Credential disconnection: a Marxist analysis of college graduate underemployment

Despite the world slowly recovering from the 2008 recession and reducing levels of unemployment, the problem of underemployment persists. Underemployment is a problematic work status determined by an array of factors, including hours worked, comparative wages, and various subjective elements. This particular employment condition is affecting a great number of college graduates, specifically in the realms of subjective underemployment where the skills and education obtained in one’s college experiences are not utilized in one’s occupation. In this way, college graduate underemployment (CGU) is the product of a dialectical interplay between higher education institutions and the world of work. A Marxist analysis is utilized here to parse out the nuances of this relation. Marx’s original examination of capitalism illustrates how the forces of capital manipulate labor power as a commodity. Capitalist manipulation, coupled with technological dynamism and automation, gradually appropriate skills from the worker into the larger apparatus of capital. Formerly limited to manufacturing, this formal subsumption has now moved to modes of labor that require a college education, forcing college graduates, across nearly all disciplines, to assume work discordant to their degree. Moreover, with new labor paradigms consisting of disempowered part-time work, CGU will continue to be an obstacle that graduates must navigate, beckoning more critical educational experiences.     

Enacting key skills-based curricula in secondary education: lessons from a technology-mediated,group-based learning initiative

Bridge21 is an innovative approach to learning for secondary education that was originally conceptualised as part of a social outreach intervention in the authors’ third-level institution whereby participants attended workshops at a dedicated learning space on campus focusing on a particular model of technology-mediated group-based learning. This paper analyses the current expansion of the Bridge21 project to mainstream schools against a backdrop of government-led reforms for lower secondary education in Ireland. The key skills central to the proposed reforms aim to make education more relevant to the challenges of twenty-first-century living and, among other goals, to empower students to think critically, communicate effectively and work collaboratively. This paper investigates the viability of the Bridge21 model in facilitating the promotion of a selection of these key skills within the context of two case study schools.     

Diversity in Broadcast Television: An Empirical Study of Local News

The relation between the structure of a market and the diversity of its product offering has been extensively explored by theorists. We develop 2 measures of diversity and explore the content of local news for 60 stations and 20 designated market areas (DMAs) in the United States. Using a relative station-level diversity metric, ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates imply that relative diversity of local news content decreases as market concentration increases. This result is not, however, robust to an instrumental variables specification. Using a total market diversity metric, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (Hirshman, 1964) is significant in OLS and robust to instrumental variable estimation. Because the total market diversity metric is arguably superior to the incremental metric as a measure of overall diversity, this result is useful-it suggests that the total diversity of local news content within a DMA is sensitive to the level of concentration.     

Structural Determinants of Local Public Affairs Place Blogging: Structural Pluralism and Community Stress

This study examines the relationship between community-level characteristics and the presence of public affairs place blogs in 232 U.S. cities. Two models to predict the presence of these sites are tested: a structural pluralism model, which suggests that the presence of one of these sites reflects more pluralistic voices, and a community stress model, which suggests that the presence of these sites reflects citizens’ efforts to cope with community problems. Analysis of demographic and crime data using logistic regression suggests that the community stress model is the stronger predictor. Public affairs place blogs are more likely in cities with higher murder rates, poverty rates, more physical decay, and more residents with professional occupations. It is these residents—with more education and income, living on the periphery of the most affected urban neighborhoods—who are most likely to go online to write about obtrusive community problems.     

The 2008 Presidential Campaign: Political Cynicism in the Age of Facebook,MySpace, and YouTube

Considerable research over the years has been devoted to ascertaining the impact of media use on political cynicism. The impact of the Internet has been difficult to assess because it is not a single monolithic medium. For example, the 2008 presidential campaign was the first presidential campaign in which popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube were widely available to voters. Therefore, the campaign offered the first opportunity to explore the influence of these social media on political cynicism. In this study, we examined whether the use of such social media influenced political cynicism. We also considered the influence of user background characteristics (e.g., self-efficacy, locus of control, political orientation, demographics, and influence of family and friends), motives for using social media for political information, and users’ elaboration on political content. Several individual differences were stronger predictors of political cynicism than was social media use. In fact, social networking use was a negative predictor of political cynicism. Results supported uses and gratifications’ notions that the influence of social media on political cynicism is more attributable to user background and media-use differences than to sheer use of these popular sites.     

Exceptional Research or Why Harry Truman Sought a One-Handed Economist

This article challenges the traditional illustration of the relations between circulation size and advertising rates used by educators. It does so by using a sample of newspapers and explores various regression trendlines and data display of the data obtained from the sample. I find that the relations are best explained by curvilinear rather than linear trendlines and suggest an improved illustration of the relations between advertising price and newspaper circulation.     

Reading-Related Skills in Earlier- and Later-Schooled Children

We investigate the effects of age-related factors and formal instruction on the development of reading-related skills in children aged 4 and 7 years. Age effects were determined by comparing two groups of children at the onset of formal schooling; one aged 7 (later-schooled) and one aged 4 (earlier-schooled). Schooling effects were measured by comparing the later-schooled group with earlier-schooled age-matched controls. There were significant effects of age and schooling on phonological awareness and visual–verbal learning, and an effect of age, but not schooling, on vocabulary and short-term verbal memory. We conclude that age-related factors and reading instruction contribute to the development of phoneme awareness and that vocabulary and verbal memory improve with age.     

Authenticating Mäori Physicality: Translations of ‘Games’ and ‘Pastimes’ by Early Travellers and Missionaries to New Zealand

This paper theorizes how knowledge of indigenous tribal epistemologies was made ‘knowable’ through Enlightenment rationalism in an early colonial context. Specifically, the paper determines how and what knowledge of Mäori tribal physical activities was interpreted and authenticated through early travellers' tales and missionaries’ accounts in New Zealand. The central thesis argues that what was established as authentic and truthful aligned with Enlightenment rationalism, while those Mäori physical practices incomprehensible to Western understandings were deemed inauthentic and, consequently, were obscured and/or discarded. Throughout, the article theorizes the translation of knowledge into meaningful Western discourses and how these translations came to be crystallized in the colonial imagination.     

Field tested milliliter-scale blood filtration device for point-of-care applications

In this paper, we present a low cost and equipment-free blood filtration device capable of producing plasma from blood samples with mL-scale capacity and demonstrate its clinical application for hepatitis B diagnosis. We report the results of in-field testing of the device with 0.8–1 ml of undiluted, anticoagulated human whole blood samples from patients at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, Vietnam. Blood cell counts demonstrate that the device is capable of filtering out 99.9% of red and 96.9% of white blood cells, and the plasma collected from the device contains lower red blood cell counts than plasma obtained from a centrifuge. Biochemistry and immunology testing establish the suitability of the device as a sample preparation unit for testing alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), urea, hepatitis B “e” antigen (HBeAg), hepatitis B “e” antibody (HBe Ab), and hepatitis B surface antibody (HBs Ab). The device provides a simple and practical front-end sample processing method for point-of-care microfluidic diagnostics, enabling sufficient volumes for multiplexed downstream tests.     

The force–time profile of elite front crawl swimmers

Abstract

In this study, we used recently developed technology to determine the force–time profile of elite swimmers, which enabled coaches to make informed decisions on technique modifications. Eight elite male swimmers with a FINA (Federation Internationale de Natation) rank of 900+ completed five passive (streamline tow) and five net force (arms and leg swimming) trials. Three 50-Hz cameras were used to video each trial and were synchronized to the kinetic data output from a force-platform, upon which a motorized towing device was mounted. Passive and net force trials were completed at the participant's maximal front crawl swimming velocity. For the constant tow velocity, the net force profile was presented as a force–time graph, and the limitation of a constant velocity assumption was acknowledged. This allowed minimum and maximum net forces and arm symmetry to be identified. At a mean velocity of 1.92 ± 0.06 m · s^?1, the mean passive drag for the swimmers was 80.3 ± 4.0 N, and the mean net force was 262.4 ± 33.4 N. The mean location in the stroke cycle for minimum and maximum net force production was at 45% (insweep phase) and 75% (upsweep phase) of the stroke, respectively. This force–time profile also identified any stroke asymmetry.