1.1 Introduction The ‘welfare state’ and its future are frequently a topic of passionate debate. Its philosophy, best embodied in the expression ‘from the cradle to the grave’, is based on the principle that one of the duties of the state is to care for the well-being of its citizens at each stage of their lives. Health is now recognised, at least in most European countries, as a universal right and many agree that its costs should be met by society as a whole and not just by those who are sick. Furth
Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should be able to: assess the specific problems concerning the health of a community; describe how medical knowledge was a resource for, and was shaped by, broader cultural perceptions of the body.
Introduction This unit provides an overview of John Napier and his work on logarithms. It discusses his approach to this lasting invention and looks at the key players who worked with him, including Briggs, Wright and Kepler. This unit is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Topics in the history of mathematics (MA290) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore other courses we offer in
1 Learning Latin The aim of this unit is to enable you to get started in Latin in a fairly leisurely but well-focused way. The material has been developed in response to requests from students who had had no contact with Latin before and who felt they would like to spend a little time preparing for the kind of learning which takes place on a language course – and, in particular, on a classical language course. If you have taken Classical Studies courses in the Open University or elsewhere, you will be
1.6 Further reading For an advanced general introduction to the philosophy of language, see Blackburn 1984. Lycan 1996 is pitched at a more accessible level. Pinker 1994 is an informal but informative discussion of the hypothesis that much of our linguistic ability is innate, an important topic that has had to be left out of this unit.
5.4 Clinics and outpatient services In addition to acquiring greater access to general practitioners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poor patients also received more medical help from the outpatient departments of charitable hospitals and dispensaries. Hospital outpatient departments were an increasingly popular source of care: between 1860 and 1900, the number of patients attending the outpatient department of the London Hospital increased from 25,000 to 220,000. By 1910, there were 1.75 million attendanc
4.2 Raiding your past The more you write, the more you will raid your own past. These incursions won't diminish or reduce your memories – rather those recollections can be enriched and become more fully realised. As Jamaica Kincaid says of her writing: One of the things I found when I began to write was that writing exactly what happened had a limited amount of power for me. To say exactly what happened was less than what I knew happe 5.6.4 Wedding anniversaries Silver and golden wedding anniversaries were often commemorated with a portrait. Many examples follow the pattern of the studio portraits taken for engagements and weddings, with the couple taken individually and together. 5.6.2 Engagement and marriage Of all rites of passage celebrated in the Victorian family album, those taken at the time of engagement and marriage are by far the most numerous. This testifies to the importance vested in marriage by the Victorians. The custom of commissioning oil or miniature portraits at the time of an engagement or marriage was well established before the advent of photography. Photography enabled couples on more modest incomes to indulge a practice that became widespread among working-class families by 2.2 Insider/outsider perspectives Social historians have long argued that we must study history ‘from the underside’, if we want to thoroughly understand a society. In other words, it is not sufficient to have a top-down knowledge of a society's institutions and politics. We need also to examine how ordinary, ‘unimportant’ people operate within a culture: what influences them and what they can (and cannot) influence; how they see their role in society and how others see it. The outsider view is the view from the outsi 1.1 What are the issues? Some themes recur when we start to think about religion. These include issues of continuity and change, representation, differing perspectives, authority, community and identity. In this unit we start to consider some of them in detail. The full list of themes and issues considered in this section are: Continuity and change Representation The Victoria and Albert Museum 'Sacred Spaces' exhibition of 2000 6.2 A rational-economic perspective on risk A rational-economic perspective generally represents risk as a combination of the expected magnitude of a gain or loss, combined with some probability distribution of anticipated outcomes. Economic ideas of risk behaviour are founded largely on expected utility theory. Expected utility theory predicts that investors will always be risk averse. The shape of the utility curve (utility plotted against increasing wealth) is such that utility increases with wealth, but at a declining rate. This is 5.6 A way of dealing with social pressures: decoupling Organisations often deal with these social pressures by decoupling responses to these different pressures. The need to appear legitimate in the eyes of important constituencies is met by actions and practices which have a purely ceremonial character: they are done for the sake of appearances and not with any real engagement. The example in Author(s): Learning outcomes At the end of this unit you should be able to: explain the key components of project closure and their importance; plan an effective project closure; ensure that the project activities have been completed; be alert to problems that may need to be resolved at the closure stage; contribute to evaluating a project; plan personal development to improve your performance in managing projects. Introduction In this unit, we explore some aspects of bringing a complex project to completion. There are a number of things to consider in the final stages of a project. It is very important to ensure that the goals of the project have been achieved, and that all the outcomes and deliverables have been handed over to the sponsor (or that any discrepancies have been addressed). Handover can involve different types of presentation for different types of outcome. There may be a physical object to handover, 5 Setting aims and objectives ‘If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else.’ (Casey Stengel, New York Yankees, quoted in Beckhard and Harris, 1987) Aims are broad goals and can encompass an organisation's mission and values, whereas objectives define more precisely what a project is trying to achieve and how success will be recognised. The SMART principle is often applied to objectives. The 4 Project inputs and outputs A project involves the transformation of inputs into an output or product. For example, people's mental and physical efforts, bricks and mortar, equipment or materials might be transformed into a new road, a municipal park or an advertising campaign. Or perhaps transformed into a stream of outputs or products, for example, attendances at a conference or exhibition, state school places or data from a new in-house costing system. The output or outputs might be used within the organisation 1.6.1 Introduction Of course, there is another problem hovering in the background in respect to the Euro's international role: namely that of the enlargement of the EU. In the light of the analysis so far two areas are picked out here: monetary implications and fiscal policy implications. These are obviously closely related. Both of these raise questions about the costs involved for the new members and those set to join somewhere down the line. We concentrate on the monetary issue of joining the Euro-zone first 6.1 ‘Maybe you can look, but you cannot touch’: asylum and restricting access to welfa So far we have considered meanings of citizenship in terms of legal status, national identity and belonging. In this section we want to explore it in terms of ‘access to welfare’, recognising that people who flee from their country of origin are likely to require assistance and support when they arrive. There is a long history of the state linking controls on access to welfare and control of migration since the 1905 Aliens Act (Lewis, 2003). 2.2 Diversity between states To attempt more precise definitions would run the risk of arbitrarily excluding many of the phenomena we need to address. In fact the intentionally loose, multifaceted nature of these definitions reflects the reality of regional diversity, which has many dimensions. The differences start with the states which in practical political terms largely define regions, for they are themselves very different in area and population size, in economic strength, in cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity, a
