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This paper reports on a project which aimed to ascertain current and anticipated use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in museums in Wales. The project also traced the primary ICT trends in the museum community worldwide, and listed relevant contemporary policy and project initiatives and funding sources in the UK. The main findings – applications, the resource and other issues, barriers to development, the perceived value of ICT in museum work, and the main project outcomes and recommendations are listed.

Recently at the Westland Helicopters facility at Yeovil Somerset, Rear Admiral Michael F. Simpson RN, Director General Aircraft (Naval), inspected the first production version of the Sea King Mk2 Airborne Early Warning (AEW) helicopter, equipped with the successful THORN EMI Searchwater AEW radar.

Service centers work with customers to ensure that raw materials will be delivered “when needed, as needed,” and processed to the dimensions required.

In this chapter we apply a range of insights drawn from social science studies of hope amidst contexts of illness, and studies of hope emerging from the sociology of emotions, in critically considering social processes of hoping amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. While much of the health sciences literature on hope emphasises positive outcomes in terms of coping and motivation, we also draw upon various perspectives which denote a dark side of hoping, whereby inequalities and injustices are tolerated, or where feeling rules insidiously coordinate collective hopes in ways which serve various political-economic interests. Reflecting this ambivalence across different literatures, our examples and analyses suggest that hoping as a social process is itself inherently conflicted, dissonant and rife with tensions. As we explore the contradictions of hoping amidst a pandemic, the tensions between expectations and desire, tragedy and optimism, aspiring to act and fatalistic acceptance make apparent that emotions of hope can be neither neatly delineated nor disentangled from a ‘messy’ web of related feelings and framings. We extend our emphasis of these blurry, dissonant and messy aspects of hoping through work on ‘tragic optimism’, following Frankl, wherein wider lifeworlds or imaginaries pertaining to deeply embodied and implicit notions of self and a good life are central to maintaining hope amidst heightened vulnerability and uncertainty. We close by laying out a post-formal approach to hope, which methodologically and conceptually focusses on contradictions and dissonance in narratives of hope, whereby living hopefully always involves living awkwardly with these tensions.

Jon Sharp has been appointed as the new managing director of Qualitair Aviation Ltd, London Stanstead Airport, one of three subsidiary companies within the Qualitair Aviation Group.

The length of the working week and the flexibility of working time are two aspects which impact on the international competitiveness of Australian industry. The popular view of the Australian worker is often couched in terms such as “lazy” and “slack”, and the “sickie” appears to have gained a permanent place in Australian vocabulary. Presents evidence, however, which tends to suggest that the lazy “tag” may be somewhat inappropriate. Comparison of the Australian estimates on hours of work with international data obtained from the OECD and the ILO indicates that Australian full‐time workers are working more hours than most other OECD countries. Also, full‐time employees are working considerably longer hours than they did a decade ago. Puts forward four primary reasons for this increase in hours worked by full‐time employees: (1) a substantial increase in the proportion of employees working in excess of 48 hours per week; (2) a decrease in absence rates over the last ten years; (3) a decline in the amount of annual and long service leave taken by full‐time employees; and (4) a significant decrease over the last decade in time lost owing to industrial disputes. Of greater concern is the flexibility of working time. Evidence suggests, for example, that penalty rates of pay and working time restrictions have tended to spread through the award system to an extent that is not healthy for Australian industry. While there has been some relaxation of these rigidities, it is thought that there is considerable scope for further moves in this direction.

This paper presents an overview of what we have learned about the state of academic freedom in the public schools. It includes a rationale for the place of academic freedom in social studies classrooms, a perspective on the court system as recourse for teachers, and a call for action to protect our freedoms by alternative means. Based on a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) presentation by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Fritz Mulhauser, the paper provides a thematic summary of case law and precedent as they stand at present, including speech outside of school, classroom materials and content, classroom discussion, and expression through dress. Finally, the paper offers suggestions of how to exercise academic freedom successfully in the classroom.

An investigation of how secondary history teacher education candidates implemented research-based instructional practices for instruction is described as a model of pre-service teacher preparation for social studies teachers. Cohorts of candidates participated in a five-year project while enrolled in a discipline-specific capstone senior methods course and subsequent student teaching experiences. Candidates were surveyed and interviewed concerning their use of, and feelings about, twelve instructional strategies developed with a focus on authentic history pedagogy. Surveys were administered three times: before the secondary social studies methods course, after the methods course, and after student teaching. A variation on the Concerns-Based Adoption Model was used to measure the levels of use and stages of concern of the candidates. Artifacts of practice, including lesson plans from a model unit plan and actual student teaching, also were analyzed to document use of the strategies. Results indicate an increasingly high level of implementation of and comfort with the strategies, as well as the developmental nature of the process. Implications and recommendations for pre-service activities in history teacher education are presented.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.