Should we subsidise childcare, and if so, how?

The subsidy of childcare for pre-school-age children has moved rapidly up the political agenda in the UK, and government policy has developed considerably in this area. In his 1990 Budget, John Major introduced income tax relief for childcare provided by the employer at the workplace. Since October 1994, certain family credit claimants have been entitled to deduct up to £40 per week of childcare expenditure from their income for the family credit means test, and from April 1997, all parents of four-year-olds will be eligible for an annual £1,100 childcare voucher to be used as full or part payment for childcare services. The Labour Party has also long advocated increased state-funded childcare in the form of nursery education for three- and four-year-olds. It favours local education authorities (LEAs) setting targets for the provision of nursery education and points to certain LEAs that already provide nursery education for 90 per cent of three- and four-year- olds. The Liberal Democrats have promised to increase public education expenditure by £2 billion (7 per cent), with the first priority for this extra money being nursery education services.

A Bayesian space–time model for clustering areal units based on their disease trends

Population-level disease risk across a set of non-overlapping areal units varies in space and time, and a large research literature has developed methodology for identifying clusters of areal units exhibiting elevated risks. However, almost no research has extended the clustering paradigm to identify groups of areal units exhibiting similar temporal disease trends. We present a novel Bayesian hierarchical mixture model for achieving this goal, with inference based on a Metropolis-coupled Markov chain Monte Carlo ((MC) 3 ) algorithm. The effectiveness of the (MC) 3 algorithm compared to a standard Markov chain Monte Carlo implementation is demonstrated in a simulation study, and the methodology is motivated by two important case studies in the United Kingdom. The first concerns the impact on measles susceptibility of the discredited paper linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination to an increased risk of Autism and investigates whether all areas in the Scotland were equally affected. The second concerns respiratory hospitalizations and investigates over a 10 year period which parts of Glasgow have shown increased, decreased, and no change in risk

Globular Clusters in the Sombrero Galaxy (NGC 4594)

The Sombrero galaxy, NGC 4594, contains the most numerous globular cluster system of any nearby spiral. It is an ideal candidate in which to study the globular clusters and contrast them with those in Local Group spirals. Here we present B and I imaging from the CTIO Schmidt telescope which gives a field-of-view of 31' x 31'. Using DAOPHOT we have detected over 400 globular clusters and derived their magnitudes, B--I colors and photometric metallicities. We have attempted to separate our sample into disk and bulge/halo globular cluster populations, based on location in the galaxy. There is some evidence that the disk population is more metal--rich than the bulge/halo globular clusters, however contamination, dust reddening and small number statistics makes this result very tentative. We find that the median metallicity of the bulge/halo globular clusters is [Fe/H] = -0.8. This metallicity is consistent with previous estimates based on smaller samples. It is also similar to the metallicity predicted by the globular cluster metallicity -- galaxy luminosity relation. As with our Galaxy, there is no radial metallicity gradient in the halo globular clusters. This suggests that the spheriodal component of NGC 4594 did not form by a dissipational process.Comment: 7 pages, Latex. To be published in the Astronomical Journal. Full paper available at http://www.ucolick.org/~forbes/home.htm

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Exercise intensity-dependent effects of arm and leg-cycling on cognitive performance

Physiological responses to arm and leg-cycling are different, which may influence psychological and biological mechanisms that influence post-exercise cognitive performance. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of maximal and submaximal (absolute and relative intensity matched) arm and leg-cycling on executive function. Thirteen males (age, 24.7 ± 5.0 years) initially undertook two incremental exercise tests to volitional exhaustion for arm-cycling (82 ± 18 W) and leg-cycling (243 ± 52 W) for the determination of maximal power output. Participants subsequently performed three 20-min constant load exercise trials: (1) arm-cycling at 50% of the ergometer-specific maximal power output (41 ± 9 W), (2) leg-cycling at 50% of the ergometer-specific maximal power output (122 ± 26 W), and (3) leg-cycling at the same absolute power output as the submaximal arm-cycling trial (41 ± 9 W). An executive function task was completed before, immediately after and 15-min after each exercise test. Exhaustive leg-cycling increased reaction time (p 0.05). Improvements in reaction time following arm-cycling were maintained for at least 15-min post exercise (p = 0.008, d = -0.73). Arm and leg-cycling performed at the same relative intensity elicit comparable improvements in cognitive performance. These findings suggest that individuals restricted to arm exercise possess a similar capacity to elicit an exercise-induced cognitive performance benefit

An application of the theory of planned behavior to student retention

Although student integration theory, a sociologically-based model, has been the dominant explanation for student drop-out from colleges for over 40 years, it has received only mixed empirical support in residential colleges and less in non-residential colleges. Psychological theories of active choice and behavior change offer an alternative explanation for drop-out. In research at a non-residential UK university, structural equation modeling was used in two separate studies to compare a model of student dropout based on student integration theory with a psychological model based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB). In the first study (N=633), a model including TPB variables and two key student integration theory variables (academic integration, and social integration) showed good fit to the data, Although all three TPB variables predicted intention to quit, neither of the two student integration theory variables did so. The TPB variables explained over 60% of the variance in student's intention to voluntarily withdraw from college before completing their studies, and intention to withdraw was associated with actual dropout behavior. In the second study (N=180), using alternative measures of student integration theory factors, a model including both student integration theory and TPB variables had acceptable fit, and over 70% of the variance in intention to quit was explained. But only the TPB variables predicted intention to quit significantly. The benefits of adopting a process-based psychological explanation to student retention are discussed

Missing Out: does masters students' preference for surveys produce sub-optimal research outcomes?

Little research has been done on the way Business Masters students carry out research for their dissertations. This exploratory study examined the way data is collected and analysed; it reviewed a small sample of dissertations and found them overwhelmingly skewed towards questionnaires (used by 91% of students) with archival (secondary) sources largely ignored. Further examination of the findings showed that almost half (45%) had poorly analysed data from questionnaires exhibiting problems such as ‘voting on the facts’ and ‘crowdsourcing judgements’. By comparison, more experienced researchers showed a much lower dependence on questionnaires. To investigate causes for this, research methods texts were reviewed and generally found to have little focus on secondary data and often to show a negative attitude towards it. The study concludes that there are issues in the way students gather data and that this can have adverse impacts on quality

Colour, Scepticism and Epistemology

Colours provide a paradigm example of how one can introduce sceptical challenges to our ordinary beliefs about the world. These sceptical challenges come in at least three forms: the Pyrrhonian challenge, the traditional problem of the external world, and the problem of acquaintance. The traditional problem of external world can arise from the split between the primary qualities of objects and the secondary qualities of objects. Recall that the idea is that a property like being the colour red is too differential in subjects’ experiences to be among the primary qualities. A related epistemological worry arises from the thought that our knowledge of the world is not simply propositional knowledge, or what Bertrand Russell called our “knowledge of truths”. However, as Mark Johnston argues, as far as acquaintance knowledge of world goes, it’s hard to see how agents in good case are any better off than the agents in the bad case with respect to acquaintance knowledge of the world.</p