Social Sciences – Page 30 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

Lessons on Community Building from The Dream Storytelling Project

The Dream Storytelling Project is an oral history initiative with the purpose of educating the wider public about Detroit’s African American Muslim and African Muslim community-building and revitalization efforts. I served as a transcriber for several oral history interviews. In this capacity, I worked to make the content of each individual’s interview clear for the wider public. As I carried out my work, I learned about the mosque as a venue for community-building, acting as a gathering place for people to meet throughout the week. I also observed the importance of language and shared rhetoric, noticing the prevalence of Arabic terms and phrases. Additionally, I noted the importance of community building efforts via the devotion of individuals’ time and skillsets, applying them to the different needs of the population in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all. Once finalized, the transcripts are then shared via an interactive multimedia website and permanent public archive. This allows for The Storytelling Project to provide educational materials about African American Muslim and African Muslim history and leadership in Detroit, thereby building knowledge about under-represented and under-served populations.

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Data is asset – Evaluating the market value of databases

The topic of research concerns where SEC-licensed broker-dealers send their securities trades to be executed by financial services companies and if the payment for this order flow (PFOF) depends on the broker internalization’s market power and/or the broker-dealer’s trading volume. This research seeks to answer why certain broker-dealers send their trades to certain financial companies to execute their orders and if this reveals anything about trade practices. The SEC 606 reports that track this information are newly revised as of 2020 so this is fairly untouched public information that has had little-to-no analysis currently preformed on it. The main methodology used for data collection was simply searching through the broker-dealers websites for their 606 report which details where they send their trades to be executed and how much it costs to route orders to each firm. I tracked every broker-dealers information on an Excel spreadsheet and we will use this information to draw conclusions. We hope to find meaningful connections between broker-dealers order routing practices and the amount of market power they hold. We think there will be some connection between the amounts paid to certain companies and the amount of influence these firms have over the financial system. We don’t have any conclusions yet but we hope to start the data analysis soon. We hope to find patterns in our research that point to some conclusion on why certain companies behave the way they do with financial institutions and the implications that may have. This project hopes to shed some light on financial practices between institutions and to better explain how our financial system is structured as a whole and how much market power influences financial transactions. The results we find may help public policy makers, economists, politicians, etc., who all may use data such as this to have a basis for the functioning of our financial system.

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Data is asset – Evaluating the market value of databases

The project aims to evaluate how the market value reflects the value of the firms’ data accumulation. Traditionally, the market value can be estimated using the discounted cash flow (DCF) method. This approach is flawed because the prediction of future cash flow is always inaccurate. This project uses firms’ data accumulations as inputs. Regression models are fitted to quantify the results.

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What is on the table? Peer effects within A Large Canadian Restaurant Chain

Jianglai Zhang Pronouns: she/her/hers Research Mentor(s): Luchi He, Research Assistant of Dr. Yue Maggie Zhou Research Mentor School/College/Department: Strategy department, Ross School of Business Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021 Session: Session 1 (10am-10:50am) Breakout Room: Room 20 Presenter: 4 Event Link Abstract For privacy concerns this abstract cannot be published at this time. Authors:

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Methods of exploring the effects of verb causativity on reaction time

Our research focuses on methods of studying how causativity of verbs affect our processing of them and therefore our reaction time, and how these reaction time effects can be isolated from other sentence processing effects like general lexical prediction. In a previous study conducted by Dr. Levinson, it was found that there is an added level of complexity in transitive variants of causative verbs as compared to transitive variants of non-causative, or activity, verbs. This was concluded by measuring reaction times in self-paced reading tasks of sentences with verbs of transitive and intransitive, as well as causative and non-causative variants. For example, a causative transitive verb appears in the sentence “The sun melted the ice”, whereas an example of a causative intransitive verb appears in the sentence “The ice melted”, which differs from an activity verb, such as “ate”. The complexity of causative verbs vs. non-causative verbs is something that has long been debated, and helps to better understand linguistic processing. Our research mainly focused on using different methods of studying this causativity phenomenon other than self-paced reading tasks, as well as determining the best methods for disentangling verb representations from lexical confounds.

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Methods of Exploring the Effect of Verb Causativity on Reaction Time

Our research focuses on methods of studying how causativity of verbs affect our processing of them and therefore our reaction time, and how these reaction time effects can be isolated from other sentence processing effects like general lexical prediction. In a previous study conducted by Dr. Levinson, it was found that there is an added level of complexity in transitive variants of causative verbs as compared to transitive variants of non-causative, or activity, verbs. This was concluded by measuring reaction times in self-paced reading tasks of sentences with verbs of transitive and intransitive, as well as causative and non-causative variants. For example, a causative transitive verb appears in the sentence “The sun melted the ice”, whereas an example of a causative intransitive verb appears in the sentence “The ice melted”, which differs from an activity verb, such as “ate”. The complexity of causative verbs vs. non-causative verbs is something that has long been debated, and helps to better understand linguistic processing. Our research mainly focused on using different methods of studying this causativity phenomenon other than self-paced reading tasks, as well as determining the best methods for disentangling verb representations from lexical confounds.

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Impact of School Policy Change on School Enrollment: Evidence from Mozambique

Enrollment in primary and secondary education in Sub Saharan Africa has lagged behind much of the rest of the world. Amongst numerous potential reasons, the fees to attend school is often considered a prohibitive barrier in accessing public education. In 2018, the government of Mozambique introduced legislation abolishing the fees for school enrollment in grades corresponding to the school-ages of 6 to 12. Previously on average, the fee for primary school is 21,410 meticas ($354 USD) per child per year for grades 1 to 5 and Mt 60,013 ($992 USD) per child per year for grades 6 and 7. This study explores the efficacy of this policy change and its external validity with respect to education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Data is asset – Evaluating the market value of databases

The world is encountering a remarkable transformation to the digital economy. Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb…More and more large companies are having no real capital. What is the truly valuable things today for a company? It is data. Data affects a company’s valuation, from the simple question of revenue earned to different metrics that show a company’s ability. Valuation is, however, a tricky work to do today: most data are not transparent to the public, and factors are complex behind. The project aims to determine the exact factors behind company valuation, and how stock prices react to data changes.

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Effective ways of communicating research on language learning by children and adults

Media use has been a beneficial tool for education in schools, especially over the past year, and can expand the knowledge that can be known by any individual person. While it advances education in the school systems, it may also have some negative effects regarding how children adapt to language acquisition, especially those who are not native to English in the U.S. In this study, we observed 23 children from Spanish-speaking homes. We asked about both the children’s and their parents Spanish and English media use through a questionnaire asking them to report their time spent on certain categories of media. In addition, two animated videos aiming to teach English possessive nouns and verbs were shown to the students. They were tested on English vocabulary, through the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Spanish vocabulary through the Spanish version, TVIP, and on English and Spanish grammar through morphosyntax tests. The results of this project reinforce that educational content is beneficial for children’s language development. However, the results also show that parent’s media use negatively impacted childrens English morphosyntax scores, as well as their English and Spanish vocabulary knowledge. For future research, it would be beneficial to understand which aspects of educational media benefit bilingual children’s ability to develop their non-native language. Additionally, it would be interesting to see the impacts of interactive educational media compared to passive animated media.

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