Providing for the Priceless Student: Ideologies of Choice in an Emerging Educational Market

The growing popularity of school choice is typically linked to the spread of neoliberal ideology. Identifying four components of this ideology, we examine the rationales of providers in an emerging private school market. Data come from interviews and site visits at 45 “third-sector” private schools in Toronto, Canada. We find that only one of the four components has a strong resonance among these educators. Few private school operators sharply criticize public schools, compete via quantitative performance indicators, or are strongly business oriented. However, they voice a philosophy of matching their personal talents to the needs of “unique” children. Overall, rather than being influenced by neoliberalism, these providers are more directly driven by personalized rationales that prize tailored education in specialized niches. We draw two conclusions from these findings. First, they demonstrate how ideologies of choice are shaped by their market setting, in this case, small proprietorship, in contrast to a corporate environment. Second, they highlight how providers can be motivated by new cultures of consumerism and intensive child rearing when working in highly uncertain conditions. We recommend that theories of choice recognize the range of educational markets and the specific motives of their providers

Enhanced Ultraviolet Cancellations in N = 5 Supergravity at Four Loop

We show that the four-loop four-point amplitudes of N = 5 supergravity are ultraviolet finite in four dimensions, contrary to expectations based on supersymmetry and duality-symmetry arguments. We explain why the diagrams of any covariant local formalism cannot manifestly exhibit the necessary cancellations for finiteness but instead require a new type of nontrivial ultraviolet cancellation that we call "enhanced cancellations". We also show that the three-loop four-point amplitudes in N = 4 and N = 5 supergravity theories display enhanced cancellations. To construct the loop integrand, we use the duality between color and kinematics. We apply standard methods for extracting ultraviolet divergences in conjunction with the FIRE5 integral reduction program to arrive at the four-loop results.Comment: 26 pages,8 figures, RevTe

Double-Copy Constructions and Unitarity Cuts

The duality between color and kinematics enables the construction of multiloop gravity integrands directly from corresponding gauge-theory integrands. This has led to new nontrivial insights into the structure of gravity theories, including the discovery of enhanced ultraviolet cancellations. To continue to gain deeper understandings and probe these new properties, it is crucial to further improve techniques for constructing multiloop gravity integrands. In this paper, we show by example how one can alleviate difficulties encountered at the multiloop level by relaxing the color-kinematics duality conditions to hold manifestly only on unitarity cuts instead of globally on loop integrands. As an example, we use a minimal ansatz to construct an integrand for the two-loop four-point nonsupersymmetric pure Yang-Mills amplitude in $D$ dimensions that is compatible with these relaxed color-kinematics duality constraints. We then immediately obtain a corresponding gravity integrand through the double-copy procedure. Comments on ultraviolet divergences are also included.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, ancillary file, RevTe

Dynamic Location-Based Shopping Lists Using Smart Assistants

Despite the growth of online retail, shopping at brick-and-mortar stores remains a powerful draw for even tech-savvy customers. For example, many customers still like to examine certain items, e.g., fruits, vegetables, clothing, etc., prior to purchasing such items. Customers who make purchases at physical stores often create shopping lists on their mobile devices. With user permission, the techniques of this disclosure detect the user’s location (or navigation plan) to determine if items on the shopping list are available at physical stores in proximity to the user’s current or immediate-future locations, and notify the user appropriately

Automatic context determination for answering user queries

Virtual assistant applications enable users to specify a query. When the virtual assistant receives a query without relevant context, determining the appropriate answer is not possible. In these situations, it is necessary that the user respond to follow-up questions and provide the context. This disclosure describes techniques to automatically obtain the query context, when permitted by the user, and create a seamless user experience. Based on the obtained context, the query is answered which reduces back-and-forth with the user