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’
2.2 The shift from manufacturing to services in industrialised economies There was a profound restructuring of economic activity in ‘older’ industrialised countries in the last quarter of the twentieth century from manufacturing to service activities. There are several reasons for this restructuring. First, the long-established industrialised countries such as Germany, the USA, Japan and the UK have faced increasingly intense competition as more countries have industrialised. Second, productivity, or output per worker, has increased in manufacturing industries
1 Introduction and overview This unit is concerned with the very things that we, as ordinary people, talk about as a consequence of listening to radio, watching television or reading newspapers and magazines: the programmes and articles that constitute media output. We do not (except on rare occasions) experience celebrities face-to-face, as their celebrity is conditional on having their image disseminated far and wide. This unit examines the everyday evidence of celebrity activity – what academic media analyst
Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. This extract is taken from D218: Social policy: welfare, power and diversity, produced by the BBC on behalf of the Open University. © 2007 The Open University.
Learning outcomes On completion of this unit, you should be able to: illustrate how cities can be represented as dangerous places to live; give examples of the place of crime in representations of cities.
6.4 Summary of Section 6 The Labour government introduced a Greater London Authority (Referendum) Bill in 1997. The referendum took place in 1998. A Mayor and Assembly for London were first elected in 2000. At present the eight English regions have a tripartite structure with responsibilities and powers divided in each region between the Government Office for the region (GO), the Regional Development Agency (RDA) and the Regional Chamber (most of which have now ren
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
2.2 Scotland Having enjoyed political independence until 1707, the survival of many of Scotland's institutions – notably its systems of law, religion and education – after Union with England contributed to the preservation of its singular identity. The different way in which Scotland was incorporated into the UK, through a monarchical take-over rather than by conquest (as was the case in Wales and Ireland), may account for the lesser impact the development of the UK exerted on Scottish distinctiveness
Learning outcomes After studying this unit, you should be able to: understand the process of political devolution in the UK; relate this process to both historical developments and to the wider context of contemporary events in Europe; practise the skill of reading, summarising and evaluating academic arguments; engage more actively as a citizen in relevant political debates (especially if you are a citizen of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland!).
3.3 Other disadvantaged groups Information on other disadvantaged groups, such as older workers or people with disabilities, is even harder to come by. The problems faced by older workers in the labour market have become an increasing cause for concern in recent years. The nature of the disadvantage faced by older workers is, however, much harder to uncover and the evidence is often anecdotal. One trend that has become evident during the past three decades is the difficulty older workers have in obtaining any work and, in
3.1 Gender-based disadvantage The post-war period has seen a significant increase in the participation of women in the labour market, with women now making up around 45 per cent of the UK workforce. Although women still undertake the major share of family responsibilities and domestic activities, an increasing number of women are entering the labour market. This increase is evident in many countries and has been associated with an improvement in the relative earnings of women. This trend towards greater equality is eviden
7.2 Adding 2's complement integers The leftmost bit at the start of a 2's complement integer (which represents the presence or absence of the weighting −128) is treated in just the same way as all the other bits in the integers. So the rules given at the start of Section 7.1 for adding unsigned integers can be used. 1 Representing data in computers: introduction A computer is designed to do the following things:
receive data from the outside world;
store that data;
manipulate that data, probably creating and storing more data while doing so;
present data back to the outside world. In the next few sections I am going to examine in more detail the data that a computer receives, stores, manipulates and presents. I 14.3 Personal Digital Assistants
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or handheld computers are small, portable computers. They each contain a small processor and have specially written operating systems. Two popular types of PDA at the time of writing (early 2005) are those running the Palm OS operating system and those using the Windows Mobile operating system, (also called Pocket PC). There is a range of applications purposely written for PDAs, but many also use special versions of popular applications like Microsof 4.2.1 First computer (your computer) In the block diagram, the computer receives data from the user and sends it into the network. It will manipulate and also store and retrieve data. If you send a message to a FirstClass conference, your computer receives the message from you as data via the keyboard. The computer manipulates the data into a form that can be sent into the network, in this case the internet via your internet service provider (ISP). Your computer will also store or retrieve relevant data, such as details of 14.1 Introduction Now that I have introduced you to the processes carried out by a stand-alone computer, I will move on to discuss what happens when computers are linked. 6.1 Networks Next I'll be looking more closely at the ‘network’ block in Figure 8, and in particular at the links that must be present before communication can take place. I'll introduce you to just a few of the forms that these links can take; links may be physical ones, such as cables, or they 5 The processes My description of the three subsystems of ‘means of conveying a message’ has indicated some important processes that each carries out. These are shown in Figure 8. The key processes are those that will always be carried out and they are shown in bold; the other processes may or may 4.8 Verification You will, perhaps, by now be getting a sense of the challenge of setting up an identification system on a national scale. However, for many routine purposes, establishing who a person is from an entire population of possibilities is not what is required. Instead what is required is confirmation that the person is who they claim to be. This is verification. An example of verification happens when you collect a parcel from a depot. You are sometimes asked to show your driving licence, pa 1.6.6 Problems with the use of sound Pre-recorded digitised speech can be included in a UI relatively easily, but generating speech is harder. One of the methods for synthesising speech is called concatenation. The idea behind concatenation is that the computer stores sentences, phrases or word segments of real human speech. New sentences are constructed by arranging words in the right order. For example, with current telephone directory enquiry systems in many countries, after having made an enquiry of a human operator,
Example 7
