Victims Twice Over: Return Narratives of Ethnic Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors

After World War II, more than two million people returned to their homeland, Korea, from Japan, Manchukuo, and the battlefields in the Asian Pacific area. Among them, it was reported that over ten thousand migrants were repatriated from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the liberated Korean Peninsula. While preceding studies of Korean atomic bomb survivors have focused on their experience of victimization, their historical migration experiences were rarely given attention by social scientists. As the new national governance was reordered following the collapse of Imperial Japan, the returnees were represented as natural members to be incorporated into the new nation. From a sociocultural perspective on Korean atomic bomb survivors return migration experiences and based on family registries and life history interviews, this paper traces how their identities and sentiments toward the homeland were intertwined with their life experiences and sociocultural networks they had built in colonial Japan. In spite of national integration propaganda, the returnees from Japan were often discriminated against as pro-Japanese, and were sometimes excluded from sociocultural reintegration at the community level because of anti-Japanese nationalistic sentiment. This paper concludes that Koreas liberation in 1945 needs to be studied more critically and ethnographically, not as an integrated space of nationalistic purity to be taken for granted but as a differentiated, subtle place in which sociocultural identities conflict

Communication-Efficient On-Device Machine Learning: Federated Distillation and Augmentation under Non-IID Private Data

On-device machine learning (ML) enables the training process to exploit a massive amount of user-generated private data samples. To enjoy this benefit, inter-device communication overhead should be minimized. With this end, we propose federated distillation (FD), a distributed model training algorithm whose communication payload size is much smaller than a benchmark scheme, federated learning (FL), particularly when the model size is large. Moreover, user-generated data samples are likely to become non-IID across devices, which commonly degrades the performance compared to the case with an IID dataset. To cope with this, we propose federated augmentation (FAug), where each device collectively trains a generative model, and thereby augments its local data towards yielding an IID dataset. Empirical studies demonstrate that FD with FAug yields around 26x less communication overhead while achieving 95-98% test accuracy compared to FL.Comment: presented at the 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2018), 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning on the Phone and other Consumer Devices (MLPCD 2), Montr\'eal, Canad

A Literature Review of Implementing Response to Intervention for English Language Learners

Response to intervention (RTI) has actively been used for identifying reading difficulties and providing supplemental instructions for students with disabilities. Recent developments of RTI show that the method expands its applicability to other areas and populations. In particular, it is difficult to distinguish learning disability (LD) from English as a second language acquisition. RTI could successfully be implemented for English language learners (ELLs). A systematic literature review has been conducted to delineate various components, strategies, and implications of RTI for ELL students. Twenty six articles that meet the criteria are analyzed for themes and important findings. The result of the literature review along with the implications of the identified studies is reported. It is identified that direct instruction used in tier 2 is an effective technique when infusing linguistic and cultural aspects of ELL with diverse needs

FAQ : Do Non-linguists Share the Same Intuition as Linguists?

When studying the nature of human language, we frequently ask ourselves the following question: Do native speakers agree with our judgments of the sentences in question? Many of us have encountered quite a few sentences which linguists report to be grammatical but which non-linguists find ungrammatical. Linguists try their best in their language analyses to accommodate the native speakers intuitions in a systematic way, but these efforts are mostly confined to the so-called informal method. A natural question that arises is if the naïve native speakers would agree to the introspective acceptability judgments. In order to properly answer this question, a rigorous and formal method that will ensure more systematic and fine-grained results is required. This paper aims to address questions relating to this issue, exclusively focusing on Korean. The present work intends to provide some substantive discussion on how similar or different linguists intuitions are to/from those of the general public estimating grammatical acceptability. Our main experiment was carried out with 138 subjects, using about one thousand sentences excerpted from two volumes of a linguistic journal. We calculated the convergence rate focusing on the pairwise sentences in the data, and the rate was computed to be 84.75%. This measure is somewhat lower than the convergence rate of 95% reported in Sprouse et al. (2013) for the English data

Processing Negative Polarity Items in Korean: Implications from an ERP Study

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural correlates supporting the processing of two negative polarity items (NPI) (nominal amwu+N+to any+N+even and adverbial te isang any more/longer) in Korean. Participants read sentences phrase by phrase while their brain activities during the processing of the NPIs and their licensors were being recorded. The results revealed that the NPI licensors in such contexts as positive or interrogative clauses not containing a proper licensor elicited a larger N400 component, possibly reflecting the cost of semantic or pragmatic integration. By contrast, sentences with the adverbial NPI te isang in the negative implicatureinducing before clause are not significantly different in ERP responses from those in the negative clause, thus evoking no ERP component. The present findings not only demonstrate semantic and pragmatic effects in neural signatures evoked by varied NPI-licensor relations, but also point to the multidimensionality of NPI processing/licensing recruiting semantic/pragmatic integration as well as syntactic dependency formation.We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers of this journal for the helpful comments and suggestions. Usual disclaimers apply here, of course. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF2015S1A5A2A03048485

Measured sodium excretion is associated with cardiovascular outcomes in non-dialysis CKD patients: results from the KNOW-CKD study

BackgroundThere are insufficient studies on the effect of dietary salt intake on cardiovascular (CV) outcomes in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients, and there is no consensus on the sodium (Na) intake level that increases the risk of CV disease in CKD patients. Therefore, we investigated the association between dietary salt intake and CV outcomes in CKD patients.MethodsIn the Korean cohort study for Outcome in patients with CKD (KNOW-CKD), 1,937 patients were eligible for the study, and their dietary Na intake was estimated using measured 24h urinary Na excretion. The primary outcome was a composite of CV events and/or all-cause death. The secondary outcome was a major adverse cardiac event (MACE).ResultsAmong 1,937 subjects, there were 205 (10.5%) events for the composite outcome and 110 (5.6%) events for MACE. Compared to the reference group (urinary Na excretion< 2.0g/day), the group with the highest measured 24h urinary Na excretion (urinary Na excretion ≥ 8.0g/day) was associated with increased risk of both the composite outcome (hazard ratio 3.29 [95% confidence interval 1.00-10.81]; P = 0.049) and MACE (hazard ratio 6.28 [95% confidence interval 1.45-27.20]; P = 0.013) in a cause-specific hazard model. Subgroup analysis also showed a pronounced association between dietary salt intake and the composite outcome in subgroups of patients with abdominal obesity, female, lower estimated glomerular filtration rate (< 60 ml/min per 1.73m2), no overt proteinuria, or a lower urinary potassium-to-creatinine ratio (< 46 mmol/g).ConclusionA high-salt diet is associated with CV outcomes in non-dialysis CKD patients

Discrepant glomerular filtration rate trends from creatinine and cystatin C in patients with chronic kidney disease: results from the KNOW-CKD cohort

Abstract Background Serum creatinine (Cr) and cystatin C (CysC) can both be used to estimate glomerular filtration rate (eGFRCr and eGFRCysC). However, certain conditions may cause discrepancies between eGFR trends from Cr and CysC, and these remain undetermined in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Methods A total of 1069 patients from the Korean CKD cohort (KNOW-CKD), which enrolls pre-dialytic CKD patients, whose Cr and CysC had been followed for more than 4 years were included in the sample. We performed trajectory analysis using latent class mixed modeling and identified members of the discrepancy group when patient trends between eGFRCr and eGFRCysC differed. Multivariate logistic analyses with Firths penalized likelihood regression models were performed to identify conditions related to the discrepancy. Results Trajectory patterns of eGFRCr were classified into three groups: two groups with stable eGFRCr (stable with high eGFRCr and stable with low eGFRCr) and one group with decreasing eGFRCr. Trajectory analysis of eGFRCysC also showed similar patterns, comprising two groups with stable eGFRCysC and one group with decreasing eGFRCysC. Patients in the discrepancy group (decreasing eGFRCr but stable & low eGFRCysC; n = 55) were younger and had greater proteinuria values than the agreement group (stable & low eGFRCr and eGFRCysC; n = 706), differences that remained consistent irrespective of the measurement period (4 or 5 years). Conclusions In the present study, we identify conditions related to discrepant trends of eGFRCr and eGFRCysC. Clinicians should remain aware of such potential discrepancies when tracing both Cr and CysC

Serum uric acid is associated with coronary artery calcification in early chronic kidney disease: a cross-sectional study

Background Although uric acid (UA) is regarded as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, whether UA is an independent risk factor contributing to coronary artery calcification in chronic kidney disease (CKD) is not well known. We evaluated whether UA level is associated with coronary artery calcium (CAC) score in a predialysis CKD cohort. Methods A total of 1,350 subjects who underwent coronary computed tomography as part of the KoreaN Cohort Study for Outcome in Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease were analysed. We conducted a logistic regression analysis to evaluate the association between UA and the presence of CAC. Results CAC was detected in 705 (52.2 %) patients, and the level of UA was significantly higher in CAC > 0 patients. UA showed a positive relationship with CAC > 0 in age- and sex-adjusted logistic regression analysis (Odds ratio (OR) 1.11, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 1.04–1.19, P = 0.003). However, UA showed no association with CAC > 0 in multivariate analysis. Further analysis showed that UA showed a positive association with CAC > 0 only in estimated glomerual filtration rate (eGFR) > 60 ml/min/1.73 m2 (OR 1.23, 95 % CI 1.02–1.49, P = 0.036) but not in eGFR 30–59 ml/min/1.73 m2 (OR 0.92, 95 % CI 0.78–1.08, P = 0.309) or < 30 ml/min/1.73 m2 (OR 0.92, 95 % CI 0.79–1.08, P = 0.426). Conclusions UA level was significantly associated with CAC in early CKD, but not in advanced CKD.This study was supported by the Research Program funded by the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2011E3300300, 2012E3301100, 2013E3301600, 2013E3301601, 2013E3301602, 2016E3300200, 2016E3300201, 2016E3300202, 2019E320100, 2019E320101, and 2019E320102)