BEYOND GATEWAY CITIES: ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND POVERTY AMONG MEXICAN IMMIGRANT FAMILIES AND CHILDREN

Our main objective is to better understand how new residential patterns have reshaped patterns of poverty among America's growing Mexican-origin population. We use data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) to document recent changes in poverty rates among native-born and foreign-born Mexicans living in the Southwest and in new regions where many Mexican families have resettled. Our analysis focuses on how changing patterns of employment (e.g., in construction and food processing industries) have altered the risk of poverty among Mexican families and children. We demonstrate that the Mexican population dispersed widely throughout the United States during the 1990s. Perhaps surprisingly, Mexican workers, especially new immigrants, had much lower rates of poverty in the new destination regions and rural areas than their counterparts that remained in traditional areas of population concentration - the Southwest. As we show in this study, the dispersion of America's Mexican native-born and immigrant populations raises questions and hopes about their economic and political incorporation into American society.Food Security and Poverty,

Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis

What are the relationships between death row offender attributes, social arrangements, and executions? Partly because public officials control executions, theorists view this sanction as intrinsically political. Although the literature has focused on offender attributes that lead to death sentences, the post-sentencing stage is at least as important. States differ sharply in their willingness to execute and less than 10 percent of those given a death sentence are executed. To correct the resulting problems with censored data, this study uses a discrete-time event history analysis to detect the individual and state-level contextual factors that shape execution probabilities. The findings show that minority death row inmates convicted of killing whites face higher execution probabilities than other capital offenders. Theoretically relevant contextual factors with explanatory power include minority presence in nonlinear form, political ideology, and votes for Republican presidential candidates. Inasmuch as there is little or no systematic research on the individual and contextual factors that influence execution probabilities, these findings fill important gaps in the literature

Generalized bioinspired approach to a daytime radiative cooling "skin"

Energy-saving cooling materials with strong operability are desirable towards sustainable thermal management. Inspired by the cooperative thermo-optical effect in fur of polar bear, we develop a flexible and reusable cooling skin via laminating a polydimethylsiloxane film with a highly-scattering polyethylene aerogel. Owing to its high porosity of 97.9% and tailored pore size of 3.8 +- 1.4 micrometers, superior solar reflectance of 0.96 and high transparency to irradiated thermal energy of 0.8 can be achieved at a thickness of 2.7 mm. Combined with low thermal conductivity of 0.032 W/m/K of the aerogel, the cooling skin exerts midday sub-ambient temperature drops of 5-6 degrees in a metropolitan environment, with an estimated limit of 14 degrees under ideal service conditions. We envision that this generalized bilayer approach will construct a bridge from night-time to daytime radiative cooling and pave the way for economical, scalable, flexible and reusable cooling materials.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, of which another version has been accepted by ACS ami but not published ye

Prediction of patient choice tendency in medical decision-making based on machine learning algorithm

ObjectiveMachine learning (ML) algorithms, as an early branch of artificial intelligence technology, can effectively simulate human behavior by training on data from the training set. Machine learning algorithms were used in this study to predict patient choice tendencies in medical decision-making. Its goal was to help physicians understand patient preferences and to serve as a resource for the development of decision-making schemes in clinical treatment. As a result, physicians and patients can have better conversations at lower expenses, leading to better medical decisions.MethodPatient medical decision-making tendencies were predicted by primary survey data obtained from 248 participants at third-level grade-A hospitals in China. Specifically, 12 predictor variables were set according to the literature review, and four types of outcome variables were set based on the optimization principle of clinical diagnosis and treatment. That is, the patient's medical decision-making tendency, which is classified as treatment effect, treatment cost, treatment side effect, and treatment experience. In conjunction with the study's data characteristics, three ML classification algorithms, decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and support vector machine (SVM), were used to predict patients' medical decision-making tendency, and the performance of the three types of algorithms was compared.ResultsThe accuracy of the DT algorithm for predicting patients' choice tendency in medical decision making is 80% for treatment effect, 60% for treatment cost, 56% for treatment side effects, and 60% for treatment experience, followed by the KNN algorithm at 78%, 66%, 74%, 84%, and the SVM algorithm at 82%, 76%, 80%, 94%. At the same time, the comprehensive evaluation index F1-score of the DT algorithm are 0.80, 0.61, 0.58, 0.60, the KNN algorithm are 0.75, 0.65, 0.71, 0.84, and the SVM algorithm are 0.81, 0.74, 0.73, 0.94.ConclusionAmong the three ML classification algorithms, SVM has the highest accuracy and the best performance. Therefore, the prediction results have certain reference values and guiding significance for physicians to formulate clinical treatment plans. The research results are helpful to promote the development and application of a patient-centered medical decision assistance system, to resolve the conflict of interests between physicians and patients and assist them to realize scientific decision-making

Influence of Intrinsic Electronic Properties on Light Transmission through Subwavelength Holes on Gold and MgB2 Thin Films

We show how intrinsic material properties modify light transmission through subwavelength hole arrays on thin metallic films in the THz regime. We compare the temperature-dependent transmittance of Au films and MgB$_{2}$ films. The experimental data is consistent with analytical calculations, and is attributed to the temperature change of the conductivity of both films. The transmission versus conductivity is interpreted within the open resonator model when taking the skin depth into consideration. We also show that the efficiency of this temperature control depends on the ratio of the transmission peak frequency to the superconducting energy gap in MgB$_{2}$ films.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Women, Schooling, and Marriage in Rural Philippines

Using data from the Bicol region of the Phillipines, we examine why women are more educated than men in a rural, agricultural economy in which women are significantly less likely than men to participate in the labor market. We hypothesize that educational homogamy in the marriage market and cross-productivity effects in the household allow Filipino women to reap substantial benefits from schooling regardless of whether they enter the labor market. Our estimates reveal that the return to schooling for women is approximately 20 percent in both labor and marriage markets. In comparison, men experience a 12 percent return to schooling in the labor market. By using birth order, sibship size, percent of male siblings, and parental education as instruments, we correct for a significant downward bias that is caused by the endogeneity of schooling attainment

Changes in American marriage, 1970-1990: Forces of attraction, assortative mating and interracial marriage

This research uses a two-sex perspective to examine recent changes in American marriage. It focuses on propensities to marry according to age and educational attainment of potential partners. It also examines age, educational and racial assortative mating. Data from the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses, and from the 1990 Current Population Survey, are employed. By relating actual marriage to the population at risk, this research makes it possible to distinguish between changes in the availability of eligible partners and changes in the force of attraction between men and women in age and education categories. Changes in availability conditions are not found to have had a substantial impact on changing marriage rates. The force of attraction, rather than availability, was the dominant influence on trends in marriage rates. The sharp declines in marriage rates between 1970 and 1980 were not highly differentiated by age or education for either men and women, but the smaller declines between 1980 and 1990 were highly concentrated among younger men and women. Including cohabiting unions in the definition of marriage reduces the magnitude of the declines. Age and education combinations that have greater forces of attraction to marriage also show greater forces of attraction to cohabitation. Chapter Five, which has a methodological focus, shows that changes in assortative mating are similar whether or not the population at risk is considered. Age homogamy remained unchanged but educational homogamy increased. Moreover, there have been more women marrying men more poorly educated than they are and more men marrying women better educated than they are. The study of interracial marriage in 1980 shows that interracial marriage with whites is highest for Hispanics, followed by Japanese, Chinese, blacks and then Koreans. In general, white men and women who married at older ages and who were less educated were more likely to marry minority races while minority men and women who were better educated were more likely to marry whites