School Achievement and Labour Market Outcomes

Achieving well in school, and completing Year 12, have significant employment and earnings outcomes for young people a decade or more after leaving school. Early school leavers have less chance of securing full-time employment, and a problematic early start in the labor market can be difficult to overcome.LABOUR MARKET ; EDUCATION ; SKILLED WORKERS

Martin's conjecture, arithmetic equivalence, and countable Borel equivalence relations

There is a fascinating interplay and overlap between recursion theory and descriptive set theory. A particularly beautiful source of such interaction has been Martin's conjecture on Turing invariant functions. This longstanding open problem in recursion theory has connected to many problems in descriptive set theory, particularly in the theory of countable Borel equivalence relations. In this paper, we shall give an overview of some work that has been done on Martin's conjecture, and applications that it has had in descriptive set theory. We will present a long unpublished result of Slaman and Steel that arithmetic equivalence is a universal countable Borel equivalence relation. This theorem has interesting corollaries for the theory of universal countable Borel equivalence relations in general. We end with some open problems, and directions for future research.Comment: Corrected typo

Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and the Lysenko affair: boundary work

This article looks at the highly influential scientific work of François Jacob and Jacques Monod in the context of the Lysenko affair. It argues that Lysenkoism provided a stimulus to understand and interpret the science they were doing in the field of molecular biology in a particular way, leading to a crucial terminological shift from adaptation to induction in 1953. At a time when new geopolitical borders and barriers were being constructed, molecular biology claimed to have identified a rigidly policed border between the genetic material in the cell nucleus and the rest of the cell. Molecular biology was, in this sense, drawn into a form of intellectual Cold War

‘Ça tient qu'à toi’: cartographies of post-fordist labour in Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's work on Michel Foucault, control societies and cinema, Laurent Cantet's L'Emploi du temps is analysed as a cartographic rendering of post-Fordist labour. The film creates a pervasive ambiance of liminality and dreamlike disconnection—‘flottement’—around the central character of Vincent in order to convey the affective landscape of post-Fordist immaterial labour (in this case business consultancy). Approaching L'Emploi du temps as a diagram—in Deleuzian terms—of discursive and non-discursive components helps to explain the ways in which the film goes beyond psychoanalytic drama in order to convey a more general sense of a social reality that is frequently problematic and overwhelming for Vincent. Recent work on hypermodernity and the hypermodern self is employed in order to analyse Vincent's behaviour as an example of the kinds of subjectivity produced by control societies. In many cases, the hypermodern individual is fragile, isolated and unpredictable, prone to excessive behaviours and periodic breakdowns. Whereas Cantet's previous film, Ressources humaines, powerfully dramatised a crisis of place, L'Emploi du temps conveys an individual and collective crisis of confidence

Building and Executing MOOCs: A Practical Review of Glasgow's First Two MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

No abstract available

Clone stories: ‘shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder’

This article explores literary interrogations of the bioethical implications of cloning. It does so by outlining the basic science of cloning before going on to question the dominance of the Freudian notion of the ‘uncanny’ in the critical theoretical responses to cloning by figures such as Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek. The second half of the article turns to two recent novels exploring the theme of cloning: Eva Hoffman's The Secret, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. It is argued that the former rehearses familiar themes of revulsion connected to the figure of the clone, yet resolves the struggle for identity in a ‘human’ conclusion; whereas the latter maintains the uncanny in-human difference of the clone even as it highlights the dangers of the biopolitical instrumentalization of life itself. The article therefore argues that fictional treatments of cloning can provide an important alternative to simplified debates on the subject in the mass media