64,490 research outputs found
Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England
Ā© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This article is available open access through the publisherās website at the link below.This article considers professional youth work in England. It reflects on youth work's persistently anomalous position in the division of labour. Since their achievement of a contested professional status in the 1960s and 1970s, youth workers have pursued an occupational ideology that draws principally on a romantic humanism. Until recently, this provided a relatively stable basis to their practices. Under a dominant contemporary neo-liberalism, influential in different ways across Europe, youth work has been subjected to a range of managerialist practices that have further exposed its ambiguity as a profession. Austerity policy, enacted under the Coalition government, has further weakened professional youth work's position in the welfare division of labour. The article points to resistance to austerity on the part of some youth workers and speculates on the possible future of professional youth work in a policy regime that has little sympathy for the public professions
Evaluating Throwing Ability in Baseball
We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league
outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success
and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We
attribute a run contribution to each success or failure which are tabulated for
each player in each season. We use four seasons of data to estimate the overall
throwing ability of each player using a Bayesian hierarchical model. This model
allows us to shrink individual player estimates towards an overall population
mean depending on the number of opportunities for each player. We use the
posterior distribution of player abilities from this model to identify players
with significant positive and negative throwing contributions.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in
Sport
Collisional deexcitation of exotic hydrogen atoms in highly excited states. II. Cascade calculations
The atomic cascades in mu-p and pbar-p atoms have been studied in detail
using new results for the cross-sections of the scattering of highly excited
exotic atoms from molecular hydrogen. The cascade calculations have been done
with an updated version of the extended standard cascade model that computes
the evolution in the kinetic energy from the beginning of the cascade. The
resulting X-ray yields, kinetic energy distributions, and cascade times are
compared with the experimental data.Comment: 13 pages, 23 figure
Changes in the Distribution of Income Volatility
Recent research has documented a significant rise in the volatility (e.g.,
expected squared change) of individual incomes in the U.S. since the 1970s.
Existing measures of this trend abstract from individual heterogeneity,
effectively estimating an increase in average volatility. We decompose this
increase in average volatility and find that it is far from representative of
the experience of most people: there has been no systematic rise in volatility
for the vast majority of individuals. The rise in average volatility has been
driven almost entirely by a sharp rise in the income volatility of those
expected to have the most volatile incomes, identified ex-ante by large income
changes in the past. We document that the self-employed and those who
self-identify as risk-tolerant are much more likely to have such volatile
incomes; these groups have experienced much larger increases in income
volatility than the population at large. These results color the policy
implications one might draw from the rise in average volatility. While the
basic results are apparent from PSID summary statistics, providing a complete
characterization of the dynamics of the volatility distribution is a
methodological challenge. We resolve these difficulties with a Markovian
hierarchical Dirichlet process that builds on work from the non-parametric
Bayesian statistics literature
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