3.3 Quantitative and qualitative evidence The Tables above provide official quantitative evidence: evidence, data or information which is expressed in numerical terms. On the face of it, this clearly shows that recorded crime increased significantly throughout the twentieth century, albeit with some ‘dips’ in recent years. Common sense is confirmed. But there are problems with these data. Remember, we are looking here at crimes recorded by the police. Do you think that all crimes are recorded? There might be different reas
2.1 Social attitudes towards crime Crime, then, is a social construction. We had to break down the definition of crime and the process of recognising crimes to explore that. This is an analytical approach to the issue, which simply means unpacking an idea or a process into its separate components so that we can examine them more closely. But most of the time we don't think about crime analytically. We think about it as a narrative, as a story. At a personal level we may tell the story, over a drink, of our
4.3 Reconstituting older people's personal lives in uncertain times The multiplicity of different ‘work-endings’ at the close of the twentieth century, combined with the increasing mobilisation of older people through pensioner and ‘third age’ movements, effectively destabilised the institution of retirement and the associated orthodoxy that older age began at the age of 60 or 65 years. However, voices from within the pensioner movement were marginalised in the process of reconstitution that ensued. A neo-liberal redrawing of the boundari
4.1 Introduction The 1970s marked a period in which the cessation of the ‘normal’ period of full-time employment at 60 or 65 years had become the accepted orthodoxy. The personal lives of older people had thus become constituted outside the domain of paid employment and within the arena of public and private welfare. As we illustrated in the preceding section, pensions, organised around fixed ages of retirement based on chronological measurements of age, played a crucial role in this process. Further, as
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 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:
Author(s):
3 Making photographs that make demands: stories from the oil industry There are strong links between the audio files in Activity 2 and the series of photographs in Activity 1. The discus
3.4 The weightless economy In this subsection we want to look at one attempt to link some of the positive and negative aspects of the new economy. Danny Quah is an economist at the London School of Economics who has studied the new economy over a number of years. He refers to the new economy as the weightless or dematerialised economy and he examines its economic implications and also why it has a tendency to lead to increasing economy inequality. According to the ‘weightless economy’ argument, the fac
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 D315: Crime, order and social control, produced by the BBC on behalf of the Open University. © 2007
Introduction This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Crime, order and social control (D315) 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 this subject area.
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this unit: Seton-Watson, H. (1985) ‘What is Europe, where is Europe? From mystique to politique,’ Encounter, Vol. LXV, No. 2, July/August 1985, Encounter Ltd; Churchill, W. S. (1946) ‘The tragedy of Europe’, Speeches of Winston Churchill, Cassell. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf o
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5.3.1 Investment in education and training Human capital theory has been used to show how investments in education and training lead to higher levels of earning. One reason why education and training are referred to as investments is because their benefits accrue over time and because training early in a career leads to higher earnings over the rest of an individual's working life. An important consideration, therefore, in the decision about whether to invest in additional human capital is the potential length of working life over whi
7.3 Summary The idea of discourse alerts us to a number of issues about the social construction of social problems. It suggests that we need to look beyond competing theories or perspectives to look at how knowledge is organised around central themes that allow the different theories to compete. Discourses define what the problem is, and it is because theories share the definition of the problem that they can compete and argue. Perspectives that start somewhere else – or do not share the definition of
4.2 Levels of explanation The distinction between the natural and the social is not the only significant one. Even the social orientation in constructions of social problems is complicated by different sorts of emphasis. The growth of social science since the late nineteenth century has ensured that a variety of competing theories, disciplines and perspectives are available to us in our attempt to make sense of social problems. Such theories have made their way into the realm of everyday or common-sense constructions
Objectives for Section 3
After studying this section you should be able to do the following.
Recognise and use the terminology: disjoint union; power set (of a set); representation (of a data abstraction). Use and interpret the notation:
X
3.3 Compression The previous section mentioned the large file size of bit-map representations of even small pictures. Therefore just a few images use up a great deal of storage space. This can be inconvenient for PC users, but in the case of a digital camera it presents a real problem. In addition, it is becoming increasingly popular to send digital pictures as email attachments, or via mobile phones using multimedia messaging services (MMS), but large files take a long time to transmit. The way round
2.4 Representing numbers: negative integers In Section 2.2 I showed you how integers can be encoded if they are known to be positive, treating the integers in the kitchen scales as if they were known to be positive. However, if the user invokes the ‘add-and-weigh’ function on the scales while there is an object in the scalepan and then removes th
16.2.4 Sending data As the items are scanned into the checkout computer, information about the price of each item may be shown on a small display so that the customer can see the price. Sometimes there is a beep as each item passes the bar code reader, to tell the checkout operator the item has been identified. Once all the items have been scanned, the total amount is displayed. Once the customer has paid, they are given a printed till receipt which shows all the items purchased, the price of each and total expe
3.7 Databases and XML In Table 1, it was easy to see which pieces of data belonged to which fields, where the records began and ended, and so on. The tabular layout enabled us to see at a glance the salient features. If you wanted to find a particular name in a table, you ran your eye down the ‘name’ field. It i
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,
6.4 Using music to good effect Music in UIs is relatively undeveloped, except in games and specialist packages designed for composers and musicians. Some operating systems have a signature tune that is played automatically when they are loaded. This informs the user that the operating system has loaded correctly and creates a sense of identity, but can be annoying for the user if they have to listen to it repeatedly. A development on this use might be to signpost different parts of the program using musical clips.
