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Retail Investors And Investment Fraud Victims: Is There A Connection?
No full textThis study analyzed specific characteristics of investment fraud victims. Logistic regressions on a national sample of retail investors revealed that overconfident and financially literate investors shared several characteristics with victims of investment fraud. While overconfident investors were the most comfortable with market regulation and making investment decisions that assumed high amounts of risk relative to investment returns, financially literate investors surpassed them in the frequency of annual trading and portfolio allocation to stocks. Surprisingly, overconfident investors favored due diligence via background checks on investment professionals, while financially literate investors did not. Overall, males and younger investors tended to share characteristics with investment fraud victims
Jigsaw Puzzle Solving Robot
No full textJigsaw puzzles are an exciting activity that people of all ages love to do. This project seeks to develop a robot capable of solving jigsaw puzzles. To do so, I took a preexisting CNC mill and assembled the mill except the spindle. The mill ran using G-code, a programming language I learned. From here I created a program that can move the arm of the mill to any point chosen, and can move up and down, as a proof of concept for the robot. On the puzzle solving side, I started by first taking high resolution scans of the backs of all my puzzle pieces, and isolating the pieces into individual images by creating a mask to remove the background, finding contours of adequate size, and then creating bounding boxes for the images. From here, I analyzed each individual piece to find the corner pieces to characterize the edges, and created a scoring algorithm that would determine how similar edges were. Using these matches, I constructed a finished image of the puzzle. Due to time constraints, this code was not able to be reintegrated with the CNC milling machine, which is left as work for the future
Development of an Alpha-Diimine Aluminum Catalyst for Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization
No full textAluminum is an attractive metal in developing novel homogeneous catalysts due to its natural abundance, low cost, and benign environmental impact. The Graves group has been investigating its chemistry by developing metal complexes with redox non-innocent ligands. Thus, the previously reported (LMes 2- )AlCl(THF) (LMes = N,N′-bis[2,4,6-trimethylphenyl]-2,3-dimethyl-1,4-diazabutadiene) will be investigated as a potential atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) catalyst. Using gel permeation chromatography and 1H-NMR spectroscopy, this study investigates a model ATRP system of methyl methacrylate (MMA) with (LMes2- )AlCl(THF). The dependence of polymerization outcomes on several reaction parameters was tested. In addition, a time-resolved polymerization study determined that (LMes 2- )AlCl(THF) does catalyze a living ATRP process, but undergoes slow initiation kinetics
Disease and Deprivation: Care, Medical Pluralism, and Healthcare Experiences of Diabetes Patients in Liberia
No full textEqual access to healthcare continues to be a problem across the globe, with people from colonized nations suffering at an even higher rate. Infrastructures and healthcare resources’ limitations in developing nations like Liberia continue to limit how much care citizens, especially low income people can receive for their illnesses. This thesis combines ethnographic fieldwork, history, and quantitative data analysis to describe the issues of access to healthcare in Liberia and the circumstances that have shaped Liberia’s inability to provide adequate care for its citizens. The analysis in this thesis is rooted in weeks long in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals, herbalists, and constant visitation at the Liberian Government Hospital (also called Buchanan Government Hospital) in Grand Bassa County, the Eternal Love Winning Africa (ELWA) Hospital in Montserrado County, Phebe Hospital and Gonkpah Memorial Clinic in Bong County.
By coining the term apostereopolitics, I argue that deprivation in care resources within Liberia has been shaped by a combination of historical, social, environmental, structural, economical, and political forces; hence, providing holistic care will require not leaving any of these forces behind. Lastly, I illuminate experiences of surviving from a disease through patients and healers strategies of improvisations and community building that show up when a healthcare system isn’t capable of caring for its people, specifically people with diabetes
Sculpting a Program on Unsteady Ground: Tensions, Issues, and Possibilities in theImplementation of Spanish-English Dual Language Immersion in Georgia
No full text“Then we would know, and then we could help the world:” Exploring the Multidirectional Relationship Between Young Children, Families, and Social Movements
No full textThis study began with the researcher’s noticings and wonderings about young children’s understanding and impact in family activism spaces and broader social movements. Thus, the overarching research question was born: what is the multidirectional impact of young children on social movements? Secondary questions tackled children’s agency, families’ negotiation of activism at home and in the streets, and the rhetorical impact of children’s involvement. The bulk of the data was conducted via semi-structured interviews with young children (aged 3-8), caregivers, and educators. Qualitative thematic coding and analysis was conducted. A number of themes emerged, including: 1. Children make social movements more rhetorically and physically accessible, ultimately expanding who can contribute and how 2. Children contribute an acute sense of fairness and justice to movements, making them ripe for developing a power analysis with adult support. Implications are discussed, highlighting the increased risk of indoctrination when there is an absence of critical discussion about social issues in the home, children’s right to understand their role in movements, and the imperative that our movements tactically reflect their ideology. Finally, specific considerations and recommendations are given for folding children into social movements before limitations and future research suggestions are presented
Measuring Cognitive Function And Cognitive Decline With Response Time Data In The National Social Life, Health, And Aging Project
No full textObjectives: Scholarly, clinical, and policy interest in cognitive function has grown over the last several decades in part due to large increases in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias as populations age. However, adequate measures of cognitive function have not been available in many research data sets. We argue that a wealth of previously unexploited survey data exists to model cognition and cognitive decline.Methods: We use metadata of the time it takes older respondents in the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Survey, which we label response times (RTs), to answer questions in a standard cognitive assessment. We compare several measures of RT to a survey-adapted form of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).Results: We show that RTs predict both concurrent and future MoCA scores. Our results show that longer and more varied RT at baseline predict lower MoCA scores 5 years later, net of baseline scores and controls. We also show that the effect of RT measures on predicting current MoCA differs for individuals of different races and ages, but are not different by gender.Discussion: Our paper demonstrates that RTs constitute a separate powerful measure of cognitive functioning. RTs may be remarkably useful both to clinicians and social scientists because they can increase the accuracy of cognitive assessment without increasing the time it takes to administer the assessment
Biophysical Modeling And Experimental Analysis Of The Dynamics Of \u3cem\u3eC. elegans\u3c/em\u3e Body-Wall Muscle Cells
No full textThis study combines experimental techniques and mathematical modeling to investigate the dynamics of C. elegans body-wall muscle cells. Specifically, by conducting voltage clamp and mutant experiments, we identify key ion channels, particularly the L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (EGL-19) and potassium channels (SHK-1, SLO-2), which are crucial for generating action potentials. We develop Hodgkin-Huxley-based models for these channels and integrate them to capture the cells’ electrical activity. To ensure the model accurately reflects cellular responses under depolarizing currents, we develop a parallel simulation-based inference method for determining the model’s free parameters. This method performs rapid parallel sampling across high-dimensional parameter spaces, fitting the model to the responses of muscle cells to specific stimuli and yielding accurate parameter estimates. We validate our model by comparing its predictions against cellular responses to various current stimuli in experiments and show that our approach effectively determines suitable parameters for accurately modeling the dynamics in mutant cases. Additionally, we discover an optimal response frequency in body-wall muscle cells, which corresponds to a burst firing mode rather than regular firing mode. Our work provides the first experimentally constrained and biophysically detailed muscle cell model of C. elegans, and our analytical framework combined with robust and efficient parametric estimation method can be extended to model construction in other species