Measuring educational efficiency at student level with parametric stochastic distance functions: An application to Spanish PISA results

This study explicitly considers that education is a multi-input multi-output production process subject to inefficient behaviors that can be identified at student level. Therefore a distance function allows us to calculate different aspects of educational technology. The paper presents an empirical application of this model using Spanish data from the Programme for International Student Assessment implemented by the OECD. The results provide insights into how student background, peer-group and school characteristics interact with educational outputs. Findings also suggest that, once educational inputs are taken into account; there is no statistically significant difference in efficiency levels across schools regarding public-private ownership.Secondary schools, technical efficiency, stochastic frontier, distance function.

On the generation of a regular multi-input multi-output technology using parametric output distance functions

Monte-Carlo experimentation is a well-known approach to test the performance of alternative methodologies under different hypothesis. In the frontier analysis framework, whatever parametric or non-parametric methods tested, most experiments have been developed up to now assuming single output multi-input production functions and data generated using a Cobb- Douglas technology. The aim of this paper is to show how reliable multi-output multi-input production data can be generated using a parametric output distance function approach. A flexible translog technology is used for this purpose that satisfies regularity conditions. Two meaningful outcomes of this analysis are the identification of a valid range of parameters values satisfying monotonicity and curvature restrictions and of a rule of thumb to be applied in empirical studies.Output distance function; technical efficiency, Monte-Carlo experiments.

Formas sociales de estabilización en actividades informales: cirujas y vendedores ambulantes en la ciudad de Buenos Aires

En este artículo se abordan formas sociales de estabilización en dos actividades consideradas “informales”: los cirujas –recolectores informales de residuos- y personas que se dedican a la venta ambulante en los trenes de pasajeros. El escrito busca mostrar la importancia que tienen las relaciones personales para el mantenimiento de ambas actividades económicas. Más específicamente, se centra en los modos en que generan, mantienen y configuran relaciones entre los actores involucrados y la manera en que ello contribuye a una mayor predictibilidad para obtener los medios necesarios para vivir.This article addresses social forms of stabilization in two activities considered as “informal”: cirujas (scavengers), and ambulant vendors that work on passenger trains. The article seeks to explain the importance that personal relationships have in order to maintain economic activities. More specifically, the article focuses on the ways in which actors create, maintain and configure relationships between them, and how this contributes to the creation predictability and the obtaining of necessary means for a living.Fil: Perelman, Mariano Daniel. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Instituto de Investigaciones "Gino Germani"; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Nuevas formas de participación en la democracia argentina : reflexiones críticas en torno a los piquetes

Este artículo es una aproximación a la relación de los sectores populares y las formas de hacer política a partir de un actor social y político que surge hacia fines de la década de 1990 y principios de 2000: el piquetero. A partir de las transformaciones en el mundo del trabajo y los corrimientos identitarios surgidos en este proceso, el objetivo central es reflexionar acerca de como este actor social es pensado, en tanto actor político dentro de la democracia Argentina posdictadura.This article is an approach to the relantionship between the popular sectors and ways of doing politics of a political and social actor that appears towards the end of 1990 and early 2000: the piquetero. Based on the changes in the world of work and shifting identity encountered, the main objective of this article is to reflect on how this subjets are thoughts as political actors within democracy posdictadura Argentina.Fil: Perelman, Mariano Daniel. Universidad de Buenos Aire

Pensar los territorios: cirujas y vendedores ambulantes

Las personas usan y construyen la ciudad de diferentes formas. Las maneras en que el territorio es vivido, limitado, diferenciado, imaginado, simbolizado producen modos de identificación (ser porteño, por ejemplo) que son móviles y contrastativos (ser porteño en contraposición a ser de la provincia, o ser de un barrio en contraposición a ser de otro) que pueden transformarse en fundamentos para la desigualdad social. Ello, porque estas formas se producen en el marco de procesos históricos y de relaciones de poder territorializadas.Fil: Perelman, Mariano Daniel. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Bodies in the tip: Deaths and politicised deaths in Buenos Aires's refuse

The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received diering degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landlls. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and congure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itseFil: Perelman, Mariano Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

FlashProfile: A Framework for Synthesizing Data Profiles

We address the problem of learning a syntactic profile for a collection of strings, i.e. a set of regex-like patterns that succinctly describe the syntactic variations in the strings. Real-world datasets, typically curated from multiple sources, often contain data in various syntactic formats. Thus, any data processing task is preceded by the critical step of data format identification. However, manual inspection of data to identify the different formats is infeasible in standard big-data scenarios. Prior techniques are restricted to a small set of pre-defined patterns (e.g. digits, letters, words, etc.), and provide no control over granularity of profiles. We define syntactic profiling as a problem of clustering strings based on syntactic similarity, followed by identifying patterns that succinctly describe each cluster. We present a technique for synthesizing such profiles over a given language of patterns, that also allows for interactive refinement by requesting a desired number of clusters. Using a state-of-the-art inductive synthesis framework, PROSE, we have implemented our technique as FlashProfile. Across $153$ tasks over $75$ large real datasets, we observe a median profiling time of only $\sim\,0.7\,$s. Furthermore, we show that access to syntactic profiles may allow for more accurate synthesis of programs, i.e. using fewer examples, in programming-by-example (PBE) workflows such as FlashFill.Comment: 28 pages, SPLASH (OOPSLA) 201

Pourquoi les performances des élèves flamands et francophones sont- elles différentes: une analyse par la méthode des frontières stochastiques

Les différentes vagues de l’enquête internationale PISA de l’OCDE sur les connaissances et les compétences des jeunes de 15 ans montrent de nettes différences de performance entre la Flandre et la Belgique francophone. La Flandre et la Communauté française ont en commun une forte inégalité entre élèves mais celle-ci présente des scores moyens nettement inférieurs. Plusieurs études ont déjà essayé d’expliquer ces différences par une série de facteurs : autonomie des établissements, origine sociale des élèves, orientation précoce, taille des classes, redoublements, dépenses par élèves,…De ces études il ressort que seule une partie de la différence entre les deux communautés peut être expliquée. L’objet de cet article est de contribuer à cette importante question en appliquant à la dernière vague de PISA une mesure de performance fondée sur l’approche par les « frontières de meilleure pratique.