Yes, the fees for UK universities are higher and this will discourage some people from going to university. But the fee levels are still restricted and do not vary much between universities, and access to student finance is available to everyone, so I don't think the new system will make much difference at all.
this might help improve performance (though probably the effect will be much smaller than you think), but it doesn't explain the comparative weakness of american PISA results.
within the constraints of by the competition, the optimal method of winning is almost always to use well known existing algorithms and methods. academic research, however, is extremely time consuming and is of uncertain value ex ante. but without it we would not have many of the most popular machine learning tools used today...
the indentation the code editor shows does not always reflect the actual indentation of the code. so i had to c+paste it into another window and then back again to get the code to run...
most traders cannot simply move out and start their own fund. Their skills are not directly transferable to fund management and the risks in trying to set up a new fund are high.