7.1 History So far, I have provided a brief historical background for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, one that accounts for their distinctive identities and for the origins of their differing role within the UK. I have also defined devolution as an asymmetric decentralisation process which responds to the claims advanced by the nations constituting the UK state. What, then, do we mean by Britain? Is it a nation? If so, when did the British nation begin to exist? The historian Linda Colley
6.2 English regions At present, regional government in England is divided between local government and central government agencies. 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 renamed themselves Regional Assemblies). The Labour government established Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in April 1999. The role
5.4 Devolution in Northern Ireland: a particular case Devolution in Northern Ireland has been an integral part of the post-1994 peace process, which aims to share power between the two divergent communities, the Unionist-Protestant majority and the Republican-Catholic minority. All-party talks, chaired by the former US Senator George Mitchell, followed the 1997 renewal of a paramilitary ceasefire. The decommissioning of arms by paramilitary groups was made a condition of the talks, but no specific date for its accomplishment was ever given. This
5.2 Devolution in Scotland Scotland endured a long and complicated process towards self-determination. In a 1979 referendum, the Scots voted in favour of the Labour government proposals to establish a Scottish Parliament, but, thanks to a special majority provision requiring at least 40 per cent of the registered electorate to vote in favour, devolution was rejected when only 32.9 per cent of the electorate voted in favour in the referendum. 2 Discrimination in the labour market: introduction Discrimination can manifest itself in all aspects of life. It may be evident in the type and location of housing available to certain groups, in their access to quality education and health care or how they are treated in the labour market. We will focus on the last of these considerations and, in particular, why the labour market status of some groups of workers is significantly worse than that for the population at large. This does not mean that discrimination in the labour market is a more The Final Cut Introduction Why is the way something looks important? Text, colour, images, moving images and sound all interact to produce a user friendly environment within a user interface. This course will help you understand the effect each software component has on the user and explain how a consistent and thoughtful application of these components can have a significant impact on the ‘look’ of final product. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of postgraduate study in Author(s): Introduction This course will introduce you to some ideas about how information and communiction technologies (ICTs) systems work. We will look at how ICT systems convey, store and manipulate data, and how they process data. Finally, using the example of a supermarket, we will analyse how ICT systems are used. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of level 1 study in Author(s): Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Course image: Author(s): Objectives for Section 4 After studying this section you should be able to do the following. Recognise and use the terminology: function, signature, domain, semantics, input set, output set, precondition, postcondition. Suggest appropriate signatures and preconditions for functions corresponding to a variety of processes on numbers, characters and sequences, including those with more than one input and those that return a Boolean value. For Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: evaluate technical descriptions of communication protocols and demonstrate an understanding of their operation describe the characteristics of circuit-switched and packet-switched networks, and of connectionless and connection-oriented modes in packet-switched networks describe the role played by primitives in the OSI reference model explain how ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ com 3.3.2 Enhancing the perceptual system Magnificently evolved though it is, our sensory system is nothing special. We do not see as well as birds; our hearing is feeble compared to that of bats and some forest-dwelling mammals. Our sense of smell can't compare with that of dogs or pigs. There are many things we don't detect at all – radio waves, for instance. In one capacity, though, humans are supreme: we have learned to enhance our perceptual systems with instruments. For example, the human eye has only a limited p 7.6 Arithmetic with binary fractions My final point in the preceding section brings home the fact that integer arithmetic is not really suitable when divisions are to be performed. It is also not suitable where some or all of the values involved in the arithmetic are not – or are not necessarily – integers, and this is often the case. In such cases, arithmetic has to be performed on non-integers. The most common representation for non-integers is the floating-point representation that I mentioned briefly in Box 3. You 7.4 Multiplying 2's complement integers Multiplication can be thought of as repeated addition. For instance, in denary arithmetic 7 × 5 can be thought of as 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 There is therefore no need for a new process for the multiplication of binary integers; multiplication can be transformed into repeated addition. In multiplication the result is very often much larger than either of the two integers being multiplied, and so a multiple-length representation may be needed to hold the result of a mu 6 Manipulating data in computers: introduction Sections 1 to 5 of this course have shown that in a computer all types of data are represented by binary codes, and that programmers must make sure that the programs they write treat this data appropriately in any particular application: as text if it is intended to be text, as a binary fraction if it is intended to be a binary fraction, and so on. Programmers must also ensure that the programs manipulate the binary codes in an appropriate way for the particular application. But what so 2.5 Representing weights A physical quantity such as weight has the property that it can take on any value, not just a finite set of values. For instance, at one time the ingredients in the scalepan could weigh 29.2569427 grams, at another time 125.1234659 grams, at yet another 2805.87625922 grams. It may not be possible for the scales to display such values, but they are physically possible. Quantities like weight whose values can take on any value in this way are said to be analogue. Figure 3 may help 2.2.2 Positive integers: binary numbers Just as a denary number system uses ten different digits (0, 1, 2, 3, … 9), a binary number system uses two (0, 1). Once again the idea of positional notation is important. You have just seen that the weightings which apply to the digits in a denary number are the exponents of ten. With binary numbers, where only two digits are used, the weightings applied to the digits are exponents of two. The rightmost bit is given the weighting of 2°, which is 1. The ne 2.2 Representing numbers: positive integers A very straightforward way of finding binary codes to represent positive integers is simply to use the binary number that corresponds to each integer. This is because every positive integer in the everyday number system (known as the decimal or denary system because it uses 10 different digits) has a corresponding number in the binary number system. As you will see later, in Section 7 of this course, just as arithmetic (addition, subtraction, etc.) can be performed on everyday denary nu 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 17.2 The checkout terminal The first computer block represents the checkout terminal. The processes at the checkout (receiving, storing, retrieving, manipulating and sending data to the user), are the same as I described earlier. However, the checkout terminal also sends data via the supermarket's network.
It is often said that a movie comes to life in the edit suite. Ben Harrex of Final Cut post production studios in London discusses five themes with examples; The Cut, The Dissolve, Cropping and Resizing, Titles and The Sound. Ben explains how the video editor has a huge amount of creative control over how the final product looks. This material forms part of The Open University course T215 Communication and information technologies.Author(s):
