Media Representation of Taiwan’s New Female Immigrants in Documentaries

Today the new female immigrants mainly from China and ASEAN countries have become large ethnic groups in Taiwan, accompanied by the negative labels and stereotypes of “money marriage”, “commoditized female” and “mercenary marriage” reproduced by the media. Above all, the rhetoric of “foreign bride” hinted that the underprivileged “Others” are hard to integrate into the Taiwan society. To explore the image of these immigrants, this article aims to discuss about the meaning of the media representation of Taiwan’s new female immigrants in documentaries. It takes two documentaries as the main texts to be discussed and by interpretation of shots, language and political/social implications used in these documentaries to produce representation and reflection on these immigrants, it analyzes how these documentaries present the various issues of Taiwan’s new female immigrants and the implication for multiculturalism and the transforming process of these new female immigrants’ position from “outsiders” to “insiders” in the Taiwan society

Signals of New Gauge Bosons in Gauged Two Higgs Doublet Model

Recently a gauged two Higgs doublet model, in which the two Higgs doublets are embedded into the fundamental representation of an extra local $SU(2)_H$ group, is constructed. Both the new gauge bosons $Z^\prime$ and $W^{\prime (p,m)}$ are electrically neutral. While $Z^\prime$ can be singly produced at colliders, $W^{\prime (p,m)}$, which is heavier, must be pair produced. We explore the constraints of $Z^\prime$ using the current Drell-Yan type data from the Large Hadron Collider. Anticipating optimistically that $Z^\prime$ can be discovered via the clean Drell-Yan type signals at high luminosity upgrade of the collider, we explore the detectability of extra heavy fermions in the model via the two leptons/jets plus missing transverse energy signals from the exotic decay modes of $Z^\prime$. For the $W^{\prime (p,m)}$ pair production in a future 100 TeV proton-proton collider, we demonstrate certain kinematical distributions for the two/four leptons plus missing energy signals have distinguishable features from the Standard Model background. In addition, comparisons of these kinematical distributions between the gauged two Higgs doublet model and the littlest Higgs model with T-parity, the latter of which can give rise to the same signals with competitive if not larger cross sections, are also presented.Comment: 39 pages, 23 figures, 7 tables and two new appendixes, to appear in EPJ

Improvement of surgical performance of medical students after basic surgical suturing workshops

Introduction Surgery, subject considered as one of the most demanding in medical education, fascinates medical students for centuries. And despite the possibilities of surgical observerships, as well as the passion and dreams of young adepts of medicine to acquire practical skills and experience in this fascinating field, we observe lack of practical aspect in medical undergraduate training. In order to allow medical students to experience basics of surgical reality, every year our team performs surgical suturing workshops for more than 50 students from all years within non-formal peer-to-peer education model. The Aim of the Study The aim of this study is to present the effectiveness of basic suturing training among 145 international students of Medical University of Lublin. Materials and methods The study group included 145 international students with no prior or little practical surgical experience, who attended surgical workshops in 15-participant groups in years 2014-2016. Both knowledge and technical performance were rated before and after conduction of the workshops. Results Within theoretical part of the training, 84% increase of knowledge in surgical procedures was observed. As for the practical skills, 71% of attendees decreased time of basic and continuous sutures performance by at least 50%. Non-formal peer-to-peer education model, as well as small groups and sufficient time for practice were noted as essential factor to the significant results of conducted workshop. Conclusions Basic surgical skills workshops serve as a great example of non-formal peer-to-peer training which improves practical abilities among attendees, as well as didactic and teamwork skills among senior students

Surface Metallization of Polyimide as a Photoanode Substratefor Rear-Illuminated Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Plastic film is promising as a photoanode substrate of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) for flexible applications, while a lowtemperaturesintering process is generally adopted for the TiO2 mesoporous film due to unstable thermal property of general plastics.This study demonstrates that typical high-temperature TiO2 sintering can be adopted for preparing the photoanode when using asurface-metallized polyimide (PI) film. A Sn/Ni bi-layer is formed on a PI film via a chemical process as the conductive layer. TheSn/Ni-coated PI photoanode can withstand high-temperature TiO2 sintering at a peak temperature of 430◦C for 30 min withoutsignificant visual deformation due to high thermal stability of PI and strength reinforcement caused by surface metallization. TheDSSC employing the Sn/Ni-coated PI film as the photoanode substrate reaches an energy conversion efficiency of 3.44% under1 sun rear-side illumination

Knowledge-Enriched Visual Storytelling

Stories are diverse and highly personalized, resulting in a large possible output space for story generation. Existing end-to-end approaches produce monotonous stories because they are limited to the vocabulary and knowledge in a single training dataset. This paper introduces KG-Story, a three-stage framework that allows the story generation model to take advantage of external Knowledge Graphs to produce interesting stories. KG-Story distills a set of representative words from the input prompts, enriches the word set by using external knowledge graphs, and finally generates stories based on the enriched word set. This distill-enrich-generate framework allows the use of external resources not only for the enrichment phase, but also for the distillation and generation phases. In this paper, we show the superiority of KG-Story for visual storytelling, where the input prompt is a sequence of five photos and the output is a short story. Per the human ranking evaluation, stories generated by KG-Story are on average ranked better than that of the state-of-the-art systems. Our code and output stories are available at https://github.com/zychen423/KE-VIST.Comment: AAAI 202

Psychometric evaluation of the Farsi version of the diabetes foot self-care bahavior scale

Background: Diabetes foot self-care is one of the self-management behaviors of diabetic patients leading to a reduction in the incidence of pressure ulcers and amputation. Having a valid, reliable, simple and comprehensive tool is essential in measuring the self-care behavior of diabetic patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Farsi version of the diabetes foot self-care bahavior scale (DFSBS) in Iran. Methods: In this cross-sectional and methodological study, 500 patients with type 2 diabetes were recruited by convenience sampling. Construct validity was assessed by exploratory factor analysis (over 300 patients) and confirmatory factor analysis (over 200 patients). Internal consistency was calculated by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and its stability was calculated by intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: In the exploratory factor analysis, two self-care factors related to feet and shoes were extracted which had specific values of 38.49 and 1.24, respectively, and were able to account for 56.22% of the total self-care variance of diabetes foot. Confirmatory factor analysis had excellent fit model. The internal consistency and ICC of the whole instrument were 0.83 and 0.791 (95% CI: 0.575–0.925; P < 0.001), respectively. Conclusions: The Farsi version of DFSBS (F-DFSBS) has good validity and reliability, and due to its appropriate psychometric properties, this tool can be used in future studie

miRTarBase update 2014: an information resource for experimentally validated miRNA-target interactions

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA molecules capable of negatively regulating gene expression to control many cellular mechanisms. The miRTarBase database (http://mirtarbase.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/) provides the most current and comprehensive information of experimentally validated miRNA-target interactions. The database was launched in 2010 with data sources for >100 published studies in the identification of miRNA targets, molecular networks of miRNA targets and systems biology, and the current release (2013, version 4) includes significant expansions and enhancements over the initial release (2010, version 1). This article reports the current status of and recent improvements to the database, including (i) a 14-fold increase to miRNA-target interaction entries, (ii) a miRNA-target network, (iii) expression profile of miRNA and its target gene, (iv) miRNA target-associated diseases and (v) additional utilities including an upgrade reminder and an error reporting/user feedback system

Tau PET With 18F-THK-5351 Taiwan Patients With Familial Alzheimer's Disease With the APP p.D678H Mutation

Background: Brain 18F-AV-45 amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) in Taiwanese patients with familial Alzheimer's disease with the amyloid precursor protein (APP) p.D678H mutation tends to involve occipital and cerebellar cortical areas. However, tau pathology in patients with this specific Taiwan mutation remains unknown. In this study, we aimed to study the Tau PET images in these patients.Methods: Clinical features, brain magnetic resonance imaging/computed tomography (MRI/CT), and brain 18F-THK-5351 PET were recorded in five patients with the APP p.D678H mutation and correlated with brain 18F-AV-45 PET images. We also compared the tau deposition patterns among five patients with familial mild cognitive impairment (fMCI), six patients with sporadic amnestic mild cognitive impairment (sMCI), nine patients with mild to moderate dementia due to Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 12 healthy controls (HCs). All of the subjects also received brain 18F-AV-45 PET.Results: The nine patients with sAD and six patients with sMCI had a positive brain AV-45 PET scans, while the 12 HCs had negative brain AV-45 PET scans. All five patients with fMCI received a tau PET scan with the age at onset ranging from 46 to 53 years, in whom increased standard uptake value ratio (SUVR) of 18F-THK-5351 was noted in all seven brain cortical areas compared with the HCs. In addition, the SUVRs of 18F-THK-5351 were increased in the frontal, medial parietal, lateral parietal, lateral temporal, and occipital areas (P &lt; 0.001) in the patients with sAD compared with the HCs. The patients with fMCI had a significant higher SUVR of 18F-THK-5351 in the cerebellar cortex compared to the patients with sMCI. The correlations between regional SUVR and Mini-Mental State Examination score and between regional SUVR and clinical dementia rating (sum box) scores within volumes of interest of Braak stage were statistically significant.Conclusion: Tau deposition was increased in the patients with fMCI compared to the HCs. Increased regional SUVR in the cerebellar cortical area was a characteristic finding in the patients with fMCI. As compared between amyloid and tau PET, the amyloid deposition is diffuse, but tau deposition is limited to the temporal lobe in the patients with fMCI