Delayed Time-to-Degree and Post-college Earnings

Research in Higher Education - Increasingly, undergraduates take more than 4 years to complete a baccalaureate, a situation widely perceived as a waste of time and money, for students,...     

Using the Information Structure Model to Compare Profile-Based Information Filtering Systems

In the IR field it is clear that the value of a system depends on the cost and benefit profiles of its users. It would seem obvious that different users would prefer different systems. In the TREC-9 filtering track, systems are evaluated by a utility measure specifying a given cost and benefit. However, in the study of decision systems it is known that, in some cases, one system may be unconditionally better than another. In this paper we employ a decision theoretic approach to find conditions under which an Information Filtering (IF) system is unconditionally superior to another for all users regardless of their cost and benefit profiles.It is well known that if two IF systems have equal precision the system with better recall will be preferred by all users. Similarly, with equal recall, better precision is universally preferred. We confirm these known results and discover an unexpected dominance relation in which a system with lower recall will be universally preferred provided its precision is sufficiently higher.     

Asia's Four Little Tigers: A comparison of the role of education in their development

The economic success of some of the countries within the East Asian region has generated a range of studies which have attempted to identify the sources of that growth. One strand within these analyses has focused on the critical role of schooling in the accumulation of human capital. This paper examines the role which education has played in the rapid development of the four 'Asian Tigers'; namely: Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. It is argued that whilst patterns of educational provision displayed some common features there were also significant differences in other areas such as the role of the state, sources of educational funding, the role of technical education and of the school curriculum.