Economics knowledge, attitudes and experience of student teachers in Scotland

There is a move away from teaching economics as a separate subject in Scotland. It is now mainly taught within Business Management courses in upper secondary school and is embedded within several subject areas in both primary and early secondary curricula, a move that is in step with broader curricular aims to break down barriers among subjects. This writing discusses the need for clearly situated teaching and learning of economics, provided by teachers provided by teachers who have sufficient background knowledge to devise effective contexts for learning, whether or not it is taught as a discrete subject. The results of a survey of student teachers' levels of economic literacy are analysed and recommendations made for the preparation of teachers to deal effectively with embedded approaches to teaching about economics

On the Role and Impact of the Metaparameters in t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

Similarity-based embedding is a paradigm that recently gained interest in the field of nonlinear dimensionality reduction. It provides an elegant framework that naturally emphasizes the preservation of the local structure of the data set. An emblematic method in this trend is t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), which is acknowledged to be an efficient method in the recent literature. This paper aims at analyzing the reasons of this success, together with the impact of the two metaparameters embedded in the method. Moreover, the paper shows that t-SNE can be interpreted as a distance-preserving method with a specific distance transformation, making the link with existing methods. Experiments on artificial data support the theoretical discussion