Does Financial Education Impact Financial Literacy and Financial Behavior, and if so, When?

In a meta-analysis of 126 impact evaluation studies, we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior and, to an even larger extent, financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of randomized experiments (RCTs). However, intervention impacts are highly heterogeneous: Financial education is less effective for low-income clients as well as in low and lower-middle income economies. Specific behaviors, such as the handling of debt, are more difficult to influence and mandatory financial education tentatively appears to be less effective. Thus, intervention success depends crucially on increasing education intensity and offering financial education at a 'teachable moment'

Automated Tool‐Path Generation for Rapid Manufacturing of Additive Manufacturing Directed Energy Deposition Geometries

In additive manufacturing (AM) directed energy deposition (DED), parts are built by welding layers of powder or wire feedstock onto a substrate with applications for steel powders in the fields of forging tools, spare parts, and structural components for various industries. For large and bulky parts, the choice of tool‐paths influences the build rate, the mechanical performance, and the distortions in a highly geometry‐dependent manner. With weld‐path lengths in the range of hundreds of meters, a reliable, automated tool‐path generation is essential for the usability of DED processes. This contribution presents automated tool‐path generation approaches and discusses the results for arbitrary geometries. So‐called “zig‐zag” and “contour‐parallel” processing strategies are investigated and the tool‐paths are automatically formatted into machine‐readable g‐code for experimental validation to build sample geometries. The results are discussed in regard to volume‐fill, microstructure, and porosity in dependence of the path planning according to photographs and metallographic cross‐sections

Blind Knowledge Distillation for Robust Image Classification

Optimizing neural networks with noisy labels is a challenging task, especially if the label set contains real-world noise. Networks tend to generalize to reasonable patterns in the early training stages and overfit to specific details of noisy samples in the latter ones. We introduce Blind Knowledge Distillation - a novel teacher-student approach for learning with noisy labels by masking the ground truth related teacher output to filter out potentially corrupted knowledge and to estimate the tipping point from generalizing to overfitting. Based on this, we enable the estimation of noise in the training data with Otsus algorithm. With this estimation, we train the network with a modified weighted cross-entropy loss function. We show in our experiments that Blind Knowledge Distillation detects overfitting effectively during training and improves the detection of clean and noisy labels on the recently published CIFAR-N dataset. Code is available at GitHub.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to the 1st Learning and Mining with Noisy Labels Challenge on IJCAI22, see http://competition.noisylabels.com/. Code is available https://github.com/TimoK93/blind_knowledge_distillatio

Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge and downstream financial behaviors. Treatment effects are economically meaningful in size, similar to those realized by educational interventions in other domains and are at least three times as large as the average effect documented in earlier work. These results are robust to the method used, restricting the sample to papers published in top economics journals, including only studies with adequate power, and accounting for publication selection bias in the literature. We conclude with a discussion of the cost-effectiveness of financial education interventions

Persistent Digermenes with Acyl and α-Chlorosilyl Functionalities

We report the preparation of α-chlorosilyl- and acyl-substituted digermenes. Unlike the corresponding transient disilenes, these species with a Ge=Ge double bond show an unexpectedly low tendency for cyclization, but in turn are prone to thermal Ge=Ge bond cleavage. Triphenylsilyldigermene has been isolated as a crystalline model compound, and is the first fully characterized example of a neutral digermene with an A2 GeGeAB substitution pattern. Spectroscopic and computational evidence prove the constitution of 1-adamantoyldigermene as a first persistent species with a heavy double bond conjugated with a carbonyl moiety

An inconspicuous, conspicuous new species of Asian pipesnake, genus Cylindrophis (Reptilia: Squamata: Cylindrophiidae), from the south coast of Jawa Tengah, Java, Indonesia, and an overview of the tangled taxonomic history of C. ruffus (Laurenti, 1768)

We describe a new species of Cylindrophis currently known only from Grabag, Purworejo Regency, Jawa Tengah Province (Central Java), Java, Indonesia. Cylindrophis subocularis sp. nov. can be distinguished from all congeners by the presence of a single, eponymous subocular scale between the 3rd and 4th or 4th and 5th supralabial, preventing contact between the 4th or 5th supralabial and the orbit, and by having the prefrontal in narrow contact with or separated from the orbit. We preface our description with a detailed account of the tangled taxonomic history of the similar and putatively wide-ranging species C. ruffus, which leads us to (1) remove the name Scytale scheuchzeri from the synonymy of C. ruffus, (2) list the taxon C. rufa var. javanica as species inquirenda, and (3) synonymize C. mirzae with C. ruffus. We provide additional evidence to confirm that the type locality of C. ruffus is Java. Cylindrophis subocularis sp. nov. is the second species of Asian pipesnake from Java

Redescription of Cyrtodactylus fumosus (Müller, 1895) (Reptilia: Squamata: Gekkonidae), with a revised identification key to the bent-toed geckos of Sulawesi

The binominal Cyrtodactylus fumosus has frequently been used for populations of bent-toed geckos occurring on some Indonesian islands, including Java, Bali, Sulawesi, and Halmahera. Unfortunately, incorrect usage of this name for different geographic lineages has resulted in confusion about the true identity of C. fumosus. Examination of the type specimen and additional specimens from Rurukan and Mount Masarang, North Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, revealed that this population is distinct from other forms heretofore called ‘fumosus’ by a combination of unique morphological characters. In order to stabilize the taxonomy of C. fumosus sensu stricto, and to prevent further confusion, we provide a comprehensive redescription of this species, whose distribution we herein restrict to North Sulawesi. Cyrtodactylus fumosus is one of the most distinctive species among the six bent-toed geckos recorded from Sulawesi, and it differs from Sulawesi congeners by the presence of (1) precloacofemoral scales, including three pore-bearing scales on each thigh, separated from 10 or 11 pore-bearing scales in the precloacal region by 9-11 interscales in males, (2) a precloacal groove in adult males, (3) flat dorsal tubercles in 4-7 irregularly arranged longitudinal rows at midbody, and (4) a distinct lateral fold lacking tubercles. We also provide a revised identification key to the bent-toed gecko species of Sulawesi