A List of Wisconsin Springtails With New Records and Annotations (Hexapoda: Parainsecta: Collembola)

Twenty Collembola species new to Wisconsin were collected from soil at two agricultural sites in southern Wisconsin, including an undescribed species of Isotomidae. The state faunal list now contains 52 species representing seven families

To bridge the gap: voluntary action in primary education

Voluntary action has had a long history in the education of our children, bringing a wide range of positive benefits to schools, children, staff, the local community and volunteers alike. Voluntary action enables schools to draw upon a wide range of additional skills and resources, can strengthen a school community and engage children in philanthropic activity from an early age. Schools continuously highlight how much they value the commitment, passion, skills and expertise brought into their community by volunteers, and recognise the advantages of fundraising in terms of community engagement, fostering philanthropic activity in children and providing additional income for the school. Unsurprisingly voluntary action in education tends to be viewed as a positive and good thing, and is increasingly encouraged within policy and practice. This research suggests that voluntary action in primary schools is indeed becoming progressively central to school activities, with many primary schools keenly seeking to strategically engage and grow this area of activity. Schools report purposefully fostering engagement of volunteers to help increase teacher capacity, support children through one-to-one activities and provide additional resources for both core and extra-curricular activities. Furthermore, schools highlight increasing focus on their fundraising activities to help support depleting budgets and growing demands. There is however very little research in the UK which explores voluntary action in education. The limited research that is available suggests significant disparities in how additional resources from voluntary action are dispersed within the UK context. This is supported by research from across Europe and the United States. Therefore this project sets out to be an exploratory study of this area to ascertain how actively schools engage with this voluntary action and what barriers they may face. The local authority of Kent was chosen as a focus for this study. Through analysis of financial data of over 600 primary schools, questionnaires completed by 114 of these and interviews with 4 case study schools this research presents initial findings and trends in activity under the separate headings of volunteering and philanthropic activity (fundraising)

To bridge the gap? Voluntary action in primary schools

Voluntary action has long played a role in state education, with Parent Teacher Associations being one of the most common forms of charitable organisation in England. However, education policy, driven by a growing free-market discourse and policy initiatives such as localism, is increasingly pushing for greater voluntary action. This article explores the distribution of voluntary action for primary schools in one local authority area in England. Drawing upon primary data from 114 questionnaires completed by head teachers and secondary data from the financial records (2013/14) of 380 primary schools, we find evidence of considerable uneven dispersal of voluntary action between schools. These disparities are related to factors including school size, location, leadership ideology and the socio-economic profile of the school. The consequence of this uneven distribution is that schools catering for more affluent communities are more likely to have additional resources than those with poorer profiles

Nested quantum search and NP-complete problems

A quantum algorithm is known that solves an unstructured search problem in a number of iterations of order $\sqrt{d}$, where $d$ is the dimension of the search space, whereas any classical algorithm necessarily scales as $O(d)$. It is shown here that an improved quantum search algorithm can be devised that exploits the structure of a tree search problem by nesting this standard search algorithm. The number of iterations required to find the solution of an average instance of a constraint satisfaction problem scales as $\sqrt{d^\alpha}$, with a constant $\alpha<1$ depending on the nesting depth and the problem considered. When applying a single nesting level to a problem with constraints of size 2 such as the graph coloring problem, this constant $\alpha$ is estimated to be around 0.62 for average instances of maximum difficulty. This corresponds to a square-root speedup over a classical nested search algorithm, of which our presented algorithm is the quantum counterpart.Comment: 18 pages RevTeX, 3 Postscript figure

A List of Wisconsin Springtails With New Records and Annotations (Hexapoda: Parainsecta: Collembola)

Twenty Collembola species new to Wisconsin were collected from soil at two agricultural sites in southern Wisconsin, including an undescribed species of Isotomidae. The state faunal list now contains 52 species representing seven families

Adiabatic Quantum Computing for Random Satisfiability Problems

The discrete formulation of adiabatic quantum computing is compared with other search methods, classical and quantum, for random satisfiability (SAT) problems. With the number of steps growing only as the cube of the number of variables, the adiabatic method gives solution probabilities close to 1 for problem sizes feasible to evaluate via simulation on current computers. However, for these sizes the minimum energy gaps of most instances are fairly large, so the good performance scaling seen for small problems may not reflect asymptotic behavior where costs are dominated by tiny gaps. Moreover, the resulting search costs are much higher than for other methods. Variants of the quantum algorithm that do not match the adiabatic limit give lower costs, on average, and slower growth than the conventional GSAT heuristic method.Comment: added discussion of discrete adiabatic method, and simulations with 30 bits 8 pages, 8 figure

Quantum Portfolios

Quantum computation holds promise for the solution of many intractable problems. However, since many quantum algorithms are stochastic in nature they can only find the solution of hard problems probabilistically. Thus the efficiency of the algorithms has to be characterized both by the expected time to completion {\it and} the associated variance. In order to minimize both the running time and its uncertainty, we show that portfolios of quantum algorithms analogous to those of finance can outperform single algorithms when applied to the NP-complete problems such as 3-SAT.Comment: revision includes additional data and corrects minor typo

Fast computation by block permanents of cumulative distribution functions of order statistics from several populations

The joint cumulative distribution function for order statistics arising from several different populations is given in terms of the distribution function of the populations. The computational cost of the formula in the case of two populations is still exponential in the worst case, but it is a dramatic improvement compared to the general formula by Bapat and Beg. In the case when only the joint distribution function of a subset of the order statistics of fixed size is needed, the complexity is polynomial, for the case of two populations.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure