Animated Video-Making: A Collaborative Approach to Researching Inclusion and Support for Immigrant Seniors

This visual essay describes how we as artist-scholars used arts-based research (ABR) to examine seniors’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to consider ways of fostering social inclusion and integration through an ABR approach to public engagement with research. Central to this inquiry is how ABR, as visual storytelling that combines a narrative with digital content, allows us to capture these seniors’ complex lived experiences while serving as public-friendly research output accessible to a wide range of community members

Experiential value of exhibition in the cultural and creative park: antecedents and effects on CCP experiential value and behavior intentions

The protection of industrial cultural heritage is related to sustainable urban development. Cultural and creative parks (CCPs) are a way for many cities to protect their industrial cultural heritage. In the context of CCPs, this study examines the relationships among the antecedents of exhibition experiential value, CCP experiential value, and behavioral intentions. Surveying 428 visitors in two well-known CCPs in Taipei, this study found that the four antecedents (attractiveness, existential authenticity, self-congruence, and exhibition–park image congruence) have a positive impact on exhibition experiential value. Exhibition experiential value has a positive impact on CCP experiential value, which in turn, affects behavioral intentions toward the CCP. In addition, this study finds that exhibition experiential value has a mediating effect between the four antecedents and CCP experiential value. Moreover, CCP experiential value has a mediating effect between exhibition experiential value and behavioral intentions. The findings of this study provide a direction for CCPs to achieve sustainable development through exhibitions that can attract more tourists

Mulan: An Exploration of Culture and Representation in Hollywood

\u27Mulan: An Exploration of Culture and Representation in Hollywood\u27 is a presentation and detailed analysis of various representational, cultural, and minority-related issues in the context of Hollywood and western media. The presentation will focalize specifically around the recent live-action remake of the 1998 film Mulan . The remake, premiered in March 2020, received critical backlash from various audiences (mostly from the BIPOC community), bashing the film for its misrepresentation of Ancient China and Ancient Chinese culture. Through this misrepresentation, the Hollywood film ultimately reflects views of cultural appropriation, misogyny, and overall minority underrepresentation in the United States. The research presents the backlash that lead actress Liu Yifei received over the course of the film\u27s wave of criticism. Many uneducated and uninformed viewers raced to Twitter to attack her performance and \u27cooperation\u27 with this controversial film, however it is important to consider the relationship between Chinese Americans and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), as it is incredibly risky to speak out against the CCP due to the possibility of being blacklisted by the Chinese market. Overall, the presentation encompasses and analyzes the issues stirred by Mulan 2020, the response of the BIPOC community, and how the controversy is ultimately a representation of Hollywood media when dealing with portrayal of foreign cultures

Delivery of chemotherapeutic agents using drug-loaded irradiated tumor cells to treat murine ovarian tumors

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death among women with gynecologic malignancies in the United States. Advanced ovarian cancers are difficult to cure with the current available chemotherapy, which has many associated systemic side effects. Doxorubicin is one such chemotherapeutic agent that can cause cardiotoxicity. Novel methods of delivering chemotherapy without significant side effects are therefore of critical need.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In the current study, we generated an irradiated tumor cell-based drug delivery system which uses irradiated tumor cells loaded with the chemotherapeutic drug, doxorubicin.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We showed that incubation of murine ovarian cancer cells (MOSEC) with doxorubicin led to the intracellular uptake of the drug (MOSEC-dox cells) and the eventual death of the tumor cell. We then showed that doxorubicin loaded MOSEC-dox cells were able to deliver doxorubicin to MOSEC cells in vivo. Further characterization of the doxorubicin transfer revealed the involvement of cell contact. The irradiated form of the MOSEC-dox cells were capable of treating luciferase-expressing MOSEC tumor cells (MOSEC/luc) in C57BL/6 mice as well as in athymic nude mice resulting in improved survival compared to the non drug-loaded irradiated MOSEC cells. Furthermore, we showed that irradiated MOSEC-dox cells was more effective compared to an equivalent dose of doxorubicin in treating MOSEC/luc tumor-bearing mice.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Thus, the employment of drug-loaded irradiated tumor cells represents a potentially innovative approach for the delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs for the control of ovarian tumors.</p

Leveraging Auxiliary Domain Parallel Data in Intermediate Task Fine-tuning for Low-resource Translation

NMT systems trained on Pre-trained Multilingual Sequence-Sequence (PMSS) models flounder when sufficient amounts of parallel data is not available for fine-tuning. This specifically holds for languages missing/under-represented in these models. The problem gets aggravated when the data comes from different domains. In this paper, we show that intermediate-task fine-tuning (ITFT) of PMSS models is extremely beneficial for domain-specific NMT, especially when target domain data is limited/unavailable and the considered languages are missing or under-represented in the PMSS model. We quantify the domain-specific results variations using a domain-divergence test, and show that ITFT can mitigate the impact of domain divergence to some extent.Comment: Accepted for poster presentation at the Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries (PML4DC) workshop, ICLR 202

Chef image's influence on tourists' dining experiences

Highlights • Tourists’ teppanyaki restaurant dining experience is examined. • A chef’s image has a positive influence on experiential value. • Interaction with other customers positively influences experiential value. • Service quality has a positive influence on diners’ experiential value