Restaurants Help Feed Job Growth: How the Leisure and Hospitality Industry Fared After the Recent Employment Downturn

The most recent employment downturn was historic in many ways, but most notably, in the substantial number of jobs lost. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey show that total nonfarm employment fell by 8.7 million jobs between the employment peak in January 2008 and the employment trough in February 2010. In percentage terms, this was the largest job loss since the 1940s. Total nonfarm payroll employment did not make a full recovery until May 2014, a full 51 months after its employment low. During this recovery period, the leisure and hospitality industry gained more than 1.6 million jobs, accounting for almost 1 out of every 5 nonfarm jobs added during the recovery. (See chart 1.) Although other industries had similar or larger job gains, the leisure and hospitality industry is interesting because so many of the jobs were created in very few component industries. This Beyond the Numbers article examines recent trends in the leisure and hospitality industry and analyzes the concentrated distribution of job gains

The accessibility of administrative processes: Assessing the impacts on students in higher education

Administrative processes that need to be completed to maintain a basic standard of living, to study, or to attain employment, are perceived to create burdens for disabled people. The navigation of information, forms, communications, and assessments to achieve a particular goal raises diverse accessibility issues. In this paper we explore the different types of impacts these processes have on disabled university students. We begin by surveying literature that highlights the systemic characteristics of administrative burdens and barriers for disabled people. We then describe how a participatory research exercise with students led to the development of a survey on these issues. This was completed by 104 respondents with a diverse range of declared disabilities. This provides evidence for a range of impacts, and understanding of the perceived level of challenge of commonly experienced processes. The most common negative impact reported was on stress levels. Other commonly reported impacts include exacerbation of existing conditions, time lost from study, and instances where support was not available in a timely fashion. Processes to apply for disability-related support were more commonly challenging than other types of processes. We use this research to suggest directions for improving accessibility and empowerment in this space

Smoothing cones over K3 surfaces

We prove that the affine cone over a general primitively polarised K3 surface of genus g is smoothable if and only if g\le 10 or g=12. We also give several examples of singularities with special behaviour, such as surfaces whose affine cone is smoothable even though the projective cone is not

Effective communication in requirements elicitation: A comparison of methodologies

The elicitation or communication of user requirements comprises an early and critical but highly error-prone stage in system development. Socially oriented methodologies provide more support for user involvement in design than the rigidity of more traditional methods, facilitating the degree of user-designer communication and the 'capture' of requirements. A more emergent and collaborative view of requirements elicitation and communication is required to encompass the user, contextual and organisational factors. From this accompanying literature in communication issues in requirements elicitation, a four-dimensional framework is outlined and used to appraise comparatively four different methodologies seeking to promote a closer working relationship between users and designers. The facilitation of communication between users and designers is subject to discussion of the ways in which communicative activities can be 'optimised' for successful requirements gathering, by making recommendations based on the four dimensions to provide fruitful considerations for system designers

50,000 Facebook views from a $30 investment: CYP-Media’s use of open practices to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector<i></i>

In 2015 Tony Coughlan was awarded the Open Education Consortium award for Creative Innovation, recognising the impact of his CYP-Media project in using open educational practices (OEP) to increase access to learning in the children and young people’s sector. Core to CYP-Media is a blog (www.cyp-media.org) in which Tony curates and evaluates free e-learning, textbooks and journals for working with children of different ages and needs. The reach of these blog posts is maximised by dissemination through Facebook and Twitter. The CYP-Media.org blog cost only $30 to set up, yet its impact is substantial. The CYP-Media Facebook page has an average reach of 7,244 per item, with a maximum of about 500 shares or 50,000 views of an individual item, and Tony himself has been identified as one of the top 50 most influential social media-using professionals in UK higher education. CYP-Media shows how just one person can make a huge difference to achieving educational and social equity with a tiny financial investment and a commitment to openness. This paper outlines the conceptual background to CYP-Media, with its roots in Perryman and Coughlan’s (2013) ‘public open scholar’ research, Weller’s (2011) concept of the ‘digital scholar’, and the emerging practice and theories of digital curation. The paper details CYP-Media’s multi-platform social media strategy and the challenges encountered since the project’s inception in 2010, in addition to presenting a mixed methods analysis of CYP-Media’s reception within the children and young people’s sector. We conclude that openness does not have to be the province of institutions and organisations, or even smaller projects and that by listening to the needs of your target audience, rather than adopting a top-down approach, real educational transformation through OEP is within the reach of anyone.</i

Reaching out with OER: the new role of public-facing open scholar

Open educational resources (OER) and, more recently, open educational practices (OEP) have been widely promoted as a means of increasing openness in higher education (HE). Thus far, such openness has been limited by OER provision typically being supplier-driven and contained within the boundaries of HE. Seeking to explore ways in which OEP might become more needs-led we conceptualised a new ‘public-facing open scholar’ role involving academics working with online communities to source and develop OER to meet their needs. To explore the scope for this role we focused on the voluntary sector, which we felt might particularly benefit from such collaboration. We evaluated four representative communities for evidence of their being self-educating (thereby offering the potential for academics to contribute) and for any existing learning dimension. We found that all four communities were self-educating and each included learning infrastructure elements, for example provision for web chats with ‘experts’, together with evidence of receptiveness to academic collaboration. This indicated that there was scope for the role of public-facing open scholar. We therefore developed detailed guidelines for performing the role, which has the potential to be applied beyond the voluntary sector and to greatly extend the beneficial impact of existing OER, prompting institutions to release new OER in response to the needs of people outside HE