation.