AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON PARENTS' CHOICES APPLY ON ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY OF T SCHOOL IN BEIJING

Since the end of the 20th century, education reform has been carried out all over the world. In one hand, the system of public school education cannot be recognized and satisfied by parents, and alternative education is one of the replacements. Through ethnographic research, the author participated in school activities, interview parents and micro-school APP interaction simultaneously, and use snowball sampling method to expand the depth and breadth of interviews. The purpose of this paper is to find out the differences between the school-running visions declared by schools verses the educational choices applied to parents. Try to classify what kind of parents will choose alternative education, and to reflect on the public education reform through their practices

Phenotypic switching of populations of cells in a stochastic environment

In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response. We focus on the case in which the environment switches randomly between discrete states. Starting from an individual-based model we derive stochastic differential equations to describe the dynamics, and obtain analytical expressions for the mean instantaneous growth rates based on the theory of piecewise deterministic Markov processes. We show that optimal phenotypic responses are non-trivial for slow and intermediate environmental processes, and systematically compare the cases of periodic and random environments. The best response to random switching is more likely to be heterogeneity than in the case of deterministic periodic environments, net growth rates tend to be higher under stochastic environmental dynamics. The combined system of environment and population of cells can be interpreted as host-pathogen interaction, in which the host tries to choose environmental switching so as to minimise growth of the pathogen, and in which the pathogen employs a phenotypic switching optimised to increase its growth rate. We discuss the existence of Nash-like mutual best-response scenarios for such host-pathogen games.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure