State requirements that high school graduates pass exit exams were the leading edge of the movement towards standards-based reform and continue to be adopted and refined by states today. In this study, we present new empirical evidence on how exit exams influenced educational attainment and labor market experiences using data from the 2000 Census and the National Center for Education Statistics...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to discover, through a controlled experiment, whether cognitive and non-cognitive assessment would select higher-achieving applicants to medical school than selection by lottery. METHODS We carried out a prospective cohort study to compare 389 medical students who had been admitted by selection and 938 students who had been admitted by weighted lottery, between 2001 and 20...

The liability facing a pay-as-you-go social security system can be calculated in several ways. The exact liability measure chosen can significantly affect the conversion of a public pay-as-you-go system to a system based on individually funded accounts. Most conversions, including that which took place in Chile, as well as in many plans to convert the US system, assume the largest measure, know...

The current interdomain routing protocol, Border Gateway Protocol, is limited in implementations of universal security. Because of this, it is vulnerable to many attacks at the AS to AS routing infrastructure. Initially, the major concern about BGP security is that malicious BGP routers can arbitrarily falsify BGP routing messages and spread incorrect routing information. Recently, some authors...

We study the minimization of a convex function f(X) over the set of n × n positive semi-definite matrices, but when the problem is recast as minU g(U) := f(UU >), with U ∈ Rn×r and r ≤ n. We study the performance of gradient descent on g—which we refer to as Factored Gradient Descent (Fgd)—under standard assumptions on the original function f . We provide a rule for selecting the step size and,...

Abstract Dropping behavior is an effective antipredator defense utilized by many insects including aphids, which drop from plants to lower plant parts or underlying substrates avoid attack predatory invertebrates. While research commonly focusses on triggers of dropping, less attention given what happens prey individuals following escape drops. In this study, the duration tonic immobility, reco...

This paper describes three ways to fix antenna problems: (1) diode dropping, (2) jumper insertion, and (3) diode dropping with extension wires. Basic principles of these methods are compared and results are presented. Diode structures, SPIC simulation, and diode slicing are also discussed in this paper.

We consider the stochastic behavior of dropping time of a decoder withM frame buffers. It can be formulated as the following stochastic problem. Suppose X1, X2, . . . , are independent and identically distributed random variables. Suppose W0 and Wi = max{Wi−1 + Xi, 0}, i = 1, 2, . . . . For a fixed positive threshold Γ, the dropping time D is defined as D = min{n,Wn ≥ Γ}. Our main result is to ...

Optical Burst Switching (OBS) has been developed as an efficient switching technique to exploit the capacity provided by Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transmission technology for the next generation optical Internet. Segmentation is proposed in literatures to resolve contention, a major concern in optical burst switched networks. As far as segmentation is concerned, nearly all t...

polydimethylsiloxane (pdms) has been synthesized by ring-opening polymerization of octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane (d4) in microemulsion with acidic catalyst. the structure and properties of microemulsion were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (tem), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ft-ir), photo correlation spectroscopy (pcs). the effect of the variation in ph value, amoun...