Income and Child Well-Being. THIRTY-FOURTH GEARY LECTURE, 2005

My topic this afternoon is the link between family income and the well-being of children. While it is easy to document the better health and higher achievement of children who have grown up in richer as opposed to poorer families, it is much harder to isolate the causal impact of income itself. Children growing up in higher income families are advantaged in many other ways, including having parents who have completed more formal schooling and are embedded in higher-status social networks, and whose genetic endowments may provide cognitive and health-related advantages

Reading and proclaiming the birth narratives from Luke and Matthew : a study in empirical theology amongst curates and their training incumbents employing the SIFT method

Drawing on Jungian psychological type theory, the SIFT method of biblical hermeneutics and liturgical preaching suggests that the reading and proclaiming of scripture reflects the psychological type preferences of the reader and preacher. This thesis is examined amongst two samples of curates and training incumbents (N = 23, 27), serving in one Diocese of the Church of England, who completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Firstly, the narrative of the shepherds from Luke was discussed by groups organised according to scores on the perceiving process. In accordance with the theory, sensing types focused on details in the passage, but could reach no consensus on the larger picture, and intuitive types quickly identified an imaginative, integrative theme, but showed little interest in the details. Secondly, the narrative of the massacre of the infants from Matthew was discussed by groups organised according to scores on the judging process. In accordance with theory, the thinking types identified and analysed the big themes raised by the passage (political power, theodicy, obedience), whilst the feeling types placed much more emphasis on the impact that the passage may have on members of the congregation mourning the death of their child or grandchild

The importance of poverty early in childhood

Introduction: Using a poverty line set at 60% of New Zealand’s median national income, nearly one in five New Zealand children (19%) was poor in 2011. This poverty rate is considerably less than that of the United States and Canada, similar to that of Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, and much greater that in Scandinavian countries. These rates are far from immutable; New Zealand’s child poverty rate was much higher in 2004 before social policies were enacted which focused, in part, on the country’s child poverty problem

Morita theory and singularity categories

We propose an analogue of the bounded derived category for an augmented ring spectrum, defined in terms of a notion of Noether normalization. In many cases we show this category is independent of the chosen normalization. Based on this, we define the singularity and cosingularity categories measuring the failure of regularity and coregularity and prove they are Koszul dual in the style of the BGG correspondence. Examples of interest include Koszul algebras and Ginzburg DG-algebras, $C^*(BG)$ for finite groups (or for compact Lie groups with orientable adjoint representation), cochains in rational homotopy theory and various examples from chromatic homotopy theory.Comment: Final version, accepted for publication in Advances in Mathematics, 49 page

Energy consumption and cooperation for optimal sensing

The reliable detection of environmental molecules in the presence of noise is an important cellular function, yet the underlying computational mechanisms are not well understood. We introduce a model of two interacting sensors which allows for the principled exploration of signal statistics, cooperation strategies and the role of energy consumption in optimal sensing, quantified through the mutual information between the signal and the sensors. Here we report that in general the optimal sensing strategy depends both on the noise level and the statistics of the signals. For joint, correlated signals, energy consuming (nonequilibrium), asymmetric couplings result in maximum information gain in the low-noise, high-signal-correlation limit. Surprisingly we also find that energy consumption is not always required for optimal sensing. We generalise our model to incorporate time integration of the sensor state by a population of readout molecules, and demonstrate that sensor interaction and energy consumption remain important for optimal sensing.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Forthcoming in Nature Communication

Optimal Dynamic Management of Agricultural Land-Uses: An Application of Regime Switching

The capacity of global agricultural production to meet increased demand for food from population growth and wealth accumulation is threatened by extensive land degradation. Nonetheless, previous research has focused primarily on the dynamic implications of input management and ignored land-use choice. This paper extends this theory through an examination of the intertemporal management of agricultural land through the use of non-crop inputs, such as fertilizer, and land uses that either degrade or restore productivity. The need to consider the relative total asset value of alternative crops over time is demonstrated. Moreover, higher output prices for degrading crops are shown to increase their relative value, motivating the later adoption of substitutes. An inability of land markets to reflect differences in resource quality and low capital malleability promote greater degradation. However, substitution of complementary effects through input use may help to sustain productivity. These factors are discussed in the context of crop sequence management in Western Australian cropping systems.crop sequences, land degradation, regime switching, International Development, Production Economics, Q15, Q24,