These are the notes of a talk given by Prof. Dick Gross. The talk was the first one of a graduate student seminar held at Harvard, Fall 2013, and was aimed at providing an introduction to the Gross-Zagier formula and related things from an expert’s perspective. The notes were taken by Yihang Zhu, and he is respondible for any mistakes or inaccuracies. Please contact him at [email protected]...

© Informal Logic Vol. 26, No. 2 (2006): pp. 149-174.

These notes started their life as a lecture given at the Toronto Student Seminar on February 9, 2012. The material is taken mostly from the classic paper by Coppersmith and Winograd [CW]. Other sources are §15.7 of Algebraic Complexity Theory [ACT], Stothers’s thesis [Sto], V. Williams’s recent paper [Wil], and the paper by Cohn at al. [CKSU]. Starred sections are the ones we didn’t have time t...

This study examines the theoretical and practical implications of ranking teachers with a one-dimensional metric when teacher effectiveness varies across subjects or student types. We document the empirical failure of standard value-added assumptions of teacher input homogeneity, but demonstrate that previously suggested teacher firing policies still improve student welfare, although they resul...

Despite its growing popularity, school-based management is seldom evaluated systematically with respect to its impact on student performance. This study examines the impact of the current school autonomy reform in Nicaragua on learning within an educational production function approach. Results show that autonomous public schools are indeed making more decisions about pedagogical and administra...

This article is expanded from a talk given by the author in (the preliminary version of) the Student Algebraic Topology seminar in University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The rst part will be a review of ordinary sheaf cohomology which is done in such a way that generalization to generalized sheaf cohomology theory becomes automatic. The second part is a quick introduction of the approach to general...

Based on the survey data of 364 peasant households in Yibin, Sichuan, this paper analyzes the farmer’s willingness to small forest tenure mortgage loans. The result indicates a high willingness up to 74.2%, i.e. the farmers are willing to invest forest tenure mortgage loans into forestry and agricultural production. The influential factors on farmer’s willingness to small forest tenure mortgage...

For the last two years, I have focused on gender issues in the seminar I teach on law and biomedical sciences. My primary goal in the seminar has been to combine a basic exploration of the major themes in law and biomedical sciences with an examination of related gender issues. Although I did not consider myself versed in feminist legal theory, I had been working on a number of women's health i...

PURPOSE This study evaluates the effectiveness of an intervention targeting adolescent risk-taking associated with drug and alcohol use, driving, and celebrating. METHODS Pre- and post written surveys were administered in 21 intervention and 19 comparison schools in Northern New South Wales during March 2003 and 2004. The instrument covered knowledge and attitudes associated with self-reporte...