Beyond Statistical Significance: Implications of Network Structure on Neuronal Activity

It is a common and good practice in experimental sciences to assess the statistical significance of measured outcomes. For this, the probability of obtaining the actual results is estimated under the assumption of an appropriately chosen null-hypothesis. If this probability is smaller than some threshold, the results are deemed statistically significant and the researchers are content in having revealed, within their own experimental domain, a “surprising” anomaly, possibly indicative of a hitherto hidden fragment of the underlying “ground-truth”. What is often neglected, though, is the actual importance of these experimental outcomes for understanding the system under investigation. We illustrate this point by giving practical and intuitive examples from the field of systems neuroscience. Specifically, we use the notion of embeddedness to quantify the impact of a neuron's activity on its downstream neurons in the network. We show that the network response strongly depends on the embeddedness of stimulated neurons and that embeddedness is a key determinant of the importance of neuronal activity on local and downstream processing. We extrapolate these results to other fields in which networks are used as a theoretical framework

Hyper-fast gas chromatography and single-photon ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry with integrated electrical modulator-based sampling for headspace and online VOC analyses.

We developed a novel fast gas chromatography (fastGC) instrument with integrated sampling of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and detection by single-photon ionisation (SPI) time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOFMS). A consumable-free electrical modulator rapidly cools down to -55 °C to trap VOCs and inject them on a short chromatographic column by prompt heating to 300 °C, followed by carrier gas exchange from air to helium. Due to the low thermal mass and optical heating, the fastGC is operated within total runtimes including cooling for 30 s and 15 s, referring to hyper-fast GC, and at a constantly increasing temperature ramp from 30 °C to 280 °C. The application of soft SPI-TOFMS allows the detection of co-eluting VOCs of different molecular compositions, which cannot be resolved by conventional GC (cGC) with electron ionisation (EI). Among other analytical figures of merit, we achieved limits of detection for toluene and p-xylene of 2 ppb and 0.5 ppb, respectively, at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3 and a linear response over a range of more than five orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of the instrument on samples from the fields of environmental research and food science by headspace analysis of roasted coffee beans and needles from coniferous trees as well as by quasi-real-time analysis of biomass burning emissions and coffee roast gas

The Minimum Wage, EITC, and Criminal Recidivism

For recently released prisoners, the minimum wage and the availability of state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) can influence both their ability to find employment and their potential legal wages relative to illegal sources of income, in turn affecting the probability they return to prison. Using administrative prison release records from nearly six million o enders released between 2000 and 2014, we use a difference-in- differences strategy to identify the effect of over two hundred state and federal minimum wage increases, as well as 21 state EITC programs, on recidivism. We find that the average minimum wage increase of 8% reduces the probability that men and women return to prison within 1 year by 2%. This implies that on average the wage effect, drawing at least some ex-o enders into the legal labor market, dominates any reduced employment in this population due to the minimum wage. These reductions in reconvictions are observed for the potentially revenue generating crime categories of property and drug crimes; prison reentry for violent crimes are unchanged, supporting our framing that minimum wages affect crime that serves as a source of income. The availability of state EITCs also reduces recidivism, but only for women. Given that state EITCs are predominantly available to custodial parents of minor children, this asymmetry is not surprising. Framed within a simple model where earnings from criminal endeavors serve as a reservation wage for ex-o enders, our results suggest that the wages of crime are on average higher than comparable opportunities for low-skilled labor in the legal labor market

Three Shades of Embeddedness, State Capitalism as the Informal Economy, Emic Notions of the Anti-Market, and Counterfeit Garments in the Mauritian Export Processing Zone

Purpose This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capitalist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory – “embeddedness” and “the informal economy.” These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology’s engagement with (neoliberal) capitalism. Findings A process-oriented revision of Polanyi’s work on embeddedness and the “double movement” is proposed to help us situate EPZs within ongoing power struggles found throughout the history of capitalism. This helps us to challenge the notion of economic informality as supplied by Hart and others. Social implications Scholars and policymakers have tended to see economic informality as a force from below, able to disrupt the legal-rational nature of capitalism as practiced from on high. Similarly, there is a view that a precapitalist embeddedness, a “human economy,” has many good things to offer. However, this paper shows that the practices of the state and multinational capitalism, in EPZs and elsewhere, exactly match the practices that are envisioned as the cure to the pitfalls of capitalism. Value of the paper Setting aside the formal-informal distinction in favor of a process-oriented analysis of embeddedness allows us better to understand the shifting struggles among the state, capital, and labor

Not Just Any Job Will Do: A Study on Employment Characteristics and Recidivism Risks After Release

Ex-prisoners’ recidivism risks are high. Several theories state that employment can reduce these risks but emphasize that the protective role of employment is conditional on job qualities (work intensity, job duration, etc.). Longitudinal research on the role of employment in ex-prisoners’ recidivism patterns is scarce, and most existing work used a simplistic employment measure (i.e., employed vs. unemployed), leaving the topic of job quality underexplored. This study examines the association between employment characteristics and recidivism among Dutch ex-prisoners. Using longitudinal data of the Prison Project (n = 714), we found that not just any job, but particularly stable employment and jobs with a higher occupational level could help reduce crime rates among these high-risk offenders. Many ex-prisoners face a human capital deficit that complicates the guidance to high-quality jobs. It might, however, be possible to help place ex-prisoners in stable employment.Criminal Justice: Legitimacy, accountability, and effectivit