Administrative support staff in schools : ways forward

The aims of the research were to establish: • the impact of administrative support in school; • how teachers employ any time released by the presence of extra administrative support; • how the effective use of administrative support, including teacher time released, can best be used to support pupil attainment

Biosphere mapping : the next phase

The current strontium (Sr) isotope biosphere variation map of Britain (Fig. 1) has been well used (114 citations in 5 years). It allows the user to identify which out of seven spatial domains a sample most strongly resembles with respect to strontium isotopes. It has enabled archaeologists to look at movement and migration on people and fauna across Britain, and to highlight individuals who may have originated outside Britain

Immobility and support for Leave: Brexit was partly a reaction to change from the locally rooted

Popular explanations of the Brexit vote have centred on the division between cosmopolitan internationalists who voted Remain, and geographically-rooted individuals who voted Leave. Katy Morris, Neil Lee, and Thomas Kemeny write that residential immobility also matters. They explain why those living in their county of birth were more likely to support Leave. However, the impact of immobility was filtered by local circumstances: immobility only mattered for respondents living in areas experiencing relative economic decline or increases in migrant populations

A Blob Method for Mean Field Control With Terminal Constraints

In the present work, we develop a novel particle method for a general class of mean field control problems, with source and terminal constraints. Specific examples of the problems we consider include the dynamic formulation of the p-Wasserstein metric, optimal transport around an obstacle, and measure transport subject to acceleration controls. Unlike existing numerical approaches, our particle method is meshfree and does not require global knowledge of an underlying cost function or of the terminal constraint. A key feature of our approach is a novel way of enforcing the terminal constraint via a soft, nonlocal approximation, inspired by recent work on blob methods for diffusion equations. We prove convergence of our particle approximation to solutions of the continuum mean-field control problem in the sense of Gamma-convergence. A byproduct of our result is an extension of existing discrete-to-continuum convergence results for mean field control problems to more general state and measure costs, as arise when modeling transport around obstacles, and more general constraint sets, including controllable linear time invariant systems. Finally, we conclude by implementing our method numerically and using it to compute solutions the example problems discussed above. We conduct a detailed numerical investigation of the convergence properties of our method, as well as its behavior in sampling applications and for approximation of optimal transport maps

Bioinformatics Protocol for Assessing Contamination Level and Quality on Genomics Data of Ensifer meliloti

Nitrogen (N) fixing bacteria have a symbiotic relationship with host plants. The legume plants provide sugar, a product of its photosynthesis, to rhizobacteria. Rhizobacteria, one of the various N fixing bacteria, utilize the sugar for its energy source needed for conversion of N2into NH4+. The rhizobacteria would provide fixed nitrogen to legume plant for its growth in exchange of energy source. There are various symbiotic relationships between microbes and plants, and the Heath Lab is especially interested in relationship between rhizobacteria and legume plants. Various genomic methods to study rhizobacteria require sequence data in Heath Lab. However, there is high possibility of contamination in the sequence data, which may lead to false result in research. Possible non-rhizobacteria that reside within the legume nodules, which don’t participate in N fixation but in survival of the legume plant, could affect the research as well. It was recently found that rhizobacteria other than Ensifer meliloti reside within the legume nodules. Due to the existence of other rhizobacteria, we need a protocol to differentiate between these bacteria. Here, we designed a protocol based on comparing the sequences of E.meliloti from the Heath Lab against public database to determine the level of contamination

The Development of a New Model of Educational Leadership: Leadership for Teacher Flourishing

This paper contributes to a broader movement in which the telos of leadership is flourishing, and the primary role of a leader is to promote the flourishing of their team members through creating a loving environment. In support of this, we propose a new perspective on, and associated model, of educational leadership: ‘leadership for teacher flourishing’ (LFTF). This model was developed through a literature review and a mixed methods research project across 78 British schools with collaborative and participatory elements which asked how school leaders could improve the flourishing of teachers. The quantitative and qualitative findings suggested that key factors in enabling teachers to flourish, and therefore incorporated into the model ‘LFTF’, were positive relationships; opportunities for growth; positive impact on subjective wellbeing; and increasing teachers’ sense of meaning at work. The ways leaders could impact these factors were reported as: being supportive and compassionate; being trustworthy; giving teachers autonomy; enabling teachers to grow; being appreciative and focusing on strengths; and enabling teachers to do meaningful work. It was also found that not only leaders could influence flourishing; teachers with no formal leadership role could also positively impact teacher flourishing. It is suggested that virtuous dispositions in leaders are required to ensure they are consistent in acting in ways that promote flourishing. We argue that this integration of virtue and a desire to promote flourishing is properly understood as love. The participatory and collaborative phase of the research showed that teachers wanted autonomy in deciding what would help them to flourish. The conclusion sets out the implications of this research for policy on the training and selection of school leaders, to improve not only the flourishing of teachers, but also pupils and communities

How can cities thrive in the changing economy?

The last ten years of economic growth in the UK is a story of the knowledge economy; and one which has played out in our cities. The expansion of knowledge intensive industries, from financial services and professional services to high tech manufacturing, has made cities more important to the UK economy. Certain cities have provided industries with access to skilled workers, affluent consumers, the chance to exchange ideas and a thriving cultural offer: all particularly important for industries that rely on innovation and knowledge for comparative advantage. With every new job in other industries being matched by 12 new jobs in knowledge intensive industries between 1995 and 2005, it is little wonder that the cities that can attract these industries have boomed

A Bayesian Feature Allocation Model for Identifying Cell Subpopulations Using CyTOF Data

A Bayesian feature allocation model (FAM) is presented for identifying cell subpopulations based on multiple samples of cell surface or intracellular marker expression level data obtained by cytometry by time of flight (CyTOF). Cell subpopulations are characterized by differences in marker expression patterns, and cells are clustered into subpopulations based on their observed expression levels. A model-based method is used to construct cell clusters within each sample by modeling subpopulations as latent features, using a finite Indian buffet process. Non-ignorable missing data due to technical artifacts in mass cytometry instruments are accounted for by defining a static missingship mechanism. In contrast with conventional cell clustering methods, which cluster observed marker expression levels separately for each sample, the FAM-based method can be applied simultaneously to multiple samples, and also identify important cell subpopulations likely to be otherwise missed. The proposed FAM-based method is applied to jointly analyse three CyTOF datasets to study natural killer (NK) cells. Because the subpopulations identified by the FAM may define novel NK cell subsets, this statistical analysis may provide useful information about the biology of NK cells and their potential role in cancer immunotherapy which may lead, in turn, to development of improved NK cell therapies