COURSEWORK 2 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

COURSEWORK 2 - Assignment Example Owner-occupied housing includes property that is owned by private entities and have those private owners as the occupiers of the housing. Of the total number of households in the United Kingdom in the year 2010, about 17.8 million were households that were properties occupied by their owners, the biggest slice of the pie in comparison to privately rented households, households rented by the local authorities, and the households that are managed by the housing associations. The rise in owner-occupied housing is reflected in the fact that those figures for this categories represent about 65.5 percent of all households in the UK, up from about 70 percent in the initial part of the current century. This figure represents an elevation from the average percentage of owner-occupied housing for all of the European Union. These figures are reflected in the chart below (Economics Online 2013). Graph Source: Economics Online 2013 On the other hand we get a glimpse of the total picture of the ho using market in the UK at present from several proxy indicators of health, including for instance the affordability of housing relative to the income or earnings of UK workers. This latter figure is a representation of the potential demand for housing, where for instance higher ratios of house prices to worker earnings translate to lower affordability owing to the reduced capacity of workers to purchase homes, and therefore lowered demand, and lowered ratios conversely translating to higher demand owing to the increased capacity of workers to purchase houses, all other things being equal. Of course in reality there are other factors that impinge on the ability of workers to purchase houses, such as the availability and affordability of credit to finance the housing purchases. That said, and more into that later, the following is a chart of the house prices to worker earnings ratios in the United Kingdom from 2002 to 2012 (Riley 2012): Graph Source: Riley 2012 In the plot above, we s ee that the prices to earnings ratios for property in the UK spiked from 2005 to its peak towards the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, before sharply declining from that point to 2009, where prices to earnings have been in the doldrums. On the one hand we see that the ratios should indicate a higher uptick in ownership from the lowered ratios, but we also get from the literature that the financial crisis in 2007 and the continued weakness in the UK economy from that time all the way to the present has generally resulted in a subdued interest in housing purchases in the country. Those two factors together has kept access to credit difficult, for one, while a generally depressed economy has affected consumer sentiment negatively (Riley 2013; Thomson and Bryan-Low 2013; BBC 2013; Ranscombe 2013). Graph Source: BBC News Following up on the last line of though, in the plot above, we see that the economy has not been doing well as of the past several years, contracting for five stra ight quarters on the tail of the severe financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and barely avoiding a triple-dip recession in the most recent quarter. This general state of affairs has a heavy bearing on the supply and demand dynamics for owner-occupied property in the United Kingdom, as this paper will demonstrate in greater detail. Taking a step back, we see

Cultural Post-Modernism and the Machine Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Cultural Post-Modernism and the Machine - Essay Example The essay "Cultural Post-Modernism and the Machine" discovers Michael Bay’s "Transformers". The film ties its themes to heroism, the sub plots involving U.S. Marines as well as covert divisions of the government. The film Transformers is a post-modern study of culture as it explores the nature of good and evil as well as the consumer culture as it is oriented towards the encoded objects for the male gender. The film Transformers has within it the construction those things that are most often associated with the male cultural dream of perfection: oversized machines that are heroic, sentient, and vehicular. Cars are gender coded, the appeal of the car traditionally a high priority for men with women not having the same kind of relationship with their vehicles . Where cars are concerned, men have wished to personify them since they were invented, naming them after women, giving them personalities, and creating a sense of identity through the formulation of the body as combined wi th the ‘heart’ or engine. In a variety of film projects such as the Disney film The Love Bug, the television show Knight Rider, the film Christine, and even to an extent, the television film Duel directed by Stephen Spielberg, the idea of giving a vehicle sentience and a personality has been used to give life to the post-modern symbol of male virility. The film gives reverence to this concept through everything from the emotional musical score to the intensity and wisdom filled authority of the voice of Optimus Prime. The vehicle is a cultural symbol of virility for the male. The post-modern world is one of consumerism and is about the shift from the domestic world to the public world where displays of consumer power has replaced other forms of displays of virility. The power to control the machine, to own it and to have dominion over it has become the center of mating practices, conflicts for domination within the male gender, and for expressing male gendered control o ver the environment. Men no longer pick up a sword and go into combat style displays of strength. Post-modern expressions of male domination can involve the economic power to hold and control the strongest, most dangerous looking car on the block (Griffens & Carnes, 1990). While the explicit male domination of the automobile has ended as women now equally own cars, the idea of the car as the male extension of virility still exists. This can be seen as little boys play with cars and are more often attracted to play that involves trucks and cars. One of the more interesting scenes in the film involves a cultural connection to past films, all relating to a specific look as it is associated with heroism. The car is chastised by Megan Fox’s character for choosing to wear the exterior of a crappy old Chevy Camero, which appears to have insulted the ‘Autobot’ (the name for the transforming alien). The car then throws her and her co-star, Shia Lebouf out of the car so th at it can drive a bit away to the rising sound of music that is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’