Categorical dilemmas: challenges for HIV prevention among men who have sex with men and transgender women in Vietnam

In Vietnam, HIV continues disproportionately to affect men who have sex with men and transgender women, and the increase in HIV prevalence in these populations may be related to a lack of tailoring of current prevention approaches, which often fail to address social diversity within these populations. To effectively respond to HIV in Vietnam, it is imperative to identify sub-populations within the broad category of ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), a term which in Vietnam as in many other sites frequently subsumes transgender women. In this paper, we document the different categories used to describe people who engage in same-sex sexual practices and/or non-normative gender performances drawing on data collected via in-depth interviews and focus groups with a total of 79 participants in Hanoi. We identified over 40 different categories used to describe men who have sex with men and/or transgender women. These categories could be described as behaviourally-based, identity-based, or emic, and each carried different meanings, uses (based on age and geography) and levels of stigma. The categories shine light on the complexity of identities among men who have sex with men and transgender women and have utility for future research and programming to more comprehensively address HIV in Vietnam

The Representation of Texture in Cold-Rolled Copper Sheet by an Advanced X-Ray Diffraction Technique

The influence of texture on forming properties of metals has widely been recognized [l–4]. Preferred orientation of the crystallites (grains) in polycrystalline aggregates results in anisotropy of the mechanical properties. The desired degree of, or absence of, anisotropy depends on the particular process of forming, and any subsequent manufacturing process requires certain material properties for satisfactory performance. For example, the type of texture desired in deep drawing is quite different from the one necessary for simple stamping or multiaxial bending. Thus, in-process texture monitoring is receiving increased interest, both from manufacturers and researchers [4,5].</p

The Effectiveness of Co-Determination Laws in Cooperative and Adversarial Employment Relations: When Does Regulation Have Bite?

The German Codetermination Law grants workers of establishments with 200 or more employees the right to have a works councillor who is fully exempted from his or her regular job duties while still paid a regular salary. This article analyses theoretically and empirically how this de jure right to exemption translates into de facto practice, and explicitly takes into account the nature of the employment relations participation regime. It is found that the right of exemption has no effect in cooperative employment relations because exemptions are granted even in the absence of legal rights, but does make a difference in adversarial relations when exemptions are only granted above the threshold where legal rights force employers to do so, i.e. legal rights do make a decisive difference in exactly those situations where the legislators’ intent would not be realized without the right to legal enforcemen

An alternative approach to measuring treatment persistence with antipsychotic agents among patients with schizophrenia in the Veterans Health Administration

Prior studies have demonstrated the importance of treatment persistence with anti-psychotic agents in sustaining control of schizophrenic symptoms. However, the conventional approach in measuring treatment persistence tended to use only the first prescription episode even though some patients received multiple prescriptions (or multiple treatment episodes) of the same medication within one year following the initiation of the index drug. In this study, we used data from the Veterans Health Administration in the United States to assess the extent to which patients received multiple prescriptions. The study found that about a quarter of the patients had two or more treatment episodes and that levels of treatment persistence tended to vary across treatment episodes. Based on these results, we offered an alternative approach in which we calculated treatment persistence with typical and atypical antipsychotic agents separately for patients with one, two, or three treatment episodes. Considering that patients with different number of treatment episodes might differ in disease profiles, this treatment episode-specific approach offered a fair comparison of the levels of treatment persistence across patients with different number of treatment episodes. Future research needs to extend the analyses beyond two antipsychotic classes to individual antipsychotic agents. A more comprehensive assessment using appropriate analytic methods should help physicians make prescription choices that will ultimately improve the care of patients with schizophrenia

Home-ownership as a social norm and positional good: subjective well-being evidence from panel data

Much attention has been devoted to examining the absolute benefits of home-ownership (e.g. security and autonomy). This paper by contrast is concerned with conceptualising and testing the relative benefits of homeownership; those benefits that depend on an individual’s status in society. Home-ownership has previously been analysed as a social norm, implying that the relative benefits (costs) associated with being an owner (renter) are positively related to relevant others’ home-ownership values. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to additionally conceptualise home-ownership as a positional good, implying that the status of both home-owners and renters is negatively related to relevant others’ home-ownership consumption. The empirical contribution of this paper is to quantitatively test for these relative benefits in terms of subjective well-being. We run fixed effects regressions on three waves of the British Household Panel Study. We find that i) a strengthening of relevant others’ home-ownership values is associated with increases (decreases) in the subjective well-being of home-owners (renters), and ii) an increase in relevant others’ home-ownership consumption decreases the life satisfaction of owners but has no effect for renters. Overall our findings suggest that i) the relative benefit of home-ownership are both statistically significant and of a meaningful magnitude, and ii) homeownership is likely to be both a social norm and a positional good. Without explicitly recognising these relative benefits, policymakers risk overestimating the contribution of home-ownership to societal well-being

Characterization of highly frequent epitope-specific CD45RA(+)/CCR7(+/- )T lymphocyte responses against p53-binding domains of the human polyomavirus BK large tumor antigen in HLA-A*0201+ BKV-seropositive donors

Human polyomavirus BK (BKV) has been implicated in oncogenic transformation. Its ability to replicate is determined by the binding of its large tumor antigen (LTag) to products of tumor-suppressor genes regulating cell cycle, as specifically p53. We investigated CD8+ T immune responses to BKV LTag portions involved in p53 binding in HLA-A*0201+ BKV LTag experienced individuals. Peptides selected from either p53-binding region (LTag(351–450 )and LTag(533–626)) by current algorithms and capacity to bind HLA-A*0201 molecule were used to stimulate CD8+ T responses, as assessed by IFN-γ gene expression ex vivo and detected by cytotoxicity assays following in vitro culture. We observed epitope-specific immune responses in all HLA-A*0201+ BKV LTag experienced individuals tested. At least one epitope, LTag(579–587); LLLIWFRPV, was naturally processed in non professional antigen presenting cells and induced cytotoxic responses with CTL precursor frequencies in the order of 1/20'000. Antigen specific CD8+ T cells were only detectable in the CD45RA+ subset, in both CCR7+ and CCR7- subpopulations. These data indicate that widespread cellular immune responses against epitopes within BKV LTag-p53 binding regions exist and question their roles in immunosurveillance against tumors possibly associated with BKV infection

Imbibition in Disordered Media

The physics of liquids in porous media gives rise to many interesting phenomena, including imbibition where a viscous fluid displaces a less viscous one. Here we discuss the theoretical and experimental progress made in recent years in this field. The emphasis is on an interfacial description, akin to the focus of a statistical physics approach. Coarse-grained equations of motion have been recently presented in the literature. These contain terms that take into account the pertinent features of imbibition: non-locality and the quenched noise that arises from the random environment, fluctuations of the fluid flow and capillary forces. The theoretical progress has highlighted the presence of intrinsic length-scales that invalidate scale invariance often assumed to be present in kinetic roughening processes such as that of a two-phase boundary in liquid penetration. Another important fact is that the macroscopic fluid flow, the kinetic roughening properties, and the effective noise in the problem are all coupled. Many possible deviations from simple scaling behaviour exist, and we outline the experimental evidence. Finally, prospects for further work, both theoretical and experimental, are discussed.Comment: Review article, to appear in Advances in Physics, 53 pages LaTe

Long term productivity and collaboration in information science

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 02/07/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2061-8 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Funding bodies have tended to encourage collaborative research because it is generally more highly cited than sole author research. But higher mean citation for collaborative articles does not imply collaborative researchers are in general more research productive. This article assesses the extent to which research productivity varies with the number of collaborative partners for long term researchers within three Web of Science subject areas: Information Science & Library Science, Communication and Medical Informatics. When using the whole number counting system, researchers who worked in groups of 2 or 3 were generally the most productive, in terms of producing the most papers and citations. However, when using fractional counting, researchers who worked in groups of 1 or 2 were generally the most productive. The findings need to be interpreted cautiously, however, because authors that produce few academic articles within a field may publish in other fields or leave academia and contribute to society in other ways

Sneutrino dark matter in low-scale seesaw scenarios

We consider supersymmetric models in which sneutrinos are viable dark matter candidates. These are either simple extensions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with additional singlet superfields, such as the inverse or linear seesaw, or a model with an additional U(1) group. All of these models can accomodate the observed small neutrino masses and large mixings. We investigate the properties of sneutrinos as dark matter candidates in these scenarios. We check for phenomenological bounds, such as correct relic abundance, consistency with direct detection cross section limits and laboratory constraints, among others lepton flavour violating (LFV) charged lepton decays. While inverse and linear seesaw lead to different results for LFV, both models have very similar dark matter phenomenology, consistent with all experimental bounds. The extended gauge model shows some additional and peculiar features due to the presence of an extra gauge boson Z' and an additional light Higgs. Specifically, we point out that for sneutrino LSPs there is a strong constraint on the mass of the Z' due to the experimental bounds on the direct detection scattering cross section