Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions). This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence This extract is taken from D218: Social policy: welfare, power and diversity, produced by the BBC on behalf of the Open University.
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able: identify the value and best way of note taking.
1.3.4 Databases At a basic level, a database is a collection of information which can be searched. It is a way of storing, indexing, organising and retrieving information. You may have created one yourself to keep track of your references – or your friends' names and addresses. They are useful for finding articles on a topic, and can be used to search for many different types of information. You may find some of the following databases useful for your topic. They contain different types of informatio
1.3.1 Introduction You can find a lot of information about society on the internet. To find this information you might choose to use: internet resources; search engines and subject gateways; books and electronic books; databases; journals; encyclopedias.
1 Poverty in Scotland Poverty in Scotland 2011 provides a detailed overview of poverty and anti-poverty policies in Scotland. It provides a comprehensive account of the state of poverty in Scotland, highlighting the main trends and the impact poverty has on people and places. This unit comprises a PDF document produced originally by Child Poverty Action Group, in association with Glasgow Caledonian University, The Open University and Poverty Alliance. Poverty in Scotland, (250 pages, 789 KB)
2.3 Watching the programme There are two main themes to consider as you watch the programme: (a) Image and identity Note down examples o 2.2 Postscript A headline-grabbing weekend of ‘midsummer madness’, when six murders occurred in (parts of) Glasgow over the weekend of 5–6 August 1995, reinforced the ongoing nature of contestation and debate about the issues discussed in the programme. As noted in The Scotsman (8 August 1995), the legacy of the imagery of No Mean City was quickly resurrected by the press – for example, ‘a darker side to that much-vaunted transformation of Glasgow from No Mean City to Culture City’ 2.1 How the programme progresses The programme takes the form of a visit to Glasgow. We talked to people and asked about their image(s) of Glasgow and whether these had changed – what was the ‘old’ image; what is the ‘new’; how has it changed; what will it be like in another ten years? The five main participants have different experiences of Glasgow and these are represented in the images which they hold and aspects of the city's character which they highlight. The themes and ideas behind the programme are al 1.3 Constructing a new image The image ‘Glasgow's miles better’ was deliberately constructed by the City Council, avowedly to make Glaswegians feel better about Glasgow but in fact largely on behalf of business. But it begged a question – ‘miles better for whom?’ Certainly, the city centre was better for shoppers and visitors and the new roads were literally ‘miles better’ for motorists, but the spiralling problems of the housing schemes provided stark counter-images. In other words, as with all images, the 2.3 Activity 1: Flora Macdonald temp – ground stewardess – office manager – accountant 3.1 Introduction As well as looking at the behaviour of firms and the industries and markets to which they belong, economists also engage in a different style of inquiry, thinking about what economic change means for the lives of the people involved. Once again there is a variety of interpretations and different ideas but this time they concern the desirability of economic change. What benefits does the ‘new economy’ bring and what costs, or negative effects, does it impose on people? In analysing these b 2.4 Information and communication technologies The new economy is much more than a shift from manufacturing to services and the increased integration of economies on a global scale. It is also strongly linked to the development of ICT, which has facilitated the development of new processes and products, especially ‘knowledge goods’ which are described below. The internet has increased the ‘connectivity’ or interconnectedness between economies by making textual communication possible in real time as well as providing a new me Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: appreciate different understandings of the new economy; understand claims about the benefits and costs of the new economy. 6 Conclusion As you moved through the various techniques we can use to analyse media texts in Sections 2 to Section 4, you should have discovered how rich even the simplest text can be in its drawing on political, social and cultural meanings discernible by close attention. Textual analysis enables you to register and negotiate the polysemy of texts and to see how the preferred reading is not the only one available. The preferred reading may be given prominence, however, by anchoring or by the genre chose Acknowledgements This chapter is taken from Living Political Ideas (eds) Geoff Andrews and Micheal Saward published in association with Edinburgh University Press (2005) as part of a series of books which forms part of the course DD203 Power, Dissent, Equality: Understanding Contemporary Politics. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Author(s): 4 What is a ‘nation’? Guibernau (1996, p. 47) has defined the nation as: ‘a human group conscious of forming a community, sharing a common culture, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, having a common past and a common project for the future and claiming the right to rule itself’. So awareness, territory, history and culture, language and religion all matter. However, it is rare in the real world to find a case of a nation with a clear-cut and homogenous character in terms of this list of possibilities. 3.1 What makes a nation, a state or a nation-state? Why do England, Scotland and Wales take part in the Six Nations rugby championship alongside Italy, Ireland and France? Are they all ‘nations’? What do we mean by calling them ‘nations’? The nation has become one of the most contested concepts of our times. Scholars, politicians and political activists present different definitions of the nation, usually focusing on a variety of cultural, political, psychological, territorial, ethnic and sociological principles. The lack of an agreeme Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: illustrate what is social about social science; demonstrate how certain social constructions become dominant; distinguish how labelling something can create expectations about behaviour and actions; give examples of inequalities that result from particular social constructions. Digital communications 2.1 Numbers The supermarket example discussed in Section 1 involves various forms of data that a computer may need to handle. Some of these, such as numbers and characters, are simple but fundamental. Other forms of data, such as sequences, involve more complicated structure. In this section, we will introduce sets, which are a variety of data collection that is different from sequences. But first we will look more carefully at numbers and characters. When developing software we need to dist
Activity 1: Watching the programme
Optical-fibre communications became commercially viable in the 1970s and innovation continues today. This unit will illustrate how very high data rates can be transmitted over long distances through optical fibres. You will learn how these fibres are linked, examine the technology used and assess the future direction of this continually developing area of communication.Author(s):
