Sex-typed : the impact of changes in the polytechnic environment on women office systems lecturers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Women's Studies at Massey University

Over the past two decades there has been a good deal of "official" accounting of organisational change and the restructuring of post-compulsory education in New Zealand. Some key players in the administration of the educational reforms have given accounts of these changes. However, this research raises a different set of voices. My study gives accounts of change, different from the official accounts, based on the experiences of office systems lecturers teaching in the polytechnic sector during the 1990s. By the late 1980s the rate of change in polytechnics had begun to accelerate within the context of general political upheaval and the policies of the "new right". Throughout the same period, computer technology advanced at an unprecedented rate having a profound effect on the polytechnic environment and especially upon women teaching in office systems. This research measures the effect of "reforms" that reshaped the polytechnic environment, particularly in the 1990s. in terms of their impact on the experience ot olfice systems lecturers involved. It offers an interpretation of how these women made sense of these changes to the institution in which they worked. My thesis utilises feminist perspectives to demonstrate that women teaching in office systems departments are both subject to, and draw upon a number of gendered and classed discursive fields to make sense of the changes in their workplace. These discursive fields are identified in the research as "working class", "maternal" and "professional". This thesis concludes with reflections about positive opportunities, and some constraints, for office systems women, sex-typed within the identified discursive fields, shaping and making accessible "new" subject positions in the polytechnic of the 21st century

Do Firms Respond to Immigration?

Research generally focuses on how immigration a€ects native workers, while the impact of immigration on domestic .rms is often overlooked. This paper addresses this important omission by examining whether .rms respond to immigration by adjusting the location of their production activities. The results indicate that .rms respond to immigration at the extensive margin by increasing the number of establish- ments and at the intensive margin by increasing the size of existing establishments. This is an important .nding because .rm mobility can explain the insigni.cant im- pact of immigration on wages found using regional data but the negative impact found using national level data. Additional evidence indicates that these results are not driven by immigrants simply consuming more goods and services.immigration, firm structure, establishment births & deaths

Offshoring, Immigration, and the Native Wage Distribution

While workers in developed countries have become increasingly concerned about the impact that offshoring and immigration have on their wages, the available evidence remains mixed. This paper presents a simple model that examines the impact offshoring and immigration on wages and tests these predictions using U.S. state-industry-year panel data. According to the model, the productivity effect causes offshoring to have a more positive impact on low-skilled wages than immigration, but this gap decreases with the workers. skill level. The empirical results confirm both of these predictions and thus present direct evidence of the productivity effect. Furthermore, the results provide important insight into how specific components of o€shoring and immigration affect the wages of particular types of native workers.offshoring, outsourcing, immigration, productivity effect, native wages

Remittances and the Wage Impact of Immigration

This paper is the first to examine the impact of immigrant remittances on the wages of native workers in the host country. The model shows that the effect of immigration on wages depends on the ratio of an immigration-induced change in the consumer base relative to an immigration-induced change in the workforce. Remittances provide a unique way of identifying changes in this ratio since they reduce the consumer base but not the workforce. The model is then tested using an unusual data set that follows the same individuals over time and has detailed information on remittances. Consistent with the prediction of the model, the results indicate that remittances depress the wages of native workers, especially those in non-traded industries.Remittances; Immigration; Wages

A Case Study of Vocabulary Instruction for High School Students

A review of typical vocabulary instruction in a high school classroom. Several themes emerged from this case study, which highlight the related difficulties and challenges that accompany a popular approach to vocabulary instruction

Some projective distance inequalities for simplices in complex projective space

We prove inequalities relating the absolute value of the determinant of n+1 linearly independent unit vectors in an n+1 dimensional complex vector space and the projective distances from the vertices to the hyperplanes containing the opposite faces of the simplices in complex projective n-space whose vertices or faces are determined by the given vectors.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, a few minor typos corrected in version

Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world cyber-physical systems. The key challenge is to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Often, hybrid systems are rather complex in that they require expertise from many domains (e.g., robotics, control systems, computer science, software engineering, and mechanical engineering). Moreover, despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires nontrivial human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is, thus, not uncommon for development and verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) graphical (UML) and textual modeling of hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks

A Vision of Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems

Abstract. Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world physical systems. The key challenge is how to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires significant human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is thus not uncommon for verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) modeling hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks.