Do Students Benefit From Supplemental Instruction? Evidence From a First-Year Statistics Subject in Economics and Business

Peer assisted study sessions (PASS) are a type of supplemental instruction (SI) that provide students with out-of-class study review sessions with a group of peers. A student, who has successfully completed the subject and acts as a mentor, facilitates the voluntary sessions. Results of the PASS program at the University of Wollongong have been quite positive in that students, on average, who attend more PASS, achieve higher marks. However, a simple comparison does not control for self-selection bias. We control for self-selection in two ways. Firstly, we use Heckman’s two-stage correction technique to analyze the 2002 cohort. Secondly, students in the 2003 cohort were randomly allocated into three groups of equal size: 1. A control group that was allocated to normal tutorials with standard class sizes and ineligible to attend PASS; 2. A group that was eligible to attend PASS and had normal tutorials of standard sizes; 3. A group that was ineligible to attend PASS but allocated to normal tutorials with smaller class sizes. The results of both methods are consistent and indicate the PASS program has a positive impact on the academic performance of students after correcting for selection bias.Economics Education; Teaching of Economics; Design of Experiments

The Impact of Tree Planting Program Governance Structure on Tree Survivorship and Vigor: A Case Study using the Massachusetts Greening the Gateway Cities Program

Trees in urban neighborhoods benefit residents by reducing building energy costs, providing cleaner air, decreasing surface runoff, and improving quality of life. However, tree canopy cover is not evenly distributed across neighborhoods in many mid-sized American cities which leads to higher air and surface temperatures, and increased energy bills for residents who are the most economically vulnerable. The state of Massachusetts (USA) created the Greening the Gateway Cities (GGC) program to increase tree canopy cover by 10% in post-industrial, midsized cities with lower educational attainment and lower income than state averages. The study posed two questions: what is the governance structure of the GGC program? How successful is the program using annual survivorship and vigor of the trees? This research examines the GGC program as a case study for a governance structure that fosters connections between the city, community and residents can create the social and environmental infrastructure to support increased tree canopy in urban neighborhoods. Data was collected in four gateway cities in Massachusetts: Chicopee, Fall River, Holyoke and Chelsea. 49 residents who received trees as part of the program were interviewed as well as two DCR foresters, three city planners, one head of the city’s community maintenance (Department of Public Works), and two paid staff and three volunteers of community partners. These interviews informed the creation of a governance framework for the GGC program. Tree survivorship, annual mortality and vigor of 3459 trees were used to measure the initial success of the planting program and to forecast potential benefits to residents. Results show how the GGC planting program can produce increased sense of ownership between cities, communities and individuals in the planting zones. The governance model, with an emphasis on stewardship, showed high rates of annual survivorship (~96.5%), low annual mortality rates (~3.5%) and average vigor rating of 1.5 (1 being healthy, 5 being dead)

Combined collider constraints on neutralinos and charginos

Searches for supersymmetric electroweakinos have entered a crucial phase, as the integrated luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider is now high enough to compensate for their weak production cross-sections. Working in a framework where the neutralinos and charginos are the only light sparticles in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, we use gambit to perform a detailed likelihood analysis of the electroweakino sector. We focus on the impacts of recent ATLAS and CMS searches with 36 fb$^{-1}$ of 13 TeV proton-proton collision data. We also include constraints from LEP and invisible decays of the $Z$ and Higgs bosons. Under the background-only hypothesis, we show that current LHC searches do not robustly exclude any range of neutralino or chargino masses. However, a pattern of excesses in several LHC analyses points towards a possible signal, with neutralino masses of $(m_{\tilde{\chi}_1^0}, m_{\tilde{\chi}_2^0}, m_{\tilde{\chi}_3^0}, m_{\tilde{\chi}_4^0})$ = (8-155, 103-260, 130-473, 219-502) GeV and chargino masses of $(m_{\tilde{\chi}_1^{\pm}}, m_{\tilde{\chi}_2^{\pm}})$ = (104-259, 224-507) GeV at the 95% confidence level. The lightest neutralino is mostly bino, with a possible modest Higgsino or wino component. We find that this excess has a combined local significance of $3.3\sigma$, subject to a number of cautions. If one includes LHC searches for charginos and neutralinos conducted with 8 TeV proton-proton collision data, the local significance is lowered to 2.9$\sigma$. We briefly consider the implications for dark matter, finding that the correct relic density can be obtained through the Higgs-funnel and $Z$-funnel mechanisms, even assuming that all other sparticles are decoupled. All samples, gambit input files and best-fit models from this study are available on Zenodo.Comment: 38 pages, 16 figures, v3 is the version accepted by EPJ

How low can SUSY go? Matching, monojets and compressed spectra

If supersymmetry (SUSY) has a compressed spectrum then the current mass limits from the LHC can be drastically reduced. We consider a possible 'worst case' scenario where the gluino and/or squarks are degenerate with the lightest SUSY particle (LSP). The most sensitive searches for these compressed spectra are via the final state LSPs recoiling against initial state radiation (ISR). Therefore it is vital that the ISR is understood and possible uncertainties in the predictions are evaluated. We use both MLM (with Pythia 6) and CKKW- L (with Pythia 8) matching and vary matching scales and parton shower properties to accurately determine the theoretical uncertainties in the kinematic distributions. All current LHC SUSY and monojet analyses are employed and we find the most constraining limits come from the CMS Razor and CMS monojet searches. For a scenario of squarks degenerate with the LSP and decoupled gluinos we find $M_{\tilde{q}}>340$ GeV. For gluinos degenerate with the LSP and decoupled squarks, $M_{\tilde{g}}>500$ GeV. For equal mass squarks and gluinos degenerate with the LSP, $M_{\tilde{q},\tilde{g}}>650$ GeV.Comment: References added, version submitted to ep

Current and wave effects around windfarm monopile foundations

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Current and wave effects around windfarm monopile foundations journaltitle: Coastal Engineering articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.coastaleng.2017.01.003 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Tips for Players and Athletes COVID-RECOVER

First paragraph: The aim of this guidance is to provide a framework for athletes to cope, thrive and engage in personal growth during the current pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely led to wide-scale disruption of your sporting trajectories for 2020. This has included the cancellation or postponement of sporting events, limits to group training due to social distancing, restrictions on use of sporting facilities and loss of face-to-face access to coaches and support personnel. In the context of a threat to public health, arguably sports competition sinks into lesser importance, but for athletes like you, for whom sport is a fulltime job or major life goal, or for those who identify sports competition as a key part of their identity, it is important to share recommendations based on evidence and theory on how to support athletes and players through this time. The unprecedented situation means that evidence from similar or related contexts and relevant theories needs to be used to extrapolate to COVID-19 and all its challenges. Each of the guidelines below should be viewed like a menu to choose from and try, test and review, and be seen as a road to discovery instead of passive prescription of activities. Our team of practitioners and researchers have collated the knowledge below based on four premises: 1. Psychological Strengths: As a performer on the sporting stage, you have, in all likelihood, developed many skills and habits to support your on-field performance. Pre-performance routines for penalty taking, for example, may include relaxation and focusing components which aid emotional regulation. This can be also applied to help you cope in world outside of sport (i.e. outside the bubble). Awareness of your repertoire of psychological skills and the ability to use them across different contexts is highly important. 2. Resilience: The capacity to mobilise resources both in advance and after a major challenge, is developed through our sporting challenges. In the face of a trauma, it is likely that resilience is the default rather than the exception. As an athlete, you have the ability to respond in an optimistic way to major stressors and engage in post-traumatic growth. Further, you have successful experiences from memory to call upon on which By doing this, you build a firm foundation on which to build your beliefs that you have sufficient resources to cope with COVID-19. 3. Individual Responses: It is important to acknowledge that athletes in different sports and at different levels of competition have developed diverse sets of abilities and competencies. Dual-career athletes (e.g. student-athletes) may have invested much of their effort in their sport despite study or work commitments, and injured athletes may be over-identifying with their sport as a predictable response to injury, in both cases making these athletes very vulnerable to major stressors. 4. Perception of Control: Loss of control is a major source of anxiety in a pandemic (see Mansell, 2020). Developing autonomy and a sense of control is a key part to feeling safe and secure. With COVID-19, the new habits that could help protect you such as physical isolation, hand hygiene, and avoiding touching your face can help you gain control in an uncertain world. And finding new ways to exercise, to work and to interact can open up a world of exciting possibilities. Athletes have shown an ability to develop positive habits and maintain self-control, skills transferable to meeting the present challenging circumstances

Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Tips for Players and Athletes COVID-RECOVER

First paragraph: The aim of this guidance is to provide a framework for athletes to cope, thrive and engage in personal growth during the current pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely led to wide-scale disruption of your sporting trajectories for 2020. This has included the cancellation or postponement of sporting events, limits to group training due to social distancing, restrictions on use of sporting facilities and loss of face-to-face access to coaches and support personnel. In the context of a threat to public health, arguably sports competition sinks into lesser importance, but for athletes like you, for whom sport is a fulltime job or major life goal, or for those who identify sports competition as a key part of their identity, it is important to share recommendations based on evidence and theory on how to support athletes and players through this time. The unprecedented situation means that evidence from similar or related contexts and relevant theories needs to be used to extrapolate to COVID-19 and all its challenges. Each of the guidelines below should be viewed like a menu to choose from and try, test and review, and be seen as a road to discovery instead of passive prescription of activities. Our team of practitioners and researchers have collated the knowledge below based on four premises: 1. Psychological Strengths: As a performer on the sporting stage, you have, in all likelihood, developed many skills and habits to support your on-field performance. Pre-performance routines for penalty taking, for example, may include relaxation and focusing components which aid emotional regulation. This can be also applied to help you cope in world outside of sport (i.e. outside the bubble). Awareness of your repertoire of psychological skills and the ability to use them across different contexts is highly important. 2. Resilience: The capacity to mobilise resources both in advance and after a major challenge, is developed through our sporting challenges. In the face of a trauma, it is likely that resilience is the default rather than the exception. As an athlete, you have the ability to respond in an optimistic way to major stressors and engage in post-traumatic growth. Further, you have successful experiences from memory to call upon on which By doing this, you build a firm foundation on which to build your beliefs that you have sufficient resources to cope with COVID-19. 3. Individual Responses: It is important to acknowledge that athletes in different sports and at different levels of competition have developed diverse sets of abilities and competencies. Dual-career athletes (e.g. student-athletes) may have invested much of their effort in their sport despite study or work commitments, and injured athletes may be over-identifying with their sport as a predictable response to injury, in both cases making these athletes very vulnerable to major stressors. 4. Perception of Control: Loss of control is a major source of anxiety in a pandemic (see Mansell, 2020). Developing autonomy and a sense of control is a key part to feeling safe and secure. With COVID-19, the new habits that could help protect you such as physical isolation, hand hygiene, and avoiding touching your face can help you gain control in an uncertain world. And finding new ways to exercise, to work and to interact can open up a world of exciting possibilities. Athletes have shown an ability to develop positive habits and maintain self-control, skills transferable to meeting the present challenging circumstances

Modelling the spatiotemporal change of canopy urban heat islands

This study models the spatiotemporal change of Birmingham’s urban heat island (UHI) using air temperature measurements made during the HiTemp project to study the atmospheric conditions over the city [1]. The study identifies the causative factors and their contributions to the formation of UHI, based on a number of data used to build 2.5 D model; land cover, land use, geometrical factors and shadow layers. The raw air temperature measurements were filtered, georeferenced and interpolated to create maps of temperature variations. The expected influencing parameters on the development of the UHI were derived and prepared for regression modelling. The results showed that the difference in temperature across Birmingham city through two years of ground measurements (June 2012 – June 2014) reached up to 13.53 °C. The UHI’s appeared daytime and night-time throughout the different seasons for approximately 56% of the total hours during the study period. However, the high intensity events happened during the calm and clear nights. Moreover, buildings’ shadow provided up to 2 °C reduction to the air temperature, while the wind speed and direction are responsible for the size and distribution of hot spots. The built up area contributed to increase the UHI, whereas, the other types of land cover and the geometrical parameters, contributed less