School uniform and other costs of schooling: views and experiences in Wales (technical report & final report)

"The overall aim of the research was... to explore the views of parents/carers and young people in Wales on the validity, usefulness and benefits of having school uniforms and their experiences and views on the cost and availability of buying uniforms, and to explore how the wider costs of schooling impacts on children, families and schools." - research aims & objectives

Social disparities in heart disease risk and survivor bias among autoworkers: an examination based on survival models and g-estimation.

ObjectivesTo examine gender and racial disparities in ischaemic heart disease (IHD) mortality related to metalworking fluid exposures and in the healthy worker survivor effect.MethodsA cohort of white and black men and women autoworkers in the USA was followed from 1941 to 1995 with quantitative exposure to respirable particulate matter from water-based metalworking fluids. Separate analyses used proportional hazards models and g-estimation.ResultsThe HR for IHD among black men was 3.29 (95% CI 1.49 to 7.31) in the highest category of cumulative synthetic fluid exposure. The HR for IHD among white women exposed to soluble fluid reached 2.44 (95% CI 0.96 to 6.22). However, no increased risk was observed among white men until we corrected for the healthy worker survivor effect. Results from g-estimation indicate that if white male cases exposed to soluble or synthetic fluid had been unexposed to that fluid type, then 1.59 and 1.20 years of life would have been saved on average, respectively.ConclusionsWe leveraged the strengths of two different analytic approaches to examine the IHD risks of metalworking fluids. All workers may have the same aetiological risk; however, black and female workers may experience more IHD from water-based metalworking fluid exposure because of a steeper exposure-response or weaker healthy worker survivor effect

On the Minimum Distance of Generalized Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes

Families of generalized spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (GSC-LDPC) code ensembles can be formed by terminating protograph-based generalized LDPC convolutional (GLDPCC) codes. It has previously been shown that ensembles of GSC-LDPC codes constructed from a protograph have better iterative decoding thresholds than their block code counterparts, and that, for large termination lengths, their thresholds coincide with the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) decoding threshold of the underlying generalized LDPC block code ensemble. Here we show that, in addition to their excellent iterative decoding thresholds, ensembles of GSC-LDPC codes are asymptotically good and have large minimum distance growth rates.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 201

Inclusion and Equity Committee Diverse Recruitment Task Force 3 “Qualitative/Community-Specific Data Gathering”

The Diverse Recruitment Task Force 3 was charged to “focus on a qualitative environmental scan of UNLV University Libraries’ current hiring practices” with the goal of understanding the staff perceptions of current cultural climate and recommending potential areas of focus for future changes. Task Force 3 initially planned a formal qualitative research project with IRB approval around interviewing Libraries’ staff on their experiences with the hiring process. However, this was changed to an informal town hall-style information sharing meeting after reviewing the timeline. Two meetings were held: one on November 19th, 2019 which focused on attendees’ reflections and experiences with the hiring process, and one on December 9th, 2019 which focused on attendees’ feedback on the recommendations of the other two task forces. Both meetings were approximately an hour long with about 20 attendees broken into four or five small groups at each meeting; a five minute recap of the Diverse Recruitment project was provided at the beginning with the rest of the time devoted to discussion. Notes were taken by task force members and then grouped by topic. See appendix for pre-prepared questions for each meeting

Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes Constructed from Protographs

In this paper, we construct protograph-based spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes by coupling together a series of L disjoint, or uncoupled, LDPC code Tanner graphs into a single coupled chain. By varying L, we obtain a flexible family of code ensembles with varying rates and frame lengths that can share the same encoding and decoding architecture for arbitrary L. We demonstrate that the resulting codes combine the best features of optimized irregular and regular codes in one design: capacity approaching iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding thresholds and linear growth of minimum distance with block length. In particular, we show that, for sufficiently large L, the BP thresholds on both the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGNC) saturate to a particular value significantly better than the BP decoding threshold and numerically indistinguishable from the optimal maximum a-posteriori (MAP) decoding threshold of the uncoupled LDPC code. When all variable nodes in the coupled chain have degree greater than two, asymptotically the error probability converges at least doubly exponentially with decoding iterations and we obtain sequences of asymptotically good LDPC codes with fast convergence rates and BP thresholds close to the Shannon limit. Further, the gap to capacity decreases as the density of the graph increases, opening up a new way to construct capacity achieving codes on memoryless binary-input symmetric-output (MBS) channels with low-complexity BP decoding.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor