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
6.1 London London's population and economic size are those of a region. As such it contains various peripheries within itself. Further to this, there are some issues, mainly economic planning and transport, which are closely connected with the rest of south-east England. The Labour government introduced a Greater London Authority (Referendum) Bill in October 1997 and organised a referendum on 7 May 1998 in which 72 per cent voted (on a low turn-out of 33.5 per cent) in favour of establishing a Mayor and
5.6 Summary of Section 5 In 1997, the newly elected Labour government set in motion the asymmetric decentralisation of the UK by granting differing degrees of political autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In 1997 referendums on devolution where held in Scotland and Wales. Their affirmative outcome in favour of devolution cannot of itself deliver constitutional entrenchment, but might reinforce its moral and political legitimacy. The
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. Systems thinking: Understanding sustainability 3.5.1 IPv4 Addresses The allocation of addresses on the Internet is controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), although authority is delegated to several local registries. IPv4 addresses may be interpreted in two ways. Initially, they were divided into distinct ranges of addresses called classes, but this proved to be inflexible and now a more flexible scheme, called classless addressing, dominates IPv4 internetworks. I shall describe both ways of interpreting IPv4 addresses because the limitat 2.3 Horizontal communication In the OSI reference model there is a clear separation of services and protocols, but this separation is not always evident in practical applications, so it is worthwhile spending some more time on the differences between them. A service is provided by one layer to the layer above, and the capabilities of a service are defined in terms of primitives and their parameters. A service relates to two adjacent layers in the same system. In contrast, a protocol defines the communication between two Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions). This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Course image: S 6.7 Summary This section has looked at simulations, in which digital models of key aspects of the real world can be manipulated by programs. The examples included models of the world's climate, the early cosmos, stock markets, biological evolution and fantasy worlds and personalities. I've offered the view that simulation has far reaching implications for science, politics and society and will invite you to question that view in the final section. 5.5.5 Summary In this section I've briefly considered the very contentious question of what digital representations mean, but this debate must be left to another course. I have also described some of the devices that take digital information back into the analogue world of sight and sound, presenting it in a form that is meaningful to human eyes and ears. 5.5.4 Loudspeakers Speakers also produce an analogue output. The audio program inside the boundary converts the digital encoding of the sound to a series of electrical pulses that are sent to the speaker, where they cause a cone of stiffened paper (or some synthetic material) to vibrate in and out. This makes the air vibrate in the characteristic sound wave. 5.2 A conundrum about meaning Look at the following set of binary numbers: 00011010 00100011 10001001 10011100 10100011 01001101 10000011 01010100 10001000 00010001 10000110 11110010 … which we may imagine are stored in the memory o 4.13 Sound capture devices In the past, the work of recording sound and music was carried out by professional recording studios. Before digital technology arrived, recordings were made by picking up sounds on a microphone which converted them to an analogue electrical signal. This signal was then transferred to another analogue medium, such as the grooves of a vinyl record or the changing patterns of metallic atoms on a magnetic tape. At the start of the digital revolution, analogue to digital conversion, and the 4.2.5 Scanners and OCRs A better solution is to get some electronic help. A page of text is placed in a scanner, which produces an image of the page using techniques that I will discuss shortly. The image is passed to a computer program called an optical character recogniser (OCR), which detects each letter on the page in turn and transforms it into its digital code. This recognition is an immensely difficult task, requiring very sophisticated software, so OCRs are generally only partially effective. 3.11 Summary In this section I examined the terms analogue, discrete and digital and illustrated their correct use through examples and brief definitions. I raised the familiar idea of the five human senses which enable us to perceive our analogue world. Finally I focused on the digital world of counting and representing numbers, and in particular the binary system used in the inner world of the computer. 3.7 How we work with numbers Most civilisations have had to face the problem of counting and recording numbers. Our own culture has adopted the so-called Arabic system of numbers. This system is now used more or less worldwide. In this section I will look very briefly at some of its key features. We have an infinity of numbers at our disposal. If we start counting from 1, we can in theory go on for ever. But although there is an infinity of numbers, we only have a very small, fixed number of digits to 3.5 Digital things The terms ‘discrete’ and ‘digital’ are often used interchangeably. For example, The New Penguin Dictionary of Computing contains the following definition. Digital. Any communication or computing technology whose data may only have a finite number of discrete values. However, I want you to be clear about the strong association between a digital thing and a number 2.8 The price But using computers to acquire, store, exchange and manipulate data comes at a price. By this, I don't mean that the technology is expensive, although this may be an issue. Rather it's the fact that the quality of the information computers give us can often be suspect. More worrying still are the questions of privacy, liberty and security that are raised. The computer gives ordinary people unprecedented access to information. But it also gives people that might not wish us well – gov 2.6 Going back Capturing bits of reality and transferring them to a computer would be a pointless exercise if they stayed locked in the digital world. We want access to what we've captured. We want to see the results. In particular, we may want to look at our captive in a different form. For instance, suppose we input the series of temperature readings shown in Author(s): 1 Aims In this course, I want to be more specific and look at the way computers represent and handle data. The course aims to: broaden the definition of a computer and explain the concept of crossing the boundary between the computer's world and our own explain the digital nature of the computer's world and contrast it with our analogue world of sense and motion describe in detail how to transform features of our world in
This free course, Systems thinking: Understanding sustainability, introduces ways in which systems thinking can help support processes of decision making among stakeholders with different, often contrasting, perspectives on sustainable development in order to generate purposeful action to improve situations of change and uncertainty. You will be encouraged to engage with the concept of sustainable development, and discover and contextualise your own sustainable development beliefs and values.
SAQ 19
