4 The celebrity persona and the celebrity text It has been emphasised that we can only know stars through media texts (Dyer, 1998) and this can be extended to seeing celebrities themselves as texts, though for celebrities of any longevity we would certainly have to consider them as large, complex and modulating ones. This section will look at how we might go about reading such a text. There is a distinction between the ‘real’ person and a persona presented in the public arena. One pervasive feature of the ‘large celebrity text’ is
2.3 The representation of ‘celebrity’ We have already seen the way in which texts gain meaning from other texts by the operation of contrast, but multiple texts are useful to the textual analyst in another way. Looking at a large number of texts dealing with the same subject – celebrity – enables us to detect common themes and narratives (stories), to the extent that with enough repetition we become able to talk about the representation of that subject. Working through a large number of texts about celebrities, we beco
6.7 What about alternatives to secession? We have seen that in principle there are alternatives: cultural autonomy or a form of federalism. There are alternative ways to recognise 'national' identity apart from secession. One conclusion to arise from this discussion of secession is that we are not cast adrift without any general principles or guidelines. We have also seen how the complexities of the real political world impinge upon poli
5.4 ‘The desire to give politico-institutional expression to the first two core concepts There is a strong case for regarding the third element in the ‘core structure’ of nationalism as the key one. Generally, as we have seen, nationalists want their nation to have a state, or statehood. But political self-determination might have other outlets. From the comparatively ‘soft’ demands to harder and less compromising ones, the spectrum might consist of some form of:
recognition of the cultural distinctiveness of a ‘na
2 Political belonging: loyalty, community and statehood Which people, which group, do you belong to? How do we know who is Them, and who is Us? Where do your political loyalties lie? In a way these are simple questions. There are many contexts in our daily lives when we could answer them well enough. We speak common languages with people around us (and often with the same accent). Many of us live in neighbourhoods and recognise ‘neighbours’ as a distinctive group to which we belong. If we pray regularly in a mosque or church then we might iden
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):
Coöperatief leren : Dossier Leraar24 ontsluit video's en dossiers voor de onderwijspraktijk. Dit dossier richt zich hoofdzakelijk op coöperatieve werkvormen en biedt daarvoor zeven sleutels aan:
"Environmental Challenges Across Asia - Q & A"
There is little doubt that climate change, deforestation, erosion, and the unequal distribution of natural resources around the globe are of pressing importance everywhere, but these problems are perhaps most acute in Asia, home to 64 percent of the world’s population. Much of this population (1 and 1.3 billion, respectively) is concentrated in India and China, two countries with rapidly growing economies, increasing levels of personal consumption, and serious ecological problems. Southeast As
6.2.1 Job rewards Segmented labour market theory views the labour market as systematically differentiating the job rewards achieved by comparable individuals. The high pay of primary workers cannot be explained simply in terms of their higher quality of labour since many secondary workers are capable of performing well, given the opportunity to do so. The labour market is thus seen as a key ingredient in the generation of economic inequality and not a passive mirror of the inequalities which people bring to it
5.3.2 Productivity difference The preceding discussion has only considered what would happen if all women undertake less investment in human capital than men. If men and women invest to the same extent, human capital theory suggests that no wage differences would be observed. What happens, however, if there are differences in skill levels both between genders and within gender groups? To consider this we will also make the additional assumption that firms do not know when recruiting workers who are the most productive. Ho
3.2 Combining data structures In Section 2, we introduced the notation SeqOfX for the set of all sequences whose members come from the set X. In Section 2, we looked only at sequences whose members were of one of the primitive forms of data (integers, characters or Booleans). We can have sequences whose members are themselves data with a more complicated form. For example, suppose that Jo is working at the till T1 and is replaced by Jessica. We might represent this handover by the 3-tuple (Jo, T1, Jes
16.7 A loyalty card scheme Supermarkets, and other types of retailer, use loyalty cards to encourage customers to use their particular shops. Points are awarded when a customer spends money in the shop. Supermarkets ‘reward’ their customers by converting loyalty card points into vouchers. They may also give them discount vouchers for a range of products. Supermarkets use their loyalty card schemes to collect data about their customers. Data about each customer is held in a large database where each customer i
16.1 Introduction Supermarkets make use of ICT systems for a range of purposes. In the following sections, we'll look at the processes of receiving, storing, retrieving, manipulating and sending data at the checkout, and then we'll move on to the larger context of the supermarket.
7 Describing an ICT system: conclusion We have arrived at a model of a communication system that illustrates the processes needed for communication. We have also looked at the different kinds of communication link that can be used to convey data, and how to express the rates at which they can convey data. In sections 8–14, we shall be looking at a computer system as an example of an ICT system where data manipulation and storage are the most important features.
7.5 The spread of spam A staggering 25 per cent of all incoming mail messages to the Open University in February 2004 were marked as spam by our automated spam filter. Is this a problem that is getting worse? There are companies that act as filtering agents for email; they check and stop viruses, spam and pornography. Do, using the link below, look at the proportion of messages that one such company, Messagelabs, has blocked in the last 12 months.
3.1 Searching for your ancestors In this section we consider searching for information about your ancestors. We cannot hope to cover all the techniques and information required to research genealogy, family history and local history; there is only time in this unit to scratch the surface. Some of the activities here are open-ended; please do not spend too long on them. If the subject interests you, you can revisit it after the course finishes, making use of the genealogical resources in the Appendix.
2.4 Using search engines Search engines can be very good at finding information since they cover such a huge number of web pages. Unfortunately it can be difficult to find the one you want in the huge number of hits that they return. I can illustrate some of the problems, and some of the strategies you can use to overcome them, with an example. Let's assume a friend of yours, Jill, has heard you talking about ‘Living with the Net’ and is trying to find out more about the course. What problems might Jill fac
Introduction There is more to computers and processors than simply PCs. In fact computers are ubiquitous in everyday life. This unit challenges how we view computers through the examples of processors in kitchen scales and digital cameras, as well as a work of art that, at heart, is a computer. This unit is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Computers and processors (T224) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to explore ot
2.2.1 Finance Every time you use a debit or credit card the shop till uses a terminal connected to other computers via a network. Your identification details are automatically transferred from your card to your bank or credit card company for verification, and your balance adjusted accordingly. This also applies if you are shopping online, or over the phone (when booking a cinema ticket, for example). ATMs (also known as cashpoints) allow you to check your bank balance or withdraw cash from wherever you ar
Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: describe some of the architectural and programming paradigms used in distributed system development; describe message passing and the role of protocols within a message passing paradigm; introduce the concept of a distributed object; describe how event-based architectures are used within distributed system development; introduce one implementation of an event-based archite
