Can Grades Move the Big Fish? The Consequences of Receiving Report Cards for Frame-of-Reference Effects on Academic Self-Concept

Equally able students have lower academic self-concepts in high-achieving classes—a phenomenon known as the big fish little pond effect (BFLPE). School grades have been speculated to contribute to the BFLPE as they provide relative class ranking information and increase competition. However, empirical evidence for this assumption is not conclusive as it stems from correlational studies. Our sample comprised 9,104 Swedish elementary school students from the 1970s, a time period in which Swedish municipalities were free to decide to abolish grading. We found the frame-of-reference effect not to differ between nongraded and graded students. In line with the evolutionary basis of the BFLPE, these results suggest that students engage in social comparisons independent of whether or not they are graded.

Fee Complexity and Investor Mistakes in Retail Financial Markets

Mutual funds sold via brokers offer fund portfolios that investors can purchase in one of three classes: A, B or C. These classes are distinguished only by their fee schedules and thus have different net performance results. An analysis of relative class performances for a set of U.S. mutual funds between 1992 and 2008 reveals a striking fact about class B: while classes A and C provide the best performance results at long and short holding periods, respectively, class B is dominated by either class A or C at any holding period. The inferiority yet popularity of class B at first suggests that naïve investors who do not understand the fee schedule of this class are being exploited. However, I propose two hypothetical clienteles which might rationally demand class B shares: one (a) with uncertain holding periods, or one (b) that desires to have long holding periods but is unable to commit to them. I identify whether investors rationally or naïvely purchase class B by examining the flow-fee sensitivity and estimating investor holding periods. My results support the naïve investor explanation.

‘Primary’ Factors in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Europe: Results from the Application of a Topological Model

There is little consensus in past research regarding the sources of cross-national variation in relative rates of intergenerational class mobility. We argue for the importance of distinguishing between ‘primary’ factors that explain why inequalities in relative chances of mobility exist in the first place, and ‘secondary’ factors that explain variation in these chances. Our main aim is to identify primary factors. We follow Erikson and Goldthorpe in developing a topological model of the endogenous mobility regime which we then apply to class mobility tables for 30 European nations. The model claims that inequalities in relative class mobility chances derive from three kinds of effect: those of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status affinity. When applied to all nations together, the model accounts for the very large part of the total association between class origins and destinations. Clear differences, however, show up between the mobility regimes of men and of women: gender is a secondary factor. When the model is applied separately to nations in the high fluidity and low fluidity sets that we distinguish, we find that the effects of the primary factors identified by our model strengthen in a consistent way from the former set to the latter, although it seems likely that different secondary factors may operate in offsetting ways. Finally, when the model is applied to the groups of nations that we distinguish within the high and low fluidity sets, few differences in the strengths of the various effects show up, but those that do are highly concentrated in post-socialist nations and can be related to secondary factors of a specific kind associated with particular features of their transitions to some form of capitalist democracy.

A Learning Framework for Target Detection and Human Face Recognition in Real Time

Inspired by the function, mechanism and efficiency of the visual nerve system of human beings, a revolutionary detection and reorganization method named YOLO is present to provide an accurate, stable and fast arithmetic for a variety of targets, be it target detection for unmanned vehicle, car license recognition and optimization for surveillance. The traditional method for object detection is to reuse the classifier to implement detection, in contrast, the method named YOLOV2 process this problem by considering it in the mathematical area as a regression of spatially discrete bordered areas and relative class probability. However, as a cost of stable and fast response of this arithmetic, inaccurate detection maybe caused by YOLOV2 when the detected object is tiny (e.g., face recognition in surveillance). In this article, the authors provide a new method to further improve the performance of YOLOV2 by utilizing the accurate, stable and fast properties of YOLOV2 and editing the original code of YOLOV2 to eliminate the inaccuracy of tiny object detection, and implement this method on an embedded system.

Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Class analysis has re-emerged as a pertinent area of enquiry. This development is linked to a growing body of work dubbed cultural class analysis, that utilises Bourdieu’s class scheme to develop rich understandings of how culture and lifestyle interacts with economic and social relations in Britain, generating inequalities and hierarchies. Yet cultural class analyses do not properly account for the way individuals resist their relative class positions, nor the role of unsecured credit in facilitating consumption. This article contributes to this area by examining how unsecured credit and problem debt influences consumption and class position amongst individuals with modest incomes. Drawing on 21 interviews with individuals managing problem debt, this article details how class inequality emerges through affective states that include anxiety and feelings of deficit. It also shows how these experiences motivate participants to rely on unsecured credit to consume cultural goods and engage in activities in a struggle against their class position, with the intention of enhancing how they are perceived and classified by others. The findings indicate that cultural class analyses may have overlooked the symbolic importance of mundane consumption and goods in social differentiation. This article further details how these processes entangle individuals into complex liens of debt – which lead to over-indebtedness, default, dispossession and financial expropriation – illustrating how investigations of credit-debt can better inform understandings of class inequality, exploitation and struggle.