A cross-national analysis of the relations between school choice and effectiveness differences between private-dependent and public schools

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public one, in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus, to account for selectivity issues involved in the comparison of the two. Concerning school choice, we found two patterns: a choice of the upwardly mobile parents for private schools and a preference for segregation by (lower-) middle class parents. As regards school effectiveness, our results indicate that, after controlling for selectivity, a substantial advantage in reading achievement remains among students in publicly funded private schools in ten out of the 26 countries.school choice; school effectiveness; private-dependent and public schools; international comparison; PISA data

School sector variation on non-cognitive dimensions: are denominational schools different?

Denominational schooling makes up an important part of European educational systems. Given its specificity, denominational schooling can be expected to place a greater weight on values teaching and moral education. As such, it may be more effective in bringing about certain attitudes and opinions. It also may be more successful in creating a warm and caring atmosphere, thus helping students to better emotionally connect to the school community. This paper set out to empirically test some of these hypotheses by making use of three waves of data collected in the framework of the Program for International Student Assessment study. We compare public and publicly supported private (as a proxy to denominational) schools on two dimensions, namely the emotional integration with the rest of the school community, and the concern and feelings of responsibility towards the environment. But for Austria, Belgium and Spain, no evidence could be found that the type of the school has any impact on the reported psychological adaptation to the school. In these three countries, publicly supported private schools tend to be more successful in integrating their students. Also students in public and private dependent schools were equally environment oriented, taking into account several student and school characteristics. The lack of schooling sector differences in attaining non-cognitive aims may have at least three causes. First, ecological issues could be salient enough not to necessitate any special religious or moral reinforcement in order to gain traction. Second, public schools may use religious education or ethics just as fruitfully and consequently, they are just as successful in values and norms transmission. Third, it is possible that schools play a minor role in introducing students to environmental dilemmas and concerns, this role being taken over by the family or the media.public schools; private schools; non-cognitive; value teaching; psychological integration; PISA data

Hesse Pencils and 3-Torsion Structures

This paper intends to focus on the universal property of this Hesse pencil and of its twists. The main goal is to do this as explicit and elementary as possible, and moreover to do it in such a way that it works in every characteristic different from three

Scaling Monte Carlo Tree Search on Intel Xeon Phi

Many algorithms have been parallelized successfully on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, especially those with regular, balanced, and predictable data access patterns and instruction flows. Irregular and unbalanced algorithms are harder to parallelize efficiently. They are, for instance, present in artificial intelligence search algorithms such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In this paper we study the scaling behavior of MCTS, on a highly optimized real-world application, on real hardware. The Intel Xeon Phi allows shared memory scaling studies up to 61 cores and 244 hardware threads. We compare work-stealing (Cilk Plus and TBB) and work-sharing (FIFO scheduling) approaches. Interestingly, we find that a straightforward thread pool with a work-sharing FIFO queue shows the best performance. A crucial element for this high performance is the controlling of the grain size, an approach that we call Grain Size Controlled Parallel MCTS. Our subsequent comparing with the Xeon CPUs shows an even more comprehensible distinction in performance between different threading libraries. We achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the fastest implementation of a parallel MCTS on the 61 core Intel Xeon Phi using a real application (47 relative to a sequential run).Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Latitudinal differences in the amplitude of the OAE-2 carbon isotopic excursion : pCO2 and paleo productivity

A complete, well-preserved record of the Cenomanian/Turonian (C/T) Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE-2) was recovered from Demerara Rise in the southern North Atlantic Ocean (ODP site 1260). Across this interval, we determined changes in the stable carbon isotopic composition of sulfur-bound phytane (δ13Cphytane), a biomarker for photosynthetic algae. The δ13Cphytane record shows a positive excursion at the onset of the OAE-2 interval, with an unusually large amplitude (~7‰) compared to existing C/T proto-North Atlantic δ13Cphytane records (3–6‰). Overall, the amplitude of the excursion of δ13Cphytane decreases with latitude. Using reconstructed sea surface temperature (SST) gradients for the proto-North Atlantic, we investigated environmental factors influencing the latitudinal δ13Cphytane gradient. The observed gradient is best explained by high productivity at DSDP Site 367 and Tarfaya basin before OAE-2, which changed in overall high productivity throughout the proto-North Atlantic during OAE-2. During OAE-2, productivity at site 1260 and 603B was thus more comparable to the mid-latitude sites. Using these constraints as well as the SST and δ13Cphytane-records from Site 1260, we subsequently reconstructed pCO2 levels across the OAE-2 interval. Accordingly, pCO2 decreased from ca. 1750 to 900 ppm during OAE-2, consistent with enhanced organic matter burial resulting in lowering pCO2. Whereas the onset of OAE-2 coincided with increased pCO2, in line with a volcanic trigger for this event, the observed cooling within OAE-2 probably resulted from CO2 sequestration in black shales outcompeting CO2 input into the atmosphere. Together these results show that the ice-free Cretaceous world was sensitive to changes in pCO2 related to perturbations of the global carbon cycle