Impact of California's Transitional Kindergarten Program, 2013-14

Transitional kindergarten (TK)—the first year of a two-year kindergarten program for California children who turn 5 between September 2 and December 2—is intended to better prepare young five-year-olds for kindergarten and ensure a strong start to their educational career. To determine whether this goal is being achieved, American Institutes for Research (AIR) is conducting an evaluation of the impact of TK in California. The goal of this study is to measure the success of the program by determining the impact of TK on students' readiness for kindergarten in several areas. Using a rigorous regression discontinuity (RD) research design,1 we compared language, literacy, mathematics, executive function, and social-emotional skills at kindergarten entry for students who attended TK and for students who did not attend TK. Overall, we found that TK had a positive impact on students' kindergarten readiness in several domains, controlling for students' age differences. These effects are over and above the experiences children in the comparison group had the year before kindergarten, which for more than 80 percent was some type of preschool program

Knowledge discovery for friction stir welding via data driven approaches: Part 2 – multiobjective modelling using fuzzy rule based systems

In this final part of this extensive study, a new systematic data-driven fuzzy modelling approach has been developed, taking into account both the modelling accuracy and its interpretability (transparency) as attributes. For the first time, a data-driven modelling framework has been proposed designed and implemented in order to model the intricate FSW behaviours relating to AA5083 aluminium alloy, consisting of the grain size, mechanical properties, as well as internal process properties. As a result, ‘Pareto-optimal’ predictive models have been successfully elicited which, through validations on real data for the aluminium alloy AA5083, have been shown to be accurate, transparent and generic despite the conservative number of data points used for model training and testing. Compared with analytically based methods, the proposed data-driven modelling approach provides a more effective way to construct prediction models for FSW when there is an apparent lack of fundamental process knowledge

Fuzzy Jets

Collimated streams of particles produced in high energy physics experiments are organized using clustering algorithms to form jets. To construct jets, the experimental collaborations based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) primarily use agglomerative hierarchical clustering schemes known as sequential recombination. We propose a new class of algorithms for clustering jets that use infrared and collinear safe mixture models. These new algorithms, known as fuzzy jets, are clustered using maximum likelihood techniques and can dynamically determine various properties of jets like their size. We show that the fuzzy jet size adds additional information to conventional jet tagging variables. Furthermore, we study the impact of pileup and show that with some slight modifications to the algorithm, fuzzy jets can be stable up to high pileup interaction multiplicities

The effect of compulsory schooling on health - evidence from biomarkers

Using data from the Health Survey for England and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we estimate the causal effect of schooling on health. Identification comes from two nation wide increases in British compulsory school leaving age in 1947 and 1973, respectively. Our study complements earlier studies exploiting compulsory schooling laws as source of exogenous variation in schooling by using biomarkers as measures of health outcomes in addition to self-reported measures. We find a strong positive correlation between education and health, both self-rated and measured by blood fibrinogen and C-reactive protein levels. However, we find ambiguous causal effects of schooling on women's self-rated health and insignificant causal effects of schooling on men's self-rated health and biomarker levels in both sexes.Health, Compulsory schooling, Biomarkers, Regression discontinuity

The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Health - Evidence from Biomarkers

Using data from the Health Survey for England and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we estimate the causal effect of schooling on health. Identification comes from two nation wide increases in British compulsory school leaving age in 1947 and 1973, respectively. Our study complements earlier studies exploiting compulsory schooling laws as source of exogenous variation in schooling by using biomarkers as measures of health outcomes in addition to self-reported measures. We find a strong positive correlation between education and health, both self-rated and measured by blood fibrinogen and C-reactive protein levels. However, we find ambiguous causal effects of schooling on women's self-rated health and insignificant causal effects of schooling on men's self-rated health and biomarker levels in both sexes.health, compulsory schooling, biomarkers, regression discontinuity