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How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools. Enrolling in 8th-grade algebra boosts students' enrollment in advanced math in ninth grade by 30 percentage points and eleventh grade by 16 percentage points. Math scores in tenth grade rise by 0.05 standard deviations. Women, students of color, and English-language learners benefit disproportionately from placement into early algebra. Importantly, the benefits of 8th-grade algebra are substantially larger in schools that set their eligibility threshold higher in the baseline achievement distribution. This suggests a potential tradeoff between increased access and rates of subsequent math success.Sepsis is one of the biggest risks to patient safety, with a natural mortality rate between 25% and 50%. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/U0126.html It is difficult to diagnose, and no validated standard for diagnosis currently exists. A commonly used scoring criteria is the quick sequential organ failure assessment (qSOFA). It demonstrates very low specificity in ICU populations, however. We develop a method to personalize thresholds in qSOFA that incorporates easily to measure patient baseline characteristics. We compare the personalized threshold method to qSOFA, five previously published methods that obtain an optimal constant threshold for a single biomarker, and to the machine learning algorithms based on logistic regression and AdaBoosting using patient data in the MIMIC-III database. The personalized threshold method achieves higher accuracy than qSOFA and the five published methods and has comparable performance to machine learning methods. Personalized thresholds, however, are much easier to adopt in real-life monitoring than machine learning methods as they are computed once for a patient and used in the same way as qSOFA, whereas the machine learning methods are hard to implement and interpret.We conduct experiments eliciting risk preferences with over 1,400 children and adolescents aged 3-15 years old. We complement our data with an assessment of cognitive and executive function skills. First, we find that adolescent girls display significantly greater risk aversion than adolescent boys. This pattern is not observed among young children, suggesting that the gender gap in risk preferences emerges in early adolescence. Second, we find that at all ages in our study, cognitive skills (specifically math ability) are positively associated with risk taking. Executive functions among children, and soft skills among adolescents, are negatively associated with risk taking. Third, we find that greater risk-tolerance is associated with higher likelihood of disciplinary referrals, which provides evidence that our task is equipped to measure a relevant behavioral outcome. For academics, our research provides a deeper understanding of the developmental origins of risk preferences and highlights the important role of cognitive and executive function skills to better understand the association between risk preferences and cognitive abilities over the studied age range.The literature on socio-economic variations in the association between retirement timing and health is inconclusive and largely limited to the moderating role of occupation. By selecting the sample case of Mexico where a sizeable number of older adults have no or very little formal education, this study allows the moderating role of education to be tested properly. Drawing on panel data for 2,430 individuals age 50 and over from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS) and combining propensity score matching models with fixed-effects regressions, this article investigates differences in the health effects of retirement timing between older adults with varying years of education. Subjective health is measured using a self-reported assessment of respondents' overall health and physical health as a reverse count of doctor-diagnosed chronic diseases. The results indicate that early transitions into retirement are associated with worse health outcomes, but education fully compensates for the detrimental association with subjective and physical health, while adjusting for baseline health, demographics and socio-economic characteristics. In conclusion, formal education during childhood and adolescence is associated with a long-term protective effect on health. It attenuates negative health consequences of early retirement transitions. Policies and programmes promoting healthy and active ageing would benefit from considering the influence of formal education in shaping older adults' health after the transition into retirement.

Irrigating rice with groundwater can lead to As accumulation in soil and rice grains. Matched sets of irrigation water, paddy soil, and rice grains were collected to assess the scale of the problem in the Punjab plains of Pakistan.

From a total of 60 sites, irrigation water and rice grains as well as 103 soil samples were collected and analyzed in the laboratory. Irrigation water and 660 soil samples were also analyzed in the field using a field kit.

Concentrations of As in irrigation water (65±32 μg/L) are higher in the floodplain of the Ravi River compared to the Chenab (13±9 μg/L) and Jhelum (4±5 μg/L) rivers, as well as the intervening Rechna (6±6 μg/L) and Chaj doabs (0.8±0.2 μg/L). Area-weighted mean soil As concentrations are 12±3 mg/kg along the Ravi, 8.9±2 and 8.1±2 mg/kg along the Chenab and Jhelum, respectively, and 6.2±0.2 mg/kg within the Rachna and 6.1±0.1 mg/kg in Chaj doabs. The As content of polished grains export-quality basmati rice of 0.09±0.05 mg/kg, however, is low across the entire area.

Groundwater irrigation leads to elevated As concentrations in paddy soil of some rice-growing regions of Punjab but does not result in increased uptake of As in basmati rice grains.

Groundwater irrigation leads to elevated As concentrations in paddy soil of some rice-growing regions of Punjab but does not result in increased uptake of As in basmati rice grains.