If You Don’t Build It... Mexican Mobility Following the U.S. Housing Bust

This paper demonstrates the importance of earnings-sensitive migration in response to local variation in labor demand. We use geographic variation in the depth of the housing bust to examine its effects on the migration of natives and Mexican-born individuals in the U.S. We find a strong effect of the housing bust on the location choices of Mexicans, with movement of Mexican population away from U.S. states facing the largest declines in construction and movement toward U.S. states facing smaller declines. This effect operated primarily through interstate migration of Mexicans previously residing in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, through slower immigration rates from Mexico in states with larger housing declines. There is no evidence that return migration to Mexico played an important role in immigrants\u27 migration response. We also find no impact of the housing bust on natives\u27 location choices. We interpret these results as the causal impact of the housing bust on migration after confirming that they are robust to controls for immigrant diffusion and a pre-housing-bust false experiment

RIDI: Robust IMU Double Integration

This paper proposes a novel data-driven approach for inertial navigation, which learns to estimate trajectories of natural human motions just from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in every smartphone. The key observation is that human motions are repetitive and consist of a few major modes (e.g., standing, walking, or turning). Our algorithm regresses a velocity vector from the history of linear accelerations and angular velocities, then corrects low-frequency bias in the linear accelerations, which are integrated twice to estimate positions. We have acquired training data with ground-truth motions across multiple human subjects and multiple phone placements (e.g., in a bag or a hand). The qualitatively and quantitatively evaluations have demonstrated that our algorithm has surprisingly shown comparable results to full Visual Inertial navigation. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to integrate sophisticated machine learning techniques with inertial navigation, potentially opening up a new line of research in the domain of data-driven inertial navigation. We will publicly share our code and data to facilitate further research

Sparse 3D Point-cloud Map Upsampling and Noise Removal as a vSLAM Post-processing Step: Experimental Evaluation

The monocular vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) is one of the most challenging problem in mobile robotics and computer vision. In this work we study the post-processing techniques applied to sparse 3D point-cloud maps, obtained by feature-based vSLAM algorithms. Map post-processing is split into 2 major steps: 1) noise and outlier removal and 2) upsampling. We evaluate different combinations of known algorithms for outlier removing and upsampling on datasets of real indoor and outdoor environments and identify the most promising combination. We further use it to convert a point-cloud map, obtained by the real UAV performing indoor flight to 3D voxel grid (octo-map) potentially suitable for path planning.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, camera-ready version of paper for "The 3rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR 2018)

Immune system activation by natural products and complex fractions: a network pharmacology approach in cancer treatment.

Natural products and traditional herbal medicine are an important source of alternative bioactive compounds but very few plant-based preparations have been scientifically evaluated and validated for their potential as medical treatments. However, a promising field in the current therapies based on plant-derived compounds is the study of their immunomodulation properties and their capacity to activate the immune system to fight against multifactorial diseases like cancer. In this review we discuss how network pharmacology could help to characterize and validate natural single molecules or more complex preparations as promising cancer therapies based on their multitarget capacities

Comparative Negligence and the Special Verdict.

Abstract Forthcoming

Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Public Transport Personal Security Perceptions: Digital Evidence from Mexico City's Periphery

The potential for information and communication technologies (ICTs) to revolutionise transportation is of long-standing interest. Just as the telegraph, trans-oceanic cable communications, the telephone, and the fax surely influenced travel behaviours and supply of transportation infrastructures and services, related developments, especially in computing, have changed the way we analyse and plan systems. The most recent wave of ICT-related technological advances – epitomised by high-powered sensing and realtime computing capabilities – promises a new era of seamless services, autonomous vehicles, and high resolution system micro-simulation, to name a few emerging opportunities.Singapore. National Research FoundationSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Center. Future Urban Mobilit

Correlación clínica e inmunohistopatológica de la nefropatía lúpica en un centro de referencia del Caribe colombiano durante los años 2012 a 2013

Objectives: To determine the behavior of lupus nephropathy (LN) in a population group of a reference center in the Colombian Caribbean during 2012 and 2013, analyzing the most prevalent clinical and laboratory findings and its relation to the immunohistotopathological findings, define the class of Lupus nephritis with greater prevalence and the clinical or paraclinic data more correlated with this one. Methods: Descriptive, retrospective, cross-sectional study conducted from January 1st of 2012 to December 31st 2013, which included 53 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus according to diagnostic critearia of the Colegio Americano de Reumatologia, with manifestations of renal impairment. Results: In our study population in the Colombian Caribbean, LN predominates more in women and class IV represents 66.03% of the total cases analyzed, in which there was more hematuria present, hypertension and proteinuria with nephrotic pattern, as well as higher levels of serum creatinine. Despite the lack of data, none of the clinical or paraclinical variables was specific for a certain class of LN and in relation to the immunostaining, lambda chains were positive in 100% of the cases and only C4 and fibrinogen were specific to LN class IV. Conclusions: Class IV LN is the most prevalent and with a higher percentage of predominance of the variables hematuria, proteinuria, hypertension, elevated serum creatinine and bun levels. At the same time they are not specific for some class of LN in our population.Objetivos: Determinar el comportamiento de la nefropatía lúpica (NL) en un grupo poblacional de un centro de referencia del Caribe colombiano, durante los años 2012 y 2013, analizando los hallazgos clínicos  de laboratorio más prevalentes y su relación con los hallazgos inmunohistopatológicos, definir la clase de NL con mayor prevalencia y el dato clínico o paraclínico más correlacionado con esta.Métodos: Estudio descriptivo, retrospectivo, transversal, realizado desde el 1 de enero de 2012 al 31 de diciembre de 2013, que incluyó a 53 pacientes con lupus eritematoso sistémico (LES), según los criterios diagnósticos del Colegio Americano de Reumatología, con manifestaciones de compromiso renal.Resultados: En nuestra población de estudio del Caribe colombiano, la NL predomina más en mujeres y la clase IV representa el 66,03% del total de casos analizados, en los cuales hubo más presentación de hematuria, hipertensión y proteinuria con patrón nefrótico, al igual que mayores niveles de creatinina sérica. A pesar de la falta de datos, ninguna de las variables clínicas o paraclínicas fue específica para cierta clase de NL y con relación a la inmunomarcación, las cadenas lambda se presentaron positivas en el 100% de los casos y tan solo el C4 y el fibrinógeno fueron específicos de la NL clase IV.Conclusiones: La NL clase IV es la más prevalente y con mayor porcentaje de predominio de las variables como hematuria, proteinuria, hipertensión, niveles de creatinina y BUN séricos elevados y, a su vez, no son específicos para cierta clase de NL en nuestra población

How Immigrants and Students Respond to Public Policies: Evidence from Welfare Reform, the Minimum Wage and Stafford Loans.

The first two essays of this dissertation use policy experiments to show that low-skilled newly arriving immigrants help keep the economy in geographic equilibrium by differentially selecting destinations that provide better labor market prospects. The first essay finds that immigrants choose labor markets with smaller welfare-reform created native supply shocks. Theory predicts that an increase in native supply will lower the earnings a new immigrant can expect, and immigrants thus should choose labor markets experiencing smaller supply shocks. Using a linearized version of a discrete choice model, I find that the distribution of immigrants' destinations shifts markedly away from cities with high welfare participation prior to reform toward cities with lower participation. This shift "undoes" nearly all of the difference in labor supply that would have resulted had immigrants not altered their destination choices. The second essay shows that immigrants also respond optimally to the minimum wage. These policy changes have a theoretically ambiguous effect on a job seeker's expected earnings; so I first use native teenagers to determine that a minimum wage increase will lower expected earnings for a new entrant. I then show that immigrants differentially select destination states with smaller increases or a fixed minimum, consistent with the theory. The results are strong and statistically significant even after accounting for several potentially confounding alternatives. As a falsification test, I show that the minimum wage does not affect the destinations chosen by higher-skilled immigrants. The final essay, written with Ben Keys, proposes an explanation for a surprising borrowing phenomenon: nearly one fifth of undergraduate students who are offered interest-free loans turn them down, foregoing a significant government subsidy worth up to $1,500. We discuss how advances behavioral economics can explain students' failure to accept this "free money." We then demonstrate a differential rejection rate based on how students receive their loan funds. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that students who would receive their loan as easy to spend cash are seven percentage points more likely to reject the loan than are similar students living off-campus. We interpret this finding as evidence for the behavioral explanation.Ph.D.EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61787/1/cadena_1.pd