Social Mobility and Equality of Opportunity Geary Lecture Spring 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, director, colleagues and friends: it is a great honour and a pleasure to be asked to deliver this year’s Geary lecture, coming, as it does, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Over the years many eminent economists and sociologists have given the Geary lecture, but I believe that I am one of the few who knew Roy Geary personally because we were colleagues here during the last few years of his life. Roy Geary was the most eminent Irish statistician of the 20th century. But during the short time in which I knew him he was less concerned with statistical problems and more with the social problems of contemporary Ireland. So I hope that the topic of my lecture is one that Roy would have found both intellectually interesting and of some practical relevance. For a large part of my professional life I have worked on social mobility and so it will come as no surprise that this is the topic of my talk. Recently, governments and political parties have discovered, or rediscovered, social mobility and in some cases they have made its promotion a central theme in

Versioning Cultural Objects through the Text-Encoding of Folk Songs

This paper will present and discuss experiences studying different versions of folk songs as cultural objects, and will investigate how using specific Digital Humanities tools may assist the versioning of intangible oral tradition. This was primarily achieved using The Versioning Machine, a framework and an interface for displaying multiple versions of text and audio encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. Through encoding a set number of songs in The Versioning Machine and displaying the results online, new questions and conclusions could be made to version cultural material with an emphasis on trying to trace the evolution of cultural ideas through subsequent iterations of ideas. Using examples from the project Documenting Transmission: The Rake Cycle1, this paper will examine the effectiveness of using a specific existing versioning tool to model and map the differences between versions of folk songs and examine the intangible nature of performance and oral tradition. How do these digital versions change or reinforce our perception of a song cycle and transmission processes in general? This paper will give a broad overview of the Documenting Transmission project and some of the musicological and technical considerations that were made over the course of the project

The Girl Friend

Sheet music contains sexist and/or misogynistic language, concepts, and/or imagry promoting rape culture. With Ukulele arrangement. Contains advertisements and/or short musical examples of pieces being sold by publisher.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/7077/thumbnail.jp

The Blue Room

With Ukulele arrangement. Contains advertisements and/or short musical examples of pieces being sold by publisher.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/7145/thumbnail.jp

EDUCATION AND THE LABOUR MARKET: WORK AND UNEMPLOYMENT AMONG RECENT COHORTS OF IRISH SCHOOL LEAVERS. General Research Series Paper No. 119, December 1984

This paper looks at the relationship between the post-primary educational system and the world of work. It addresses tile question of how, during their first year after leaving school, young people fare in their search for work and in the kind of jobs they get and how these are related to the educational credentials they possess. In particular, the study focuses on those young people who leave school with a relatively low level of, or no, formal academic qualifications

The distributional impact of COVID-19: Geographic variation in mortality in England

Background: By their nature, the impact of epidemics on mortality varies geographically, suggesting that the geographical impact of an epidemic implies a social impact. Objective: To examine the association between two measures of the social composition of a local area and age- and sex-standardised Covid-19 and other mortality in the period 1 March to 31 July 2020. The measures are how deprived an area is and what proportion of its population is non-white. Methods: Using spatial autoregressive regression we analyse geographical variation in age- and sex-standardised Covid-19 mortality among English local authorities between 1 March and 31 July 2020 in relation to measures of social composition, and we compare it with mortality from non-Covid sources in the same period, and with all-causes mortality in 2018. Results: Areas with higher social deprivation have a higher Covid-19 mortality rate, but the association is much weaker than between social deprivation and mortality rates more generally. An area's proportion non-white has a strong positive association with Covid-19 mortality, in contrast to a negative association with 2020 non-Covid and with 2018 mortality. Conclusions: Covid-19 mortality is related to the social composition of areas in different ways than current non-Covid mortality or past mortality. Contribution: The paper provides the first demonstration of the distinct distributional impact of mortality in relation to the Covid-19 virus by the social composition of areas in England