Neighborhood school characteristics: what signals quality to homebuyers?

Popular wisdom and economic research suggest that the quality of the neighborhood school should be an important determinant of housing values. Many researchers have found that housing values are higher where school spending or student test scores are higher. However, few economists consider these characteristics good indicators of school quality. Meanwhile, no one has examined whether the economists' notion of school quality-the school's marginal effect on students-is a school characteristic that matters to homebuyers. ; Using a model of new home purchases and historical data on homes in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD), Kathy Hayes and Lori Taylor demonstrate that property values do reflect the characteristics of the neighborhood school. They present evidence that property values reflect student test scores but not school expenditures. Interestingly, they also find that the relationship between test scores and property values arises from an underlying relationship between property values and the marginal effects of schools. Thus, their analysis suggests that homebuyers and economists share the same definition of school quality.Education ; Property tax

Splitting Sensitivity of the Ground and 7.6 eV Isomeric States of 229Th

The lowest-known excited state in nuclei is the 7.6 eV isomer of 229Th. This energy is within the range of laser-based investigations that could allow accurate measurements of possible temporal variation of this energy splitting. This in turn could probe temporal variation of the fine-structure constant or other parameters in the nuclear Hamiltonian. We investigate the sensitivity of this transition energy to these quantities. We find that the two states are predicted to have identical deformations and thus the same Coulomb energies within the accuracy of the model (viz., within roughly 30 keV). We therefore find no enhanced sensitivity to variation of the fine-structure constant. In the case of the strong interaction the energy splitting is found to have a complicated dependence on several parameters of the interaction, which makes an accurate prediction of sensitivity to temporal changes of fundamental constants problematical. Neither the strong- nor Coulomb-interaction contributions to the energy splitting of this doublet can be constrained within an accuracy better than a few tens of keV, so that only upper limits can be set on the possible sensitivity to temporal variations of the fundamental constants.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Whole-brain patterns of 1H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging in Alzheimer's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies

Acknowledgements We thank Craig Lambert for his help in processing the MRS data. The study was funded by the Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust (grant ref: 05/JTA) and was supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre and the Biomedical Research Unit in Lewy Body Dementia based at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust and Newcastle University and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and Biomedical Research Unit in Dementia based at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Why will rat's go where rats will not

Experimental evidence indicates that regular plurals are nearly always omitted from English compounds (e.g., rats-eater) while irregular plurals may be included within these structures (e.g., mice-chaser). This phenomenon is considered to be good evidence to support the dual mechanism model of morphological processing (Pinker & Prince, 1992). However, evidence from neural net modelling has shown that a single route associative memory based account might provide an equally, if not more, valid explanation of the compounding phenomenon