Sometimes a bunny is just a bunny: The Playboy brand and sexualisation of children. In recent years the Playboy brand has come to represent what has been emotively called the 'sexualisation of childhood' or even 'corporate paedophilia'. These terms put a particularly gloomy spin on the fact that children are becoming consumers in their own right, suggesting that they are being 'prematurely sexualised' by the 'inappropriate' sexual connotations of the products they, or their parents, are buying (of course we're really talking about girls and mothers here, since the debate is highly gendered).Want to know more about childhood?
There's an OU course on that...12 Campaigners and even some researchers go on to blame these goods for a mind-boggling range of social ills, from lack of self-esteem to bodily dissatisfaction to low academic attainment, and (in what seems a worrying logic of blaming the victim) for placing girls at risk from adult sexual predators. However, the research team (of which I was a member) quickly realized the difficulties of doing any such thing. Who counts as a refugee? Dark matter, dark energy and the sound of the Big Bang. Creative commons image Credit: By Gnixon [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons 9 An artist's concept illustrating the expansion of a portion of a flat universe. How loud was the Big Bang? It turns out, not that loud at all. In decibels, it’s a bit less than 120db. Motörhead concerts are louder than the Big Bang. OK, the sound had wavelengths of hundreds of thousands of light years, so the notes are much too low to be audible, but it’s still 120db.
But if you transpose the pitch up 50 or so octaves, what did it sound like? Imagine that when you were born, your excited parents sent a text message. Now imagine it wasn’t your parents, it was their parents, so the news was sent out a maybe 2 or 3 decades earlier. But it turns out there’s a limit. Now imagine a very early time in the history of the Universe. These primordial sound waves left their imprint on the Universe. As the Universe expanded it became transparent. 11, or take a 60-second adventure12.) 13 from Virginia University: Alcohol and human health. Early development. This unit is from our archive and it is an adapted extract from Human Biology and Health (SK220) which is no longer in presentation. If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explore the courses we offer in this curriculum area 40 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip41)] . This unit looks at the human being in the context of an individual life cycle, examining some of the processes that contribute to the formation of a new person.
After a brief discussion of historical ideas about human conception, and about contraception to the present day, we look at the cells involved in the conception and development of a new individual. Gamete production (that is, production of mature cells able to unite with another in sexual reproduction) in both men and women is introduced and the role gametes in fertility and, when things go wrong, infertility is explained. Meiosis and mitosis. Gene testing. What do genes do? Introducing the philosophy of religion. Studying religion. This unit will give you an opportunity to think about some of the key concepts and methods of the discipline of religious studies. You will meet examples of different forms of religious practice and belief, mostly from Britain and India, and will compare the ways in which boundaries are drawn (or not drawn) between what is held to be ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ in two different societies.
The aim of this unit is to explore three key questions: Why study religion? What is religion? The unit begins with a series of video clips on religion in Liverpool. This study unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course A103 An introduction to the Humanities, which is no longer taught by the University. At the end: How do you decide if a patient should be allowed to die? Copyrighted image Credit: Qiqming Zhou 11 | Dreamstime.com 12 Dripping away? A switch on an intravenous drip The case of Mr.
Khan [discussed in an episode of Inside The Ethics Committee13] raises a number of interesting and important issues. Others are more general. Two important questions need to be distinguished in such end of life cases. We can ask, first, does the patient want to stay alive? And second, if he does, will he have a life worth living? In Mr Khan’s case, the answer to neither question is straightforward. Suppose that someone both wants to live and, with the right treatment, has good prospects of recovery. It may seem clear that it is. Given costs and, limited resources, it may be that some judgement needs to be made about just which patients get the highest priority, or first place in the queue.
Suppose, in contrast, the patient both wants to die and, if she doesn’t die, will have a life that is not worth living. This leaves two less straightforward positions to consider.