Maternal schooling and children’s relative inequalities in developmental outcomes: evidence from the 1947 school leaving age reform in Britain

This paper investigates whether mothers’ participation in post‐compulsory education impacts on children’s relative inequalities across four developmental outcomes. The empirical analysis uses information from children born in 1958 in Britain. Mothers of the 1958 British cohort were affected by the 1947 school leaving age reform, which increased the age of compulsory schooling from 14 to 15 years. We selected the first‐born cohort members whose mothers were born in 1933 and 1934 and whose mothers completed compulsory schooling only. We found that the additional year of maternal schooling was significantly associated with relative improvements in mathematics attainment for their children, but no significant differences for reading or behavioural outcomes. The impact on mathematics was mainly for boys. These results suggest wider dispersion in mathematics attainment between sons whose mothers benefited from the additional year of schooling in 1947 and those whose mothers did not.     

The reform of curricula

The framing of school curricula and syllabi is a basic stage in the complex process of educational development. It may be said to be the clearest and most concrete ‘scholastic’ and ‘didactic’ expression of a task that begins with the taxing problem of defining objectives, continues with the establishment of the structures appropriate to aims and such objectives considered desirable and practicable, and ends with the evaluation of their present efficacity and possibilities for the future.     

Identifying top relevant dates for implicit time sensitive queries

Despite a clear improvement of search and retrieval temporal applications, current search engines are still mostly unaware of the temporal dimension. Indeed, in most cases, systems are limited to offering the user the chance to restrict the search to a particular time period or to simply rely on an explicitly specified time span. If the user is not explicit in his/her search intents (e.g., “philip seymour hoffman”) search engines may likely fail to present an overall historic perspective of the topic. In most such cases, they are limited to retrieving the most recent results. One possible solution to this shortcoming is to understand the different time periods of the query. In this context, most state-of-the-art methodologies consider any occurrence of temporal expressions in web documents and other web data as equally relevant to an implicit time sensitive query. To approach this problem in a more adequate manner, we propose in this paper the detection of relevant temporal expressions to the query. Unlike previous metadata and query log-based approaches, we show how to achieve this goal based on information extracted from document content. However, instead of simply focusing on the detection of the most obvious date we are also interested in retrieving the set of dates that are relevant to the query. Towards this goal, we define a general similarity measure that makes use of co-occurrences of words and years based on corpus statistics and a classification methodology that is able to identify the set of top relevant dates for a given implicit time sensitive query, while filtering out the non-relevant ones. Through extensive experimental evaluation, we mean to demonstrate that our approach offers promising results in the field of temporal information retrieval (T-IR), as demonstrated by the experiments conducted over several baselines on web corpora collections.     

A Bibliometric Analysis of High Impact Research in the Middle East Using Champion Works

Increasing political and financial support for scientific research in the Middle East requires academic and research communities in the region to demonstrate the visibility and impact of their scientific output. However, for countries with smaller scientific communities or lack of detailed information on their scientific production, the use of common metrics of scientific impact (e.g., number of papers, impact factor, h-index, etc.) may fail to reveal their true ability to produce high quality research, and thus guarantee the wanted societal support. In such cases, identifying and highlighting outstanding papers produced by national institutions or scientists may be another way to demonstrate scientific capacity and impact. In this context, this work aims to provide an overview of champion works (papers that have received over 1,000 citations) produced by Middle East countries. This analysis focuses on science, medicine, and technology papers featured in the Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science. The authors identified 213 champion works authored by Middle East scientists published since the 1970s. Israel is currently the leading nation in the Middle East in terms of published champion works, but at least one such work was identified for the majority of countries in the region. Middle East champion works were published on a diverse range of subject categories and often featured in the top journals worldwide (e.g., Science, Nature, etc.). The top institutions in the Middle East authoring champion works and their leading collaborating countries worldwide are listed, and the role of international scientific collaborations in achieving these highly cited papers is highlighted.     

Are the new starting block facilities beneficial for backstroke start performance?

We aimed to analyse the handgrip positioning and the wedge effects on the backstroke start performance and technique. Ten swimmers completed randomly eight 15 m backstroke starts (four with hands on highest horizontal and four on vertical handgrip) performed with and without wedge. One surface and one underwater camera recorded kinematic data. Standardised mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used. Handgrip positioning did not affect kinematics with and without wedge use. Handgrips horizontally positioned and feet over wedge displayed greater knee angular velocity than without it (SMD = ?0.82; 95% CI: ?1.56, ?0.08). Hands vertically positioned and feet over wedge presented greater take-off angle (SMD = ?0.81; 95% CI: ?1.55, ?0.07), centre of mass (CM) vertical positioning at first water contact (SMD = ?0.97; 95% CI: ?1.87, ?0.07) and CM vertical velocity at CM immersion (SMD = 1.03; 95% CI: 0.08, 1.98) when comparing without wedge use. Swimmers extended the hip previous to the knee and ankle joints, except for the variant with hands vertically positioned without wedge (SMD = 0.75; 95% CI: ?0.03, 1.53). Swimmers should preserve biomechanical advantages achieved during flight with variant with hands vertically positioned and wedge throughout entry and underwater phase.     

An assessment of a social–cognitive model of academic performance in mathematics in Argentinean middle school students

This study tested a set of hypotheses derived from the model of academic achievement in mathematics of the Social Cognitive Career Theory in a sample of Argentinean middle school students. To this aim, 277 students (male and female; age: 13–15 years) were assessed using the following instruments: logical–mathematical self-efficacy scale, mathematics outcome expectations, mathematics performance goals, and mathematics ability test. All of these instruments had been adapted for use in Argentinean students. Academic achievement in mathematics (i.e., grades obtained on regular school exams) was the variable to be modeled through the path analysis technique. The analysis allowed identification of interrelations among the variables and identification of direct and indirect effects. Academic achievement in mathematics was partially explained by the model. Overall, the results support the theoretical postulates of Social Cognitive Career Theory.     

Scholarly Communities at the Crossroads: Internationalizing Sociological Networks in Valparaíso,Chile (2003–2019)

Minerva - Achievements and tensions derived from the internationalization of national scholarly communities have attracted extensive attention. However, very little is hitherto known about the...     

Biomechanical analyses of synchronised swimming standard and contra-standard sculling

Synchronised swimming involves a variety of sculling movements essential for body support and propulsion but its study is scarce. We aimed to biomechanically compare standard and contra-standard sculling techniques, and to observe the relationship between measures. Six synchronised swimmers performed two, 30 s maximal intensity, fully tethered standard and contra-standard sculling motions. Kinetic and kinematic data were obtained using a load-cell and underwater cameras, respectively. Force decreased along both techniques’ bouts, but no differences in-between techniques were noted for any kinetic variables. Standard sculling presented a higher cycle rate and a lower elbow mean angle than the contra-standard sculling (2.4 ± 0.3 vs. 2.0 ± 0.2 cycles/s and 134.1 ± 5.8 and 141.5 ± 4.7°, p < 0.05). In the standard sculling, by removing and maintaining the variation between participants (r _w and r, respectively), the absolute mean force was directly related with cycle rate (r _w  = 0.60) and wrist angular velocity during flexion (r = 0.82), while in the contra-standard condition the force was inversely associated with wrist mean angle (r = ?0.95) and directly with hand speed (r _w  = 0.76), and elbow angular velocity (r _w  ≈ 0.60). Therefore, technique learning and training require different attention by coaches and swimmers.     

Adding Compression to Block Addressing Inverted Indexes

Inverted index compression, block addressing and sequential search on compressed text are three techniques that have been separately developed for efficient, low-overhead text retrieval. Modern text compression techniques can reduce the text to less than 30% of its size and allow searching it directly and faster than the uncompressed text. Inverted index compression obtains significant reduction of its original size at the same processing speed. Block addressing makes the inverted lists point to text blocks instead of exact positions and pay the reduction in space with some sequential text scanning.In this work we combine the three ideas in a single scheme. We present a compressed inverted file that indexes compressed text and uses block addressing. We consider different techniques to compress the index and study their performance with respect to the block size. We compare the index against three separate techniques for varying block sizes, showing that our index is superior to each isolated approach. For instance, with just 4% of extra space overhead the index has to scan less than 12% of the text for exact searches and about 20% allowing one error in the matches.     

The Network Orientations of Highly Resilient Urban Minority Youth: A Network-Analytic Account of Minority Socialization and Its Educational Implications

In this article the authors present a critical assessment of existing characterizations of resiliency and help-seeking behavior in light of their relevance to issues of minority youth socialization and schooling. In this effort, they reconceptualize the notion of resiliency within an analysis that highlights the more contextual aspects of how minority adolescent cope with structural forces that threaten healthy development. They show how key developmental transitions are thwarted by social forces that undermine the development of supportive relationships across multiple institutional sites (e.g., family, neighborhood, school). They also explain how resiliency is associated with egocentric networks that exhibit key structural characteristics. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of a critical network-analytic model of minority socialization in the development of future educational and youth mediations and reforms.