This study was conducted to identify ethical issues experienced by social workers in the COVID-19 situation, enhance ethical sensitivity of social workers, and ultimately seek directions for ethical social welfare practices. Four focus group interviews (FGI) were conducted between March 20 and 30, 2022, targeting sixteen social workers working at community social welfare centers in Seoul. As a result of this study, major ethical issues experienced by social workers was (1) conflict of interest (difficulty in demonstrating autonomy as a private organization, and the different and variable guidelines for each program), (2) respect for individuals (invasion of privacy of users and employees, and the limitation of confidentiality due to preventive measures), (3) work responsibility and employee rights (proceeding of work in an infection risk situation, and the work after work), (4) competence and evidence-based practice(the practice of unprepared professionals, and the unproven practice), ( 5) discrimination/ exclusion/ stigma (the marginalization of the digitally vulnerable, the discrimination and exclusion of non-vaccinated persons, and the fear of community stigma about infection). Based on this research results, this study suggested the necessity of ethics education to enhance ethical sensitivity of social workers, the strengthening of the role of Social Workers Association for ethical practices, the advocacy role for the socially underprivileged in crisis and disaster situations, and the need for support from central and local governments.

Background: Surgical manipulation of paraganglioma can induce a massive release of catecholamines leading to hypertensive attack. But it has been not known about risk factors to cause hypertensive attack because paragangliomas of urinary bladder and retroperitoneum are notably rare tumors and have been recorded as case report or series. We investigated the relationship between mass size and hypertensive attack during surgery in patients with paraganglioma.Methods: Our retrospective chart review included 32 patients who had a pathological diagnosis of paraganglioma between March 2006 and May 2021, in single center. We analyzed the risk factors such as age, sex, height, weight, blood pressure before surgery, history of hypertension, pre-operative symptoms, mass location, and mass in 24 patients with retroperitoneal paragangliomas including urinary bladder.Hypertensive attack was defined as systolic blood pressure >180 mmHg during excision of the mass from the electric medical chart. The predictive power was assessed by the area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve.Results: There were 19 retroperitoneal, 5 urinary bladder, 2 middle-ear cavity, 2 mediastinal, 2 neck, 1 spinal cord and 1 duodenal paraganglioma. Seven (29.2%) of the 24 patients had preoperative symptoms such as pain, fluctuation of blood pressure, and palpable mass. Hypertensive attack during surgery occurred in 11 patients (45.8%). There was a significant difference in mass size between groups with (n=11) and without (n=13) FBP (P=0.007). The area under curve for predicting surgical complications according to mass size was 0.808 (cutoff size 4.25 cm, sensitivity 72.7%, specificity 76.9%, 95% CI: 0.635-0.981).Conclusions: Mass size impacted occurrence of hypertensive attack during surgery in patients with retroperitoneal paraganglioma. Surgeons have to be watchful regarding of intraoperative hypertension during resection of retroperitoneal masses exceeding 4.25 cm, which are suspected as paraganglioma.

Recent neural room impulse response (RIR) estimators typically comprise an encoder for reference audio analysis and a generator for RIR synthesis. Especially, it is the performance of the generator that directly influences the overall estimation quality. In this context, we explore an alternate generator architecture for improved performance. We first train an autoencoder with residual quantization to learn a discrete latent token space, where each token represents a small time-frequency patch of the RIR. Then, we cast the RIR estimation problem as a reference-conditioned autoregressive token generation task, employing transformer variants that operate across frequency, time, and quantization depth axes. This way, we address the standard blind estimation task and additional acoustic matching problem, which aims to find an RIR that matches the source signal to the target signal's reverberation characteristics. Experimental results show that our system is preferable to other baselines across various evaluation metrics.

This study develops a multicultural efficacy measure and examines the validation of the measure to turn out many excellent social welfare professionals with multicultural practice competence. Korean Cultural Competence Measure(??) (33 items) was modified to construct a multicultural efficacy measure for social welfare students. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted with cross-validation analysis of 511 cases. The result of measure validation analysis confirms the multicultural efficacy measure that consists of four component factors and 28 items: multicultural attitude efficacy (11 items), multicultural knowledge efficacy (6 items), multicultural skill efficacy (7 items), multicultural awareness efficacy (4 items).Keyword: multicultural efficacy measure, cultural competence measure, multicultural awareness efficacy, multicultural attitude efficacy, multicultural knowledge efficacy, multicultural skill efficacy

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