"The Unmeasured Labor Force, The Growth in Work Hours"

Is the current labor market as tight as official statistics would seem to indicate? If incumbent workers increase their hours of work, it is irrelevant to the unemployment rate, but hardly irrelevant to the level of labor supply. Bluestone and Rose find that job insecurity and stagnating wages have made Americans willing to work those extra hours to build a financial cushion, and a 1 percent increase in hours worked per worker for a fixed labor supply is equivalent in terms of labor supply to a 1 percent increase in the number of workers. This more realistic picture of labor supply has important implications for expectations that welfare recipients can easily find jobs, for reforms in labor market statistics to provide better information, and for the direction of monetary policy.

Manifest Needs of Women in Male-Intensive Professions: A Replication Study

published or submitted for publicatio

mLearning, development and delivery : creating opportunity and enterprise within the HE in FE context

This research project was funded by ESCalate in 2006-7 to support Somerset College in developing the curriculum, as well as widening participation via the use of mobile communications technologies such as mp3 players and mobile phones. The Project represents a highly topical and timely engagement with the opportunities for learning provided by the burgeoning use of mobile computing/ communications devices. Activities bring together colleagues from Teacher Education and Multimedia Computing in an innovative approach to designing for and delivering the curriculum. The Project addresses pedagogic issues and also vitally involves current and future learners, providing them with a new context for skills development and entrepreneurship. Anticipated outcomes include informed development of new HE modules and professional CPD activities which address the skills and context of this emerging approach to delivering the curriculum. The Project also intends to trial and evaluate the use of mobile technologies to support a blended learning approach to programme delivery and the development of a FD module which could be delivered via a mobile computing device. An interim report and a final project report are available as Word and PDF file

Attitudes and perceptions of middle school students toward competitive activities in physical education

The attitudes and perceptions of middle school students toward competitive activities in physical education were examined. Ten boys and 14 girls volunteered (11-high-skilled, 11 moderate-skilled, and 2 low skilled students) in 6th and 7th grade from a total of 6 schools, all offering competitive activities. Data collection was conducted over several months and included focus groups consisting of students of mixed skill levels, observations of competitive class activities, and informal interviews with teachers. The three major themes that emerged were, having fun in competitive activities, not all students were attaining motor skills necessary to participate in activities due to a lack of time to engage in appropriate practice, and the structure of competitive activities affects student experience

Skills for self employment

This small scale, explorative research study looks at the hitherto relatively under-researched question of the role of skills and training in the development of self employment. It draws on a literature review, data analysis from the Labour Force Survey, and a series of expert interviews. We summarise here the main findings from the research and, where appropriate, we highlight possible policy implications of those findings, although given the small scale, exploratory nature of the study, some of these issues would benefit from further investigation(and the report highlights possible avenues for new research to fill these gaps: see section 6.7). In thinking about policy we do not, for the most part, recommend specific interventions. Rather we highlight the kinds of considerations that policy-makers should be aware of when designing interventions" -- page i (Evidence Report). "This Annex presents an analysis of Labour Force Survey data, to provide descriptive statistics on the nature and extent of self-employment in the UK" -- page 1 (Annex)

Patriotic purification:cleansing Italian secular vocal music in Thuringia, 1575-1600

In German-speaking lands until the 1580s, Italian secular vocal music was mainly cultivated by a narrow elite of aristocrats and merchants who valued its exclusivity. Yet some German patriots – teachers, clergy and humanists – regarded such foreign imports as emasculating luxuries that would corrupt their national character. This article examines four collections of contrafacta of Italian villanellas and madrigals that were published in Erfurt and have been neglected by modern scholars: the Cantiones suavissimae (1576 and 1580), Primus liber suavissimas praestantissimorum nostrae aetatis artificum Italianorum cantilenas (1587) and Amorum filii Dei decades duae (1598). According to the prefatory material of these anthologies, their editors were motivated by a patriotic agenda of purifying Italian secular song and by a Lutheran belief in the intrinsic holiness of music. This article provides the first comprehensive identification of the originals of the contrafacta, showing that the latest Italian secular repertory travelled as speedily to Thuringian towns as to the better-known publishing centre of Nuremberg. The process of transformation in the contrafacta is discussed, including examples where church officials ruled that the change of text was insufficient to cleanse the tunes of their lascivious connotations.</jats:p

mLearning: Development and Delivery - creating opportunity and enterprise within the HE in FE context

A project which supported Somerset College in developing the curriculum