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Gendered Consequences of Vocational Training

Margarita Estévez-Abe

in The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

This chapter delves into the gendered effects of different training and educational systems. It poses the following three questions. Are some specific types of vocational training and educational ... More

This chapter delves into the gendered effects of different training and educational systems. It poses the following three questions. Are some specific types of vocational training and educational systems more biased against women than others? If so, what are the gendered implications of educational reforms in many of the advanced industrial societies? Do women’s greater educational investments—a universal trend observed in all countries—promote gender equality in the labor market? Briefly summarized, this chapter shows that, first, vocational education is more gender-segregating than general education systems; second, apprenticeship-based vocational education is more gender-segregating than school-based vocational education; and third, school-based training for professional jobs is a woman-friendly pathway into high-status occupations.Less

Kindling

Andrew C. Scott

in Title Pages

What does it take to make a fire? The factors underlying fire can be illustrated with a triangle, and five fire triangles, relevant to different scales in area and ... More

What does it take to make a fire? The factors underlying fire can be illustrated with a triangle, and five fire triangles, relevant to different scales in area and time, have been defined. Let’s start with the most basic, at the smallest scale. The ‘fire fundamentals triangle’ has three elements: fuel, as there needs to be something to burn; heat, because fires can’t start without a source of heat; and oxygen, essential for a fire to combust and spread. The importance of oxygen becomes obvious when we put out a fire. The use of sand or CO2, or even smothering, is a way to exclude air, and more specifically to remove oxygen from the system so that the combustion reaction stops. Water has two effects. It reduces the amount of oxygen getting to the fire, but more importantly the heat energy from the fire goes into evaporating the water rather than heating the fuel that allows the combustion reaction to continue. Our second triangle can be called the ‘fire environment triangle’. Here again, fuel forms one of the points. Another is the weather, as this controls the moisture in the fuel, affecting its flammability. The drier the fuel, the more easily it can burn. Perhaps surprisingly, the third point of the triangle is topography, which impacts on the rate and pattern of spread of the fire. Hill slopes, for instance, can provide an updraft of air that allows the fire to spread more quickly. The next triangle up widens our perspective in terms not only of spatial scale but also time. This triangle can be called the ‘fire regime triangle’. Here we consider not simply the fuel but the type of vegetation that is being burned. Some types of vegetation are more flammable than others. The overall climate is also significant at this bigger scale. For example, temperate seasonal climates are more fire-prone than wet tropical climates, where there is rain every day. The third arm of this triangle is landform: mountainous regions are more susceptible to fire than low-lying flat areas. Less

Before the Stone Age Existed

Anne O'Connor

in Title Pages

What is the difference between temptation and geological time? The one is a wile of the devil and the other is a devil of a while. (Dawkins to Hughes, 17 March 1870: ... More

What is the difference between temptation and geological time? The one is a wile of the devil and the other is a devil of a while. (Dawkins to Hughes, 17 March 1870: SMC: TMH) In the early eighteenth century, John Conyers, an apothecary and antiquary of London, discovered the body of an elephant as he was digging for gravel at Gray’s Inn Lane. Nearby lay a flint implement (Fig. 1.1). Today we might well call his elephant a ‘mammoth’ and refer the implement to the ‘Palaeolithic’ period; in 1715, however, Conyers’s beast was dated to the reign of Claudius, the Roman Emperor. This was the belief of John Bagford, an old friend of Conyers, a bookseller and one of the founder members of a tavern-based antiquarian club that was soon to become the Society of Antiquaries of London. At the time, a Roman elephant attacked by an Ancient Briton seemed a likely scenario to account for the curious occurrence of this animal in London, far from its hot and distant homeland. It would be a century and a half later when our ancestors were acknowledged as the contemporaries of such enormous animals: they would then be pictured in a newly-discovered geological world, more ancient than the time of the Romans or even the British natives described by Caesar. For Bagford and his contemporaries, the time allotted to humans, and even to the Earth itself, was not long. Their knowledge about the distant past was gathered from folklore or historical texts, and the Bible supplied a particularly important source of chronological information. Back in the seventeenth century, James Ussher (1581–1656) had famously calculated the age of the Earth and the Creation to date to 4004 BC. But Ussher did not, as is often believed, reach this date by counting back through the generations of the Bible; indeed, he could not. As John Fuller has observed, there is no fixed point from which to start counting: a vague gap divides the last of the Hebrew books from the year AD 1. Less

Dinosaur Extinction

J. David Archibald and David E. Fastovsky

in The Dinosauria

The disappearance of nonavian dinosaurs is only a small part of a greater class of extinctions known as “mass extinctions.” Mass extinctions are global events characterized by unusually high rates of ... More

The disappearance of nonavian dinosaurs is only a small part of a greater class of extinctions known as “mass extinctions.” Mass extinctions are global events characterized by unusually high rates of extinction. The five episodes of mass extinctions in Earth history are the Permo-Triassic extinction, the Late Ordovician extinction, the Late Devonian extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction, and the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) extinction. This chapter focuses on patterns of geologic and biotic changes that occurred during the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) extinction. It also highlights the similarities and differences in interpretations of geologic and fossil records. It concludes with two scenarios explaining the differing views about dinosaur extinction.Less

Later Tertiary Lorisiformes

Terry Harrison

in Cenozoic Mammals of Africa

The lorisiformes are a group of strepsirrhine primates, comprising the extant galagos and lorisids, that are included together in the superfamily Lorisoidea. They share with other crown ... More

The lorisiformes are a group of strepsirrhine primates, comprising the extant galagos and lorisids, that are included together in the superfamily Lorisoidea. They share with other crown strepsirrhines the possession of a specialized tooth comb, comprising the lower canines and incisors, reduced upper incisors with a broad central diastema, and a toilet claw on the second pedal digit. Molecular, karyological, and anatomical studies confirm that galagos and lorisids are monophyletic with respect to lemuriforms from Madagascar. Earlier molecular studies produced contradictory results concerning the monophyly of lorisids and galagids, respectively. The galagos are included together in a single family, the Galagidae, restricted to sub-Saharan Africa. The later Tertiary fossil record of Lorisiformes is quite poor, being restricted to material from the middle to late Miocene of the Siwalik Group of northern Pakistan and to Miocene and Plio-Pleistocene localities in Africa.Less

Historical background

Tony Hallam

in Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities: The causes of mass extinctions

Georges Cuvier has not been treated with much respect in the English-speaking world for his contributions to the study of Earth history. Charles Lyell is thought to ... More

Georges Cuvier has not been treated with much respect in the English-speaking world for his contributions to the study of Earth history. Charles Lyell is thought to have effectively demolished his claims of episodes of catastrophic change in the past, and it is only in the past few decades, with the rise of so-called ‘neocatastrophism’, that a renewed interest has emerged in his writings, which date from early in the nineteenth century. Cuvier was a man of considerable ability, who quickly rose to a dominant position in French science in the post-Napoleonic years. Though primarily a comparative anatomist, his pioneer research into fossil mammals led him into geology. He argued strongly for the extinction of fossil species, most notably mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths, at a time when the very thought of extinctions was rather shocking to conventional Christian thought, and linked such extinctions with catastrophic changes in the environment. This view is expressed in what he called the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to his great four-volume treatise entitled Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles (Researches on fossil bones), published in 1812. This extended essay was immensely influential in intellectual circles of the western world, was reissued as a short book, and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into the main languages of the day. It became well known in the English-speaking world through the translation by the Edinburgh geologist Robert Jameson (1813), who so bored the young Charles Darwin with his lectures that he temporarily turned him off the subject of geology. According to Martin Rudwick, who has undertaken a new translation which is used here, Jameson’s translation is often misleading and in places downright bad. It was Jameson’s comments rather than Cuvier’s text that led to the widespread belief that Cuvier favoured a literalistic interpretation of Genesis and wished to bolster the historicity of the biblical story of the Flood. The English surveyor William Smith is rightly credited with his pioneering recognition of the value of fossils for correlating strata, which proved of immense importance when he produced one of the earliest reliable geological maps, of England and Wales, but the more learned and intellectually ambitious Cuvier was the first to appreciate fully the significance of fossils for unravelling Earth history. Less

Dinosaur Killer

James Lawrence Powell

in Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth

This chapter examines the theory that meteorite impact was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs on Earth. The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, or K-T, is the point in geological time at which the ... More

This chapter examines the theory that meteorite impact was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs on Earth. The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, or K-T, is the point in geological time at which the dinosaurs and seventy percent of all species became extinct, one of the five big mass extinctions in earth history. In 1980, a paper appeared in Science titled “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.” The authors were the fatherCretaceous-Tertiary boundaryson team of Luis and Walter Alvarez, together with their University of California colleagues Frank Asaro and Helen Michel. This chapter considers Luis Alvarez's proposal that a large meteorite struck the Earth 65 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs and seventy percent of all species on the planet. It also discusses the controversy sparked by Alvarez's theory and the discovery of the K-T impact site known as the “Crater of Doom” in Chicxulub.Less

Out with a Bang

James Lawrence Powell

in Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth

This chapter examines how the impact skeptics reacted to Luis Alvarez's theory that the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs and seventy percent of all species on the planet at the Cretaceous-Tertiary ... More

This chapter examines how the impact skeptics reacted to Luis Alvarez's theory that the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs and seventy percent of all species on the planet at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, or K-T, were caused by a large meteorite that struck the Earth 65 million years ago. The discovery of the putative K-T crater, the “Crater of Doom,” in Chicxulub failed to convince most paleontologists who specialize in dinosaur fossils and some of those who work with fossils at the opposite end of the size scale. Two of them were Charles Officer and Charles Drake, who concluded that the Chicxulub structure was nothing special, but merely another alleged impact crater on a list of easily discredited candidates. Others thought they could make short work of the Alvarez theory, including William Clemens and David Archibald. By 2010, many predictions that derive from the original Alvarez theory but which were untested or not even conceived in 1980 had been fulfilled. Two extinctions, the Clovis and Permian-Triassic extinctions, were receiving new attention from the scientific community.Less

A directional history of life (1825–31)

in Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

This chapter traces how the history of life was coming to be seen ever more clearly as directional in character. Research on Tertiary faunas reinforced the increasing sense among geologists that the ... More

This chapter traces how the history of life was coming to be seen ever more clearly as directional in character. Research on Tertiary faunas reinforced the increasing sense among geologists that the earth's faunas had indeed changed directionally throughout geohistory. Adolphe Brongniart's ambitious work on fossil plants had the same impact, on the larger scale of the whole fossil record, when he identified at least three major floras that had flourished successively in the course of geohistory, marked by the successive appearance of new major groups of plants and hence an increasing diversity and even, in some sense, progress. And Brongniart linked this with the intrinsic directionality inherent in the theory of a gradually cooling earth, as newly endorsed by the physicists: as the earth cooled, climates at its surface would have become progressively more temperate and more differentiated, while even the composition of the atmosphere might have changed in a similar way. This picture of the changing vegetation on a gradually cooling earth was already getting support from the discovery in the high Arctic of the characteristic large plants of the Coal formation, and even coal seams, together with equally tropical-looking corals and other marine fossils. This suggested strongly that the whole earth, even at this high latitude, had been tropical in climate at that extremely remote period of geohistory.Less

Geohistory in Retrospect (1833)

in Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

This chapter presents Charles Lyell's detailed reconstruction of geohistory, focused on the Tertiary era. His concept of the ever-changing composition of the Tertiary molluskan fauna, combined with ... More

This chapter presents Charles Lyell's detailed reconstruction of geohistory, focused on the Tertiary era. His concept of the ever-changing composition of the Tertiary molluskan fauna, combined with his claim that the stratigraphical record was an intrinsically imperfect record of geohistory, led him to argue that the successive periods of the Tertiary era (Eocene, Miocene, Older Pliocene, and Newer Pliocene) were no more than temporally scattered samples of geohistory, snatched from the ravages of time and preserved by chance in spatially scattered “basins.” For each period, reviewed retrospectively from the present back into the deeper past, Lyell reconstructed in turn the same array of physical processes and environments, demonstrating that the earth had been essentially in a steady state throughout the Tertiary era.Less

Explaining erratics (1833–40)

in Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

The theory of a geological “deluge,” far from being in retreat during the 1830s, was being improved in the light of new ideas and new evidence. It was now fully uncoupled from its earlier association ... More

The theory of a geological “deluge,” far from being in retreat during the 1830s, was being improved in the light of new ideas and new evidence. It was now fully uncoupled from its earlier association with the biblical Flood, because geologists recognized that the “diluvial” features were far too old to be the traces of any event in the early history of literate humankind. However, they dated from a geologically very recent time, near the boundary between the present world and the vast expanses of prehuman geohistory. This was the period that Lyell named “Pleistocene,” precisely in order to blend it into the rest of the Tertiary era and to efface any sharp disjunction at the borderline with the present. But most other geologists insisted that this period had been marked by events of a far from ordinary kind. Erosional features such as valleys remained ambiguous, since their very diversity of form suggested that no single causal explanation would be applicable to all. Any adequate interpretation of erratic blocks and scratched bedrock had to account not only for those found in and around the Alps, but also for those spread even more widely across northern Europe and northern North America.Less

Developed Countries

Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann

in The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth

Research in the economics of growth – both theoretical and empirical – has produced surprisingly few resilient results about policies that might promote long-run growth in economically advanced ... More

Research in the economics of growth – both theoretical and empirical – has produced surprisingly few resilient results about policies that might promote long-run growth in economically advanced countries. The immense variation in the long-run growth experiences of developed countries has largely escaped notice. The analysis of growth differences in the OECD countries shows that long-run growth is as closely related to cognitive skills within the group of developed countries as it is in the global sample. Considerable current policy discussion involves variations in more fine-grained institutional features such as product market regulations and various forms of employment protection, but in contrast to the role of knowledge capital, a long battery of commonly identified measures of these institutions does not add to an explanation of the substantial differences in long-run growth rates that exist across OECD countries. Moreover, there is not a specific role of tertiary attainment for OECD growth once direct measures of skills are taken into consideration.Less

Justice as a Tertiary Prevention Strategy

Leigh Goodmark

in Preventing Intimate Partner Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

This chapter addresses the question, what is justice, in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) and examines the use of law and the legal system for the prevention of IPV revictimization ... More

This chapter addresses the question, what is justice, in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) and examines the use of law and the legal system for the prevention of IPV revictimization (tertiary prevention). The chapter highlights the limitations of the law and criminal legal system for achieving justice for specific groups of IPV survivors, and the potential for this system cause further harm. The chapter considers alternatives to the traditional criminal legal response to IPV to secure justice and safety for IPV survivors.Less

Stratigraphy

James S. Dunbar

in Paleoindian Societies of the Coastal Southeast

Terrestrial, wetland, and underwater sediment types are the focus of chapter 2, and no consideration of stratigraphy would be complete without their examination. Archaeological research has reached ... More

Terrestrial, wetland, and underwater sediment types are the focus of chapter 2, and no consideration of stratigraphy would be complete without their examination. Archaeological research has reached the point now that inundated sites are as much a part of the archaeological vocabulary as land sites have been. It is important to realize, for example, that the territorial extent of the Floridan Aquifer in the Southeast Coastal Plain also encompasses one of the major concentrations of Paleoindian sites in the Southeast. This aquifer, an important potable water source, is held in Tertiary limestones that are also chert bearing, making them an important toolmaking resource. Unlike land sites in the Southeast, which typically do not present preserved organic materials, wetland and submerged sites frequently offer preserved bone and organic materials, including plant seeds and wood. Sedimentation in karst rivers is most often neutral to slightly alkaline, whereas most upland sites lie buried in acidic sand. Lake and channel-fill deposits are important receptacles of preservation and will be the focus of future investigations. The rivers and lakes in Florida and the extreme Southeast are of great significance because they do not have their headwaters emanating from mountains and therefore provide us with an excellent record of late Pleistocene environments.Less

Introduction

Liz Lloyd

in Health and care in ageing societies: A new international approach

The introduction sets out the main aims of the book, highlighting the complex relationship between ageing, health and care. It provides an overview of the theoretical orientation of the book, setting ... More

The introduction sets out the main aims of the book, highlighting the complex relationship between ageing, health and care. It provides an overview of the theoretical orientation of the book, setting out the challenge to contemporary policy priorities for ageing societies and the importance of an ethic of care for this challenge. It also provides an outline of the organisation of the book.Less

A Mediterranean history

John D. Thompson

in Plant Evolution in the Mediterranean: Insights for conservation

The Mediterranean region has had a long and complex history. The phasing of three main historical elements forms a Mediterranean triptych: geology, climate, and human activities. The geological ... More

The Mediterranean region has had a long and complex history. The phasing of three main historical elements forms a Mediterranean triptych: geology, climate, and human activities. The geological fragmentation of the Mediterranean into distinct microregions and tectonic movement of its different microplates has continually reshaped the configuration of the terrestrial landscapes, islands, and mountains. Many areas have been land bridge connections across the sea. The Mediterranean region has a characteristic climate, the essential element of which is the occurrence of a summer drought. Although initial trends towards aridity are ancient, the Mediterranean climate only dates to the Pliocene. Climatic oscillations since its onset have caused sea level changes, influencing the appearance and disappearance of land bridge connections across different parts of the Mediterranean Sea, causing species’ range sizes to expand and contract in repeated phases. Finally, nowhere else in Europe has had such a long history of human presence and activity. In the last three millennia, the impact of human activities on the landscape has been dramatic in terms of the evolution of the mosaic landscape we now observe. The phased history of these three factors is at the heart of plant evolution in the Mediterranean.Less

Human impacts and plant conservation

Ahmad Hegazy and Jonathan Lovett-Doust

in Plant Ecology in the Middle East

This chapter considers the challenges faced by plant conservation in the Middle East, outlining what is needed for successful conservation. It describes how humans are exacerbating the ongoing ... More

This chapter considers the challenges faced by plant conservation in the Middle East, outlining what is needed for successful conservation. It describes how humans are exacerbating the ongoing effects of desertification, including wood collection, road construction, and extractive petroleum-related technologies. Meanwhile, massive coastal developments are degrading the diverse and productive marine ecosystems. Agriculture continues to stress the regional ecology through overstocking of livestock, land conversion, and ephemeral agriculture. Negative consequences of wadi-damming and water recharge wells all create additional challenges and the hydro-politics are a major source of conflict. The region’s major biodiversity hotspots are described, including the Horn of Africa and Eastern Afromontane regions, Eastern Mediterranean basin, the Irano–Anatolian region with its ancient “Hyrcanian” forestland south of the Caspian, and the Caucasus mountain refugia of Arcto–Tertiary relicts (with the Colchic and Hyrcan forests there and in Hyrcanian Iran being among the oldest forests in western Eurasia).Less