In this study, the authors survey students and adults to better understand their basic financial knowledge and money saving skills to measure the extent of knowledge in each group and make comparisons between.
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Predicting college retention rates from Google Street View images of campuses
Every year, around 40% of undergraduate students in the United States discontinue their studies, resulting in a loss of valuable education for students and a loss of money for colleges. Even so, colleges across the nation struggle to discover the underlying causes of these high dropout rates. In this paper, the authors discuss the use of machine learning to find correlations between the built environment factors and the retention rates of colleges. They hypothesized that one way for colleges to improve their retention rates could be to improve the physical characteristics of their campus to be more pleasing. The authors used image classification techniques to look at images of colleges and correlate certain features like colors, cars, and people to higher or lower retention rates. With three possible options of high, medium, and low retention rates, the probability that their models reached the right conclusion if they simply chose randomly was 33%. After finding that this 33%, or 0.33 mark, always fell outside of the 99% confidence intervals built around their models’ accuracies, the authors concluded that their machine learning techniques can be used to find correlations between certain environmental factors and retention rates.
Read More...The influence of implicit social pressure on prosocial behavior of adolescents
In this study the authors sought to understand the influence of implicit social pressure on prosocial behavior (voluntary acts that benefit someone else) in adolescents age 12–19. They considered how participants divided money between themselves and four teammate they did a school project with. Despite being shown examples of how to divide money (social pressure), their results showed that both boys and girls were unaffected by prosocial, neutral, and antisocial pressures.
Read More...Extroverts as Materialists: Correlating Personality Traits, Materialism, and Spending Behavior
The authors investigated the relationship between personality traits and adolescent materialism, as well as how materialism relates to spending habits. Results indicate that extroversion was positively correlated with materialism, and that adolescents' purchases were affected by the purchasing behaviors of their friends or peers. Moreover, materialistic youth were more likely than non-materialistic youth to spend money on themselves when given a hypothetical windfall of $500.
Read More...Constructing an equally weighted stock portfolio based on systematic risk (beta)
In this article, the authors investigate whether stock selection across various sectors is efficient enough to outperform an overall market. Stocks from 2006 to 2020 were selected across sectors to calculate beta values using the Capital Asset Pricing Model.
Read More...The effect of financial and food-based incentives on math test performance
The authors looked at the effect of monetary vs. food incentives on math test performance. They found that financial incentives did increase student performance, but not necessarily food incentives.
Read More...Reddit v. Wall Street: Why Redditors beat Wall Street at its own game
Here the authors investigated the motivation of a short squeeze of GameStop stock where users of the internet forum Reddit drove a sudden increase in GameStop stock price during the start of 2021. They relied on both qualitative and quantitative analyses where they tracked activity on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit in relation to mentions of GameStop. With these methods they found that while initially the short squeeze was driven by financial motivations, later on emotional motivations became more important. They suggest that social phenomena can be dynamic and evolve necessitating mixed method approaches to study them.
Read More...Virtual Screening of Cutibacterium acnes Antibacterial Agent Using Natural Compounds Database
A common form of Acne is caused by a species of bacterium called Cutibacterium acnes. By using a predictive algorithm and structural analysis, the authors identified 5 small molecules with high affinity to growth factors in Catibacterium acnes. This has potential implications for supplemental skincare products.
Read More...The effects of container materials on food microwave heat times
The authors analyzed the heat transfer of different containers in the microwave aiming to identify the most optimal material of container to reduce heating time.
Read More...Anonymity Reduces Generosity in High School Students
The disinterested willingness a person has for helping others is known as altruism. But is this willingness to help others dependent on external factors that make you more or less inclined to be generous? We hypothesized that generosity in adolescents would depend on external factors and that these factors would change the amount of help given. To evaluate altruism and generosity, we conducted non-anonymous and anonymous variations of the dictator game and ultimatum game experiments and explored the role of anonymity, fairness, and reciprocity in high school students.
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