Teachers' Pay and Pupil Performance

If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? If teachers were better paid and higher up the national income distribution, would there be an improvement in pupil performance? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine the enormous variation in teachers' pay across OECD countries and its significance for educational outcomes.incentive systems, merit pay, education, teacher salaries, pupil outcome

Analysis of Yelp Reviews

In the era of Big Data and Social Computing, the role of customer reviews and ratings can be instrumental in predicting the success and sustainability of businesses. In this paper, we show that, despite the apparent subjectivity of user ratings, there are also external, or objective factors which help to determine the outcome of a business's reviews. The current model for social business review sites, such as Yelp, allows data (reviews, ratings) to be compiled concurrently, which introduces a bias to participants (Yelp Users). Our work examines Yelp Reviews for businesses in and around college towns. We demonstrate that an Observer Effect causes data to behave cyclically: rising and falling as momentum (quantified in user ratings) shifts for businesses.Comment: 24 pages, 20 figures and 5 table

Goal-directed therapy in intraoperative fluid and hemodynamic management.

Intraoperative fluid management is pivotal to the outcome and success of surgery, especially in high-risk procedures. Empirical formula and invasive static monitoring have been traditionally used to guide intraoperative fluid management and assess volume status. With the awareness of the potential complications of invasive procedures and the poor reliability of these methods as indicators of volume status, we present a case scenario of a patient who underwent major abdominal surgery as an example to discuss how the use of minimally invasive dynamic monitoring may guide intraoperative fluid therapy

Trends for Outer Disk Profiles

The surface-brightness profiles of galaxy disks fall into three main classes, based on whether they are simple exponentials (Type I), bend down at large radii (Type II, "truncations") or bend up at large radii (Type III, "antitruncations"). Here, we discuss how the frequency of these different profiles depends on Hubble type, environment, and the presence or absence of bars; these trends may herald important new tests for disk formation models.Comment: LaTeX, 2 pages, 1 EPS figure, uses modified newpasp.sty (included). To appear in Formation and Evlution of Galaxy Disks, eds. J.G. Funes and E.M. Corsin

An intuitive control space for material appearance

Many different techniques for measuring material appearance have been proposed in the last few years. These have produced large public datasets, which have been used for accurate, data-driven appearance modeling. However, although these datasets have allowed us to reach an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance, editing the captured data remains a challenge. In this paper, we present an intuitive control space for predictable editing of captured BRDF data, which allows for artistic creation of plausible novel material appearances, bypassing the difficulty of acquiring novel samples. We first synthesize novel materials, extending the existing MERL dataset up to 400 mathematically valid BRDFs. We then design a large-scale experiment, gathering 56,000 subjective ratings on the high-level perceptual attributes that best describe our extended dataset of materials. Using these ratings, we build and train networks of radial basis functions to act as functionals mapping the perceptual attributes to an underlying PCA-based representation of BRDFs. We show that our functionals are excellent predictors of the perceived attributes of appearance. Our control space enables many applications, including intuitive material editing of a wide range of visual properties, guidance for gamut mapping, analysis of the correlation between perceptual attributes, or novel appearance similarity metrics. Moreover, our methodology can be used to derive functionals applicable to classic analytic BRDF representations. We release our code and dataset publicly, in order to support and encourage further research in this direction

The Outer Structure of Galactic Disks: Connections Between Bars, Disks, and Environments

Surface-brightness profiles for early-type (S0-Sb) disks exhibit three main classes (Type I, II, and III). Type II profiles are more common in barred galaxies, and most of the time appear to be related to the bar's Outer Lindblad Resonance. Roughly half of barred galaxies in the field have Type II profiles, but almost none in the Virgo Cluster do; this might be related to ram-pressure stripping in clusters. A strong \textit{anti}correlation is found between Type III profiles ("antitruncations") and bars: Type III profiles are most common when there is no bar, and least common when there is a strong bar.Comment: LaTeX, 4 pages, 2 EPS figures, uses modified newpasp.sty (included). To appear in Pathways through an Eclectic Universe, eds. J. H. Knapen, T. J. Mahoney, & A. Vazdeki

Barriers and Facilitators of Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency Departments: A Qualitative Study of Provider Perspectives

Objective To understand emergency department (ED) providers’ perspectives regarding the barriers and facilitators of suicide risk assessment and to use these perspectives to inform recommendations for best practices in ED suicide risk assessment. Methods Ninety-two ED providers from two hospital systems in a Midwestern state responded to open-ended questions via an online survey that assessed their perspectives on the barriers and facilitators to assess suicide risk as well as their preferred assessment methods. Responses were analyzed using an inductive thematic analysis approach. Results Qualitative analysis yielded six themes that impact suicide risk assessment. Time, privacy, collaboration and consultation with other professionals and integration of a standard screening protocol in routine care exemplified environmental and systemic themes. Patient engagement/participation in assessment and providers’ approach to communicating with patients and other providers also impacted the effectiveness of suicide risk assessment efforts. Conclusions The findings inform feasible suicide risk assessment practices in EDs. Appropriately utilizing a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to assess suicide-related concerns appears to be a promising approach to ameliorate the burden placed on ED providers and facilitate optimal patient care. Recommendations for clinical care, education, quality improvement and research are offered

Honey bee colony losses

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