Pre-School Education and Attainment in the NCDS and BCS

This paper considers the effect of how children pass time before entrance to school on attainment in primary school. We find in NCDS data that children perform marginally better at seven and eleven if they spent time with their mother, or at a pre-school, rather than in informal care. This holds when one controls for parental education, social class, and assessed parental interest in the child's education, as well as the quality of the peer group. In the BCS, however, time spent in nurseries effected no improvement in maths at ten as compared to time in informal care and pre-school children were performing much worse in reading. This worse performance was traceable to reduced vocabulary at five. Pre-school children were more advanced in copying at five relative to children in informal care but, while copying is a good predictor of scores in both maths and reading at ten, this advancement had been offset by then.

The Law of Business Torts in Mississippi

Mississippi Focu

A signaling visualization toolkit to support rational design of combination therapies and biomarker discovery: SiViT

Targeted cancer therapy aims to disrupt aberrant cellular signalling pathways. Biomarkers are surrogates of pathway state, but there is limited success in translating candidate biomarkers to clinical practice due to the intrinsic complexity of pathway networks. Systems biology approaches afford better understanding of complex, dynamical interactions in signalling pathways targeted by anticancer drugs. However, adoption of dynamical modelling by clinicians and biologists is impeded by model inaccessibility. Drawing on computer games technology, we present a novel visualisation toolkit, SiViT, that converts systems biology models of cancer cell signalling into interactive simulations that can be used without specialist computational expertise. SiViT allows clinicians and biologists to directly introduce for example loss of function mutations and specific inhibitors. SiViT animates the effects of these introductions on pathway dynamics, suggesting further experiments and assessing candidate biomarker effectiveness. In a systems biology model of Her2 signalling we experimentally validated predictions using SiViT, revealing the dynamics of biomarkers of drug resistance and highlighting the role of pathway crosstalk. No model is ever complete: the iteration of real data and simulation facilitates continued evolution of more accurate, useful models. SiViT will make accessible libraries of models to support preclinical research, combinatorial strategy design and biomarker discovery

Tweed in Martensites: A Potential New Spin Glass

We've been studying the ``tweed'' precursors above the martensitic transition in shape--memory alloys. These characteristic cross--hatched modulations occur for hundreds of degrees above the first--order shape--changing transition. Our two--dimensional model for this transition, in the limit of infinite elastic anisotropy, can be mapped onto a spin--glass Hamiltonian in a random field. We suggest that the tweed precursors are a direct analogy of the spin--glass phase. The tweed is intermediate between the high--temperature cubic phase and the low--temperature martensitic phase in the same way as the spin--glass phase can be intermediate between ferromagnet and antiferromagnet.Comment: 18 pages and four figures (included