3,468 research outputs found
Economic Transition and the Motherhood Wage Penalty in Urban China: Investigation using Panel Data
China’s economic transition has fundamentally changed the mechanisms for allocating and compensating labor. This paper investigates how the economic transition has affected the wage gap between mothers and childless women in urban China using panel data for the period 1990-2005. The results show that overall, mothers earned considerably less than childless women; additionally, the wage penalties for motherhood went up substantially from the gradualist reform period (1990-1996) to the radical reform period (1999-2005). The results also show that that although motherhood does not appear to have a significant wage effect for the state sector, it imposes substantial wage losses for mothers in the non-state sector. These findings suggest that the economic transition has shifted part of the cost of child-bearing and -rearing from the state and employers back to women in the form of lower earnings for working mothers.
Developing an oculomotor brain-computer interface and charactering its dynamic functional network
To date, invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) research has largely focused on replacing lost limb functions using signals from hand/arm areas of motor cortex. However, the oculomotor system may be better suited to BCI applications involving rapid serial selection from spatial targets, such as choosing from a set of possible words displayed on a computer screen in an augmentative and alternative communication application.
First, we develop an intracortical oculomotor BCI based on the delayed saccade paradigm and demonstrate its feasibility to decode intended saccadic eye movement direction in primates. Using activity from three frontal cortical areas implicated in oculomotor production – dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, supplementary eye field, and frontal eye field – we could decode intended saccade direction in real time with high accuracy, particularly at contralateral locations. In a number of analyses in the decoding context, we investigated the amount of saccade-related information contained in different implant regions and in different neural measures. A novel neural measure using power in the 80-500 Hz band is proposed as the optimal signal for this BCI purpose.
In the second part of this thesis, we characterize the interactions between the neural signals recorded from electrodes in these three implant areas. We employ a number of techniques to quantify the spectrotemporal dynamics in this complex network, and we describe the resulting functional connectivity patterns between the three implant regions in the context of eye-movement production. In addition, we compare and contrast the amount of saccade-related information present in the coupling strengths in the network, on both an electrode-to-electrode scale and an area-to-area scale. Different frequency bands stand out during different epochs of the task, and their information contents are distinct between implant regions. For example, the 13-30 Hz band stands out during the delay epoch, and the 8-12 Hz band is relevant during target and response epochs.
This work extends the boundary of BCI research into the oculomotor domain, and invites potential applications by showing its feasibility. Furthermore, it elucidates the complex dynamics of the functional coupling underlying oculomotor production across multiple areas of frontal cortex
Probabilistic Label Relation Graphs with Ising Models
We consider classification problems in which the label space has structure. A
common example is hierarchical label spaces, corresponding to the case where
one label subsumes another (e.g., animal subsumes dog). But labels can also be
mutually exclusive (e.g., dog vs cat) or unrelated (e.g., furry, carnivore). To
jointly model hierarchy and exclusion relations, the notion of a HEX (hierarchy
and exclusion) graph was introduced in [7]. This combined a conditional random
field (CRF) with a deep neural network (DNN), resulting in state of the art
results when applied to visual object classification problems where the
training labels were drawn from different levels of the ImageNet hierarchy
(e.g., an image might be labeled with the basic level category "dog", rather
than the more specific label "husky"). In this paper, we extend the HEX model
to allow for soft or probabilistic relations between labels, which is useful
when there is uncertainty about the relationship between two labels (e.g., an
antelope is "sort of" furry, but not to the same degree as a grizzly bear). We
call our new model pHEX, for probabilistic HEX. We show that the pHEX graph can
be converted to an Ising model, which allows us to use existing off-the-shelf
inference methods (in contrast to the HEX method, which needed specialized
inference algorithms). Experimental results show significant improvements in a
number of large-scale visual object classification tasks, outperforming the
previous HEX model.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (2015
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