A note on the temporal sure preference principle and the updating of lower previsions.

This paper reviews the temporal sure preference principle as a basis for inference over time. We reformulate the principle in terms of desirability, and explore its implications for lower previsions. We report some initial results. We also discuss some of the technical difficulties encountered

Protecting employment in the time of coronavirus: What is the EU’s €100 billion going to buy? CEPS Policy Insights No 2020-08 / April 2020

This paper briefly analyses the proposal by the European Commission to establish SURE, the ‘European instrument for temporary support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency’. The SURE facility would borrow up to €100 billion on the financial markets, lend it to member states to finance short-time work schemes and similar measures, using guarantees from the member states themselves. The analysis makes the point that the scheme should be seen, first and foremost, as a proof of European solidarity to counter hostile propaganda from Russia and China about the EU’s ineffectiveness. It can also have an impact on national policies to deal with the coronavirus and to assist the most damaged and/or fiscally weak member states, but this effect is likely to be limited. Potentially, the most important feature of SURE is that it explicitly refers to itself as the forerunner of a future European Unemployment insurance scheme

On almost sure stability of hybrid stochastic systems with mode-dependent interval delays

This note develops a criterion for almost sure stability of hybrid stochastic systems with mode-dependent interval time delays, which improves an existing result by exploiting the relation between the bounds of the time delays and the generator of the continuous-time Markov chain. The improved result shows that the presence of Markovian switching is quite involved in the stability analysis of delay systems. Numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness

September 1966

Dear Brother: I am sure you have not noticed it, but it has been a long time since I sent these yellow sheets your way. There were many reasons for the long silence: heat, work, riots, strikes and many other things. But these yellow sheets have outlasted all these matters. So here, with a special salute to the brother who was elected a full-time District executive this summer, is another wayward footnote to Church history in our time

Complexity for extended dynamical systems

We consider dynamical systems for which the spatial extension plays an important role. For these systems, the notions of attractor, epsilon-entropy and topological entropy per unit time and volume have been introduced previously. In this paper we use the notion of Kolmogorov complexity to introduce, for extended dynamical systems, a notion of complexity per unit time and volume which plays the same role as the metric entropy for classical dynamical systems. We introduce this notion as an almost sure limit on orbits of the system. Moreover we prove a kind of variational principle for this complexity.Comment: 29 page

Branching Brownian Motion with catalytic branching at the origin

We consider a branching Brownian motion in which binary fission takes place only when particles are at the origin at a rate \beta > 0 on the local time scale. We obtain results regarding the asymptotic behaviour of the number of particles above \lambda t at time t, for \lambda > 0. As a corollary, we establish the almost sure asymptotic speed of the rightmost particle. We also prove a Strong Law of Large Numbers for this catalytic branching Brownian motion.Comment: 25 page

The quality of group childcare settings used by 3-4 year old children in Sure Start local programme areas and the relationship with child outcomes (Research report DFE-RR068)

"Influenced by research indicating long-term benefits of early childhood programmes for disadvantaged children, the Government of the time set up Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) from 1998 to reduce child poverty and social exclusion. By 2004, 524 SSLPs targeted families with children 0-4 years of age in the 20% most deprived communities. In 2005 it was decided to develop SSLPs further by turning them into children’s centres and roll out the programme nationally, ensuring that comprehensive early education and family support services are available for every community. The National Evaluation of Sure Start has been undertaking research relevant to the development of SSLPs since 2001. This part of the study focuses on 150 SSLP areas from the first four rounds of SSLPs, which are all in deprived areas." - Page iii

Contact arrangements for children: a call for views

The Government thinks that it is time to review practice and the law relating to contact to make sure that arrangements are always driven by a thorough assessment of what is in the child’s best interests. This paper is a call for views. It considers the evidence from research and feedback from foster carers, children in care, adopted children and adoptive parents