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In this study, we successfully developed two-dimensional paper-based analytical devices using a hybrid technique of injection molding and embossing. This innovative approach involves passive or active delivery of molten wax onto a glass substrate through a sealed chip, facilitating wax stamp creation.

In this paper we describe our search for galaxy protocluster candidates at $4.5< z < 10$ and explore the environmental and physical properties of their member galaxies identified through JWST wide-field surveys within the CEERS, JADES, and PEARLS NEP-TDF fields. Combining with HST data, we identify 2948 robust $z>4.5$ candidates within an area of 185.4 arcmin$^2$. We determine nearest neighbour statistics and galaxy environments. We find that high-$z$ galaxies in overdense environments exhibit higher star formation activity compared to those in underdense regions. Galaxies in dense environments have a slightly increased SFR at a given mass compared with galaxies in the lower density environments. At the high mass end we also find a gradual flattening of the $M_{\star}$-SFR slope. We find that galaxies in high-density regions often have redder UV slopes than those in low-density regions, suggesting more dust extinction, weaker Lyman-alpha emission and / or a higher damped Lyman-alpha absorption. We also find that the mass-size relation remains consistent and statistically similar across all environments. Furthermore, we quantitatively assess the probability of a galaxy belonging to a protocluster candidate. In total, we identified 26 overdensities at $z=5-7$ and estimate their dark matter halo masses. We find that all protocluster candidates could evolve into clusters with $M_{\rm halo} > 10^{14}M_{\odot}$ at $z = 0$, thereby supporting the theoretical and simulation predictions of cluster formation. Notably, this marks an early search for protocluster candidates in JWST wide field based on photometric data, providing valuable candidates to study cosmic structure formation at the early stages., Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures and 7 table, submitted to MNRAS

This paper presents a demonstration of our monster battle game, in which the game agents fight in accordance with their player's language commands. The commands were translated into the knowledge expression called behavior branches by a code-generation large language model. This work facilitated the design of the commanding system more easily, enabling the game agent to comprehend more various and continuous commands than rule-based methods. The results of the commanding and translation process were stored in a database on an Amazon Web Services server for more comprehensive validation. This implementation would provide a sufficient evaluation of this ongoing work, and give insights to the industry that they could use this to develop their interactive game agents., Comment: submitted to IEEE CoG 2024

Understanding the radiogenic neutron production rate through the (${\alpha}$, n) reaction is essential in many fields of physics like dark matter searches, neutrino studies, nuclear astrophysics and medical physics. This white paper provides a review of the current landscape of (${\alpha}$, n) yields, neutron spectra and correlated ${\gamma}$-rays calculations, and describes the existing tools and the available cross-sections. The uncertainties that contribute to (${\alpha}$, n) yield calculations are also discussed with plans for a program to improve the accuracy of these estimates. Novel ideas to measure (${\alpha}$, n) cross-sections for a variety of materials of interest are presented. The goal of this study is to reduce the uncertainty in the expected sensitivity of next-generation physics experiments in the keV--MeV regime., Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures

This teaching article describes a simple and low-cost methodology for studying electrical transport and constructing basic sensor devices using everyday stationery items, including pencils, paper, and a handheld multimeter. The approach is designed for high school and undergraduate teachers and offers an easy-to-implement, hands-on method for teaching fundamental concepts in physical electronics. The materials and experiments outlined in this article are widely accessible and can be easily replicated in various teaching labs, even with limited budgets.

This position paper takes a broad look at Physics-Enhanced Machine Learning (PEML) -- also known as Scientific Machine Learning -- with particular focus to those PEML strategies developed to tackle dynamical systems' challenges. The need to go beyond Machine Learning (ML) strategies is driven by: (i) limited volume of informative data, (ii) avoiding accurate-but-wrong predictions; (iii) dealing with uncertainties; (iv) providing Explainable and Interpretable inferences. A general definition of PEML is provided by considering four physics and domain knowledge biases, and three broad groups of PEML approaches are discussed: physics-guided, physics-encoded and physics-informed. The advantages and challenges in developing PEML strategies for guiding high-consequence decision making in engineering applications involving complex dynamical systems, are presented., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, conference, pre-print after review and acceptance to the International Conference on Recent Advances in Structural Dynamics (RASD) - 2024 Note: the conference has a 12-page limit

We study a five-species cyclic system wherein individuals of one species strategically adapt their movements to enhance their performance in the spatial rock-paper-scissors game. Environmental cues enable the awareness of the presence of organisms targeted for elimination in the cyclic game. If the local density of target organisms is sufficiently high, individuals move towards concentrated areas for direct attack; otherwise, they employ an ambush tactic, maximising the chances of success by targeting regions likely to be dominated by opponents. Running stochastic simulations, we discover that the ambush strategy enhances the likelihood of individual success compared to direct attacks alone, leading to uneven spatial patterns characterised by spiral waves. We compute the autocorrelation function and measure how the ambush tactic unbalances the organisms' spatial organisation by calculating the characteristic length scale of typical spatial domains of each species. We demonstrate that the threshold for local species density influences the ambush strategy's effectiveness, while the neighbourhood perception range significantly impacts decision-making accuracy. The outcomes show that long-range perception improves performance by over 60\%, although there is potential interference in decision-making under high attack triggers. Understanding how organisms' adaptation to their environment enhances their performance may be helpful not only for ecologists but also for data scientists aiming to improve artificial intelligence systems., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Journals and conferences worry that peer reviews assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, large language models (LLMs), may negatively influence the validity and fairness of the peer-review system, a cornerstone of modern science. In this work, we address this concern with a quasi-experimental study of the prevalence and impact of AI-assisted peer reviews in the context of the 2024 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a large and prestigious machine-learning conference. Our contributions are threefold. Firstly, we obtain a lower bound for the prevalence of AI-assisted reviews at ICLR 2024 using the GPTZero LLM detector, estimating that at least $15.8\%$ of reviews were written with AI assistance. Secondly, we estimate the impact of AI-assisted reviews on submission scores. Considering pairs of reviews with different scores assigned to the same paper, we find that in $53.4\%$ of pairs the AI-assisted review scores higher than the human review ($p = 0.002$; relative difference in probability of scoring higher: $+14.4\%$ in favor of AI-assisted reviews). Thirdly, we assess the impact of receiving an AI-assisted peer review on submission acceptance. In a matched study, submissions near the acceptance threshold that received an AI-assisted peer review were $4.9$ percentage points ($p = 0.024$) more likely to be accepted than submissions that did not. Overall, we show that AI-assisted reviews are consequential to the peer-review process and offer a discussion on future implications of current trends, Comment: Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Tim R. Davidson, and Veniamin Veselovsky contributed equally to this work

We advocate for the prioritization of high-precision photometric monitoring of exoplanet and brown dwarf companions to detect brightness variability arising from features in their atmospheres. Measurements of photometric variability provide not only an insight into the physical appearances of these companions, but are also a direct probe of their atmospheric structures and dynamics, and yield valuable estimates of their rotation periods. JWST is uniquely capable of monitoring faint exoplanet companions over their full rotation periods, thanks to its inherent stability and powerful high-contrast coronagraphic imaging modes. Rotation period measurements can be further combined with measurements of v sin i obtained using high-resolution spectroscopy to infer the viewing angle of a companion. Photometric monitoring over multiple rotation periods and at multiple epochs will allow both short- and long-term time evolution in variability signals to be traced. Furthermore, the differences between the layers in a companion's atmosphere can be probed by obtaining simultaneous photometric monitoring at different wavelengths through NIRCam dual-band coronagraphy. Overall, JWST will reach the highest sensitivities to variability to date and enable the light curves of substellar companions to be characterised with unprecedented cadence and precision at the sub-percent level., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, white paper submitted in response to the call by the Working Group on Strategic Exoplanet Initiatives with HST and JWST (details at https://outerspace.stsci.edu/display/HPR/Strategic+Exoplanet+Initiatives+with+HST+and+JWST & final report at arXiv:2404.02932), adapted to include author list and affiliations

Percentage coefficient (bp) has emerged in recent publications as an additional and alternative estimator of effect size for regression analysis. This paper retraces the theory behind the estimator. It's posited that an estimator must first serve the fundamental function of enabling researchers and readers to comprehend an estimand, the target of estimation. It may then serve the instrumental function of enabling researchers and readers to compare two or more estimands. Defined as the regression coefficient when dependent variable (DV) and independent variable (IV) are both on conceptual 0-1 percentage scales, percentage coefficients (bp) feature 1) clearly comprehendible interpretation and 2) equitable scales for comparison. The coefficient (bp) serves the two functions effectively and efficiently. It thus serves needs unserved by other indicators, such as raw coefficient (bw) and standardized beta. Another premise of the functionalist theory is that "effect" is not a monolithic concept. Rather, it is a collection of concepts, each of which measures a component of the conglomerate called "effect", thereby serving a subfunction. Regression coefficient (b), for example, indicates the unit change in DV associated with a one-unit increase in IV, thereby measuring one aspect called unit effect, aka efficiency. Percentage coefficient (bp) indicates the percentage change in DV associated with a whole scale increase in IV. It is not meant to be an all-encompassing indicator of an all-encompassing concept, but rather a comprehendible and comparable indicator of efficiency, a key aspect of effect.

The support for higher-order reasoning in the Vampire theorem prover has recently been completely reworked. This rework consists of new theoretical ideas, a new implementation, and a dedicated strategy schedule. The theoretical ideas are still under development, so we discuss them at a high level in this paper. We also describe the implementation of the calculus in the Vampire theorem prover, the strategy schedule construction and several empirical performance statistics., Comment: 8 pages + references + 1 appendix, accepted to IJCAR 2024 (without the appendix)

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this year's competition are as follows: First, we replace the loose track with a paper track, which allows (for example) non-model-based submissions, novel cognitively-inspired benchmarks, or analysis techniques. Second, we are relaxing the rules around pretraining data, and will now allow participants to construct their own datasets provided they stay within the 100M-word or 10M-word budget. Third, we introduce a multimodal vision-and-language track, and will release a corpus of 50% text-only and 50% image-text multimodal data as a starting point for LM model training. The purpose of this CfP is to provide rules for this year's challenge, explain these rule changes and their rationale in greater detail, give a timeline of this year's competition, and provide answers to frequently asked questions from last year's challenge.

Galaxy cluster mergers are representative of a wide range of physics, making them an excellent probe of the properties of dark matter and the ionized plasma of the intracluster medium. To date, most studies have focused on mergers occurring in the plane of the sky, where morphological features can be readily identified. To allow study of mergers with arbitrary orientation, we have assembled multi-probe data for the eight-cluster ICM-SHOX sample sensitive to both morphology and line of sight velocity. The first ICM-SHOX paper (Silich+2023) provided an overview of our methodology applied to one member of the sample, MACS J0018.5+1626, in order to constrain its merger geometry. That work resulted in an exciting new discovery of a velocity space decoupling of its gas and dark matter distributions. In this work, we describe the availability and quality of multi-probe data for the full ICM-SHOX galaxy cluster sample. These datasets will form the observational basis of an upcoming full ICM-SHOX galaxy cluster sample analysis., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures; published in Proc. of the mm Universe 2023 conference, EPJ Web of conferences, EDP Sciences

With the rapid growth of scholarly archives, researchers subscribe to "paper alert" systems that periodically provide them with recommendations of recently published papers that are similar to previously collected papers. However, researchers sometimes struggle to make sense of nuanced connections between recommended papers and their own research context, as existing systems only present paper titles and abstracts. To help researchers spot these connections, we present PaperWeaver, an enriched paper alerts system that provides contextualized text descriptions of recommended papers based on user-collected papers. PaperWeaver employs a computational method based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer users' research interests from their collected papers, extract context-specific aspects of papers, and compare recommended and collected papers on these aspects. Our user study (N=15) showed that participants using PaperWeaver were able to better understand the relevance of recommended papers and triage them more confidently when compared to a baseline that presented the related work sections from recommended papers., Comment: Accepted to CHI 2024

Despite the growing interest in incorporating response time data into item response models, there has been a lack of research investigating how the effect of speed on the probability of a correct response varies across different groups (e.g., experimental conditions) for various items (i.e., differential response time item analysis). Furthermore, previous research has shown a complex relationship between response time and accuracy, necessitating a functional analysis to understand the patterns that manifest from this relationship. In this study, response time data are incorporated into an item response model for two purposes: (a) to examine how individuals' speed within an experimental condition affects their response accuracy on an item, and (b) to detect the differences in individuals' speed between conditions in the presence of within-condition effects. For these two purposes, by-variable smooth functions are employed to model differential and functional response time effects by experimental condition for each item. This model is illustrated using an empirical data set to describe the effect of individuals' speed on their reading comprehension ability in two experimental conditions of reading medium (paper vs. digital) by item. A simulation study showed that the recovery of parameters and by-variable smooth functions of response time was satisfactory, and that the type I error rate and power of the test for the by-variable smooth function of response time were acceptable in conditions similar to the empirical data set. In addition, the proposed method correctly identified the range of response time where between-condition differences in the effect of response time on the probability of a correct response were accurate. [This is the online version of an article published in "Journal of Educational Measurement."]

This paper documents the impact of home libraries on academic achievement, economic success, and health. It summarizes research that shows how children without access to reading materials at home are more likely to suffer learning losses when out of school and how home libraries are one of schools' and communities' best tools to combat learning loss. In sum, the paper illustrates the importance of creating a literacy-rich home environment for all children and outlines the essential components of a student home library--a tangible, cost-effective way to afford every child access to a bright, successful future. [This report was prepared by Scholastic Research & Validation.]

The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice & Education Global Practice.]

Experiential learning is critical to a smooth transition from higher education to the workforce. Work-based college courses, such as internships and practicums, may be useful in facilitating this transition. This paper applies an innovative text mining technique to identify and analyze work-based courses from transcript data. The paper examines patterns and post-degree labor market outcomes of taking work-based courses at two-year and four-year colleges in a large public college system. Findings show that approximately 15% of enrollees and 30% of graduates took a work-based course in the six years after college entry. Students typically earned credits from work-based courses, and they typically took the courses in later years of their programs. Moreover, work-based coursetaking varied largely across fields of study as well as colleges. While there was no significant racial disparity, female students, students who were younger at enrollment, and U.S.-born students were more likely to take the courses than their counterparts. Results show a positive association between work-based coursetaking in college and the probability of being employed after degree completion among both two-year and four-year degree completers, a positive association with post-degree earnings among four-year completers, and a negative association with post-degree earnings among two-year completers.

Despite a strong track record of success and parent demand, charter school growth has slowed considerably in recent years in Massachusetts and nationwide. In the Commonwealth's large urban school districts--especially Boston--this lack of growth is attributable to charter school caps that prevent the state from authorizing new charter school seats. But some school districts in the Commonwealth have room to grow. They have space available for charter expansion under the state's net school spending (NSS) cap and demand for charter schools in the form of waiting lists. A number of those districts are in Gateway Cities, "midsize urban centers that anchor regional economies around the state." The following paper provides data on the Gateway Cities with room to expand under the NSS cap. It also provides examples of how the politics of charter schooling-- both state and local--have prevented high quality operators from serving students and families who desire a charter school education. Finally, this paper concludes with recommendations to change state charter statute as well as processes and procedures related to charter school authorizing in the Commonwealth. These recommendations would make it more difficult for the state or any locality to deny families the charter school options they desire.

By the time children in low- and middle-income countries start primary school, large socioeconomic disparities are evident in children's learning and development. Both pre-primary and home environments can play important roles in influencing school readiness and can contribute to disparities in early childhood development, but there is limited evidence on their relative roles in low- and middle-income countries. This paper examines how pre-primary quality, stimulation at home, and early childhood development vary by socioeconomic status for pre-primary students in the Arab Republic of Egypt. The results demonstrate substantial socioeconomic inequality in stimulation at home, more so than in pre-primary quality and inputs, although there is variation in the degree of inequality across different dimensions of pre-primary quality. "Double inequality" is observed, where students with less stimulating home environments experience slightly lower quality pre-primary inputs. There are particularly large pre-primary inequities in structural quality (physical environment) and less inequity in process quality (pedagogy). These results suggest that targeted investments in pre-primary education in Egypt are necessary to reduce inequality in school readiness but are likely insufficient to close the socioeconomic status gap in children's development. Investing in interventions to improve vulnerable children's home learning environments, as well as investing in quality pre-primary, is critical to address disparities in children's development. [This paper is a product of the World Bank's Education Global Practice. The study is the result of a collaboration between the World Bank and the Ministry of Education and Technical Education of Egypt (MOETE). It was funded by the UK Strategic Partnership for Egypt's Inclusive Growth Trust Fund and the World Bank.]

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of instruments intended to capture cognitive and socioemotional skills among young adults. On sampling, the paper uses a panel that follows respondents from their original rural locations in 2003 to their residences in 2018, a period over which 38 percent of the respondents left their native villages. In terms of their validity and reliability, our skills measures compare favorably to previous measurement attempts in low- and middle-income countries. The following are documented in the data: (a) more years of schooling are correlated with higher cognitive and socioemotional skills; (b) labor earnings are correlated with cognitive and socioemotional skills as well as years of schooling; and (c) the earnings-skills correlations depend on respondents' migration status. The magnitudes of the correlations between schooling and skills on the one hand and earnings and skills on the other are consistent with a widespread concern that such skills are under-produced in the schooling system. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Group's Development Research Group, Development Economics. Funding was provided by RISE and World Bank's Strategic Research Program Fund.]

This paper studies the effects of differential exposure to COVID-19 on educational outcomes in Guatemala. The government adopted a warning index (ranging from 0 to 10) to classify municipalities by infection rates in 2020, which was then used by the Ministry of Education in 2021 to establish a "stoplight" system for in-person instruction. Using administrative panel data for all students in Guatemala, the study employs a difference-in-differences strategy that leverages municipal differences over time in the warning index to estimate the effects of the pandemic on dropout, promotion, and school switching. The results show that municipalities with a higher warning index had significantly larger dropout, lower promotion rates, and a greater share of students switching from private to public schools. These effects were more pronounced during the first year of the pandemic. The findings show differential effects by the level of instruction, with greater losses for younger children in initial and primary education. The results are robust to specification choice, multiple hypothesis adjustments, and placebo experiments, suggesting that the pandemic has had heterogeneous consequences. [This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice.]

This paper relates how leaders of a higher education program, the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, sparked and managed innovation across communities of scholarship, research, and practice. This paper uses a "design narrative" method to describe how leaders orchestrated organizational change by bringing diverse communities together into research-practice partnerships. The narrative uses the idea of "boundary objects" to describe how initiatives were progressively developed to create more inclusive spaces for sustained innovation. The insights and the capacity that resulted from initial design efforts created a richer space for subsequent initiatives. The paper shows how design narratives can illustrate the role that boundary objects can play in organizational change and concludes with a discussion of the role that leaders can play in creating inclusive cultures of innovation in higher education.

This technical assistance paper provides policy and guidance to individuals with test administration responsibilities in adult education programs. The Florida assessment policies and guidelines presented in this technical assistance paper are appropriate for state and federal reporting. Therefore, guidance and procedures regarding the selection and use of appropriate student assessment are included. The following important information for adult education programs is provided: (1) Definition of key terms and acronyms; (2) Selection of appropriate assessments by student and program type; (3) Appropriate student placement into program and instructional level; (4) Verification of student learning gains, EFL, and/or program completion; (5) Accommodation for students with disabilities and other special needs; (6) Assessment procedures for Distance Education; and (7) Training for all staff who administer the standardized assessments.

This 15-page document provides a high-level summary and key excerpts from WCER Working Paper No. 2023-3 (ED631017). Readers should consult the full working paper for more in-depth detail and evidence, particularly in the extensive appendices. This technical summary reports on analyses conducted during the standards development process to establish a clear correspondence between the WIDA ELD Standards Framework, 2020 Edition (WIDA's K-12 English language proficiency standards), and the academic content standards used by WIDA consortium member State Education Agencies (SEAs). The analyses assess the match, breadth, balance of representation [consistency], and depth between these two types of standards. The paper also offers evidence of correspondence between these two types of standards and offers a methodology for states to use. It reports on the broad analysis used to update the WIDA ELD Standards Framework to ensure it could be applied flexibly across the consortium. SEA correspondence mappings are specific to individual SEAs. As federal law and peer review indicate the final responsibility for standards lies with states, WIDA is able to offer this technical paper as a tool to support the state correspondence process. [For the full report, see ED631017.]

A very small number of young people enter youth custody between age 16 and 18 (about 4 in 1000 males), yet the consequences are severe. They spend an average of 7 months in youth custody and such incarceration has been related to negative outcomes in the longer term even if they can establish themselves in the labour market. In this paper, we evaluate whether there is a relationship between GCSE qualifications in English and maths and the probability of youth custody using administrative data in England. We are hindered in this because the majority of young people who end up in youth custody are not entered or fail their GCSEs in these subjects. Although regression results are consistent with educational achievement being a factor in why people end up in youth custody, they strongly suggest that both non-entry/low achievement and youth custody are correlated with severe vulnerabilities which are partially picked up by the explanatory variables available in administrative data (in particular indicators for special needs, disadvantage and being from some ethnic minority groups). Another interesting insight is that for many, problems only emerge (or at least become evident) in early or middle adolescence. [This paper forms part of a larger project funded by the Nuffield Foundation "Youth custody: Educational influences and labour market consequences."]

This paper examines the impact of Teach For America (TFA) on following-year student test and non-test outcomes in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This paper measures the extent to which exposure to TFA is followed by improved student outcomes in the future. In particular, this paper measures days missed due to absences or suspensions, course grades in each core subject, and progression in math courses. We find that students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have higher grades in math courses in the following year and are less likely to miss school due to being absent or suspended. However, while students in TFA classrooms score higher on math and ELA assessments in a given year, these test score gains fade out by the following year.

This paper presents credible and comparable evidence on intergenerational educational mobility in 53 developing countries using sibling correlation as a measure, and data from 230 waves of Demographic and Health Surveys. It is the first paper to provide estimates of sibling correlation in schooling for a large number of developing countries using high quality standardized data. Sibling correlation is an omnibus measure of mobility as it captures observed and unobserved family and neighborhood factors shared by siblings when growing up together. The estimates suggest that sibling correlation in schooling in developing countries is much higher (average 0.59) than that in developed countries (average 0.41). There is substantial spatial heterogeneity across regions, with Latin America and Caribbean having the highest (0.65) and Europe and Central Asia the lowest (0.48) estimates. Country level heterogeneity within a region is more pronounced. The evolution of sibling correlation suggests a variety of mobility experiences, with some regions registering a monotonically declining trend from the 1970s birth cohort to the 1990s birth cohort (Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific), while others remained trapped in stagnancy (South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa). The only region that experienced monotonically increasing sibling correlation is the Middle East and North Africa. The recent approach of Bingley and Cappellari (2019) is used to estimate the share of sibling correlation due to intergenerational transmission. The estimates show that when the homogeneity and independence assumptions implicit in the standard model of intergenerational transmission are relaxed, the estimated share is much larger. In the sample of countries, on average 74 percent of sibling correlation can be attributed to intergenerational transmission, while there are some countries where the share is more than 80 percent (most in Sub-Saharan Africa). This suggests a dominant role for parents in determining the educational opportunities of their children. Evidence on the evolution of the intergenerational share, however, suggests a declining importance of the intergenerational transmission component in many countries, but the pattern is diverse. In some cases, the trend in the intergenerational share is opposite to the trend in sibling correlation. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Group's Development Research Group, Development Economics.]

Since the mainstream racial awakening to pervasive and entrenched structural racism, many organizations have made commitments and adopted practices to increase workplace diversity, inclusion, and equity and embed these commitments in their organizational missions. A question often arises about how these concepts apply to research. This paper discusses how organizations can build on their specific commitments to diversity, inclusion, and equity by applying these principles in the research enterprise. RTI International's framework for conducting equity-centered transformative research highlights how incorporating principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity requires a departure from mainstream practice because of historical and intentional exclusion of these principles. Drawing on methodologies of culturally responsive evaluation, research, and pedagogy; feminist, Indigenous, and critical methodologies; community-based participatory research; and theories of social transformation, liberation, and racial justice, this organizing framework illustrates what this departure requires and how research can serve liberation and social justice by transforming the researcher, the research content, and the day-to-day practice of conducting research. Centering the work of seminal scholars and practitioners of color in the field, this paper provides a holistic framework that incorporates various research approaches and paradigms intended to shift power to minoritized and marginalized communities to achieve social transformation through research.

"Papel y lápiz" (Paper and pencil) is the result of a qualitative research project carried out using the Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a model. "Papel y lapiz" seeks to teach young people and children, who are identified as being at high social risk, in 35 different public educational institutions (PEIs) from Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. The principle aim of the project will be educating them about the importance of knowing and understanding the often-harsh realities of their social situations with particular focus on the social risks each of them might encounter. "Papel y lapiz" also aims to teach students about the social situation of their city using media and specifically the press. Working alongside Educommunication, the aim is to start educating the young people in school classrooms, in other words the most formative years of their youth. Between 2019 and 2022 this research project has reached 712 students from various public Educational Institutions (EIs) in Cartagena. The project was materialized in collaboration with teachers and directors by creating 6 educational cards that incorporate the use of the press to analyze some of the most critical issues the city is facing. [For the full proceedings, see ED654100.]

Flattery is an important aspect of human communication that facilitates social bonding, shapes perceptions, and influences behavior through strategic compliments and praise, leveraging the power of speech to build rapport effectively. Its automatic detection can thus enhance the naturalness of human-AI interactions. To meet this need, we present a novel audio textual dataset comprising 20 hours of speech and train machine learning models for automatic flattery detection. In particular, we employ pretrained AST, Wav2Vec2, and Whisper models for the speech modality, and Whisper TTS models combined with a RoBERTa text classifier for the textual modality. Subsequently, we build a multimodal classifier by combining text and audio representations. Evaluation on unseen test data demonstrates promising results, with Unweighted Average Recall scores reaching 82.46% in audio-only experiments, 85.97% in text-only experiments, and 87.16% using a multimodal approach., Comment: Interspeech 2024

The $\beta$ Pictoris system is the closest known stellar system with directly detected gas giant planets, an edge-on circumstellar disc, and evidence of falling sublimating bodies and transiting exocomets. The inner planet, $\beta$ Pictoris c, has also been indirectly detected with radial velocity (RV) measurements. The star is a known $\delta$ Scuti pulsator, and the long-term stability of these pulsations opens up the possibility of indirectly detecting the gas giant planets through time delays of the pulsations due to a varying light travel time. We search for phase shifts in the $\delta$ Scuti pulsations consistent with the known planets $\beta$ Pictoris b and c and carry out an analysis of the stellar pulsations of $\beta$ Pictoris over a multi-year timescale. We used photometric data collected by the BRITE-Constellation, bRing, ASTEP, and TESS to derive a list of the strongest and most significant $\delta$ Scuti pulsations. We carried out an analysis with the open-source python package maelstrom to study the stability of the pulsation modes of $\beta$ Pictoris in order to determine the long-term trends in the observed pulsations. We did not detect the expected signal for $\beta$ Pictoris b or $\beta$ Pictoris c. The expected time delay is 6 seconds for $\beta$ Pictoris c and 24 seconds for $\beta$ Pictoris b. With simulations, we determined that the photometric noise in all the combined data sets cannot reach the sensitivity needed to detect the expected timing drifts. An analysis of the pulsational modes of $\beta$ Pictoris using maelstrom showed that the modes themselves drift on the timescale of a year, fundamentally limiting our ability to detect exoplanets around $\beta$ Pictoris via pulsation timing., Comment: 16 pages, 16 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in A&A

Background. The recent surge in phishing attacks keeps undermining the effectiveness of the traditional anti-phishing blacklist approaches. On-device anti-phishing solutions are gaining popularity as they offer faster phishing detection locally. Aim. We aim to eliminate the delay in recognizing and recording phishing campaigns in databases via on-device solutions that identify phishing sites immediately when encountered by the user rather than waiting for a web crawler's scan to finish. Additionally, utilizing operating system-specific resources and frameworks, we aim to minimize the impact on system performance and depend on local processing to protect user privacy. Method. We propose a phishing detection solution that uses a combination of computer vision and on-device machine learning models to analyze websites in real time. Our reference-based approach analyzes the visual content of webpages, identifying phishing attempts through layout analysis, credential input areas detection, and brand impersonation criteria combination. Results. Our case study shows it's feasible to perform background processing on-device continuously, for the case of the web browser requiring the resource use of 16% of a single CPU core and less than 84MB of RAM on Apple M1 while maintaining the accuracy of brand logo detection at 46.6% (comparable with baselines), and of Credential Requiring Page detection at 98.1% (improving the baseline by 3.1%), within the test dataset. Conclusions. Our results demonstrate the potential of on-device, real-time phishing detection systems to enhance cybersecurity defensive technologies and extend the scope of phishing detection to more similar regions of interest, e.g., email clients and messenger windows., Comment: [v1] 8 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables. Accepted to STAST'24, 14th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security, Affiliated with the 9th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, https://stast.uni.lu/ [v2] 8 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables. Added an extended evaluation of the solution on a 50K mixed phishing and benign webpage dataset (Section 4.1.4)

Large Language Model (LLM) -in-the-loop applications have been shown to effectively interpret the human user's commands, make plans, and operate external tools/systems accordingly. Still, the operation scope of the LLM agent is limited to passively following the user, requiring the user to frame his/her needs with regard to the underlying tools/systems. We note that the potential of an LLM-Agent User Interface (LAUI) is much greater. A user mostly ignorant to the underlying tools/systems should be able to work with a LAUI to discover an emergent workflow. Contrary to the conventional way of designing an explorable GUI to teach the user a predefined set of ways to use the system, in the ideal LAUI, the LLM agent is initialized to be proficient with the system, proactively studies the user and his/her needs, and proposes new interaction schemes to the user. To illustrate LAUI, we present Flute X GPT, a concrete example using an LLM agent, a prompt manager, and a flute-tutoring multi-modal software-hardware system to facilitate the complex, real-time user experience of learning to play the flute.

Over the course of the recent decade, tremendous progress has been made in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing, which opened up vast areas of potential application use cases, including hiring and human resource management. We review the use cases for text analytics in the realm of human resources/personnel management, including actually realized as well as potential but not yet implemented ones, and we analyze the opportunities and risks of these., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

We measure the broad impact of galaxy structure on galaxy formation by examining the ongoing star formation and integrated star formation history as revealed through the stellar masses of galaxies at $z < 7$ based on JWST CEERS data from the Extended Groth Strip (EGS). Using the morphological catalog of 3965 visually classified JWST galaxies from Ferreira et al. (2023), we investigate the evolution of stars, and when they form, as a function of morphological type as well as galaxies classified as passive and starburst through spectral energy distributions. Although disk galaxies dominate the structures of galaxies at $z < 7$, we find that these disks are in general either `passive', or on the main-sequence of star formation, and do not contain a large population of starburst galaxies. We also find no significant correlation between morphological type and the star formation rate or colours of galaxies at $z < 7$. In fact, we find that the morphologically classified `spheroids' tend to be blue and are not found to be predominately passive systems at $z > 1.5$. We also find that the stellar mass function for disk galaxies does not evolve significantly during this time, whereas other galaxy types, such as the peculiar population, evolve dramatically, declining at lower redshifts. This indicates that massive peculiars are more common at higher redshifts. We further find that up to $z \sim 7$, the specific star formation rate (sSFR) does not vary with visual morphology, but strongly depends on stellar mass and internal galaxy mass density. This demonstrates that at early epochs galaxy assembly is a mass-driven, rather than a morphologically-driven, process. Quenching of star formation is therefore a mass-dominated process throughout the universe's history, likely due to the presence of supermassive black holes., Comment: MNRAS in press, 20 pages

V454 Aur is an eclipsing binary system containing two solar-type stars on an orbit of relatively long period (P = 27.02 d) and large eccentricity (e = 0.381). Eclipses were detected using data from the Hipparcos satellite, and a high-quality double-lined spectroscopic orbit has been presented by Griffin (2001). The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has observed the system during eight sectors, capturing ten eclipses in their entirety. V454 Aur is unusual in that the primary star - the star eclipsed at the deeper minimum - is less massive, smaller \emph{and} cooler than its companion. This phenomenon can occur in certain configurations of eccentric orbits when the stars are closer together at the primary eclipse, causing a larger area to be eclipsed than at the secondary. We use the radial velocity measurements from Griffin and the light curves from TESS to determine the masses and radii of the component stars for the first time, finding masses of 1.034 +/- 0.006 Msun and 1.161 +/- 0.008 Msun, and radii of 0.979 +/- 0.003 Rsun and 1.211 +/- 0.003 Rsun. Our measurement of the distance to the system is consistent with that from the Gaia DR3 parallax. A detailed spectroscopic study to determine chemical abundances and more precise temperatures is encouraged. Finally, we present equations to derive the effective temperatures of the stars from the inferred temperature of the system as a whole, plus the ratio of the radii and either the surface brightness or light ratio of the stars., Comment: Accepted for publication in The Observatory on 2nd April 2024. 14 pages, 4 tables, 3 black/white figures. Version 2 has a slightly revised Note added in Proof

The lack of experimental data on the direct-drive pressure leads us to the conclusion that, the published experimental confirmation of driving pressure boosting and smoothing for hybrid-drive inertial fusion is not credible., Comment: Comment on https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41477-2

OO Peg is a detached eclipsing binary system containing two late-A-type stars in a circular orbit with a period of 2.985 d. Using published spectroscopic results and a light curve from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) we determine their masses to be 1.69 +/- 0.09 and 1.74 +/- 0.06 Msun, and their radii to be 2.12 +/- 0.03 and 1.91 +/- 0.03 Rsun. The TESS data are of high quality, but discrepancies in the radial velocities from two sources prevent a precise mass measurement. The primary star is definitively hotter, larger and more luminous than its companion, but its mass is lower (albeit to a significance of only 1.1 sigma). Using published apparent magnitudes and temperatures, we find a distance of 238.8 +/- 6.1 pc, in agreement with the Gaia DR3 parallax. Although both components are in the delta Scuti instability strip, we find no evidence of pulsations. More extensive spectroscopy is needed to improve our understanding of the system., Comment: Accepted for publication in The Observatory. 12 pages, 4 tables, 3 black/white figures

This study investigated the underexplored topic of teacher preparation program admissions processes by interviewing faculty and analyzing program documents. We investigated how 31 K-12 "mathematics and science" teacher preparation programs (MSTPPs) and faculty attend to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social and racial justice (DEIJ). Specific foci included applicant recruitment and selection, components of applications (e.g., forms, essays, interviews), and how applicants' DEIJ-related information and orientations factor into admissions. We found that all MSTPPs participating in the study collected information related to DEIJ (e.g., applicants' ethnoracial backgrounds, citizenship), and all interviewed faculty expressed an interest in increasing the diversity of applicants and admitted students. Faculty expressed preferences for applicants who evidenced positive DEIJ orientations, such as recognizing social and ethnoracial injustices, but at the same time, differences were evident in how MSTPPs and faculty attended to DEIJ. Considerations, implication, and dilemmas for teacher preparation programs and faculty are discussed.

The onset of the pandemic in spring 2020 substantially disrupted routes into teaching and offered a unique opportunity to study this process with different requirements for initial entry into the classroom. We examine the impacts of the Temporary Certificate of Eligibility (Temporary CE), which allowed teacher candidates in New Jersey to enter the workforce before completing assessment and performance requirements. Relative to the novice teacher workforce before the pandemic, Temporary CE teachers were substantially more diverse without any significant effects on teacher performance or student test scores. However, Temporary CE holders were less likely to remain in the same school or in the New Jersey teaching workforce between 2020-21 and 2021-22. Although Temporary CE holders disproportionately entered through alternate routes into teaching, these patterns hold for both traditional- and alternate-route entrants.

Research universities enable students to have a unique learning environment and other experiences. This article aims to analyze student engagement in one research university in Brazil, the effects of student socioeconomic and academic characteristics and their associations with university structures (curriculum), and student trajectories. The data comes from the Student Experience in the Research University, an international survey administered in 2012 at the University of Campinas and longitudinal academic registers. The study used both Principal Component Analysis and also Multiple Linear Regression Models. Five modes of engagement were found: two related to curricular engagement (engagement with faculty and engagement outside the classroom), social and leisure engagement, curricular disengagement and co-curricular engagement. The main effects are associated with the disciplines. Regarding student trajectories, there was a negative association between academic engagement and dropout students and those still enrolled seven years after the survey application. The results align with other studies that associate disciplines with student engagement and student engagement with student success.

This qualitative study examines the information collected about applicants to mathematics or science teacher preparation programs (MSTPPs) and how university faculty perceive and value this information in admissions decisions. Based on document review and interviews with MSTPP faculty and admissions directors, we found that broad measures of mathematics and science content background (e.g., achievement test scores, past mathematics and science courses taken) were used more frequently than information on applicants' specific mathematics and science content knowledge and dispositions. In many cases, application components (such as interviews and personal essay statements) were perceived by faculty to be conducive to surfacing applicants' content knowledge and dispositions; however, they were not constructed or employed in a way that afforded the obtainment of this information. We highlight salient examples of MSTPPs' collection and use of information related to mathematics and science and discuss implications for TPP admissions processes.

Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering), and mean student achievement in grades 3-8. Our models use similar multiple regression equations and the same variables employed by Chetty et al. but also include state fixed effects, student achievement, and family, community, schoolbridging (cross-class high school friendships), and political (participation and institutional trust) capital. School-bridging capital is weakly correlated with mobility if adult-bridging is excluded from the model. R-squared barely changes when adult-bridging is incorporated into the model. When it is included, mobility continues to be significantly correlated with the achievement, family, and community variables but not with school-bridging and political ones. We infer that county mobility rates are largely shaped by parental presence, community life, and student achievement. To enhance mobility, public policy needs to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people at home, in school, and in communities, not just the social class of their friendships.

While international alliances among research universities are relatively well established, the challenges for the small liberal arts college to execute a meaningful global collaboration can be much more difficult, due both to the much smaller size of the institution, its more limited resources, and its smaller and more intimate culture centered on undergraduate teaching and learning. A new alliance of liberal arts colleges known as the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges (PALAC) was established in 2021 with the purpose to better articulate the global components of liberal arts education, and to collaborate on key projects that will build collective capacity for student-centered liberal arts education that engages with the world's most pressing problems. PALAC contains nine of the best liberal arts institutions from across the Pacific Region, including institutions in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Canada, and the United States. This essay describes the origins, motivations, and context of the creation of PALAC, its member institutions, and some of the initial projects planned by the new organization, and goals for global impact for PALAC.

We provide the first causal evidence of the returns to maternal educational curricula on offspring's health at birth. Educational programs that aim to deliver more general knowledge may potentially improve women's earning potential and maternal prenatal investment by increasing the portability of skills across occupations and improving women's ability to make informed decisions about fertility options and health behavior. We study the impacts of a comprehensive educational reform that postponed students' curriculum choices and integrated more general education into the high school system on infant health outcomes. Using a dose-response difference-in-differences (DiD) model research design applied to linked population registries, we find that the reform led to a significant reduction in the incidence of very low birth weight (less than 1,500 grams) and very preterm birth (less than 33 gestation weeks). Overall, the reform's positive effects on infant health at birth seem to be driven by increased mothers' labor market opportunities and better family planning, rather than increased ability to avoid risky behaviours or increased women's earnings via different occupational choices or assortative mating. [This report received additional funding from Fundación Ramón Areces and the Spanish National Research Plan 2017-2020.]

We use over 25 years of longitudinal data from Washington state to provide a descriptive portrait of the paraeducator workforce in the state. Paraeducators are more racially and ethnically diverse than special education teachers, particularly in the last decade, and tend to be less experienced. They also have full-time salaries that are about half of the average special education teacher salary. Paraeducator-to-student ratios have decreased over time in the state, but they are higher in schools serving more students of color. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, paraeducator attrition rates from the state's public school workforce have increased dramatically over time; for example, the paraeducator attrition rate after the 2021-22 school year (23%) was over twice as high as the attrition rate after the 2008-09 school year (8%). These findings have implications for how policymakers and school leaders should approach decision-making related to the paraeducator workforce, as well as how researchers might approach further research with this group of educators.

To trace the evolution of research strands in published Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) papers over time, a corpus of 426 highly-cited papers in four major CALL journals ("ReCALL," "CALL," "LL&T," and "CALICO Journal") was compiled and coded using NVivo 12. All identified aspects of technology-mediated language learning and teaching were collected to produce a comprehensive list of 690 recurring research strands and then, by adopting a constant comparison method, were merged to form 119 unique research strands. The top 10 alone represent almost half of all research strands: Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), writing, vocabulary, feedback, evaluation, learning environment, telecollaboration, design, speaking, and grammar. This paper provides the rationale for the study along with the methodology for data collection and analysis, with a particular focus on the dominant and intermediary strands to inform future CALL publications. [For the complete volume, "Intelligent CALL, Granular Systems and Learner Data: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2022 (30th, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 17-19, 2022)," see ED624779.]

Using the historical random assignment of MBA students to peer groups at a top business school in the United States, I study the effect of the gender composition of a student's peers on the gender pay gap at graduation and long-term labor market outcomes. I find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of male peers leads to a 2.1 percent increase in the relative earnings of female students at graduation, closing the gender gap in earnings at graduation by two-thirds. The effects on women's long-term earnings grow even larger with time. Using novel data on job offers, I find that two different mechanisms drive the effects on short- and long-term earnings. Women with a greater share of male peers take more quantitative coursework in business school and receive job offers at graduation in occupations, industries, and firms associated with higher wages, longer hours, and greater earnings growth. However, the effect of male peers on women's earnings at graduation is primarily driven by female students' increased willingness to accept the maximum salary offered within their offer set. In contrast, peer-induced effects on human capital alone place female students on dramatically different long-term expected earnings paths due to changes in the initial occupation, initial industry, and initial firm accepted at graduation. This change in the characteristics of the first job at graduation largely explains the effect of peer gender composition on long-term outcomes. [Additional financial support from the Brookings Institution's Rubenstein Fellowship.]