Microeconomic Behavior of Agents in a Credit-Output Market in an Agricultural Setting

Rural agents engage in interlocking market transactions to minimize costs due to underdevelopment of rural markets. This study aims to model the economic behavior of agents in a credit-output market. Results indicate the prevalence of high interest rates in developed areas. Where income is low, transaction costs are high and the market is segmented, informal lenders are useful on efficiency grounds. Hence, the first-best solution appears to be augmenting farmer’s income.economic/development modelling, income, rural sector, credit market, transaction cost

Microinsurance: Does Traditional Regulation Apply?

Microinsurance--insurance services for low-income households--has emerged as a phenomenon in recent years. This Policy Notes draws attention to the need for an effective regulatory and supervision framework for said phenomenon to assure access of low-income households to insurance and to maintain the soundness of the insurance industry.microinsurance, mutual benefit associations

Recursive Neural Networks for Semantic Sentence Representation

Semantic representation has a rich history rife with both complex linguistic theory and computational models. Though this history stretches back almost 50 years (Salton, 1971), recently the field has undergone an unexpected shift in paradigm thanks to the work of Mikolov et al., 2013(a & b) which has proven that vector-space semantic models can capture large amounts of semantic information. As of yet, these semantic representations are computed at the word level, and finding a semantic representation of a phrase is a much more difficult challenge. Mikolov et al., 2013(a&b) proved that their word vectors can be composed arithmetically to achieve reasonable representations of phrases, but this ignores syntactic information due to the commutativity of the arithmetic composition functions (addition, multiplication, etc.), causing the representation for the phrase “man bites dog” and “dog bites man” to be identical. This work hopes to introduce a way of computing word level semantic representations alongside a parse tree based approach to composing those word vectors to achieve a joint word-phrase semantic vector space. All associated code for this thesis was written in Python and can be found at https://github.com/liamge/Pytorch_ReNN

Seasonal and interannual variability of North American isoprene emissions as determined by formaldehyde column measurements from space

Formaldehyde (HCHO) columns measured from space by solar UV backscatter allow mapping of reactive hydrocarbon emissions. The principal contributor to these emissions during the growing season is the biogenic hydrocarbon isoprene, which is of great importance for driving regional and global tropospheric chemistry. We present seven years (1995-2001) of HCHO column data for North America from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME), and show that the general seasonal and interannual variability of these data is consistent with knowledge of isoprene emission. There are some significant regional discrepancies with the seasonal patterns predicted from current isoprene emission models, and we suggest that these may reflect flaws in the models. The interannual variability of HCHO columns observed by GOME appears to follow the interannual variability of surface temperature, as expected from current isoprene emission models

Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Galaxy Zoo spiral arms and star formation rates

Understanding the effect spiral structure has on star formation properties of galaxies is important to complete our picture of spiral structure evolution. Previous studies have investigated connections between spiral arm properties and star formation, but the effect that the number of spiral arms has on this process is unclear. Here, we use the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey paired with the citizen science visual classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project to explore galaxies’ spiral arm number and how it connects to the star formation process. We use the votes from the GAMA-Kilo Degree Survey Galaxy Zoo classification to investigate the link between spiral arm number and stellar mass, star formation rate, and specific star formation rate (sSFR). We find that galaxies with fewer spiral arms have lower stellar masses and higher sSFRs, while those with more spiral arms tend towards higher stellar masses and lower sSFRs, and conclude that galaxies are less efficient at forming stars if they have more spiral arms. We note how previous studies’ findings may indicate a cause for this connection in spiral arm strength or opacity

On predicting the outcomes of chemotherapy treatments in Breast cancer

Chemotherapy is the main treatment commonly used for treating cancer patients. However, chemotherapy usually causes side effects some of which can be severe. The effects depend on a variety of factors including the type of drugs used, dosage, length of treatment and patient characteristics. In this paper, we use a data extraction from an oncology department in Scotland with information on treatment cycles, recorded toxicity level, and various observations concerning breast cancer patients for three years. The objective of our paper is to compare several different techniques applied to the same data set to predict the toxicity outcome of the treatment. We use a Markov model, Hidden Markov model, Random Forest and Recurrent Neural Network in our comparison. Through analysis and evaluation of the performance of these techniques, we can determine which method is more suitable in different situations to assist the medical oncologist in real-time clinical practice. We discuss the context of our work more generally and further work.Postprin

Galaxy And Mass Assembly:Galaxy Zoo spiral arms and star formation rates

Understanding the effect spiral structure has on star formation properties of galaxies is important to complete our picture of spiral structure evolution. Previous studies have investigated connections between spiral arm properties and star formation, but the effect that the number of spiral arms has on this process is unclear. Here, we use the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey paired with the citizen science visual classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project to explore galaxies’ spiral arm number and how it connects to the star formation process. We use the votes from the GAMA-Kilo Degree Survey Galaxy Zoo classification to investigate the link between spiral arm number and stellar mass, star formation rate, and specific star formation rate (sSFR). We find that galaxies with fewer spiral arms have lower stellar masses and higher sSFRs, while those with more spiral arms tend towards higher stellar masses and lower sSFRs, and conclude that galaxies are less efficient at forming stars if they have more spiral arms. We note how previous studies’ findings may indicate a cause for this connection in spiral arm strength or opacity