Expectations of progression to university among pupils in rural communities : the role of social influences

Funding: Authors thank the University of St Andrews, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council for their support.This paper examines the social influences determining S5/Year 12 and S6/Year 13 (final year) pupils’ expectations of progression to university in a Scottish rural context in which pupils are less likely to go to university. In particular, we investigate the extent to which perceived support from parents, peers, and school, taking into account pupils’ own evaluation of their qualifications, is associated with their self-assessed likelihood of university entry. Our sample is drawn from a repeated questionnaire completed by pupils at three Scottish state secondary schools whose catchment areas are mainly rural. Our results are twofold. First, it is the perceived enthusiasm of their parents and peers, rather than their school, which is primarily correlated with pupils’ expectations of progression to university all else equal. This is true whether pupils report low or high qualification barriers to university entry. Second, perceived parental support is stronger for those whose parents had themselves attended university, especially for pupils identifying low qualification barriers. Given that school support appears to lack significance in pupils’ expectations of progression to university in this context, there is potentially scope for policymakers, universities and schools located in these rural communities to strengthen this influence.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Birationality of \'etale morphisms via surgery

We use a counting argument and surgery theory to show that if $D$ is a sufficiently general algebraic hypersurface in $\Bbb C^n$, then any local diffeomorphism $F:X \to \Bbb C^n$ of simply connected manifolds which is a $d$-sheeted cover away from $D$ has degree $d=1$ or $d=\infty$ (however all degrees $d > 1$ are possible if $F$ fails to be a local diffeomorphism at even a single point). In particular, any \'etale morphism $F:X \to \Bbb C^n$ of algebraic varieties which covers away from such a hypersurface $D$ must be birational.Comment: 17 pages. Replaced to add further references and make language more consistent with the literatur

Requirements for future control room and visualization features in the web-of-cells framework defined in the Electra project

This paper outlines an overview of the general requirements for the control rooms of the future power systems (2030+). The roles and activities in the future control centres will evolve with respect to the switching, dispatching and restoration functions currently active. The control centre operators will supervise on the power system and intervene - when necessary - thanks to the maturation and wide scale deployment of flexible controls. For the identification of control room requirements, general trends in power system evolution are considered and mainly the outcomes of the ELECTRA IRP project, that proposes a new Web-of-Cell (WoC) power system control architecture. Dedicated visualization features are proposed, aimed to support the control room operators activities in a WoC oriented approach. Furthermore, the work takes into account the point of view of network operators about future control rooms and feedback about the proposed visualization features, collected by means of interviews and questionnaires.publishedVersio

General Point Model with Autoencoding and Autoregressive

The pre-training architectures of large language models encompass various types, including autoencoding models, autoregressive models, and encoder-decoder models. We posit that any modality can potentially benefit from a large language model, as long as it undergoes vector quantization to become discrete tokens. Inspired by GLM, we propose a General Point Model (GPM) which seamlessly integrates autoencoding and autoregressive tasks in point cloud transformer. This model is versatile, allowing fine-tuning for downstream point cloud representation tasks, as well as unconditional and conditional generation tasks. GPM enhances masked prediction in autoencoding through various forms of mask padding tasks, leading to improved performance in point cloud understanding. Additionally, GPM demonstrates highly competitive results in unconditional point cloud generation tasks, even exhibiting the potential for conditional generation tasks by modifying the input's conditional information. Compared to models like Point-BERT, MaskPoint and PointMAE, our GPM achieves superior performance in point cloud understanding tasks. Furthermore, the integration of autoregressive and autoencoding within the same transformer underscores its versatility across different downstream tasks

Beam tracing with diffraction

Laurence Taylor, Evelyn Hesse, Z. Ulanowski, Paul H. Kaye, Antti Penttila, Timo Nousiainen, ‘Beam tracing with diffraction’, poster presented at the 15th Electromagnetic & Light Scattering Conference, Leipzig, Germany, 21-26 June, 2015.Non peer reviewe

Multidimensional Geriatric Assessment: Back to the Future Multidimensional Preventive Home Visit Programs for Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background. Multidimensional preventive home visit programs aim at maintaining health and autonomy of older adults and preventing disability and subsequent nursing home admission, but results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been inconsistent. Our objective was to systematically review RCTs examining the effect of home visit programs on mortality, nursing home admissions, and functional status decline. Methods. Data sources were MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane CENTRAL database, and references. Studies were reviewed to identify RCTs that compared outcome data of older participants in preventive home visit programs with control group outcome data. Publications reporting 21 trials were included. Data on study population, intervention characteristics, outcomes, and trial quality were double-extracted. We conducted random effects meta-analyses. Results. Pooled effects estimates revealed statistically nonsignificant favorable, and heterogeneous effects on mortality (odds ratio [OR] 0.92, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.80-1.05), functional status decline (OR 0.89, 95% CI, 0.77-1.03), and nursing home admission (OR 0.86, 95% CI, 0.68-1.10). A beneficial effect on mortality was seen in younger study populations (OR 0.74, 95% CI, 0.58-0.94) but not in older populations (OR 1.14, 95% CI, 0.90-1.43). Functional decline was reduced in programs including a clinical examination in the initial assessment (OR 0.64, 95% CI, 0.48-0.87) but not in other trials (OR 1.00, 95% CI, 0.88-1.14). There was no single factor explaining the heterogenous effects of trials on nursing home admissions. Conclusion. Multidimensional preventive home visits have the potential to reduce disability burden among older adults when based on multidimensional assessment with clinical examination. Effects on nursing home admissions are heterogeneous and likely depend on multiple factors including population factors, program characteristics, and health care settin

Measurement of the Interior Structure of Thin Polymer Films Using Grazing Incidence Diffuse X-Ray Scattering

A method is developed for calculating the small-angle x-ray scattering originating from within the interior of a thin film under grazing incidence illumination. This offers the possibility of using x-ray scattering to probe how the structure of polymers is modified by confinement. When the diffuse scattering from a thin film is measured over a range of incident angles, it is possible to separate the contributions to scattering from the interfaces and the contribution from the film interior. Using the distorted-wave Born approximation the structure factor, S q , of the film interior can then be obtained. We apply this method to analyze density fluctuations from within the interior of a silicon supported molten polystyrene PS film. Measurements were made as a function of film thickness ranging from one to ten times the polymer radius of gyration Rg . The compressibility, calculated by extrapolating the measured S q to q=0, agrees well with that of bulk PS for thick films, but thinner films exhibit a peak in S q near q=0. This peak, which grows with decreasing thickness, is attributed to a decreased interpenetration of chains and a consequent enhanced compressibility.This work is supported by NSF Grant No. DMR-0209542. Use of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under DOE Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357

Fine genetic mapping of a gene required for Rice yellow mottle virus cell-to-cell movement

International audienceThe very high resistance to rice yellow mottle virus observed in the two rice varieties Gigante (Oryza sativa) and Tog 5681 (O. glaberrima) is monogenic and recessive. Bulked segregant analysis was carried out to identify AFLP markers linked to the resistance gene. Mapping of PCR-specific markers, CAPS and microsatellite markers on 429 individuals of an IR64 × Gigante F 2 population pinpointed this resistance gene on the long arm of chromosome 4 in a 3.7-cM interval spanned by PCR markers. These markers also flanked the resistance gene of the O. glaberrima accession Tog 5681 and confirmed previous allelism tests. The rarity of this recessive natural resistance was in line with a resistance mechanism model based on point mutations of a host component required for cell-to-cell movement of the virus. Preliminary data on the genetic divergence between the two cultivated rice species in the vicinity of the resistance locus suggested that two different resistance alleles are present in Gigante and Tog 5681. A large set of recombinants is now available to envisage physical mapping and cloning of the gene

On partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency

Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to analyze, and technological advances such as weak memory architectures greatly compound this problem. This has renewed interest in partial order semantics as a theoretical foundation for formal verification techniques. Among these, symbolic techniques have been shown to be particularly effective at finding concurrency-related bugs because they can leverage highly optimized decision procedures such as SAT/SMT solvers. This paper gives new fundamental results on partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency. In particular, we give the theoretical basis for a decision procedure that can handle a fragment of concurrent programs endowed with least fixed point operators. In addition, we show that a certain partial order semantics of relaxed sequential consistency is equivalent to the conjunction of three extensively studied weak memory axioms by Alglave et al. An important consequence of this equivalence is an asymptotically smaller symbolic encoding for bounded model checking which has only a quadratic number of partial order constraints compared to the state-of-the-art cubic-size encoding.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure