The Effects of Education Quality on Income Growth and Mortality Decline

Previous work shows that higher levels of education quality (as measured by international student achievement tests) increases growth rates of national income. This paper begins by confirming those findings in an analysis involving more countries over more time with additional controls. We then use the panel structure of our data to assess whether the mechanism by which education quality appears to improve per capita income levels is through shifting the level of the production function (probably not), through increasing the impact of an additional year of education (probably not), or through increasing a country's rate of technological progress (very likely). Mortality rates complement income levels as indicators of national well-being and we extend our panel models to show that improved education quality increases the rate of decline in infant mortality. Throughout the analysis, we find a stronger impact of education quality and of years of schooling in open than in closed economies.

Leadership and the independent regulator

Being a utility regulator has perils because the independence of the regulator necessarily removes power from politicians, operators, and others. Furthermore, regulators are sometimes scapegoats for unpopular policies and unavoidably become involved in shaping the policies that they are supposed to implement. As a result of such frictions, regulators are sometimes removed from office or marginalized in some way. How can regulators not only survive in such an environment, but also thrive? Jamison describes a leadership concept called adaptive leadership that regulators can use to help their countries adapt to new policies and changing situations, while allowing the regulator to stay in the game. The first leadership skill he discusses is the ability to get on the balcony to see what is really going on with operators, politicians, consumers, and others. Once this perspective is obtained, then the regulator can engage stakeholders in an adaptive process in which people make necessary changes to traditions and expectations, while hanging on to the things that are truly important. Regulators can do this by bringing attention to problems that people want to ignore because they involve difficult tradeoffs, providing certainty and stability when tensions become too high for work to be done, and keeping attention focused on the work and the issues.

Superconformal Technicolor

In supersymmetric theories with a strong conformal sector, soft supersymmetry breaking at the TeV scale naturally gives rise to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking at the same scale. We investigate models where such a sector dynamically breaks electroweak symmetry. We consider two scenarios, one where the strong dynamics induces vacuum expectation values for elementary Higgs fields, and another where the strong dynamics is solely responsible for electroweak symmetry breaking. In both cases there is no fine tuning required to explain the absence of a Higgs boson below the LEP bound, solving the supersymmetry naturalness problem. A good precision electroweak fit can be obtained, and quark and lepton masses are generated without flavor-changing neutral currents. Electroweak symmetry breaking may be dominated either by the elementary Higgs bosons or by the strong dynamics. In addition to standard superymmetry collider signals, these models predict production of multiple heavy standard model particles (t, W, Z, and b) from decays of resonances in the strong sector.Comment: 4 pages; v2: minor changes, references adde

Revealing Carrier-Envelope Phase through Frequency Mixing and Interference in Frequency Resolved Optical Gating

We demonstrate that full temporal characterisation of few-cycle electromagnetic pulses, including retrieval of the carrier envelope phase (CEP), can be directly obtained from Frequency Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) techniques in which the interference between non-linear frequency mixing processes is resolved. We derive a framework for this scheme, defined Real Domain-FROG (ReD-FROG), as applied to the cases of interference between sum and difference frequency components and between fundamental and sum/difference frequency components. A successful numerical demonstration of ReD-FROG as applied to the case of a self-referenced measurement is provided. A proof-of-principle experiment is performed in which the CEP of a single-cycle THz pulse is accurately obtained and demonstrates the possibility for THz detection beyond the bandwidth limitations of electro-optic sampling.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. To be submitted for publication in Optics Express, January 201

Electro-optic bunch diagnostics on ALICE

An electro-optic longitudinal bunch profile monitor has been implemented on ALICE (Accelerators and Lasers in Combined Experiments) at the Daresbury Laboratories and will be used both to characterise the electron bunch and to provide a testbed for electro-optic techniques. The electro-optic station is located immediately after the bunch compressor, within the FEL cavity; its location allows nearby OTR, beam profile monitors and Coherent Synchrontron Radiation (CSR) diagnostics to be used for calibration and benchmarking. We discuss the implementation and the planned studies on electro-optic diagnostics using this diagnostic station

Atomic Interactions in Precision Interferometry Using Bose-Einstein Condensates

We present theoretical tools for predicting and reducing the effects of atomic interactions in Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) interferometry experiments. To address mean-field shifts during free propagation, we derive a robust scaling solution that reduces the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation to a set of three simple differential equations valid for any interaction strength. To model the other common components of a BEC interferometer---condensate splitting, manipulation, and recombination---we generalize the slowly-varying envelope reduction, providing both analytic handles and dramatically improved simulations. Applying these tools to a BEC interferometer to measure the fine structure constant (Gupta, et al., 2002), we find agreement with the results of the original experiment and demonstrate that atomic interactions do not preclude measurement to better than part-per-billion accuracy, even for atomic species with relatively large scattering lengths. These tools help make BEC interferometry a viable choice for a broad class of precision measurements.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, revised based on reviewer comment

Identifying Collegiate Athlete\u27s Motivation to Continue Training in Quarantine Compared Between Sexes

Purpose: To identify the type of motivation that was most common among NCAA Division I athletes to continue training during a period of quarantine and how this differs between sexes. Methods: Male and female student-athletes from a university in the southern United States were recruited for the study. 47 participants (males = 13, females = 34) completed the Sport Motivation Scale-II (SMS-II) and Basic Needs Satisfaction in Sport Sale (BNSSS) questionnaire to determine their motivation and basic needs satisfaction during the period of imposed quarantine. Data Analysis: A Mann-Whitney-U test was calculated to determine the differences of composite intrinsic motivation and composite extrinsic motivation and subscales of BNSSS between sex. This was also used to examine the within-sex differences in composite motivation scores. Results: A total of 47 athletes completed the study. Both males and females reported statistically significant higher intrinsic motivation scores than extrinsic motivation scores on the SMS-II [(M: Intrinsic: 39.9 ± 18.0, Extrinsic: 22.2 ± 11.7; p = .003; d = 1.16) (F: Intrinsic: 42.2 ± 13.2, Extrinsic: 28.1 ± 11.7; p \u3c .001; d = 1.12)]. No other statistically significant differences were observed (P \u3e .05). Relatedness scored the highest for both males and females on the BNSSS. Conclusion: Collegiate athletes, regardless of sex, reported higher levels of intrinsic motivation than extrinsic, and scored satisfaction of relatedness the highest when reflecting on maintaining their sport training during quarantine