49,326 research outputs found
An economic evaluation of the early impact of Aimhigher: excellence challenge on pre-16 outcomes: update to previous analysis
The Aimhigher: Excellence Challenge intervention seeks to encourage more young people to articipate in tertiary education. This paper updates previous estimates of the impact of the programme on the GCSE marks and reported expected school leaving ages, among year 11 pupils. Information from 3 different cohorts is used (whereas the previous analysis had data on the first 2 cohorts). In some schools the second and third cohorts have been exposed to the policy, whereas in others only the third cohort was exposed to the policy. This distinction is used to model the impact of the policy using linear regression analysis. However the lack of a comparison group in Spring 2004 means that the impact of the policy can only be estimated under relatively strong assumptions about the evolution of the impact of the policy across time.
Under the assumption that the policy had the same impact in the original treatment (EiC Phase 1 & 2 areas) in Spring 2004 as in Spring 2003, we find evidence that being part of the Aimhigher: Excellence Challenge programme in the new areas (EiC Phase 3) has led to a 5.2 percentage point increase in the year 11 pupils expecting to leave education at age 20 or over. Although slightly larger, this estimate is not statistically significantly different from the increase of 3.7 percentage points found in the original (EiC Phase 1 & 2) areas. Across both types of area (EiC Phase 1& 2 and EiC Phase 3) we estimate that the average impact of the policy is to increase the percentage of year 11 pupils reporting that they will leave education at age 20 or above by 4.6 percentage points. We also find some evidence of a similar positive impact on GCSE English results, although the impact across other GCSEs is less clear.
While the assumptions made in producing these new estimates are relatively strong it is clear that the analysis of the new data does not contradict the previous estimates (which were reliant on less strong assumptions)
Testing SUSY models of lepton flavor violation at a photon collider
The loop level lepton flavor violating signals are studied in a scenario of
low-energy, R-parity conserving, supersymmetric seesaw mechanism within the
context of a high energy photon collider. Lepton flavor violation is due to off
diagonal elements in the left s-lepton mass matrix induced by renormalization
group equations. The average slepton masses and the off
diagonal matrix elements are treated as model independent free
phenomenological parameters in order to discover regions in the parameter space
where the signal cross section may be observable. At the energies of the
option of the future high-energy linear collider the signal has
a potentially large standard model background, and therefore particular
attention is paid to the study of kinematical cuts in order to reduce the
latter at an acceptable level. We find, for the () channel,
non-negligible fractions of the parameter space () where the statistical significance ()
is .Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, Revtex
Time-dependent Robin boundary conditions in the dynamical Casimir effect
Motivated by experiments in which moving boundaries are simulated by
time-dependent properties of static systems, we discuss the model of a massless
scalar field submitted to a time-dependent Robin boundary condition (BC) at a
static mirror in 1+1 dimensions. Using a perturbative approach, we compute the
spectral distribution of the created particles and the total particle creation
rate, considering a thermal state as the initial field state.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. To appear in proceedings of Conference on
Quantum Field Theory under the Influence of External Condition
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