Estimating the Effect of Training on Employment and Unemployment Durations: Evidence From Experimental Data

Using data from a social experiment, we estimate the impact of training on the duration of employment and unemployment spells for AFDC recipients. Although an experimental design eliminates the need to construct a comparison group for this analysis, simple comparisons between the average durations or the transition rates of treatments' and controls' employment and unemployment spells lead to biased estimates of the effects of training. We present and implement several econometric approaches that demonstrate the importance of and correct for these biases. For the training program studied in the paper, we find that it raised employment rates because employment durations increased. In contrast, training did not lead to shorter unemployment spells.

Love that unites and vanishes: Saint Maximus the Confessor and his defense of papal primacy

Thesis advisor: Brian DunkleThesis advisor: Adrian WalkerThesis (STL) — Boston College, 2019.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology

Canadian Border Security: Examining Border Services Officer and Traveller Knowledge Concerning Interaction Narratives and Technologization Within the Windsor Borderland

Through contrasting institutional discourses with frontline official and non-official knowledge gleaned from interaction narratives from past social interactions and supplied by border services officers (BSOs) and members of travelling publics circulating at ports of entry in the Windsor, Ontario, Canada borderland, this thesis accomplishes the work of considering border security and mobility governance as an everyday practice (Côté-Boucher, Infantino, and Salter 2014). While previous literature has expertly documented the governmentality of modern borders, its privileging of institutional forms of knowledge means findings are inherently limited in that they ignore subjugated forms of knowledge (Foucault 1972), the role of diverse publics in shaping the field of (in)security, and renders invisible the presence of (in)security in everyday life (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016:43). To this end, this thesis is unique in considering – for the first time – interaction narratives supplied by BSOs and members of travelling publics circulating regularly within a geographically specific borderland. This thesis is also unique in considering how knowledge generated by such narratives potentially challenges institutional discourses supplied by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Lastly, this thesis is also unique in examining how border technologization and digitization potentially influence frontline social interactions between officers and publics, generate additional knowledge concerning the nature of digitized borders, and function to establish a gulf between institutional discourses and localized frontline practices. This thesis employs a multi-method approach, utilizing: 1) a content analysis and discourse analysis of various primary and secondary institutional documents, 2) content and thematic analyses performed on transcripts generated from in-depth, semi-structured interviews performed with 10 BSOs working in the Windsor borderland, and 3) content and thematic analyses performed on transcripts generated from in-depth, semi-structured interviews performed with 30 members of travelling publics, the vast majority of whom resided in the Windsor borderland at the time interviews were conducted. Combined, official and non-official knowledge generated from interaction narratives provided by participants provides several critiques in terms of analyzing institutional knowledge generated by CBSA. Findings generated through interaction narratives indicate: 1) officers have experienced a shift in “lifeworld” (Habermas 1981) alongside shifts in agency mandates toward a neoliberal risk-management model of mobility governance; 2) officers receive very little formal training in terms of frontline interactions; 3) officer training displays a systematic bias toward constructing all interactions as “security moments” designed to fulfill a security mandate, ultimately leaving officers ill-trained in terms of the “facilitation” (CBSA 2018e:8), non-securitized, humanitarian side of border work; 4) despite being couched by CBSA institutional discourses as being professional, courteous, law-abiding, and thorough, much evidence exists to suggest BSOs act in ways differing substantially from this knowledge, including: officers not performing full primary inspections on travellers, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms violations in terms of officers routinely asking travellers about their mobility while outside of Canada, and a variety of negative frontline interactions including: a) aggressive or unnecessary questioning by officers, b) officers presenting a rude or unfriendly demeanor, c) harassment by officers about purchases made abroad, d) officers unfairly or incorrectly applying policies, e) unnecessary examinations, and f) enforcement actions resulting in the seizure of purchased goods; 5) officers are often forced to develop shared ad hoc best practices in terms of social interactions on the frontline, where there is a real danger of BSOs “parroting” the poor practices of just one or two veteran officers; 6) the existence of a substantial gulf between national policy and training modules and the localized and geographically-specific practices occurring at disparate ports of entry across Canada. Findings generated in terms of the technologization of contemporary borders suggest border security and mobility governance practices are best understood as forms of simulation (Baudrillard 1981) and cyborg work (Bogard 1996), whereby digitized subjects (Goriunova 2019) – which are not at all representative of human subjects – are taken as irrefutable copies or “dividuals” (Deleuze 1992) by border officers, and ultimately become the unit of analysis under neoliberal risk-management schemes in making decisions possible and rendering the personal narratives and performativity of embodied subjects (travellers) effectively irrelevant. Despite CBSA institutional documents couching technologization in terms of improving efficiency at the border, augmenting officer decision-making, and enhancing security provision, official and non-official knowledge gleaned from interaction narratives generated from perceptions related to past social interactions serves to provide a serious critique of these discourses. This includes knowledge concerning perceived deficits related to border technologization, including: 1) discussions of data errors causing travel problems (duplicated NEXUS card numbers, mistaken warrants in the CPIC database, false travel histories in customs databases, and so forth); 2) the advertised benefits of the NEXUS trusted traveller program (efficiency crossing borders) as being either non-existent or irrelevant; 3) the use of Automated Border Clearance (ABC) kiosks / Primary Inspection Kiosks (PIKs) at major Canadian international airports as serving to produce superficial and robotic frontline social interactions guided exclusively by computer-generated risk codes; and 4) the apparent negative effects of technologization in terms of eroding the ability of officers to make informed decisions on the basis of anything other than information provided by computerized databases. Combined, findings generated by comparing institutional knowledge with official and non-official interaction narrative knowledge are subsequently considered through the lens of simulation, human and mobility rights, bureaucratic secrecy, and potential policy change. Additionally, slippage between nationalized institutional discourses and localized frontline practices are explained through the lens of neoliberal systems of power and governance. Finally, avenues for future research are discussed in concluding the thesis

Exact Lagrangian submanifolds in simply-connected cotangent bundles

We consider exact Lagrangian submanifolds in cotangent bundles. Under certain additional restrictions (triviality of the fundamental group of the cotangent bundle, and of the Maslov class and second Stiefel-Whitney class of the Lagrangian submanifold) we prove such submanifolds are Floer-cohomologically indistinguishable from the zero-section. This implies strong restrictions on their topology. An essentially equivalent result was recently proved independently by Nadler, using a different approach.Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures. Version 2 -- derivation and discussion of the spectral sequence considerably expanded. Other minor change

Phosphorylation of actopaxin regulates cell spreading and migration

Actopaxin is an actin and paxillin binding protein that localizes to focal adhesions. It regulates cell spreading and is phosphorylated during mitosis. Herein, we identify a role for actopaxin phosphorylation in cell spreading and migration. Stable clones of U2OS cells expressing actopaxin wild-type (WT), nonphosphorylatable, and phosphomimetic mutants were developed to evaluate actopaxin function. All proteins targeted to focal adhesions, however the nonphosphorylatable mutant inhibited spreading whereas the phosphomimetic mutant cells spread more efficiently than WT cells. Endogenous and WT actopaxin, but not the nonphosphorylatable mutant, were phosphorylated in vivo during cell adhesion/spreading. Expression of the nonphosphorylatable actopaxin mutant significantly reduced cell migration, whereas expression of the phosphomimetic increased cell migration in scrape wound and Boyden chamber migration assays. In vitro kinase assays demonstrate that extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase phosphorylates actopaxin, and treatment of U2OS cells with the MEK1 inhibitor UO126 inhibited adhesion-induced phosphorylation of actopaxin and also inhibited cell migration

Regulation of Motor Function and Behavior by Atypical Chemokine Receptor 1

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10519-014-9665-7Atypical Chemokine Receptor 1 (ACKR1), previously known as the Duffy Antigen Receptor for Chemokines, stands out among chemokine receptors for its high selective expression on Purkinje cells of the cerebellum, consistent with the ability of ACKR1 ligands to activate Purkinje cells in vitro. Nevertheless, evidence for ACKR1 regulation of brain function in vivo has been lacking. Here we demonstrate that Ackr1−/− mice have markedly impaired balance and ataxia when placed on a rotating rod and increased tremor when injected with harmaline, a drug that induces whole-body tremor by activating Purkinje cells. Ackr1−/− mice also exhibited impaired exploratory behavior, increased anxiety-like behavior and frequent episodes of marked hypoactivity under low-stress conditions. The behavioral phenotype of Ackr1−/− mice was the opposite of the phenotype occurring in mice with cerebellar degeneration and the defects persisted when Ackr1 was deficient only on non-hematopoietic cells. We conclude that normal motor function and behavior depend in part on negative regulation of Purkinje cell activity by Ackr1

Deep Markov Random Field for Image Modeling

Markov Random Fields (MRFs), a formulation widely used in generative image modeling, have long been plagued by the lack of expressive power. This issue is primarily due to the fact that conventional MRFs formulations tend to use simplistic factors to capture local patterns. In this paper, we move beyond such limitations, and propose a novel MRF model that uses fully-connected neurons to express the complex interactions among pixels. Through theoretical analysis, we reveal an inherent connection between this model and recurrent neural networks, and thereon derive an approximated feed-forward network that couples multiple RNNs along opposite directions. This formulation combines the expressive power of deep neural networks and the cyclic dependency structure of MRF in a unified model, bringing the modeling capability to a new level. The feed-forward approximation also allows it to be efficiently learned from data. Experimental results on a variety of low-level vision tasks show notable improvement over state-of-the-arts.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 201

Kick stability in groups and dynamical systems

We consider a general construction of ``kicked systems''. Let G be a group of measure preserving transformations of a probability space. Given its one-parameter/cyclic subgroup (the flow), and any sequence of elements (the kicks) we define the kicked dynamics on the space by alternately flowing with given period, then applying a kick. Our main finding is the following stability phenomenon: the kicked system often inherits recurrence properties of the original flow. We present three main examples. 1) G is the torus. We show that for generic linear flows, and any sequence of kicks, the trajectories of the kicked system are uniformly distributed for almost all periods. 2) G is a discrete subgroup of PSL(2,R) acting on the unit tangent bundle of a Riemann surface. The flow is generated by a single element of G, and we take any bounded sequence of elements of G as our kicks. We prove that the kicked system is mixing for all sufficiently large periods if and only if the generator is of infinite order and is not conjugate to its inverse in G. 3) G is the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a closed symplectic manifold. We assume that the flow is rapidly growing in the sense of Hofer's norm, and the kicks are bounded. We prove that for a positive proportion of the periods the kicked system inherits a kind of energy conservation law and is thus superrecurrent. We use tools of geometric group theory and symplectic topology.Comment: Latex, 40 pages, revised versio