Church Organists:Analysing their Willingness to Play

There currently exists a scarcity of church organ players even though they have traditionally been well paid. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the factors that affect the church organ player’s willingness to play. Results suggest pay does not attract the organ player to the position but being paid in situ increases their willingness to play, as do larger choir sizes and a better instrument quality. We also identify that organ players should be taught when they are young, as the younger the church organ player started learning the instrument then the greater their willingness to play.Religious participation; Willingness to play; Church Organ player

Unmotivated or motivated to fail? A cross-cultural study of achievement motivation, fear of failure, and student disengagement

A classic distinction in the literature on achievement and motivation is between fear of failure and success orientations. From the perspective of self-worth theory, these motives are not bipolar constructs but dimensions that interact in ways that make some students particularly vulnerable to underachievement and disengagement from school. The current study employs the quadripolar model of need achievement (Covington, 1992; Covington & Omelich, 1988) to explore how these approach and avoidance orientations are related to self-handicapping, defensive pessimism, and helplessness in Eastern and Western settings. Although there have been numerous calls for research of this kind across cultures (Elliott & Bempechat, 2002; Jose & Kilburg, 2007; Pintrich, 2003), little exists in the field to date. In Study 1, with 1,423 Japanese high school students, helplessness and self-handicapping were found to be highest when students were low in success orientation and high in fear of failure. These findings were replicated in Study 2 with 643 Australian students and extended to measures of truancy, disengagement, and self-reported academic achievement. Consistent with self-worth theory, success orientation largely moderated the relationship between fear of failure and academic engagement in both cultures. These results suggest that in the absence of firm achievement goals, fear of failure is associated with a range of maladaptive self-protective strategies. The current project thus represents a unique application of self-worth theory to achievement dynamics and clarifies substantive issues relevant to self-handicapping and disengagement across cultures

Modular embeddings of Teichmueller curves

Fuchsian groups with a modular embedding have the richest arithmetic properties among non-arithmetic Fuchsian groups. But they are very rare, all known examples being related either to triangle groups or to Teichmueller curves. In Part I of this paper we study the arithmetic properties of the modular embedding and develop from scratch a theory of twisted modular forms for Fuchsian groups with a modular embedding, proving dimension formulas, coefficient growth estimates and differential equations. In Part II we provide a modular proof for an Apery-like integrality statement for solutions of Picard-Fuchs equations. We illustrate the theory on a worked example, giving explicit Fourier expansions of twisted modular forms and the equation of a Teichmueller curve in a Hilbert modular surface. In Part III we show that genus two Teichmueller curves are cut out in Hilbert modular surfaces by a product of theta derivatives. We rederive most of the known properties of those Teichmueller curves from this viewpoint, without using the theory of flat surfaces. As a consequence we give the modular embeddings for all genus two Teichmueller curves and prove that the Fourier developments of their twisted modular forms are algebraic up to one transcendental scaling constant. Moreover, we prove that Bainbridge's compactification of Hilbert modular surfaces is toroidal. The strategy to compactify can be expressed using continued fractions and resembles Hirzebruch's in form, but every detail is different.Comment: revision including the referee's comments, to appear in Compositio Mat

Identification of stochastic processes for an estimated icewine temperature hedging variable

Weather derivatives are a relatively new form of financial security that can provide firms with the ability to hedge against the impact of weather related risks to their activities. Participants in the energy industry have employed standardized weather contracts trading on organized exchanges since 1999 and the interest in non-standardized contracts for specialized weather related risks is growing at an increasing rate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential use of weather derivatives to hedge against temperature related risks in Canadian ice wine production. Specifically we examine historical data for the Niagara region of the province of Ontario, Canada, the largest icewine producing region of the world, to determine an appropriate underlying variable for the design of an option contact that could be employed by icewine producers. Employing monte carlo simulation we derive a range of benchmark option values based upon varying assumptions regarding the stochastic process for an underlying temperature variable. The results show that such option contracts can provide valuable hedging opportunities for producers, given the historical seasonal temperature variations in the region.wine market, weather derivatives, weather hedging, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, G13, G32, Q14, Q51, Q54,

Regional Productivity Differentials: Explaining the Gap

Issues of productivity and competitiveness at a regional level have increasingly been a focus for both academic and policy concern. Significant and persistent differences in productivity are evident both in the UK and across Europe as a whole. This paper uses data relating to individual business units to examine the determinants of regional productivity differentials across British regions. It demonstrates that the substantial differences in regional productivity can be explained by a fairly limited set of variables. These include industry mix, the capital employed by the firm, business ownership and the skills of the local labour force. Also important are location-specific factors including travel-time from London and population density. Taken together, these factors largely explain regional productivity differentials. The analysis extends those studies that have identified but not quantified the role of different ‘productivity drivers’ in a systematic fashion or that have focused on only a limited set of drivers. It has important policy implications particular in relation to the role of travel time and possible effects of density and agglomeration.Regional competitiveness; Productivity; UK; Regional development; business-data analysis;

Do Students Benefit From Supplemental Instruction? Evidence From a First-Year Statistics Subject in Economics and Business

Peer assisted study sessions (PASS) are a type of supplemental instruction (SI) that provide students with out-of-class study review sessions with a group of peers. A student, who has successfully completed the subject and acts as a mentor, facilitates the voluntary sessions. Results of the PASS program at the University of Wollongong have been quite positive in that students, on average, who attend more PASS, achieve higher marks. However, a simple comparison does not control for self-selection bias. We control for self-selection in two ways. Firstly, we use Heckman’s two-stage correction technique to analyze the 2002 cohort. Secondly, students in the 2003 cohort were randomly allocated into three groups of equal size: 1. A control group that was allocated to normal tutorials with standard class sizes and ineligible to attend PASS; 2. A group that was eligible to attend PASS and had normal tutorials of standard sizes; 3. A group that was ineligible to attend PASS but allocated to normal tutorials with smaller class sizes. The results of both methods are consistent and indicate the PASS program has a positive impact on the academic performance of students after correcting for selection bias.Economics Education; Teaching of Economics; Design of Experiments

Country-level Business Performance and Policy Asymmetries in Great Britain

The HM Treasury identifies key ‘drivers’ of business performance and productivity differentials, which include skills, investment and competition. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the effects of these drivers on business-level productivity per employee across England, Scotland and Wales in order to identify whether spatial differences in the influence of these drivers exist. We adopt the Cobb-Douglas production function approach and our results suggest that, after taking account of sector specific effects, productivity differentials do exist between businesses across Great Britain and that policy instruments do potentially enhance productivity. The results indicate that these key drivers are equally applicable across countries of Great Britain. However, there is evidence to suggest that scale effects for labour and capital do differ across England, Wales and Scotland and that policy makers should be aware of these asymmetries.Productivity per employee; HM Treasury’s key drivers; scale effects

Insulator–metal transitions in Pr0.7Ca0.3MnO3 induced by a magnetic field

A magnetic field induced insulator to metal transition has been observed in both polycrystalline and single crystals samples of Pr0.7Ca0.3MnO3. Application of a magnetic field leads to a first-order phase transition from an insulating to a conducting state at low temperatures. The hysteresis associated with this transition allows the resistivity at 4 K to be varied by more than eight orders of magnitude depending on the field history of the sample

Detecting Circumbinary Exoplanets: Understanding Transit Timing

We have derived and tested a simple analytical model for placing limits on the transit timing variations of circumbinary exoplanets. These are generally of days in magnitude, dwarfing those found in multi-planet systems. The derived method is fast, efficient and is accurate to approximately 1% in predicting limits on the possible times of transits over a 3-year campaig