DETERMINATIONS OF NATURALIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON EARNINGS

Many studies about the effects of naturalization on earnings do not account for the endogenous characteristic of naturalization. This study is concerned with the determinants of naturalization, its effect on earnings, and reversal causality between earnings and naturalization. Ordinary least squares (OLS), treatment effect model, and simultaneous equation model are used to estimate the effect of naturalization on earnings for U.S. immigrants. Using a treatment effect model, we find that naturalization has a much higher positive impact than the OLS method on earnings, but by employing a simultaneous equation model, the naturalization premium becomes closer to that of OLS. Also, we find that correcting the simultaneity problem between earnings and naturalization is much more important than orthogonalizing the naturalization variable using instruments

Second language English listening comprehension using different presentations of pictures and video cues

The study tested the effects of different presentations using pictures and video cues for improving listening comprehension of English news programs. Four experiments are reported, studying listening comprehension of English as a second/foreign language with 687 Korean secondary students. Comparisons on listening comprehension showed better performance with visual cues than with no visual cues. Listening comprehension with video cues was more successful than that with pictures. The advantage of the combination of verbal and visual information over the presentation of verbal information alone was in accord with dual coding theory. When contextual information presented using priming techniques was compared to using feedback and simultaneous presentations, listening comprehension was better using priming. In the comparison of feedback with simultaneous presentations, listening comprehension was improved more when pictures with headlines were presented using feedback than using simultaneous presentations. In contrast, no differences were found between feedback and simultaneous presentations when video cues with headlines were presented. Visual cues with headlines presented using priming might enable learners to activate prior knowledge or schemata to improve listening comprehension. Headlines presented at the beginning stage of listening were effective for listening comprehension. In addition, the effects of presentations were enlarged by adding headlines to visuals. Applying the priming presentation along with the enrichment of contextual cues resulted in improved listening comprehension. Less proficient students benefited relatively more from the contextual cues with headlines and pictorial cues for comprehending the news than more proficient students. In particular, for less proficient students, video cues with headlines were more helpful in listening comprehension than pictures with headlines. This was because more abundant visual cues such as paralinguistic cues were more likely to be provided in video than in picture formats. The best listening comprehension occurred when presenting pictorial cues with headlines using priming presentation. The present study concluded that more abundant pictorial cues were useful for improving listening comprehension. Headlines added to the pictorial cues improved performance, especially for less proficient students, who benefited relatively more. The pictorial cues with headlines presented using a 'priming' technique were most effective in improving listening comprehension, probably because they activated prior knowledge or schemata

Exploring Gender Differences on Generation Y’s Attitudes towards Green Practices in a Hotel

One of the early green measures, the Save the Earth campaign, has offered significant bottom-line savings for hotels since 1993. In the current economic recession, new green measures for emerging group of customers could offer another way of saving operating cost and conserving local environment for the hotel. As environmentally conscious Gen Yers become a frequent traveler segment, identifying green attributes they are willing to accept becomes vital. Thus, this study examines the attitudes of Gen Yers toward green practices and identifies green attributes that Gen Y males and females prefer. The results show significant differences in the attributes that each gender prefers, and offer segmentation guidelines and suggest specific environmental friendly services that would result in cost saving for Gen Yers. According to the results of a proposed model, hotel companies should make more efforts to promote their green practices to Gen Y hotel guests who are willing to pay more for them

Bacterial community analysis in upflow multilayer anaerobic reactor (UMAR) treating high-solids organic wastes

A novel anaerobic digestion configuration, the upflow multi-layer anaerobic reactor (UMAR), was developed to treat high-solids organic wastes. The UMAR was hypothesized to form multi-layer along depth due to the upflow plug flow; use of a recirculation system and a rotating distributor and baffles aimed to assist treating high-solids influent. The chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal efficiency and methane (CH4) production rate were 89% and 2.10 L CH4/L/day, respectively, at the peak influent COD concentration (110.4 g/L) and organic loading rate (7.5 g COD/L/day). The 454 pyrosequencing results clearly indicated heterogeneous distribution of bacterial communities at different vertical locations (upper, middle, and bottom) of the UMAR. Firmicutes was the dominant (>70%) phylum at the middle and bottom parts, while Deltaproteobacteria and Chloroflexi were only found in the upper part. Potential functions of the bacteria were discussed to speculate on their roles in the anaerobic performance of the UMAR system

Spontaneous corneal melting during pregnancy: a case report

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract Introduction Biomechanical changes in the cornea during pregnancy might lead to pathological conditions such as corneal perforation or melting. Case presentation A 33-year-old Asian female who underwent penetrating keratoplasty in both eyes developed corneal melting in the right eye and marginal keratitis in the left eye in her fifth month of pregnancy. Marginal keratitis in the left eye immediately subsided with topical steroid therapy. However, spontaneous corneal melting progressed in the right eye, despite oral steroid therapy and amniotic membrane transplantation. We performed tectonic penetrating keratoplasty and corneoscleral grafting in the right eye. Conclusion We advise caution in the ophthalmologic care of pregnant patients who have preexisting corneal thinning disorders or who have undergone multiple corneal surgeries, because physiologic changes during pregnancy might contribute to corneal changes leading to spontaneous melting especially in patients with compromised cornea

Localization Uncertainty Estimation for Anchor-Free Object Detection

Since many safety-critical systems, such as surgical robots and autonomous driving cars, are in unstable environments with sensor noise and incomplete data, it is desirable for object detectors to take into account the confidence of localization prediction. There are three limitations of the prior uncertainty estimation methods for anchor-based object detection. 1) They model the uncertainty based on object properties having different characteristics, such as location (center point) and scale (width, height). 2) they model a box offset and ground-truth as Gaussian distribution and Dirac delta distribution, which leads to the model misspecification problem. Because the Dirac delta distribution is not exactly represented as Gaussian, i.e., for any $\mu$ and $\Sigma$. 3) Since anchor-based methods are sensitive to hyper-parameters of anchor, the localization uncertainty modeling is also sensitive to these parameters. Therefore, we propose a new localization uncertainty estimation method called Gaussian-FCOS for anchor-free object detection. Our method captures the uncertainty based on four directions of box offsets~(left, right, top, bottom) that have similar properties, which enables to capture which direction is uncertain and provide a quantitative value in range~[0, 1]. To this end, we design a new uncertainty loss, negative power log-likelihood loss, to measure uncertainty by weighting IoU to the likelihood loss, which alleviates the model misspecification problem. Experiments on COCO datasets demonstrate that our Gaussian-FCOS reduces false positives and finds more missing-objects by mitigating over-confidence scores with the estimated uncertainty. We hope Gaussian-FCOS serves as a crucial component for the reliability-required task