The influence of randomly allocated group membership when developing student task work and team work capabilities

This study explores whether randomly assigning group membership enhances the student learning experience. The paper starts with a critical analysis of the approaches to student learning within Higher Education and how these approaches conflict with findings from applied psychology on group behaviour. The study adopts a serendipitous qualitative methodology to explore how changes to assessment requirements can result in a more holistic learning experience. The findings suggest that students perceive the adoption of randomly allocated as an unnecessary risk to their performance within assessment as opposed to an opportunity to enhance their learning. This raises questions regarding the conflict that can exist within education between assessment and learning. The results suggest students operate in a ‘comfort zone’ which can be detrimental to their overall learning experience. Getting students to leave the comfort zone is a particularly stressful situation for both student and educator. Once students leave the comfort zone competencies that have been dormant surface and they are able to utilise and acquire a wider range of skills. Leaving the comfort zone also results in the creation of a critical incidence which can assist the student in developing their reflective capabilities. The results suggest that randomly allocated groups enhance both an individual’s task capabilities and their teamwork capabilities. The paper concludes that the findings have significant implications for those involved in the design of assessment. The paper also provides an interesting commentary on the issues educators face when undertaking education research within a higher educational context

Timing vs. Long-run Charitable Giving Behavior: Reconciling Divergent Approaches and Estimates

In this paper we examine the effect of the income tax on charitable giving. An important challenge in this literature has been to estimate the long-run response of giving to a persistent change in tax-price, which can be difficult to distinguish from intertemporal substitution arising from differences between current and expected future tax prices, arising for example due to transitory fluctuations in incomes, life-cycle factors, or preannounced tax reforms. Several papers that have attempted to distinguish these effects have found that the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to a persistent price change is small, while the elasticity with respect to a transitory difference between current and expected future prices is large. Auten, Sieg, and Clotfelter (2002) advance this literature by developing an estimation procedure that incorporates a more sophisticated model of the stochastic process for income. In contrast to previous research on the topic, they find the counterintuitive result that the immediate response to a persistent price change is much larger than the immediate response to a one-period transitory price change. In this paper, we present a new estimation procedure that allows us to implement their assumptions about the stochastic process of income in a more conventional regression framework, and then adapt the procedure to take into account the pre-announced and phased-in nature of tax reforms that occurred during the sample period. In preliminary analysis based on a public-use panel of individual tax return data, we are able to replicate their counterintuitive pattern of price elasticities, and find that incorporating information about pre-announced and phased-in tax law changes reverses their result – the persistent price elasticity is reduced substantially, and the transitory price elasticity is now the larger of the two. We also try an instrumental variables strategy that relies exclusively on federal and state tax reforms for identification, and this yields similar results. Finally, we incorporate a dynamic adjustment process into the empirical specification, and find evidence that the long-run response to persistent price and income changes is larger than the immediate response.

Labor Force Participation Elasticities of Women and Secondary Earners within Married Couples

Labor supply elasticities are often used to evaluate the effect of changes in tax rates on the total hours worked in the economy. Historically, married women have tended to have larger labor supply elasticities than their spouses because they were the secondary earners in a couple. However, those elasticities have fallen sharply in recent decades—a decline that has been attributed to greater labor force participation rates and increased career orientation among married women. Indeed, a growing share of wives earn more than their husbands, raising the question whether a person’s sex or relative earnings is the relevant factor affecting the sensitivity of participation to wage and tax rates. In this paper, we use administrative data to examine whether women or lower-earning spouses have larger labor supply elasticities. We present descriptive evidence on the share of women who are the primary earner and the frequency of transitions into and out of employment by sex and relative earnings. We find that lower earning spouses are more likely to start and stop working than women, except when a couple starts a family. We then model an individual’s work decision using a dynamic probit model to isolate the labor supply response to changes in tax rates. We estimate that the participation elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax rate of the secondary earner—the spouse who typically has lower earnings—is about 0.03, slightly higher than that for women, though both of these overall elasticities are small. Participation elasticities with respect to income for both women and secondary earners are effectively zero. Our estimates are robust to several alternative models, including alternative specifications of secondary earner

New Evidence on Outlet Substitution Effects in Consumer Price Index Data

In this paper we provide new and detailed evidence on the impact on the U.S. CPI of the appearance and growth of new types of product outlets. Using actual CPI microdata for 2002-2007, we find that the changing mix of outlets had a statistically significantly negative impact on average prices in most of the 14 item food categories we study. In contrast to previous studies of this issue, our approach allows us to examine the effects of changes in outlet mix both across outlet types (such as among large groceries, discount department stores, and warehouse club stores) and within those outlet categories. We also adjust for numerous differences in item characteristics such as brand name, organic certification, and, importantly, package size. In our sample we find that the upward impact on price from increased item quality has offset most of the downward impact of lower-priced outlets. We also provide evidence showing that a simulated “matched-model” approach similar to that used in the CPI yields indexes that differ to a surprising extent from our baseline hedonic indexes, which also hold outlet and item mix constant.Outlet Bias, Consumer Price Index

A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks

An extensive body of empirical research has revealed remarkable regularities in the acquisition, organization, deployment, and neural representation of human semantic knowledge, thereby raising a fundamental conceptual question: what are the theoretical principles governing the ability of neural networks to acquire, organize, and deploy abstract knowledge by integrating across many individual experiences? We address this question by mathematically analyzing the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear networks. We find exact solutions to this learning dynamics that yield a conceptual explanation for the prevalence of many disparate phenomena in semantic cognition, including the hierarchical differentiation of concepts through rapid developmental transitions, the ubiquity of semantic illusions between such transitions, the emergence of item typicality and category coherence as factors controlling the speed of semantic processing, changing patterns of inductive projection over development, and the conservation of semantic similarity in neural representations across species. Thus, surprisingly, our simple neural model qualitatively recapitulates many diverse regularities underlying semantic development, while providing analytic insight into how the statistical structure of an environment can interact with nonlinear deep learning dynamics to give rise to these regularities

The Pulping of Hardwood Sawdust by the Neutral Sulfite Semichemical Process for Use in Corrugating Medium

The need for using less expensive raw materials is ever increasing. Here the use of hardwood sawdust as one of these raw materials was investigated for use in Semichemical Corrugating Medium. It was found that 20 to 30% sawdust could be used in the furnish without a significant loss in sheet strength. It was also found that sawdust could be pulped either separately or combined with hardwood chips giving the same product quality. This was accomplished by either a regular neutral sulfite semichemical cook or by a vapor phase cook. The conventional disk refiner was found to do the best job of refining, when the plate clearance is very close. The use of 20 to 30% sawdust in the furnish could lead to a substantial cost savings, and would aid in pollution control in that it would end the disposal problem of the sawdust

Herbicide Evaluation in Arkansas Cotton, 1999

Herbicidal weed control is economically important for production of cotton. Field experiments are conducted annually in Arkansas to evaluate the activity of developmental and commercial herbicides for selective control of weeds in cotton. These experiments serve both industry and Arkansas agriculture by providing information on the selectivity of herbicides still in the developmental stage and by comparing the activity of these new herbicides with that of recommended herbicides