Social Sciences – Page 9 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Social Sciences

To Be or Not to Be (on the Platform)

Existing studies on platform competition have emphasized the importance of complementors on platform success but paid little attention to complementors’ heterogeneous decisions to collaborate with a particular platform. Building on the literature on adjustment costs, this paper examines how complementors’ organizational attributes influence their decisions to adopt an entrant platform. My preliminary results based on U.S. restaurant industry data show that restaurants that had already partnered with at least one incumbent food delivery platform were more likely to adopt an entrant platform. However, this positive relationship was weaker for complementors that had (1) a higher capacity utilization rate and (2) more than one organizational unit. This paper provides implications on how entrant platforms can establish an initial population of complementors, preparing the ground to compete with incumbent platforms.

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What are the Implications of Believing that there is no Truth?

Our study aims to investigate the trait of nescience–believing that the truth cannot be known. This is applicable in a variety of topics, such as politics and philosophy; an individual who is “high in nescience” would be unlikely to believe an absolute truth, like the existence of God. As information becomes increasingly available and, consequently, increasingly conflicting, it’s become apparent that people have begun to adopt a nescient standpoint more often, choosing to forgo making concrete judgements, even when necessary. In an effort to further explore the consequences of such behavior, the study we are constructing will measure the correlation between nescience and other traits, such as anti-intellectualism. We will be collecting results through a survey. As of right now, we have no defined hypothesis, although we began under the suspicion that widespread nescient traits may have negative implications. If our results are significant, we plan to use the information to make the public more aware of the topic of nescience, and the possible dangers of maintaining an uncertain stance too often.

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Continuous evaluation of instruction

The project uses mobile-eye tracking in classrooms to analyze teachers responses to misbehaviors in the classroom and find the most effective way of responding to a misbehavior. To measure this response, we have collected 52 different videos of 26 classrooms in which an expert teacher and a student teacher take turns teaching in. Each class period has various videos, an eye tracking video as well as a few stationary cameras focused on the students. The class periods last from 35 to 45 minutes long and feature 1st to 11th grade classrooms with around 20 or 30 students in them. The groups of students reflected different socioeconomic backgrounds. The mobile eye-tracking device tracks the teachers gaze, recording whether the teacher notices a student misbehaving. Trained coders watch each video and code each misbehavior and the teacher’s response. The point of the project is to code each misbehavior in the classroom and record whether the teacher sees it and how they respond. Preliminary results show that teachers are unaware of a majority of misbehaviors in their classrooms, that teachers respond fairly to misbehavior with regards to student gender, and that teachers are unresponsive to most of the misbehaviors they see. Although data originally suggested that teachers’ responses to boys and girls differ, further research shows that this is because boys and girls misbehave differently. This study allows educational psychologists to understand how and when teachers respond to misbehaviors in the classroom and allow them to evaluate any disparities in the education system.

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Continuous evaluation of instruction

We used Mobile Eye-tracking in regular class periods to investigate teacher attention to and teacher response to misbehavior in the classroom. To measure teacher attention, Mobile Eye-tracking follows a teacher’s gaze and their fixations onto a video of the classroom that reflects their personal field of vision. To measure teacher response to misbehaviors, trained coders watched 52 different videos of 26 different 1st through 11th grade classrooms, each taught by an expert teacher and a student-teacher. Class periods ranged from 35 to 45 minutes with 20 to 30 students, who reflected various socioeconomic backgrounds. Preliminary results show (1) that teachers do not see a majority of misbehavior in their classrooms, (2) that teachers do not respond to a majority of misbehaviors they see, and (3) that teachers respond fairly to misbehavior with regards to student gender. While data suggest that teachers’ responses to boys and girls are different, further analysis shows that this is due to the fact that boys and girls misbehave in different ways. This study allows us as educational psychologists to understand more about how and when teachers respond to misbehaviors in the classroom. More broadly, it allows us to evaluate one supposed disparity in the education system.

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Reviving Growth Keynesianism

At a time defined by the collapse of longstanding capitalistic systems and institutions, Keynesian economic thought began its ascent to prominence in what would kick off an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity. John Maynard Keynes revolutionized the field of macroeconomics with the publication of his general theory in 1936, yet he was hardly the only economist contributing to the profession’s shift away from traditional neoclassical ideas. Throughout the mid-20th century, Keynesianism grew intertwined with American political institutions and common economic thought, yet a changing political landscape and an adverse economic climate halted Keynesian advances shy of their full potential. As we enter a new period defined by bold proposals to combat economic injustice, an unprecedented climate crisis, and the ever-looming threat of financial crisis, Keynesianism is once again taking center stage, and it is the goal of the RGK project to rekindle this living tradition of American political economy for a prosperous 21st century.

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Institutional Responses to Substance Using Pregnant Women

Our research looked into institutional responses to substance-using pregnant women. Institutions include entities such as the criminal justice system, the medical system, the legal system, and the child welfare system. Data gathered from state laws and statutes, newspapers, court cases, medical guidelines, and more were examined to put together a picture of how different United States entities worked together and separately in cases of substance-using pregnant women. Historical responses, such as those used during the 1980’s “crack epidemic”, as well as modern responses, such as those being used during the “Opioid epidemic”, were examined.

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Jejueo Talking Dictionary

Jejueo Talking Dictionary is a project that aims to preserve the Jejueo language through an interactive online dictionary. Jejueo, a variant of the Korean language spoken in Jeju Island, South Korea, is an endangered language. This means that not many people speak it today, and those that do are aging. It is important to prevent this language from disappearing and that is the goal of this project. The website housing Jejueo Talking Dictionary was built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a Bootstrap framework. The dictionary includes words and phrases that are translated between Jejueo, Korean, and English, and there are audio/video files in which native Jejueo speakers use each word. There are multiple pages to navigate to in addition to the main search feature, such as an ability to add suggested words and lists of the words by category. As the online dictionary is improved upon and published on the web, the aim is to have users interacting with it to learn more about Jejueo and hopefully increase speakers of the language. Future developments of adapting the dictionary to an app format and creating a language learning app directly accessible to viewers will help to streamline the learning process.

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Jejueo Talking Dictionary

The Jejueo Talking Dictionary is an online web-based application that is intended to serve as an online dictionary and language-learning tool for a critically endangered language, Jejueo. Jejueo is spoken by roughly 5,000 to 10,000 people living in the Jeju Province, located in South Korea, and is currently undergoing contact from Standard Korean. On top of this, most fluent speakers of Jejueo are over 75 years of age now. To preserve this language in a digital form, we are compiling videos, audio files, and text entries together into a website and a mobile Android application. All of this data will be made available in Jejueo, Korean, and English, so that users of this technology can use any of those languages to browse the Jejueo Talking Dictionary. Our presentation will entail the process of creating this product, from gathering data to building the website itself.

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Taking a Stand: The Effect of Social Issue Stance-Taking on Human Capital Attraction

Companies can attract human capital, or potential employees, through wage incentives and non-wage incentives, such as commitments to causes like workplace diversity and environmental sustainability. This project examines the question of as these commitments to social issues become more prevalent in recruitment efforts, does this make companies more likely to support them. A data set of every job posting in the United States over the past decade is being analyzed by a code written in the program R that automatically sorts job postings based on keywords relating to specific non-wage incentives. In order to test the functionality of this code, smaller samples of the data set are being analyzed by manually searching for these keywords. The expected results of my role in this project is that by analyzing the smaller samples of the dataset, the main code will be validated in classifying job postings. We hope to find that this is a reliable way to find a company’s commitment to social issues and if so, that we can apply this technique to other demographics regarding the job market.

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Neurophysiological correlates of language processing

We examine the N400 as a response to single words. Prior to each target word a prime word is presented that may be semantically related to the target anomalous word. We then measure the brain wave response through the scalp using EEG to look at the electrical activity in the time for the duration of the stimulus. After cleaning data of artifacts such as those due to blinking, heartbeat, or saccades we then take compute the average event-related potential (ERP) for each subject and condition. Beyond the existence of the N400 and its relative amplitude with relation to conceptual similarity of the primed and target words we are particularly interested in the latency of the N400 which has hitherto only been influenced by subject age. Specifically , the speed of the priming words’ utterances could affect the brain response. We concluded from these measurements and subsequent analysis [Data is still being analyzed and no conclusion have been made at this stage yet]. This conclusion however has implications for our current understanding of semantic memory and underlying natural language processes of the brain.

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