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
Introduction This unit will introduce the notion of social citizenship in relation to rights and obligations within society, with particular reference to women and disabled people. The material is primarily an audio file, originally 23 minutes in length and recorded in 1998. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Social policy: Welfare power and diversity (D218) which is no longer taught by The Open University. If you want to study formally with us, you may wish to e
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.
Windows Developer Program for IoT now rolling out Oh you know I couldn't pass this up as our Hardware Friday post! It's IoT, it's Windows, much will be open source, it's new and it's IoT (yeah, I know I already said that, but it's IoT! ;!
Author(s): 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
3.3 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
6.2 Contesting ideologies Much social science analysis has been devoted to exploring the variants and consequences of this simple view of ideology, including capitalist ideology, which legitimates the interests of owners of capital against the working class; patriarchal ideology, which legitimates the interests of men against women; and racist ideology, which legitimates the interests of dominant ethnic groups against others – most evidently in the ideology of apartheid in South Africa. However, this simple and func
5.1 Common sense revisited It is worth taking a little time to reflect on what we have discovered so far. Starting from ‘what everybody knows’ about a social problem – or what are sometimes called the common-sense understandings – allows us to see a number of things if we apply the scepticism of being a stranger in our own society. First, there is a question about whether particular issues are commonly understood to be social problems. As we have seen, there are views which say either that poverty
Summary We discussed forms of data and processes relevant to an electronic till in a supermarket. In particular, we introduced the idea of a sequence of data items. A number of fundamental forms of data were introduced. We distinguished two types of number: integers (positive or negative whole numbers, or 0), and real numbers (thought of as decimal numbers and approximated in computers as floating point numbers). Characters may be thought of as sym
4.3 Character code functions Many programming languages provide two functions associated with the character codes (see Table 2). We shall call these functions ASC and CHR. ASC takes a character as input, and returns the integer giving the ASCII code of the input character. CHR returns the character whose ASCII code is the input integ
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
7.2 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 18.2 Using e-commerce Many people now have internet connections and this offers many benefits to both businesses and their customers. From a customer's point of view, e-commerce has a number of advantages. Shopping can be done from home; you can probably find what you need without trudging from one shop to another and waiting in queues. You can also purchase goods 24 hours a day, every day. From the point of view of a business, e-commerce also offers a number of advantages. There is a potentially wide 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 15 Computers and communication systems working together The combination of communication systems and computers has produced powerful new systems not possible when these technologies are used separately. In section 15–19, I'll be using an ICT system in a supermarket as an example, as it is something that you have probably experienced. The material in this study session is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of how ICT systems are used in supermarkets; I'll just be focusing on some of the supermarket's activities in order to highlight t
Example 7
