Standards in English education: An enduring historical issue

This article is available open access from the publisher’s website at the link below.This article closely examines the development of education in England, taking special account of educational standards — of the official measurable kind, but also the perceived kind — in the various sectors of education. It argues that, today, and in the past, the ‘problems’ associated with education standards mostly relate to a ‘long tail’ of underperforming schools serving urban areas and attended by relatively underprivileged children. At the other end of the scale, it is suggested that England’s leading schools, both in the public and private sectors, remain the subject of admiration. The same remains true of England’s leading, and typically oldest, universities, which occupy a more privileged position than institutions chartered in the relatively recent past. The article presents a story of persistent unequal educational opportunities over time, which, worryingly, does not seem to be improving in the second decade of the twenty-first century

Are food exposures obtained through commercial market panels representative of the general population? Implications for outbreak investigations

Current methods of control recruitment for case-control studies can be slow (a particular issue for outbreak investigations), resource-intensive and subject to a range of biases. Commercial market panels are a potential source of rapidly recruited controls. Our study evaluated food exposure data from these panel controls, compared with an established reference dataset. Market panel data were collected from two companies using retrospective internet-based surveys; these were compared with reference data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS). We used logistic regression to calculate adjusted odds ratios to compare exposure to each of the 71 food items between the market panel and NDNS participants. We compared 2103 panel controls with 2696 reference participants. Adjusted for socio-demographic factors, exposure to 90% of foods was statistically different between both panels and the reference data. However, these differences were likely to be of limited practical importance for 89% of Panel A foods and 79% of Panel B foods. Market panel food exposures were comparable with reference data for common food exposures but more likely to be different for uncommon exposures. This approach should be considered for outbreak investigation, in conjunction with other considerations such as population at risk, timeliness of response and study resources

Dynamically-Coupled Oscillators -- Cooperative Behavior via Dynamical Interaction --

We propose a theoretical framework to study the cooperative behavior of dynamically coupled oscillators (DCOs) that possess dynamical interactions. Then, to understand synchronization phenomena in networks of interneurons which possess inhibitory interactions, we propose a DCO model with dynamics of interactions that tend to cause 180-degree phase lags. Employing an approach developed here, we demonstrate that although our model displays synchronization at high frequencies, it does not exhibit synchronization at low frequencies because this dynamical interaction does not cause a phase lag sufficiently large to cancel the effect of the inhibition. We interpret the disappearance of synchronization in our model with decreasing frequency as describing the breakdown of synchronization in the interneuron network of the CA1 area below the critical frequency of 20 Hz.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Essays on banking IPOs

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on May 21, 2012).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. John HoweVita."July 2011"This dissertation explores the market reaction to analyst coverage initiations and the factors leading to coverage initiations by analysts for newly public banking stocks. I use two cases to investigate the timeliness and reaction to analyst coverage initiations. The first case serves as a means to examine how the difference in the information environment affects analyst coverage using the expiration of the quiet period to judge analyst behavior for banks. The second case allows me to look longitudinally at analyst coverage initiations and examine the factors that influence the time until coverage is initiated and if the market reacts differently to coverage with more elapsed time between the expiration of the quiet period and the first initiation of analyst coverage. For the first case, I find that analyst coverage is initiated for 15 percent of banks at the end of the quiet period and those banks experience five-day aggregate returns of -43 basis points versus 11 basis points for banks without analyst coverage initiations. Contrary to prior research, I find that underpricing is not indicative of analyst coverage. As the number of operational activities for banks increase with legislative changes, analyst coverage increases. For the second case, I find that banks with either high insider ownership after the IPO, lower leverage after the IPO, or larger size tend to have earlier coverage initiations. Banks with stock prices deviating from fundamental value do not have a strong tendency to have rapid analyst coverage following the expiration of the quiet period. However, the evidence suggests that extreme deviation from fundamental value increases the time until analyst coverage is initiated. I find that, while the cumulative aggregate returns for banks when analysts initiate coverage is negative, there is no indication that the market is more informed by the initiation of coverage.Includes bibliographical reference