A Second Look at Microfinance: The Sequence of Growth and Credit in Economic History

Microfinance -- the provision of financial services such as small loans to the world's poor -- has grown in the past decade, extending billions of dollars in credit to tens of millions of people. A major aim of the microfinance movement is to provide funds for investment in microbusinesses, thus lifting people out of poverty and promoting economic growth. Recent experience and the economic history of rich countries, however, suggest that those expectations are unrealistic. Most people, poor or otherwise, are not entrepreneurs, so there is little reason to think that mass credit would in general lead to viable business start-ups. Today as in the past, business start-ups in the advanced countries depend predominantly on savings and informal sources of credit; past forms of microcredit never played a role in small business development, and much microcredit is actually used for consumption rather than investment. In the history of today's rich countries, moreover, economic growth occurred first, then came credit for the masses. That credit was and is predominantly for consumption rather than investment. There is no reason to believe that the nature and sequence of growth and mass credit are fundamentally different for poor countries today than they were in the past. We should not expect microfinance to noticeably affect growth or successful business development

Muscle synergies after stroke are correlated with perilesional high gamma.

Movements can be factored into modules termed "muscle synergies". After stroke, abnormal synergies are linked to impaired movements; however, their neural basis is not understood. In a single subject, we examined how electrocorticography signals from the perilesional cortex were associated with synergies. The measured synergies contained a mix of both normal and abnormal patterns and were remarkably similar to those described in past work. Interestingly, we found that both normal and abnormal synergies were correlated with perilesional high gamma. Given the link between high gamma and cortical spiking, our results suggest that perilesional spiking may organize synergies after stroke

Studying and Modeling the Connection between People's Preferences and Content Sharing

People regularly share items using online social media. However, people's decisions around sharing---who shares what to whom and why---are not well understood. We present a user study involving 87 pairs of Facebook users to understand how people make their sharing decisions. We find that even when sharing to a specific individual, people's own preference for an item (individuation) dominates over the recipient's preferences (altruism). People's open-ended responses about how they share, however, indicate that they do try to personalize shares based on the recipient. To explain these contrasting results, we propose a novel process model of sharing that takes into account people's preferences and the salience of an item. We also present encouraging results for a sharing prediction model that incorporates both the senders' and the recipients' preferences. These results suggest improvements to both algorithms that support sharing in social media and to information diffusion models.Comment: CSCW 201

Violent Convictions: Punishment, Literature, and the Reconstruction of Race

This dissertation examines the relationship between race and punishment in US culture from the post-Reconstruction era through the 1950s. After slavery\u27s abolition, racial domination became embedded in popular understandings of state violence, while ideas of legitimate violence, in turn, became an important part of racial identity. “Violent Convictions” traces this development as reflected and enacted by a range of texts from this period, including fiction, prisoner autobiography, sociological studies, political writings, jurisprudence, and journalism. In this period, the claims on citizenship made by African Americans in the wake of Emancipation were fiercely countered by emerging discourses that tied whiteness to the public interest and bound blackness to criminality, turning people of color into commonsense objects of legitimate violence. Amid debates over lynching, African American migration, prison reform, and bias in the criminal justice system, authors as different as Thomas Dixon, Jr., Ida B. Wells, Alexander Berkman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gunnar Myrdal, and Chester Himes all participated variously in this remaking of the meaning of race and punishment. Starting in the late nineteenth century, racial identity and state violence were reimagined in intimate relation to one another, with lasting consequences for US racial ideology. These cultural developments paved the way for a carceral state that could conceive of itself as a colorblind force for justice and safety while simultaneously serving as an engine of racist violence

QuateXelero : an accelerated exact network motif detection algorithm

Finding motifs in biological, social, technological, and other types of networks has become a widespread method to gain more knowledge about these networks’ structure and function. However, this task is very computationally demanding, because it is highly associated with the graph isomorphism which is an NP problem (not known to belong to P or NP-complete subsets yet). Accordingly, this research is endeavoring to decrease the need to call NAUTY isomorphism detection method, which is the most time-consuming step in many existing algorithms. The work provides an extremely fast motif detection algorithm called QuateXelero, which has a Quaternary Tree data structure in the heart. The proposed algorithm is based on the well-known ESU (FANMOD) motif detection algorithm. The results of experiments on some standard model networks approve the overal superiority of the proposed algorithm, namely QuateXelero, compared with two of the fastest existing algorithms, G-Tries and Kavosh. QuateXelero is especially fastest in constructing the central data structure of the algorithm from scratch based on the input network