Social Sciences – Page 30 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

Financing and Counter-Financing of Violent Non-State Actors Project

With the threat of terrorism constantly evolving, anti-terrorist policy is constantly in need of reevaluation. The utilization of economic means to stifle the actions of violent groups varies in prominence by region and through time, and never before has a comprehensive data set been collected detailing its employment against specific groups during particular years. “The Financing and Counter Financing of Non-Violent State Actors Project” supervised by PhD candidate Corina Simonelli intends to create such a dataset and reveal patterns in the utilization of economic counterinsurgency tactics as they vary through time and across groups. Coders have been presented a list of violent actors and tasked with utilizing an evolving list of search terms and database Nexis Uni to gather news articles dating between 1990 and 2018. By streamlining the processes by which researchers sift through large sums of articles, evaluate convoluted information, and translate qualitative data into quantitative, a thorough codebook is being developed to allow for consistency and replication. While a sufficiently large dataset has not yet been achieved, the research team expects to witness variance in the prominence of particular counterinsurgent tactics when comparing groups operating across the globe and through time. This information will yield insight into the effectiveness of economic counterinsurgency when coupled with knowledge on the persistence of violent activity. Such information is valuable for policymakers and will influence which tactics are employed to thwart violent activity on regional and global scales.

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

Language can be taught in a variety of ways, but is there a specific way that helps young children benefit the most? The present study of English language learners was conducted in order to see if children’s acquisition of possessive and past tense in English could be facilitated by watching “passive” but targeted child-centric animations, and if a child’s first language plays a role in their second language acquisition. For this study, native Spanish- and Mandarin-speaking children were tested on their English vocabulary and grammar before and after being shown immersive language-learning animations where both implicit and explicit teaching methods were used. Although this study is still in progress we found that both the Spanish and Mandarin-speaking children were able to learn English vocabulary and grammar from the animations. One question that we now have is whether children who received the same exposure to the target learning material but in an interactive game would be better able to learn and whether their learning would be affected by the amount of media exposure children get in their day to day lives.

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Documentary Film Team

Documentaries are a way of telling stories in a visual form. Through learning about the process that goes into creating documentaries one can develop communication, research, and film-making skills as well as connect with others interested in film. In order to expand our knowledge of the documentary process, we were given tasks to explore the pre-production, production, and post-production aspects by looking at old documentaries, filming, editing, and reviewing video footage. As a result of our project, we plan to create a short documentary of our own with the combined knowledge we gained. Learning the process of documentary making allows one to discover and share stories that haven’t been explored.

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Using Machine Learning to Better Understand Environmental Policy Innovation

Climate change and environmental protection are perhaps the most important issues of our generation, and government policies and laws are key ways to address them. In order to better understand which countries are leaders in passing environmental protection laws, how they pass them, and what types of laws they pass, it is necessary to comb through databases of hundreds of thousands of laws, something impossible for humans to do. Therefore, it is necessary to use text analysis to more efficiently analyze laws. This project seeks to find the best method of computer text analysis to most accurately label and analyze laws and policies. In order to find the best method we are comparing the accuracy rates of a supervised transfer-learning model trained on laws we manually labeled in Atlas.ti, other more traditional machine-learning models we are building, and models used by others in similar literature. If we are able to construct a model with a high accuracy rate, it will make the analysis of law and policies much more efficient, which can help in a variety of research contexts. In our context, it would help us most accurately analyze how environmental policies have been passed worldwide.

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“What are you laughing at?” Cross cultural investigation into international Chinese students’ understanding of US minority group humor

Listening courses in graduate EAP curricula typically focus on academic listening, such as in lectures and seminars (Flowerdew 1995). However, much listening occurs outside of the classroom, with students frequently expressing frustration at not being able to understand or participate in peer conversations about cultural issues such as current topics and humor. To expose international students to diverse voices and content in a non-academic listening course, we utilized examples of US minority group humor, Key and Peele videos, from the Chinese media platform Bilibil. We present our first findings from small listening groups discussing one Key and Peele video, showing that students draw on home culture interpretations when encountering unfamiliar US culture and humor. Chinese students specifically are using an internet practice already familiar to them, live commenting (Danmu), as a tool to deepen their understanding of English, general US culture and minority group culture. We hope to create materials for the new culture class by evaluating students’ depth of understanding of important current aspects of US (minority) culture.

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