Teachers and student achievement in the Chicago public high schools

We match administrative data on Chicago public high school students and teachers at the classroom level to estimate the importance of teachers to mathematics test score gains. We show that sampling variation and other measurement issues are important drivers of naïve estimates of teacher effects, in some cases accounting for the majority of dispersion in teacher quality. However, correcting for these problems, teachers are still economically and statistically influential. Replacing a teacher with another that is rated two standard deviations superior in quality can add 0.35 to 0.45 grade equivalents, or 30 to 40 percent of an average school year, to a student's math score performance. Furthermore, the teacher quality ratings are relatively stable within an individual instructor over time and reasonably consistent across most student types, with the notable exception of the lowest achieving students, where the same two standard deviation improvement in teacher quality adds only 0.20 grade equivalents. Finally, we relate our measured teacher effects to observable characteristics of the instructors and show that the vast majority is unexplained by standard observable characteristics of teachers, including those that are typically used for compensation purposesAchievement tests - Illinois ; Education

The sensitivity to oscillation parameters from a simultaneous beam and atmospheric neutrino analysis that combines the T2K and SK experiments

A simultaneous beam and atmospheric oscillation analysis that combines the T2K and SK experiments has been presented. The first sensitivities of the joint analysis are reported, with the intention for the two collaborations to publish a data analysis in the near-future. This analysis leverages the different energies and baselines of the two experiments and provides strong sensitivities on δCP, sin2(θ23) and ∆m232. To do this, a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique is utilised to generate parameter estimates and credible intervals. Constraints from the T2K near detector are also used to constrain the uncertainties of both beam and atmospheric predictions. For a known set of oscillation parameters close to the preferred values from a T2K-only data fit, the sensitivity of the joint analysis to sin2(θ23) is increased compared to the beam-only analysis, illustrated by a 7% reduction in the width of the 1σ credible interval. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the joint analysis to select the correct mass hierarchy hypothesis is drastically improved compared to the beam-only analysis, culminating in a substantial preference as classified by Jeffrey’s scale. This statement is stronger than the sensitivity of the beam-only analysis, either with or without external constraints on sin2(θ13). The sensitivities of the beam-only and joint beam-atmospheric analyses have also been compared for a known set of oscillation parameters which are CP-conserving. The joint analysis displays an improved ability to select the correct phase of δCP and octant of sin2(θ23) compared to the beam-only analysis. This thesis illustrates the benefit of the combined beam and atmospheric analysis, which could also be extended for use in the next-generation Hyper-Kamiokande experiment

Pro Bono Develops Pericles and Plumbers: The roles of clinical legal education in contemporary European law schools

Legal education is often thought of as divided between the ‘clinical’/‘functional’/‘vocational’ and the ‘liberal’/‘holistic’, or even ‘formalist’/‘positivist’. Drawing on original data from students participating in pro bono work in a fairly typical European law clinic, we show that students do not appear to think such distinctions are particularly significant to their university learning journeys or their future career aspirations. Such distinctions may make sense at an institutional level, but at the level of an individual student and their learning experience, clinical/functional/vocational elements are not perceived as distinct from curricular learning in a liberal/holistic or even formalist/positivist mode

Don Delillo's Point Omega: Mediated Vision and the Novel After the Subject

Given 23/2/2016 at London Conference of Critical Thought 201

Clipart Pastoral: Image and the Labour of Lyric Selfhood in Contemporary British Poetry

Given on 7/5/2015 at The Place For Poetr

Buffer Zones: Visuality and the Time of Networks in Tom McCarthy's Satin Island

Given on 6/3/2016 at Birkbeck English and Humanities' Work In Progress conferenc

10:04: Everyday Life and the Novel as Late Capitalist Limit-Form

Given on 23/11/2016 at Historical Materialism conference 201

Enhanced Multi-Qubit Phase Estimation in Noisy Environments by Local Encoding

The first generation of multi-qubit quantum technologies will consist of noisy, intermediate-scale devices for which active error correction remains out of reach. To exploit such devices, it is thus imperative to use passive error protection that meets a careful trade-off between noise protection and resource overhead. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that single-qubit encoding can significantly enhance the robustness of entanglement and coherence of four-qubit graph states against local noise with a preferred direction. In particular, we explicitly show that local encoding provides a significant practical advantage for phase estimation in noisy environments. This demonstrates the efficacy of local unitary encoding under realistic conditions, with potential applications in multi-qubit quantum technologies for metrology, multi-partite secrecy and error correction.Comment: 7 figure

Non-Trivial Vacua in Higher-Derivative Gravitation

A discussion of an extended class of higher-derivative classical theories of gravity is presented. A procedure is given for exhibiting the new propagating degrees of freedom, at the full non-linear level, by transforming the higher-derivative action to a canonical second-order form. For general fourth-order theories, described by actions which are general functions of the scalar curvature, the Ricci tensor and the full Riemann tensor, it is shown that the higher-derivative theories may have multiple stable vacua. The vacua are shown to be, in general, non-trivial, corresponding to deSitter or anti-deSitter solutions of the original theory. It is also shown that around any vacuum the elementary excitations remain the massless graviton, a massive scalar field and a massive ghost-like spin-two field. The analysis is extended to actions which are arbitrary functions of terms of the form $\nabla^{2k}R$, and it is shown that such theories also have a non-trivial vacuum structure.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX2e with AMS-LaTeX 1.2, 7 eps figure