Learning to Serve? Employment aspirations and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring

Economic restructuring in cities in advanced industrial nations has, perhaps for the first time in more than a century, resulted in young working-class people facing poorer economic prospects than their parents did at the same age. For poorly educated and low-skilled young men, in particular, the decline in urban manufacturing employment means that their employment opportunities are limited and the possibilities of gaining and retaining relatively well-paid work have declined in the final decades of the twentieth century. As the socially-valued attributes of masculinity are so dependent upon economic participation, the loss of work for men is seen by many commentators as a crisis, and it has undoubtedly led to increases in poverty, as well as being associated with rises in suicide rates, especially among younger men. In this article, the author explores the ways in which young men on the verge of entering the labour market think about themselves and their employment opportunities. The article is based on interviews with low-achieving young men in Cambridge and Sheffield who were in the final year of compulsory schooling and beginning to think about their working lives.     

Design thinking for city dashboard development: Recommendations from a study of smart asset management in Sydney,Australia

The city dashboard has become an integral component of smart city asset management systems. It leverages data collected from multiple sources to monitor performance and enable evidence-based decision making. This article investigates the use of a design thinking framework to develop a functional and easy to understand city dashboard. The Smart Social Spaces project is used as a case study to illustrate how design thinking can be employed to develop an asset management dashboard, enabling efficient management of public space and infrastructure. The article profiles the unique collaboration between a local government, a multi-disciplinary team of university academics, and a street furniture designer and manufacturer, all located in Sydney, Australia. We unpack some of the design practice nuances that led this project to receive national awards and international recognition, and most importantly, created a user-friendly system to track and maintain public micro assets. We conclude with lessons learnt and recommendations for dashboard development through a design thinking process.     

Plant microfossils in human dental calculus from Nemrik 9, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Northern Iraq

Samples of dental calculus were taken from 11 human individuals buried at Nemrik 9, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Northern Iraq. All of them represented the time span of ca. 9100–8600 bp. In total, 95 microfossils were retrieved from these samples, including 70 phytoliths, 9 starch granules or clusters of starch, 3 pollens, and 1 xylem fragment. Most microfossils could be attributed to C₃ cool season cereals, most likely wheat and barley, which is consistent with previous knowledge about the composition of crops in early farming communities living in the Fertile Crescent. In addition, three phytoliths and one starch granule typical of C₄ warm season grasses were recovered including one subangular and faceted starch granule, which might derive from a native grass, but is not diagnostic of any genus. Prior to assigning diagnostic status to this starch, exhaustive reference work on native grass seeds is necessary. The presence of one Phragmites phytolith suggests non-alimentary processing of reeds using teeth or perhaps using the stem of this grass as a toothbrush or toothpick.