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A large-scale multiple surveillance system for infectious disease outbreaks has been in operation in England and Wales since the early 1990s. Changes to the statistical algorithm at the heart of the system were proposed and the purpose of this paper is to compare two new algorithms with the original algorithm. Test data to evaluate performance are created from weekly counts of the number of cases of each of more than 2000 diseases over a twenty-year period. The time series of each disease is separated into one series giving the baseline (background) disease incidence and a second series giving disease outbreaks. One series is shifted forward by twelve months and the two are then recombined, giving a realistic series in which it is known where outbreaks have been added. The metrics used to evaluate performance include a scoring rule that appropriately balances sensitivity against specificity and is sensitive to variation in probabilities near 1. In the context of disease surveillance, a scoring rule can be adapted to reflect the size of outbreaks and this was done. Results indicate that the two new algorithms are comparable to each other and better than the algorithm they were designed to replace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how A-level students construct relationships between work and happiness in their accounts of choosing mathematics and further mathematics A-level. I develop a theoretical framework that positions work and happiness as opposed, managed and working on the self and use this to examine students' dual engagement with individual practices of the self and institutional practices of school mathematics. Interviews with students acknowledge four imperatives that they use as discursive resources to position themselves as successful/unsuccessful students: you have to work, you have to not work, you have to be happy, you have to work at being happy. Tensions in these positions lead students to rework their identities or drop further mathematics. I then identify the practices of mathematics teaching that students use to explain un/happiness in work, and show how dependable mathematics and working together are constructed as 'happy objects' for students, who develop strategies for claiming control over these shapers of happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses, first, the kind of Newtonian methodology Malthus had been exposed to at Cambridge; secondly, the views on algebra and the doctrine of proportions he inherited from MacLaurin and the contribution of his colleague Bewick Bewin in devising a special role for this doctrine in the moral sciences; thirdly, Malthus's ideas on language and the reasons for rejection of an artificial language for political economy. Then it discusses his idea of political economy as a moral science and his claims to be Adam Smith's true heir. The conclusion is that Hollander is right when he contends that Malthus's and Ricardo's methods, as contrasted with their methodologies, were just two opposite poles within one spectrum, but also that the Cantabrigian and Scottish tradition provided staple for a design of a moral and political science alternative to the Unitarian and the Benthamite programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Oughtred's Clavis mathematicae, first published in 1631, was regarded for the remainder of the seventeenth century as a classic text in algebra, reprinted, translated, and explained for over 70 years. Yet its content was limited, its style obscure and its notation old-fashioned even when it was first written, and it now seems extraordinary that it should have had such a long life. The early success of the book, and the great esteem in which Oughtred was held by contemporary and later mathematicians, can only be understood in the light of the general state of algebra teaching in England during the first half of the seventeenth century. In later years the book was kept alive by the efforts of one of its greatest admirers, John Wallis. The aim of this paper is to set the story of the Clavis into the wider context of English algebra, and the political background of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]