Do Neighbours Affect Teenage Outcomes? Evidence from Neighbourhood Changes in England

In this paper, we use census data on several cohorts of secondary school students in England matched to detailed information on place of residence to investigate the effect of neighbours' background characteristics and prior achievements on teenagers' educational and behavioural outcomes. Our analysis focuses on the age-11 to age-16 time-lapse, and uses variation in neighbourhood composition over this period that is driven by residential mobility. Exploiting the longitudinal nature and detail of our data, we are able to control for pupil unobserved characteristics, neighbourhood fixed-effects and time-trends, school-by-cohort unobservables, as well as students' observable attributes and prior attainments. Our results provide little evidence that neighbours' characteristics significantly affect pupil test score progression during secondary education. Similarly, we find that neighbourhood composition only exerts a small effect on pupil behavioural outcomes, such as general attitudes towards schooling, substance use and anti-social behaviour.Neighbourhood effects, cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, secondary schools

What does daylight-saving time actually save?

Posted by Dr Felix Weinhardt, SERC and LSE On Sunday Britain turned the clocks forward an hour - and summer time officially began. Mornings will be darker, evenings lighter. BST and other daylight-saving schemes are thought to reduce demand for energy (lighting in particular). But do they

Pipeline synthesis and optimization for reconfigurable custom computing machines

This paper presents a pipeline synthesis and optimization technique for high-level language programming of reconfigurable Custom Computing Machines. The circuit synthesis generates hardware accelerators from a sequential program which exploit the reconfigurable hardware\u27s parallelism. Program loops are transformed to structural hardware specifications. The optimization algorithm uses integer linear programming to balance and pipeline the circuit\u27s registers. This global optimization determines the minimal amount of flip-flops necessary for an optimal pipeline throughput. It also considers the irregular flip-flop distribution on FPGAs. Standard interface circuitry and a runtime system provide the connection between the accelerator unit and its host computer. An integrated compiler invokes the synthesis and produces a program which downloads, calls and controls its hardware accelerators automatically

Ethical Issues in the Use of Big Data for Social Research

With the advent of Big Data (BD) in the social sciences, vast amounts of data (and the tools to analyze them) have become available faster than ethical and legal standards could develop regarding the use of such data. At the same time, data collectors and analysts face new moral dilemmas as the proliferation of personal and impersonal data clearly poses new challenges to traditional assumptions about privacy and autonomy. The discussion of such ethical challenges seems to lag behind and the literature specifically dealing with the research ethics of BD is still scarce. This article asks which ethical and legal aspects need to be considered when collecting and analyzing data on individuals from the web and combining them to gain an enriched picture of human activities. It proceeds to provide a brief overview of existing research ethics regulations and outlines areas of particular relevance to the challenges that come with the use of BD, such as the delineation of human subject research, the (im)possibility of informed consent for these new kinds of data, the sources and public availability of data and questions of risk and risk assessment. It also formulates some generic recommendations in order to stimulate further debate, one of which posits that social scientists must address and discuss the challenges that emerge in research applications of BD more widely than it is currently the case

Everyone is on Their Phones: Eighth Graders\u27 Struggle with Social Media in School

This qualitative study examined social media in the school setting from the point of view of eighth-grade participants. This study implemented a focused ethnography, examining a group of individuals’ perspectives on a focused area of their shared culture. Using critical theory, this study examined qualitative data with the concepts of structures, subjectivity, and power at the confluence of social media and school for eighth-grade students. Qualitative data were collected using five semi-structured focus groups, artifact analysis, fieldnotes, and memos. The findings highlighted that eighth-grade students acknowledge that there is a struggle between social media and school. This struggle alters their school experience, both in terms of subjectivity—in the form of a struggle for recognition—and in the structures they navigate daily—in the form of a friction between the media and scholastic apparatus. The findings show this struggle as an antinomic, ambiguous, and ambivalent battle where students experienced both advantages and disadvantages from the confluence between social media and school

Towards an Economic Analysis of Routing in Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks are supposed to overcome technical scalability limitations of blockchain infrastructure by employing a special overlay network with fast payment confirmation and only sporadic settlement of netted transactions on the blockchain. However, they introduce economic routing constraints that limit decentralized scalability and are currently not well understood. In this paper, we model the economic incentives for participants in payment channel networks. We provide the first formal model of payment channel economics and analyze how the cheapest path can be found. Additionally, our simulation assesses the long-term evolution of a payment channel network. We find that even for small routing fees, sometimes it is cheaper to settle the transaction directly on the blockchain.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, SERIAL '17 Worksho

Does geography matter? an empirical investigation into neighbourhood, peer effects and electricity consumption

This thesis consists of four distinct projects which sit at the crossroad between Labour, Education and Environmental Economics. The underlying and unifying theme is the examination of social and geographical inequalities using applied econometrics. In the first project, I estimate the effect of moving into a deprived high-density social housing neighbourhood on the educational attainments of teenagers in England. I exploit the timing of moving, which can be taken as exogenous because of long waiting lists for social housing in high-demand areas, to avoid the usual sorting problems. Using this strategy, I find no evidence for negative effects. The second project investigates the effect of neighbours' characteristics and prior achievements on teenagers' educational outcomes. The study relies on mover-induced variation in neighbourhood quality, whilst controlling for general gentrification trends and other unobservables. The results provide little evidence for significant effects on pupil test score progression. The third project looks at the size, significance and heterogeneity of ability peer effects in secondary schools in England. The methodological innovation is to identify ability peer effects using within-pupil-across-subject variation in students' test scores and peer prior achievements. The chapter shows that it is the low- and high-achievers, who account for most or all of the effect of average peer quality on the educational outcomes of other pupils and that this effect varies across genders. The final project presents -to the best of my knowledge- the first nationwide empirical assessment of residential electricity use in response to the timing of daylight for the US. Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS), I calculate the solar times of sunrise and sunset for all locations in mainland US and show that two distinct sources of geographical variation can be used to estimate county-level responses in residential electricity consumption. Using both approaches I find that early sunrise is associated with lower residential electricity use in the North, but higher consumption in the South. This is a novel finding with potentially significant policy implications and I offer some suggestions about how future research should examine the behavioural channels that could cause these results

Understanding The Physiological Effects of Suspended Material on Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

The effect of global warming on northern environments is becoming increasingly evident. Melting of underlying permafrost is associated with widespread impacts in these environments. The loss of permafrost results in a destabilizing of underlying sedimentary layers resulting in thermokarst slumping. When this occurs on a large scale (mega-slumping) soil material becomes mobilized and is carried into local streams and rivers. The purpose of this study is to examine the sub-lethal physiological effects that suspended material has on rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) in the context of the Peel River Plateau. Juvenile rainbow trout were exposed (following Environment Canada exposure guidelines) for 96h to suspended clay and field collected material of differing grain sizes: small (\u3c90µm), medium (90-150µm) and large (150-300µm), and combine (0-300µm) at concentrations of 250, 500, 1000, and 2000mg/L. The effects of exposure were assessed by measuring plasma cortisol, plasma ion concentration (Na, Cl and Ca) as well as resting metabolic rate and swim performance. It was determined that no significant changes to the measured physiological endpoints are occurring to the model organism rainbow trout at concentrations and durations equal to or greater than those present in the natural conditions