Effects of post-abortion family planning services on contraceptive practices in China : protocol for a clustered randomized controlled trial

Study objectives: To determine whether integrating post-abortion services in hospital settings in China will increase the contraceptive use and decrease repeat abortion rates. Study design: Three-arms cluster randomised controlled trial in which the unit of randomisation is hospital. Participants: Women seeking induced abortion within 12 weeks of gestation age. Sites: Ninety hospitals from 30 provinces in China will be randomised to the three arms of the study stratified by province. In each province, eligible hospitals will be matched on the characteristics of abortion departments, especially the volume of abortions in the 2 months in the situation survey. Length of follow up: Six months. Intervention: Multiple interventions that aim to increase the use of more effective contraceptive methods, improve user adherence to reduce the unintended pregnancies and repeat induced abortions. Data collection: Data will be collected at four time points, one at baseline(month 0 at the time of enrolment) and twice during intervention (1st 3rd and 6th month after enrolment, respectively). Primary outcome: Unintended pregnancies or repeated induced abortions; immediate contraceptive uptake and the use of modern effective contraceptive methods

Subscribing to Transparency

The paper empirically explores how more trade transparency affects market liquidity. The analysis takes advantage of a unique setting in which the Shanghai Stock Exchange offered more trade transparency to market participants subscribing to a new software package. First, the results show that the additional data disclosure increased trading activity, but also increased transactions costs through wider bid-ask spreads. Thus, in contrast to popular policy belief, the paper finds that more transparency need not improve market liquidity. Second, the paper finds a particularly strong immediate liquidity impact accompanied by altered trading behavior, which suggests a significant impact on institutional traders subscribing relatively early. Lastly, since the effective level of market transparency is bound to depend on how many traders are subscribing to the data, the study can empirically establish the functional form between market-wide transparency and liquidity. The relationship is non-monotonic, which can explain the lack of consensus in the existing literature where each empirical study is naturally confined to specific parts of the transparency domain

Subscribing to Transparency

The paper empirically explores how more trade transparency affects market liquidity. The analysis takes advantage of a unique setting in which the Shanghai Stock Exchange offered more trade transparency to market participants subscribing to a new software package. First, the results show that the additional data disclosure increased trading activity, but also increased transactions costs through wider bid-ask spreads. Thus, in contrast to popular policy belief, the paper finds that more transparency need not improve market liquidity. Second, the paper finds a particularly strong immediate liquidity impact accompanied by altered trading behavior, which suggests a significant impact on institutional traders subscribing relatively early. Lastly, since the effective level of market transparency is bound to depend on how many traders are subscribing to the data, the study can empirically establish the functional form between market-wide transparency and liquidity. The relationship is non-monotonic, which can explain the lack of consensus in the existing literature where each empirical study is naturally confined to specific parts of the transparency domain

Improved language identification using deep bottleneck network

Effective representation plays an important role in automatic spoken language identification (LID). Recently, several representations that employ a pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) as the front-end feature extractor, have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However the performance is still far from satisfactory for dialect and short-duration utterance identification tasks, due to the deficiency of existing representations. To address this issue, this paper proposes the improved representations to exploit the information extracted from different layers of the DNN structure. This is conceptually motivated by regarding the DNN as a bridge between low-level acoustic input and high-level phonetic output features. Specifically, we employ deep bottleneck network (DBN), a DNN with an internal bottleneck layer acting as a feature extractor. We extract representations from two layers of this single network, i.e. DBN-TopLayer and DBN-MidLayer. Evaluations on the NIST LRE2009 dataset, as well as the more specific dialect recognition task, show that each representation can achieve an incremental performance gain. Furthermore, a simple fusion of the representations is shown to exceed current state-of-the-art performance

Induced abortion in 30 Chinese provinces in 2013: a cross-sectional survey

Background: Galloping economic growth and reform in China in the past 30 years has led to dramatic social changes. Attitudes towards sex and sexual behaviour have changed, and premarital sex has become more acceptable. The methods of contraception have changed, and the use of highly effective or long-acting contraceptive methods tends to be decreasing, especially in urban areas. Abortion is commonly used to end unintended pregnancy. The aim of this study was to survey the current situation of induced abortions in selected hospitals in 30 provinces in China. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 295 randomly selected hospitals in 30 Chinese provinces between April and August, 2013. We collected data using a questionnaire filled by the abortion service providers for all women seeking abortion within 12 weeks of pregnancy during a period of two months. The information included self-reported demographic and economic characteristics, history of induced abortion, and use of contraception. The characteristics of women were summarised with counts (percentages) for categorical variables; mean (SD) and range for age of women. All participants signed a written informed consent of which they received a copy. Ethics approvals were obtained from both ethics committees of the National Research Institution for Family Planning (NRIFP), China, and of the Ghent University, Belgium. Findings: 79 174 women participated in the study (mean age 28∙9 years (SD 1∙7; range 13–58), of whom 27 134 (35%) were undergoing a first induced abortion, 28 637 (37%) a second abortion, and 22 682 (29%) a third or subsequent abortion. About a third of participants (31%) were not married and more than half (61%) were not local residents. The primary reasons for the unintended pregnancy were contraception failure (50%) and non-use of contraception (44%). Interpretation: This is the first nationwide large-scale study in 30 provinces to show that repeated induced abortion is high in China. A family planning programme for young and unmarried people is urgently needed to improve their access to information, advice, and services about contraception and to reduce unintended pregnancies and repeated induced abortion. Funding: The European Commission (EC) under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), project number 282490