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Comparing high school students' attitudes towards borrowing for higher education in England and the United States: who are the most loan averse?
Get PDFStudent borrowing is a major higher education public policy issue, with students in both England and the United States increasingly relying on loans to finance postsecondary education. Our paper examines prospective higher education students’ attitudes towards debt in England and the United States. It exploits a unique dataset which allows us to compare students’ responses to similar surveys conducted in both countries during the same time period. Our study is the first of its kind to explore how students’ borrowing attitudes differ across the two countries. It confirms widespread loan aversion among prospective higher education students in both countries. But students in the United States are more debt averse than their peers in England. These debt averse attitudes also predict lower intentions to pursue higher education, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities in access. We consider how these attitudes to borrowing are likely shaped by each country’s distinctive student loan system. We conclude that the design of loans matters. England’s income-contingent loan repayments, in contrast to America’s mortgage style repayments, make borrowing less risky and reduce the impact of loan aversion on participation decisions, while borrowing is commoner and the system less complicated in England. Thus, there are lessons for other countries considering introducing student loans or reforming their provision. We contribute to the extant literature on the determinants of, and socioeconomic differences in, higher education participation and the overlooked role of student debt aversion
Climate COP-up, COP-out & hyCOPrisy
Get PDFThe complexities of climate science, of estimates of global greenhouse gas emissions and of their implications for climate change have not prevented widespread acceptance that global warming is a reality and its consequences potentially catastrophic for our planet and its peoples. But the convoluted processes of international negotiations and the political and economic context of their implementation mean that few have any confidence that national undertakings and international targets will be met. COP26 was a watershed, revealing the lack of progress on the most critical challenge of our time, the hypocrisy and double-speak of capitalist states and corporations, and the co-option of some conservation organisations through a deceptively ‘green’ narrative. A critical, materialist, Marxist approach can break through the greenwash of official discourse, reveal the need for systemic change and potentially serve as a focus for growing public awareness and environmental activism
Victorian arts
No full textBook synopsis: From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This volume on ‘Victorian Arts’ will include sources on painting sculpture, book illustration, photography and the much-neglected area of Victorian stained glass
A tribute to Frank Wilkinson
Get PDFThis tribute article acknowledges the lifetime contributions of Frank Wilkinson to social
sciences in general and the Cambridge Journal of Economics in particular. He was not only a
founding editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics but in his later years he was also
elected a Patron of the Journal in recognition of his contributions
The distorted body: the perception of the relative proportions of the body is preserved in Parkinson’s disease
Get PDFGiven humans’ ubiquitous visual experience of their own body, one reasonable assumption is that one’s perceptions of the lengths of their body parts should be accurate. However, recent research has shown that large systematic distortions of the length of body parts are present in healthy younger adults. These distortions appear to be linked to tactile sensitivity such that individuals overestimate the length of body parts of low tactile sensitivity to a greater extent than body parts of high tactile sensitivity. There are certain conditions featuring reduced tactile sensitivity, such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and healthy older ageing. However, the effect of these circumstances on individuals’ perceptions of the lengths of their body parts remains unknown. In this study, participants visually estimated the length of their body parts using their hand as a metric. We show that despite the reductions in tactile sensitivity, and potential alterations in the cortical presentation of body parts that may occur in PD and healthy older ageing, individuals with mild-moderate PD and older adults of comparable age experience body size distortions comparable to healthy younger controls. These findings demonstrate that the ability to perceive the length of one’s body parts is well preserved in mild-moderate PD
On the average-case complexity of pattern matching with wildcards
Get PDFPattern matching with wildcards is a string matching problem with the goal of finding all factors of a text of length that match a pattern of length , where wildcards (characters that match everything) may be present.
In this paper we present a number of complexity results and fast average-case algorithms for pattern matching where wildcards are allowed in the pattern, however, the results are easily adapted to the case where wildcards are allowed in the text as well.
We analyse the \textit{average-case} complexity of these algorithms and derive non-trivial time bounds.
These are the first results on the average-case complexity of pattern matching with wildcards which provide a provable separation in time complexity between exact pattern matching and pattern matching with wildcards.
We introduce the \textit{wc-period} of a string which is the period of the binary mask where \textit{iff} and otherwise. We denote the length of the wc-period of a string by \textsc{wcp}(x).
We show the following results for constant and a pattern of length and wildcards with \textsc{wcp}(x)=p the prefix of length contains wildcards:
\begin{itemize}
\item If there is an optimal algorithm running in \cO(\frac{n \log_\sigma m}{m})-time on average.
\item If there is an algorithm running in \cO(\frac{n \log_\sigma m\log_2 p}{m})-time on average.
\item If any algorithm takes at least -time on average.
\end{itemize
The new culture wars: why critical race theory matters more than cancel culture
Get PDFThis paper argues that a set of ‘New Culture Wars’ over questions of majority identity protection and free speech have become important in American politics. Due to the distinctive moral foundations of conservative voters, this paper argues that perceived attacks on white and American identity are a more powerful source of grievance for Republican voters than concerns over freedom of expression. Data show that Republican voters are no more likely to fear career consequences or dismissal for speech than Democrats. Republicans are also more opposed to teaching critical perspectives on race and history in schools than they are to employees being fired for dissenting speech within organizations. Strong white identifiers are both more opposed to diversity training which emphasizes white racism and less opposed to firing people for disputed cases of racist or sexist speech. It is hypothesized that the conservative moral foundation of group loyalty helps to explain these findings
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