Giving Miss Marple a makeover : graduate recruitment, systems failure and the Scottish voluntary sector

The voluntary sector in Scotland, as across the globe, is becoming increasingly business like. Resultantly, there is an increasing demand for graduates to work in business and support functions. In Scotland, however, despite an oversupply of graduates in the labor market, the voluntary sector reports skills shortages for graduate-level positions; a leadership deficit was also reported in countries such as the United States. Through exploratory, mainly qualitative, case study and stakeholder research, this article proposes that one reason for this mismatch between the supply of and demand for graduates is a systems failure within the sector. Many graduates and university students remain unaware of potentially suitable paid job opportunities, in part because of the sector's voluntary label. To rectify this systems failure, thought needs to be given to the sector's nomenclature and the manner in which voluntary sector organizations attract graduate recruits, for example, through levering value congruence in potential recruits

The New ‘Hidden Abode’: Reflections on Value and Labour in the New Economy

In a pivotal section of Capital, volume 1, Marx (1976: 279) notes that, in order to understand the capitalist production of value, we must descend into the ‘hidden abode of production’: the site of the labour process conducted within an employment relationship. In this paper we argue that by remaining wedded to an analysis of labour that is confined to the employment relationship, Labour Process Theory (LPT) has missed a fundamental shift in the location of value production in contemporary capitalism. We examine this shift through the work of Autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Lazaratto and Arvidsson, who offer theoretical leverage to prize open a new ‘hidden abode’ outside employment, for example in the ‘production of organization’ and in consumption. Although they can open up this new ‘hidden abode’, without LPT's fine-grained analysis of control/resistance, indeterminacy and structured antagonism, these theorists risk succumbing to empirically naive claims about the ‘new economy’. Through developing an expanded conception of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production, the paper demarcates an analytical space in which both LPT and Autonomist Marxism can expand and develop their understanding of labour and value production in today's economy. </jats:p

Upward convergence in working conditions

Social convergence has gained an equal footing alongside economic convergence as an EU goal in the wake of the economic crisis. This report presents the results of a study into convergence in working conditions, a major component of social policymaking. It examines whether working conditions have improved over the past two decades in the EU as a whole and whether dissimilarities between Member States in this area have narrowed

The capitalist labour process : concepts and connections

The Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) and Capital & Class were central in creating the conditions for a labour process debate. However, while the journal has continued to publish some articles on labour process issues, the debate has become associated primarily with the annual International Labour Process Conference. This article explores shifts in the nature and focus of debates, emphasizing continuity between the traditions as well as change. By contrasting early attempts in the journal to uncover 'immanent laws' of the capitalist labour process to more recent writings on core theory, contemporary trends in labour power and capitalist political economy are outlined and evaluated

Reader technique as a source of variability in determining malaria parasite density by microscopy

BACKGROUND: Accurate identification and quantification of malaria parasites are critical for measuring clinical trial outcomes. Positive and negative diagnosis is usually sufficient for the assessment of therapeutic outcome, but vaccine or prophylactic drug trials require measuring density of infection as a primary endpoint. Microscopy is the most established and widely-used technique for quantifying parasite densities in the blood. METHODS: Results obtained by 24–27 expert malaria microscopists, who had independently read 895 slides from 35 donors, were analysed to understand how reader technique contributes to discrepancy in measurements of parasite density over a wide range of densities. RESULTS: Among these 35 donations, standard deviations ranged from 30% to 250% of the mean parasite density and the percent discrepancy was inversely correlated with the mean parasite density. The number of white blood cells indexed and whether parasites were counted in the thick film or thin film were shown to significantly contribute to discrepancy amongst microscopists. CONCLUSION: Errors in microscopy measurements are not widely appreciated or addressed but have serious consequences for efficacy trials, including possibly abandoning promising vaccine candidates

Deep ASKAP EMU Survey of the GAMA23 field: Properties of radio sources

We present the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) observations of the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA)-23h field. The survey was carried out at 887.5 MHz and covers a 83 square degree field. We imaged the calibrated visibility data, taken as part of the Evolutionary Mapping of Universe (EMU) Early Science Programme, using the latest version of the ASKAPSoft pipeline. The final mosaic has an angular resolution of 10 arcsec and a central rms noise of around 38 $\mu$Jy beam$^{-1}$. The derived radio source catalogue has 39812 entries above a peak flux density threshold of 5$\sigma$. We searched for the radio source host galaxy counterparts using the GAMA spectroscopic (with an i-band magnitude limit of 19.2 mag) and multi-wavelength catalogues that are available as part of the collaboration. We identified hosts with GAMA spectroscopic redshifts for 5934 radio sources. We describe the data reduction, imaging, and source identification process, and present the source counts. Thanks to the wide area covered by our survey, we obtain very robust counts down to 0.2 mJy. ASKAP's exceptional survey speed, providing efficient, sensitive and high resolution mapping of large regions of the sky in conjunction with the multi-wavelength data available for the GAMA23 field, allowed us to discover 63 giant radio galaxies. The data presented here demonstrate the excellent capabilities of ASKAP in the pre-SKA era.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, accepted by MNRA

‘Sons of athelings given to the earth’: Infant Mortality within Anglo-Saxon Mortuary Geography

FOR 20 OR MORE YEARS early Anglo-Saxon archaeologists have believed children are underrepresented in the cemetery evidence. They conclude that excavation misses small bones, that previous attitudes to reporting overlook the very young, or that infants and children were buried elsewhere. This is all well and good, but we must be careful of oversimplifying compound social and cultural responses to childhood and infant mortality. Previous approaches have offered methodological quandaries in the face of this under-representation. However, proportionally more infants were placed in large cemeteries and sometimes in specific zones. This trend is statistically significant and is therefore unlikely to result entirely from preservation or excavation problems. Early medieval cemeteries were part of regional mortuary geographies and provided places to stage events that promoted social cohesion across kinship systems extending over tribal territories. This paper argues that patterns in early Anglo-Saxon infant burial were the result of female mobility. Many women probably travelled locally to marry in a union which reinforced existing social networks. For an expectant mother, however, the safest place to give birth was with experience women in her maternal home. Infant identities were affected by personal and legal association with their mother’s parental kindred, so when an infant died in childbirth or months and years later, it was their mother’s identity which dictated burial location. As a result, cemeteries central to tribal identities became places to bury the sons and daughters of a regional tribal aristocracy