Communicating the ideas and attitudes of spying in film music: A social semiotic approach

Taking the example of two 1960s popular spy films this paper explores how social semiotics can make a contribution to the analysis of film music. Following other scholars who have sought to create inventories of sound meanings to help us break down the way that music communicates, this paper explores how we can draw on the principles of Hallidayan functional grammar to present an inventory of meaning potentials in sound. This provides one useful way to describe the semiotic resources available to composers to allow them to communicate quite specific ideas, attitudes and identities through combinations of different sounds and sound qualities, by presenting them as systems of meaning rather than as lists of connotations. Here we apply this to the different uses of music and sound in Dr No and The Ipcress Files which allows us to show how we can reveal different ideologies of spying

Trade Unions and Training Practices in British Workplaces

We use establishment-level data from the 1991 Employers Manpower and Skills Practices Survey (EMSPS) and individual-level data from the Autumn 1993 Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) to investigate the links between training provision and workplace unionization. We focus on two training measures, an incidence variable and an intensity variable. Both are strongly positively related to whether unions are recognised in the workplace. Working in a unionized establishment substantially raises the probability of receiving training and the amount of training received by British workers. We view these results as confirming the potentially important role that British unions can play in developing skill formation.

Ethical food packaging and designed encounters with distant and exotic others

There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labour. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products

Economics of education research: a review and future prospects

In this paper we offer an appraisal of the economics of education research area, charting its history as a field and discussing the ways in which economists have contributed both to education research and to education policy-making. In particular, we highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions that economists have made to the field of education during the last 50 years. Despite the success of the economics of education as a field of inquiry, we argue that some of the contributions made by economists could be limited if the economics of education is seen as quite distinct from the other disciplines working in the field of education. In these areas of common interest, economists need to work side by side with the other major disciplines in the field of education if their contribution to the field is to be maximised, particularly in terms of applying improved methodology. We conclude that the study of education acquisition and its economic and social impact in the economics of education research area is very likely to remain a fertile research ground. Acknowledgement

Floppy swimming: Viscous locomotion of actuated elastica

Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple swimming devices - which we call "elastic swimmers" - where the actuation mechanism is embedded in a solid body and the resulting swimmer is free to move. In this paper, we study theoretically the kinematics of elastic swimming. After discussing the basic physical picture of the phenomenon and the expected scaling relationships, we derive analytically the elastic swimming velocities in the limit of small actuation amplitude. The emphasis is on the coupling between the two unknowns of the problems - namely the shape of the elastic filament and the swimming kinematics - which have to be solved simultaneously. We then compute the performance of the resulting swimming device, and its dependance on geometry. The optimal actuation frequency and body shapes are derived and a discussion of filament shapes and internal torques is presented. Swimming using multiple elastic filaments is discussed, and simple strategies are presented which result in straight swimming trajectories. Finally, we compare the performance of elastic swimming with that of swimming microorganisms.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Experimental Investigations of Elastic Tail Propulsion at Low Reynolds Number

A simple way to generate propulsion at low Reynolds number is to periodically oscillate a passive flexible filament. Here we present a macroscopic experimental investigation of such a propulsive mechanism. A robotic swimmer is constructed and both tail shape and propulsive force are measured. Filament characteristics and the actuation are varied and resulting data are quantitatively compared with existing linear and nonlinear theories