Assimilation in Multilingual Cities

Using the Public Use Microdata Files of the 2001 and 2006 Canadian Censuses, we study the determinants of the assimilation of language minorities into the city majority language. We show that official minority members (i.e. francophones in English-speaking cities and anglophones in French-speaking cities) assimilate less than the "allophones" (the individuals with a mother tongue other than English or French), and that immigrants generally assimilate less than natives. In addition, the language composition of cities is shown to be an important determinant of assimilation both for allophones and for official minorities. Finally, we show that assimilation into French in French-majority cities is lower than assimilation into English in English-majority cities even when controlling for the language composition of the cities and including a rich set of language dummmies.immigration, assimilation, language policies, minorities

Immigration and the Occupational Choice of Natives: A Factor Proportions Approach

This paper evaluates the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives in France over the period 1962-1999. Combining large (up to 25%) extracts from six censuses and data from Labor Force Surveys, we exploit the variation in the immigrant share across education/experience cells and over time to identify the impact of immigration. In the Borjas (2003) specification, we find that a 10% increase in immigration increases native wages by 3%. However, as the number of immigrants and the number of natives are positively and strongly correlated across cells, the immigrant share may not be a good measure of the immigration shock. When the log of natives and the log of immigrants are used as regressors instead, the impact of immigration on natives' wages is still positive but much smaller, and natives' wages are negatively related to the number of natives. To understand this asymmetry and the positive impact of immigration on wages, we explore the link between immigration and the occupational distribution of natives within education/ experience cells. Our results suggest that immigration leads to the reallocation of natives to better-paid occupations within education/experience cells.Immigration, occupations

Immigration and the Occupational Choice of Natives: A Factor Proportions Approach

This paper evaluates the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives in France over the period 1962-1999. Combining large (up to 25%) extracts from six censuses and data from Labor Force Surveys, we exploit the variation in the immigrant share across education/experience cells and over time to identify the impact of immigration. In the Borjas (2003) specification, we find that a 10% increase in immigration increases native wages by 3%. However, as the number of immigrants and the number of natives are positively and strongly correlated across cells, the immigrant share may not be a good measure of the immigration shock. When the log of natives and the log of immigrants are used as regressors instead, the impact of immigration on natives' wages is still positive but much smaller, and natives’ wages are negatively related to the number of natives. To understand this asymmetry and the positive impact of immigration on wages, we explore the link between immigration and the occupational distribution of natives within education/experience cells. Our results suggest that immigration leads to the reallocation of natives to better-paid occupations within education/experience cells.immigration, occupations

Labor-Market Exposure as a Determinant of Attitudes toward Immigration

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. Specifically, we focus on the protection derived from investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in communication-intensive jobs, in addition to formal education. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate, by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional, and country level. Drawing on the 2004 European Social Survey, we obtain three main results. First, our estimates show that individuals that are currently employed in less exposed jobs are relatively more pro-immigration. This is true for both our new measures of exposure. Second, we show that the protection granted by job-specific human capital is clearly distinct from the protection granted by formal education. Yet the positive effect of education on pro-immigration attitudes is greatly reduced when we control for the degree of communication intensity of respondents' occupations. Third, OLS estimates are biased in a direction that suggests that natives respond to immigration by switching to less exposed jobs. The latter finding provides indirect support for the endogenous job specialization hypothesis postulated by Peri and Sparber (2009).immigration attitudes, labor market, job-specific human capital, communication skills, international migration

FaceQnet: Quality Assessment for Face Recognition based on Deep Learning

In this paper we develop a Quality Assessment approach for face recognition based on deep learning. The method consists of a Convolutional Neural Network, FaceQnet, that is used to predict the suitability of a specific input image for face recognition purposes. The training of FaceQnet is done using the VGGFace2 database. We employ the BioLab-ICAO framework for labeling the VGGFace2 images with quality information related to their ICAO compliance level. The groundtruth quality labels are obtained using FaceNet to generate comparison scores. We employ the groundtruth data to fine-tune a ResNet-based CNN, making it capable of returning a numerical quality measure for each input image. Finally, we verify if the FaceQnet scores are suitable to predict the expected performance when employing a specific image for face recognition with a COTS face recognition system. Several conclusions can be drawn from this work, most notably: 1) we managed to employ an existing ICAO compliance framework and a pretrained CNN to automatically label data with quality information, 2) we trained FaceQnet for quality estimation by fine-tuning a pre-trained face recognition network (ResNet-50), and 3) we have shown that the predictions from FaceQnet are highly correlated with the face recognition accuracy of a state-of-the-art commercial system not used during development. FaceQnet is publicly available in GitHub.Comment: Preprint version of a paper accepted at ICB 201

About Helices and Solvents: VCD and more

Intermolecular forces drive self-organization of molecules, which is ultimately the origin of most the physical and chemical phenomena in Nature. Molecules able to interact themselves by non-covalent forces, as hydrogen bonding and/or hydrophobic attractions, usually form macrostructures in condensed phases (solid, solution). The properties of these aggregates depend of three main factors: the structural and chemical features of the molecules, the nature of intermolecular forces and the environment. The first two drive aggregation in solid state, while in solution the role of the solvent become determinant as it can induce a variety of structural effects on the aggregation behaviour of the solute. In the case of chiral molecules, this property is transferred to the aggregates and supramolecular chirality appears. Here we present our research on chiral molecules that self-organize in solution forming helical structures. We use VCD as the main chiroptical tool, but also supported by other chiroptical spectroscopies (ECD, ROA) and theoretical modelling. In our first steps, we studied the effect of modulating the environmental settings on the helices. Thus, helix handedness was proved highly and reversibly dependent on factors as pH or ionic strength in peptide-mimetic hydrogelators. We also observe how the initial conditions (concentration, temperature) were capable of controlling the helix structure of oligo-p-phenylene-based polymers towards kinetic or thermodynamics pathways. Besides, the structure of the helices can also be the consequence of direct solvent-solute interactions. In this way, we have demonstrated that an achiral solvent can act as a template for chiral organization of N-heterotriangulenes-based organogelators, thus showing the different levels of complexity of the hierarchical organization of supramolecular polymers. But the solvent-helix interactions can be bidirectional. As a nice example, we recorded chiral signals which can be only assigned to the organization of the solvent molecules around helical aggregates of phenylglycine functionalized poly(phenylacetylene)s. The solvent molecules thus form a first solvation shell to which the helix chirality is transferred. The helices would act therefore as a template of the solvent molecules, and the chirality of this external helix would be fully controlled by the solute.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A Comparative Evaluation of Heart Rate Estimation Methods using Face Videos

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of methods for remote heart rate estimation using face videos, i.e., given a video sequence of the face as input, methods to process it to obtain a robust estimation of the subjects heart rate at each moment. Four alternatives from the literature are tested, three based in hand crafted approaches and one based on deep learning. The methods are compared using RGB videos from the COHFACE database. Experiments show that the learning-based method achieves much better accuracy than the hand crafted ones. The low error rate achieved by the learning based model makes possible its application in real scenarios, e.g. in medical or sports environments.Comment: Accepted in "IEEE International Workshop on Medical Computing (MediComp) 2020