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Remittance Volumes and Transaction Costs; Sensitivity Under Different Economic Environments
No full textCross-border remittances serve as the lifeline for many people around the world to supplement incomes and provide relief from economic pressures. A key factor in a migrant\u27s decision to remit is the relative cost of sending money to a particular destination. It is well known in the economic literature that increases in remittance costs for a given corridor tend to result in reduced volumes and vice versa. The motivation of this analysis is to determine whether or not the differences in macroeconomic variables within a corridor make migrants more sensitive to transaction costs in addition to explaining changes in volume. It was found that inflation and internet penetration rate differentials both had significant effects on volumes and the sensitivity to costs. An increase in the inflation differential caused a negative change in remittance volumes and made the sender less sensitive to remittance prices, while the same change in the internet penetration differential caused a positive effect on remittances and caused the sender to become more sensitive to remittance prices. These results show that emigrants become less sensitive to remittance costs as inflation increases in the host country, and more sensitive to costs as the internet penetration becomes higher in the host country. Incentives for investment and changes in decision-making based on the information available are seen in the target sample, showing evidence of changes in sensitivities to costs amongst remitters
Replication of Counterfactual Fairness in Text Classification through Robustness
No full textDeep learning is a common method to create models for the binary task of classifying comments on online forums as toxic or nontoxic. While these models have good performance overall, they often have an inherent bias to classify sentences containing certain identities e.g. “gay”, as toxic. To solve this problem, a method has been proposed to both quantify this phenomenon and counteract this bias. Namely, it proposes the Counterfactual Token Fairness metric and the Counterfactual LogitPairing loss function. We reimplement the methods of this proposal and evaluate our experimental results against theirs. We also test the robustness of the results with regard to model complexity and the dataset splits used. Our final results approximate their results in terms of the general trends, however, there are discrepancies in our values where Counterfacutal Logit Pairing underperforms and augmentation overperforms. This provides evidence that their methodology and results are overallrobust but may be somewhat limited in the scope of problems it solves
Host MicroRNAs Provide Means of Innate Immune System Evasion During Japanese Encephalitis Virus Infection
No full textNeuroplasticity, Sleep, and Recovery in the Adult Visual Cortex
No full textNeuroplasticity has recently become a topic of interest within the fields of psychology and neuroscience, referring to the ways in which the brain can change structurally and functionally as a result of experience. The adult visual cortex was historically considered to be fairly rigid and lacking in plasticity; however, new research has identified residual plasticity in the adult visual cortex where it was previously thought impossible. This paper will examine the extent of plasticity in adulthood, mechanisms by which it operates, and the role of sleep and environment on visual plasticity. Ultimately, extensive further research must be undertaken in order to draw conclusions regarding the nature of critical and sensitive periods on visual plasticity. However, plasticity in adulthood has been shown to exist in ways that can contribute to functional outcomes, and sleep appears to play a role in mediating this visual plasticity. This review will examine ways to expand upon the existing research to develop future therapies in restoring vision
A U-Pb and Lu-Hf Isotopic Reevaluation of Archean Rocks from the Minnesota River Valley: Implications for Early Tectonics
No full textThe Archean Minnesota River Valley (MRV) subprovince is composed of four granitic gneiss terranes, defined primarily on gravity and magnetic survey data. The Morton and Montevideo blocks have the best exposures and it has long been understood that these are some of the oldest rocks on Earth. Modern U-Pb zircon SIMS and TIMS data show a long and complicated history for these rocks with primary crystallization at ca. 3500 Ma followed by multiple zircon forming events until ca. 2600 Ma. This study adds LA-ICPMS U-Pb and Hf zircon data from the Morton and Montevideo gneisses and the Grt-Bt-Opx paragneiss at Granite Falls. A tonalitic sample from the Morton gneiss yields an upper intercept age of 3530 ± 33 Ma and a granitic sample from the same outcrop yields an upper intercept age of 3370 ± 32 Ma, both interpreted to be crystallization ages. A granitic gneiss sample from the Montevideo block yields an upper intercept crystallization age of 3503 ± 36 Ma. The two gneisses show a range of concordant dates from 3500 to 2600 Ma. The paragneiss yielded 276 dates, with concordant ages ranging from 2588 to 3049 Ma and most of the dates clustering at 2671 ± 27 Ma (244 grains, MSWD=2.73). A younger cluster (9 grains) shows an upper intercept date of 2586 ± 30 Ma. The zircons from this sample are rounded and appear to be detrital. The population with a peak at 2671 Ma is interpreted to be shed from the Minnesota Orogeny, and the younger cluster of ages near 2600 Ma to be a metamorphic age associated with the Sacred Heart Orogeny. εHf values from the 2671 Ma prominent peak of the paragneiss range from intermediate to primitive and support a detrital origin for these zircons
Rewriting the City: The Transgressive Flâneuse in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells
No full textEvangelical Conversion and LGBT Coming-Out Narratives: Changing Articulations of Essence, Identity, and Transformation
No full textThrough historicizing and contextualizing evangelical conversion narratives and LGBT coming- out narratives, my research documents the battle evangelical and LGBT communities wage between popular conceptions of what a person’s most basic essence is: a heterosexual, cisgender individual ready to convert to evangelicalism or a person born with an unalterable queer identity. Through a close reading of the co-creative relationship these narrative forms have with each other in the evangelical magazine Christianity Today before and after the LGBT It Gets Better campaign, I argue that both LGBT individuals and evangelicals have adapted aspects of the other group’s narratives to articulate different conceptions of what a transformed and fully-realized self is. My research demonstrates that after the proliferation of narratives in the It Gets Better project, a shift occurred in what the process of evangelical conversion entails. While conversion used to be described as a restoration of an undamaged, previous self, modern conversion narratives characterize the process as a total reconstitution of the self. Lastly, I describe articulations of queer identity that augment or eschew the coming-out narrative format to provide a fuller picture of what identity realization can look like
