Micro-Level Determinants of Lecture Attendance and Additional Study-Hours

This paper uses novel measures of individual differences that produce new insights about student inputs into the (higher) education production function. The inputs examined are lecture attendance and additional study-hours. The data were collected through a web-survey that the authors designed. The analysis includes the following measures: willingness to take risks, consideration of future consequences and non-cognitive ability traits. Besides age, gender and year of study, the main determinants of lecture attendance and additional study-hours are attitude to risk, future-orientation and conscientiousness. In addition, future-orientation, and in particular conscientiousness, determine lecture attendance to a greater extent than they determine additional study. Finally, we show that family income and financial transfers (from both parents and the state) do not determine any educational input. This study suggests that non-cognitive abilities may be more important than financial constraints in the determination of inputs related to educational production functions.higher education, education inputs, lecture attendance, hours of study, future-orientation, attitude to risk, non-cognitive ability, conscientiousness

Vertex corrections in localized and extended systems

Within many-body perturbation theory we apply vertex corrections to various closed-shell atoms and to jellium, using a local approximation for the vertex consistent with starting the many-body perturbation theory from a DFT-LDA Green's function. The vertex appears in two places -- in the screened Coulomb interaction, W, and in the self-energy, \Sigma -- and we obtain a systematic discrimination of these two effects by turning the vertex in \Sigma on and off. We also make comparisons to standard GW results within the usual random-phase approximation (RPA), which omits the vertex from both. When a vertex is included for closed-shell atoms, both ground-state and excited-state properties demonstrate only limited improvements over standard GW. For jellium we observe marked improvement in the quasiparticle band width when the vertex is included only in W, whereas turning on the vertex in \Sigma leads to an unphysical quasiparticle dispersion and work function. A simple analysis suggests why implementation of the vertex only in W is a valid way to improve quasiparticle energy calculations, while the vertex in \Sigma is unphysical, and points the way to development of improved vertices for ab initio electronic structure calculations.Comment: 8 Pages, 6 Figures. Updated with quasiparticle neon results, extended conclusions and references section. Minor changes: Updated references, minor improvement

The Case of the Frequent Flyer Fraudster

This case, based on a real fraud, engages students in a fraud investigation learning activity with a focus on interrogation. Students analyze an interrogation, identify and discuss verbal and nonverbal cues to deception, discuss legal ramifications of conducting fraud examinations, and develop recommendations to improve internal controls. The intended audience is a fraud examination course

Executive Briefing: Winning with ICT, Competing on Competency – an IT Capability Maturity Approach

Information Technology (IT) is emerging as one of the most dominant forces that are changing business, and indeed society, today. Increasingly, we are seeing the collision of Moore’s law with all types of business to produce great entrepreneurial and business opportunities. Although technology, driven by Moore’s law, is advancing at a very fast rate, the management practices used to manage and apply IT appear to be lagging significantly. Despite Nicholas Carr’s assertion that “IT doesn’t matter” many firms are increasingly using IT to create and sustain competitive advantage. However the challenges of technology complexity, demand growth, security, budget and many others make the use and conversion of technology into value unpredictable and risky. The IT profession is in a catch 22 scenario at present. IT departments are underperforming and company management is unwilling to fund IT: in fact less funding is the dominant strategy these days. CEOs invest in those areas of the business that contribute to the core objectives of the business, typically looking for growth and margin, or new successful products and services. IT departments consume so much of their available resources to just maintain current performance levels (and do not always succeed in even achieving this), that there is little capacity for investing in innovation. This situation can continue to be a constantly downward spiral, unless IT can move from a reactive to proactive posture

Trial wave functions for High-Pressure Metallic Hydrogen

Many body trial wave functions are the key ingredient for accurate Quantum Monte Carlo estimates of total electronic energies in many electron systems. In the Coupled Electron-Ion Monte Carlo method, the accuracy of the trial function must be conjugated with the efficiency of its evaluation. We report recent progress in trial wave functions for metallic hydrogen implemented in the Coupled Electron-Ion Monte Carlo method. We describe and characterize several types of trial functions of increasing complexity in the range of the coupling parameter $1.0 \leq r_s \leq1.55$. We report wave function comparisons for disordered protonic configurations and preliminary results for thermal averages.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Computer Physics Communication