The Hazard of Being an English Football League Manager: Empirical Estimates from the 2002/3 Season

This paper uses data drawn from the English Football League to model hazard rates for club managers in the 2002/3 season. Nearly one-third of managers involuntarily exited employment status with their club in that season. We model the hazard on the basis of a spell at risk, rather than the individual, using a standard logistic model. The role of neglected heterogeneity is also examined using random and fixed effects logistic models within the discrete-time setting. League position at the start of the spell at risk is found to be the most important determinant of a manager’s exit. A variety of individual specific human capital covariates were found to be unimportant in determining the hazard and no role for unobservable heterogeneity as captured by random effects was detected.econometrics; sports

Transforming Special Education: The Role of the California Association of Private Special Education Schools (CAPSES)

Editor’s Introduction: In January 2015, members of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Transformative Leader-ship and Policy Studies (JTLPS) conducted an interview with Dr. Robert Reilly, CAPSES board member, to engage on issues surrounding special education in the 21st cen-tury. This reflective essay was culled from a transcribed interview and themed around six major areas: access, special education policy, services supported by CAPSES, social justice, teacher preparation, and creating an inclu-sive school culture for children with special needs. CAPSES primary mission is to maximize the potential of individuals with disabilities by advocating for them in public policy, and promoting high quality instruction, guidance, therapy and staff development. CAPSES is ded-icated to preserving and enhancing the leadership role of the private sector in offering alternative quality services to individuals with disabilities. By providing the highest quality instruction, therapy and guidance and advocacy to their clients, CAPSES members strive to help special education students maximize their potential and lead independent and dignified lives. Through this interview, JTLPS sought to ascertain how CAPSES works to build this potential with special education students and their fami-lies to ensure appropriate services for them

Re-matching, Information and Sequencing Effects in Posted Offer Markets

This paper evaluates the effects of some standard procedural variations on outcomes in posted offer oligopoly experiments. Variations studied include the presence or absence of market information, the use of re-matching or fixed seller pairs and alterations in the order of sequencing. Experimental results indicate that such variations can have first order effects on outcomes. For this reason, we recommend that results in oligopoly experiments be carefully interpreted in light of the procedures selected.Market Experiments, Oligopoly, Re-Matching, Information, Market Concentration

Francis Thompson's debt to Richard Crashaw in poetical thought and content

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityThough women were most influential in the lives of both Crashaw and Thompson, neither of the poets has ever been connected with an orthodox or romantic affair. Crashaw had his friends at court and Thompson had Mrs. Meynell and his strange street companion of his unhappy days as their only female interests. Some have viewed Thompson's disinterest as an indication that he was of the feminine temperament himself but this has little ground for argument. In the person of the infant Jesus Crashaw shows us that he had a tender feeling for children and that he knew how to portray them in his poetry. Thompson has written more directly to children and we know who some of his models were but his poetry is often thought too deep for the understanding of children, written about children, not for them. Thompson felt awed in the presence of the innocence of the child and the differences of Youth and Age were prime problems with which he contended. The love developed by the poets in their verse emerges as a type of Platonic love given individual treatment by each of them. Crashaw regarded women as friends and as creatures of the same God who had made him. Their ambition should be the love of the Redeemer as above mere human love. The Platonic Love of Thompson is less religious and more earthly than that of Crashaw. It centers about Mrs. Meynell as its actual object but actually she represents Ideal beauty and it is this latter that Thompson celebrates. Both men have a particular devotion to a certain woman. In Crashaw it is St. Teresa and in Thompson it is Mary, the Mother of God. Crashaw admires the courage of the youthful martyr and calls upon her for a reproduction of that fervour in him. She sums up and symbolizes all of his other types of love, though he has dedicated poems to the Blessed Virgin and to Mary Magdelen. When Thompson is not concerned with Mrs. Meynell or Ideal Beauty he is playing host to the mystical vision of Mary. Sometimes, he fuses all of his ideas on Platonic love into her person. His is less fire and more admiration and respect. Neither poet can lay any great claim to being a poet of Nature. Both lack the attention given to details by the true poets of the subject. Crashaw had some appreciation of the dawn and flowers but his use of nature was mostly symbolic and never freshly observant. Thompson suffered somewhat from the same failing, in that his interest in Nature was narrowed to a few limited subjects. Those subjects, always broad, like the earth and sky, he did well. He was more interested in the Divinity behind Nature than in the Nature before him personally. Crashaw and Thompson were both Catholics at different periods in the history of the church. Crashaw had the added experience of being a convert and thus had a slightly different attitude towards the Church. Crashaw was attracted by the symbolism of the Catholic religion to some extent and he became more of a devotional poet than a strictly religious one. Thompson had less of the fiery faith of Crashaw but he had more reasoning power in his poetry. His life, too, had brought him closer to God because he saw the futility of it all without a belief in a better world ruled by a more benificent Being. Crashaw stood not in awe of the Father and the Son but placed them affectionately in his verse. Thompson was a bit frightened by his subjects and always pictured God as great Being about Whom very little could be known, or should be known. They both had an avid interest in Christ and treated the most important events of his life with almost identical sympathy, stressing above all things the Crucifixion, which for Crashaw had a symbolic pattern and for Thompson had a moral one. Saints and angels made up a large part of the imagery of the work of both men. They believed in both species implicitly as part of their religious teaching. Crashaw uses his saints to inspire and his angels for color, usually picturing the latter as kind, fairy-like creatures. Thompson takes more liberties with the angels and humanizes them in some of his poems. By and large they are likewise sweet and gentle beings. Thompson's saints conform to the tradition of the Three Churches and the saints form the Church Triumphant in Heaven. In this vein everyone in Heaven is technically a saint. Heaven and Hell are real places to both of the men and an essential part of the Godhead since they represent his Mercy and Justice. Crashaw was able to present Hell far better than Thompson, while the Victorian poet's Heaven outshone that of seventeenth-century poet. Due to the mystical achievements of both we are able to get fairly accurate pictures of their conceptions of the 1ife-after-death. Purgatory is more part of the poetry of Thompson than Crashaw, undoubtedly because of the range of the former's sufferings here on earth. Sin to Thompson is a personal problem and he struggles within himself to defeat the powers of evil at work. With Christian hope he expects the aid of the Saviour in the bestowing of Grace and the granting of final absolution. He intends to aid himself in this achievement by the proper applications of the Cardinal Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. Crashaw is not nearly so worried about his own soul, or at least he does not use his poetry as a vehicle for such a confession. As a teacher he is more concerned with the sins of his flock and directs his poetry towards this end. The Virtues are of equal importance to him and there is every reason to believe that he lived by them as well as taught them to his parishioners. Religion had significance, too, in the abundant imagery that it gave to the poets. They were able to adopt symbols from the Mass, from the Liturgy and from the Sacraments. In this way their religion aided their poetry and their poetic nuse was an aid to their appreciation of their religion. It has been mentioned that both men were mystics, that they believed in the possibility of a direct spiritual union with God. Crashaw and Thompson developed along similar and somewhat conventional lines as mystics and suffered so that they might attain the vision. There is claim in their poetry that they were possessed at times of a vision beyond the ken of ordinary senses. Their poetry abounds in references and allusions to their strugbles and their rewards. Rather than make their poetry more diffuse, it serves to make it more interesting and even imparts it a special flavor which does much to give it the high position it holds. Crashaw was no great thinker. He was decidedly more emotional than intellectual and never consciously sought to be didactic. If there is something to be learned in his poetry it is because we feel as he does not because we think along his lines. Thompson is more of a philosopher, albeit an unwitting one. He delves into the problems of meaning of the world and Man and the destiny of God's creature. The views of both are colored by their religion. In Crashaw religion takes over entirely while in Thompson there is an attempt to extend the religion and religious ideas to fit other and more universal problems. Both Crashaw and Thompson are today sadly neglected. Time seems to have given Crashaw his little niche and from it there is a little likelihood that he will stir, or, if he does, it will hardly be in the direction of elevation. Thompson's stock, on the other hand, has been rising and interest in the man and his poetry grows daily. Perhaps his final estimate will be no higher than Crashaw's but now it appears that it may emerge on a higher plane than many of those Victorian poets presently considered his masters

Conceptual Foundations of Privacy: Looking Backward Before Stepping Forward

In cyberspace, as in today\u27s real world, there seems to be confusion in regard to what privacy is and what it is not. One scholar, Ruth Granson highlights recent efforts to fully comprehend privacy: the concept of privacy is a central one in most discussions of modern Western life, yet only recently have there been serious efforts to analyze just what is meant by privacy. Over the years, the conception of the nature and extent of privacy has been severely bent out of shape. The definitions and concepts of privacy are as varied as those in the legal and academic circles who explore privacy. Another scholar, Judith DeCew, examines the diversity of privacy conceptions: the idea of privacy [which is] employed [by various legal scholars], is not always the same. Privacy may refer to the separation of spheres of activity, limits on governmental authority, forbidden knowledge and experience, limited access, and ideas of group membership...[c]onsequently ... privacy is commonly taken to incorporate different clusters of interest

Guide to intangible asset valuation

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/2671/thumbnail.jp

MIT's CWSpace project: packaging metadata for archiving educational content in DSpace

This paper describes work in progress on the research project CWSpace, sponsored by the MIT and Microsoft Research iCampus program, to investigate the metadata standards and protocols required to archive the course materials found in MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) into MIT’s institutional repository DSpace. The project goal is “to harvest and digitally archive OCW learning objects, and make them available to learning management systems by using Web Services interfaces on top of DSpace.” The larger vision is one of complex digital objects (CDOs) successfully interoperating amongst MIT’s various learning management systems and learning object repositories, providing archival preservation and persistent identifiers for educational materials, as well as providing the means to richer shared discovery and dissemination mechanisms for those materials. The paper describes work to date on the analysis of the content packaging metadata standards METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) and especially IMS-CP (IMS Global Learning Consortium, Content Packaging), and issues faced in the development and use of profiles, extensions, and external schema for these standards. Also addressed are the anticipated issues in the preparation of transformations from one standard to another, noting the importance of well-defined profiles to making that feasible. The paper also briefly touches on the DSpace development work that will be undertaken to provide new import and export functionalities, as the technical specifications for these will largely be determined by the packaging metadata profiles that are developed. Note that the degree of interoperability considered herein might be referred to as “first level,” as this paper addresses the packaging metadata only, which in turn is the carrier or envelope for the descriptive (and other kinds of) metadata. It will no doubt be an even more challenging task to ensure interoperability at what might be referred to as the “second level,” that of semantic metadata.MIT iCampu

Arg343 in Human Surfactant Protein D Governs Discrimination between Glucose and N-Acetylglucosamine Ligands

Surfactant protein D (SP-D), one of the members of the collectin family of C-type lectins, is an important component of pulmonary innate immunity. SP-D binds carbohydrates in a calcium-dependent manner, but the mechanisms governing its ligand recognition specificity are not well understood. SP-D binds glucose (Glc) stronger than N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc). Structural superimposition of hSP-D with mannose- binding protein C (MBP-C) complexed with GlcNAc reveals steric clashes between the ligand and the side chain of Arg343 in hSP-D. To test whether Arg343contributes to Glc \u3e GlcNAc recognition specificity, we constructed a computational model of Arg343→Val (R343V) mutant hSP-D based on homology with MBP-C. Automated docking of α-Me-Glc and α-Me-GlcNAc into wild-type hSP-D and the R343V mutant of hSP-D suggests that Arg343 is critical in determining ligand-binding specificity by sterically prohibiting one binding orientation. To empirically test the docking predictions, an R343V mutant recombinant hSP-D was constructed. Inhibition analysis shows that the R343V mutant binds both Glc and GlcNAc with higher affinity than the wild-type protein and that the R343V mutant binds Glc and GlcNAc equally well. These data demonstrate that Arg343 is critical for hSP-D recognition specificity and plays a key role in defining ligand specificity differences between MBP and SP-D. Additionally, our results suggest that the number of binding orientations contributes to monosaccharide binding affinity