Referee bias contributes to home advantage in English Premiership football

Abstract

Officiating bias is thought to contribute to home advantage. Recent research has shown that sports with subjective officiating tend to experience greater home advantage and that referees' decisions can be influenced by crowd noise, but little work has been done to examine whether individual referees vary in their home bias or whether biased decisions contribute to overall home advantage. We develop an ordinal regression model to determine whether various measures of home advantage are affected by the official for the match and by crowd size while controlling for team ability. We examine 5244 English Premier League (EPL) match results involving 50 referees and find that home bias differs between referees. Individual referees give significantly different levels of home advantage, measured as goal differential between the home and away teams, although the significance of this result depends on one referee with a particularly high home advantage (an outlier). Referees vary significantly and robustly in their yellow card and penalty differentials even excluding the outlier. These results confirm that referees are responsible for some of the observed home advantage in the EPL and suggest that home advantage is dependent on the subjective decisions of referees that vary between individuals. We hypothesize that individual referees respond differently to factors such as crowd noise and suggest further research looking at referees' psychological and behavioural responses to biased crowds.     

Travels in extreme social mobility: how first-in-family students find their way into and through medical education

ABSTRACT

Higher education is understood as essential to enabling social mobility. Research and policy have centred on access to university, but recently attention has turned to the journey of social mobility itself – and its costs. Long-distance or ‘extreme’ social mobility journeys particularly require analysis. This paper examines journeys of first-in-family university students in the especially high-status degree of medicine, through interviews with 21 students at an Australian medical school. Three themes are discussed: (1) the roots of participants’ social mobility journeys; (2) how sociocultural difference is experienced and negotiated within medical school; and (3) how participants think about their professional identities and futures. Students described getting to medical school ‘the hard way’, and emphasised the different backgrounds and attitudes of themselves and their wealthier peers. Many felt like ‘imposters’, using self-deprecating language to highlight their lack of ‘fit’ in the privileged world of medicine. However, such language also reflected resistance to middle-class norms and served to create solidarity with community of origin, and, importantly, patients. Rather than narratives of loss, students’ stories reflect a tactical refinement of self and incorporation of certain middle-class attributes, alongside an appreciation of the worth their ‘difference’ brings to their new destination, the medical profession.     

Interstimulus interval and viewing time effects in monkey list memory

Two rhesus monkeys were tested in 6- and 10-item list memory tasks for performance changes as a function of the exposure duration of the list stimuli and the interstimulus interval (ISI) between successive list stimuli. Accuracy increased with longer item exposure duration and tended to decrease with longer ISI duration. Humans, by contrast, typically show increases in accuracy with ISI, a result taken as evidence of rehearsal. The decrease in accuracy for monkeys suggests that they were not using rehearsal processes in these list memory experiments. Further tests in which choice accuracy with predictable ISIs was compared with choice accuracy with unpredictable ISIs also yielded no evidence of rehearsal by the monkeys. This apparent absence of rehearsal mechanisms in monkeys, in situations also shown to support human rehearsal, is discussed as a potential difference in the visual working memory processes of the two species.     

Social media and the university decision. Do prospective students really care?

In the world of social media marketing, colleges and universities can benefit from enhanced understanding of how prospective students use social media. Due to the ever-evolving nature of social media use, there are gaps in the current research regarding how students use social media to aid in their matriculation decision-making. Using survey data from current university students across the U.S. (n?=?364) and one-on-one interviews (n?=?12) with students at a small liberal arts college, the authors address conflicting information where students report both using and not using social media to narrow their search and make their matriculation decision. The findings suggest that while students may not report visiting social media sites or may report that social media does not impact their matriculation decision when asked in a survey, in interview settings the vast majority of students reported using social media platforms to learn more about higher education schools under consideration. By exploring which platforms students use and the selection of platforms for specific use cases, the authors provide suggestions and guidelines for social media managers looking to maximize the effectiveness of their social media recruiting strategies and campaigns.     

Peer Teachers With Autism Teaching 3D Modeling

ABSTRACT

Few autism programmes address the needs of adolescents and young adults, and those that do are unlikely to include individuals with autism in the design and evaluation of the programme. This study involved nine youth with autism (ages 16–25) in the development and evaluation of a peer teaching programme where they taught three-dimensional modelling to other students with autism spectrum disorder. The methodology was participant-oriented research where the students with autism were co-designers and programme evaluators in the research. This approach highlighted their unique strengths and abilities and shifted the power such that they were leaders and not simply the recipients of knowledge from instructors. Four themes emerged through the qualitative analysis of the students’ perceptions of the peer teaching programme: 1) the meaning of peer teaching, 2) motivations for peer teaching, 3) challenges and 4) coping with the challenges of the role.     

An approach to psychosexual counselling

Summary In considering in this paper the origins, development and need for psychosexual counselling to be an integral part of the provision of a counselling service, one must not lose sight of the fact that some higher educational institutions still have no general counselling provision.It is interesting to note that in the UK at a time when the age of consent and voting age were lowered to eighteen years (Family Law Reform Act, 1969, operational 1970 and Representation of the People Act, 1969), and students were rejecting the idea of wardens and academic tutors acting in loco parentis, the National Union of Students (at their annual conference in 1969) passed a resolution pressing for Counselling Services to be established in each higher educational institution-staffed by fully trained personnel, Milner (1974). Nine years later this resolution has not yet been fully implemented.The university community represents a cross-section of the population, any of whom may have a psychosexual problem and seek help from the counselling service. Counsellors must be trained to treat psychosexual problems as part of their normal range of activities.Storr (1960) points out that it is The individual as well as the disease that needs treatment. This applies in counselling as it does in medicine, so that the counsellor should be able to treat the individual as a whole, and at the same time treat his psychosexual problem.University of Reading     

Behavioural additionality of R&D subsidies: A learning perspective

The use of R&D grants as a policy instrument has been motivated by economic arguments of market failure. Neo-classical econometric studies have analysed the additionality of one Euro of subsidies on both the investments of companies in the R&D process and the output of that R&D process. More recently, behavioural additionality has been launched as a third form of additionality. In contrast to input and output additionality, behavioural additionality is related to changes in the processes that take place within the firm. In this paper, we analyse the determinants of the behavioural additionality of R&D grants. To explain the mechanism through which behavioural additionality is obtained, we use organizational learning theory as a guide to formulate our hypotheses. Hypotheses are tested using a telephone survey of 192 recipients of R&D grants provided by the IWT in Flanders in 2001–2004, matched to a sample of 84 firms that undertake innovation activities but which had never had a grant bid accepted. We find that congenital learning and interorganizational learning lead to increased behavioural additionality. However, these learning effects decrease with the number of subsidized projects that are undertaken by the company.     

Beyond a unitary conception of pedagogic pace: quantitative measurement and ethnographic experience

English education policy‐makers have targeted classroom time as a key area for regulation and intervention, with ‘brisk pace’ widely accepted as a feature of good teaching practice. We problematise this conventional wisdom through an exploration of objective and subjective dimensions of lesson pace in a corpus of 30 Key Stage 2 literacy lessons from three classrooms in one London school. Systematic classroom observation produced an anomaly: the lessons we experienced as fast‐paced were rated objectively as slowest, and vice‐versa. We contrasted the fastest and slowest episodes in the corpus, demonstrating that for these episodes the accepted measure of pace primarily reflected differences in utterance length. Linguistic ethnographic micro‐analysis of the episodes highlighted predictability, stakes, meaning and dramatic performance as key factors contributing to pace as experienced. We argue, among other claims, that sometimes accelerating pupils' experience—and learning—necessitates slowing down the pace of teaching, and that government calls for urgency may, perversely, make lessons slower.