Survey of Latino/Hispanic Adult Immigrants Living in the Colonias of Hidalgo County, Texas Evaluating Reported Food Insecurity and Immigration-Related Fear

Background: Colonias in Hidalgo County, Texas are residential communities near the Texas-Mexico border which often lack basic living necessities with high rates of poverty. Due to complex socioeconomic/geopolitical stressors (factors ranging from income inequality to access to transportation to concern regarding safety and legal status), colonia residents have limited access to fresh produce, while processed foods are more readily available, resulting in significant food insecurity. Objectives: The aim of this study is to assess levels of food insecurity, current eating habits, barriers of access, and interest in more readily affordable and accessible produce options in colonias of Hidalgo County, Texas. We hypothesize that residents of the colonias indeed have limited access to fresh produce and healthy food options and that there is interest within the population for more readily affordable and accessible produce options. Methods: In this study, we surveyed 80 residents within four colonias of Hidalgo County with health promoters from Proyecto Azteca, a program with established presences and trust within the community. The survey gathered anonymous data including respondent demographics, current food habits, barriers of access to fruits/vegetables, and interest in expanding access to fresh produce. We, furthermore, utilized geospatial analysis to map current locations of food sources in relation to the four colonias surveyed. Results: Overall, we identified high rates of food insecurity (82.5% identified as food insecure based on the Hunger Vital Signs), difficulty with many barriers of access to fresh produce (including transportation, cost, taste, and lack of knowledge about preparation), and high levels of interest in increasing fruit/vegetable consumption if there were more affordable (95%) and convenient (92.5%) options to purchase fresh produce. Furthermore, 23.8% of respondents admitted to feeling fearful of traveling outside of their colonia, the majority of whom identified immigration enforcement as their principle fear. Conclusion: This study not only demonstrates many of the impediments to accessing fresh, healthful, affordable produce, but it also highlights some of the major effects of these barriers--especially the alarmingly high rate of food insecurity. It also identifies fear of leaving one’s colonia (especially fear of immigration enforcement) as a barrier to accessing fresh produce

On the Correlation between Energy and Pitch Accent in Read English Speech

In this paper, we describe a set of experiments that examine the correlation between energy and pitch accent. We tested the discriminative power of the energy component of frequency sub- bands with a variety of frequencies and bandwidths on read speech spoken by four native speakers of Standard American English, us- ing an analysis by classification approach. We found that the frequency region most robust to speaker differences is between 2 and 20 bark. Across all speakers, using only energy features we were able to predict pitch accent in read speech with accuracy of 81.9%

Production of English Prominence by Native Mandarin Chinese Speakers

Native-like production of intonational prominence is important for spoken language competency. Non-native speakers may have trouble producing prosodic variation in a second language (L2) and thus, problems in being understood. By identifying common sources of production error, we will be able to aid in the instruction of L2 speakers. In this paper we present results of a production study designed to test the ability of Mandarin L1 speakers to produce prominence in English. Our results show that there are some consistent differences between the L1 and L2 speakers in the use of pitch to indicate prominence, as well as in the accenting of phrase-initial tokens. We also find that we can automatically detect prominence on Mandarin L1 English with 87.23% and an f-measure of 0.866 if we train a classifier with annotated Mandarin L1 English data. Models trained on native English speech can detect prominence in Mandarin L1 English with an accuracy of 74.77% and f-measure of 0.824

V-Measure: A conditional entropy-based external cluster evaluation

We present V-measure, an external entropy-based cluster evaluation measure. Vmeasure provides an elegant solution to many problems that affect previously defined cluster evaluation measures including 1) dependence on clustering algorithm or data set, 2) the “problem of matching”, where the clustering of only a portion of data points are evaluated and 3) accurate evaluation and combination of two desirable aspects of clustering, homogeneity and completeness. We compare V-measure to a number of popular cluster evaluation measures and demonstrate that it satisfies several desirable properties of clustering solutions, using simulated clustering results. Finally, we use V-measure to evaluate two clustering tasks: document clustering and pitch accent type clustering

Acoustic/Prosodic and Lexical Correlates of Charismatic Speech

Charisma, the ability to command authority on the basis of personal qualities, is more difcult to dene than to identify. How do charismatic leaders such as Fidel Castro or Pope John Paul II attract and retain their followers? We present results of an analysis of subjective ratings of charisma from a corpus of American political speech. We identify the associations be- tween charisma ratings and ratings of other personal attributes. We also examine acoustic/prosodic and lexical features of this speech and correlate these with charisma ratings

Story Segmentation of Broadcast News in English, Mandarin and Arabic

In this paper, we present results from a Broadcast News story segmentation system developed for the SRI NIGHTINGALE system operating on English, Arabic and Mandarin news shows to provide input to subsequent question-answering processes. Using a rule-induction algorithm with automatically extracted acoustic and lexical features, we report success rates that are competitive with state-of-the-art systems on each input language. We further demonstrate that features useful for English and Mandarin are not discriminative for Arabic

Perception of English Prominence by Native Mandarin Chinese Speakers

Native-like perception of intonational prominence is important for spoken language competency. Non-native speakers may have trouble interpreting prosodic variation in a second language like English, where intonational variation can critically influence utterance semantics. By identifying types of prosody non-native learners find difficult to perceive, we can improve our ability to teach L2 speakers a language. In this paper we present results of a perception study in which Mandarin speakers with knowledge of English were tested on their ability to identify prosodic prominence in English in a variety of contexts. Through this analysis we identify particular contexts which make it difficult for Mandarin speakers to recognize pitch accent in English

Perception of English Prominence by Native Mandarin Chinese Speakers

Native-like perception of intonational prominence is important for spoken language competency. Non-native speakers may have trouble interpreting prosodic variation in a second language like English, where intonational variation can critically influence utterance semantics. By identifying types of prosody non-native learners find difficult to perceive, we can improve our ability to teach L2 speakers a language. In this paper we present results of a perception study in which Mandarin speakers with knowledge of English were tested on their ability to identify prosodic prominence in English in a variety of contexts. Through this analysis we identify particular contexts which make it difficult for Mandarin speakers to recognize pitch accent in English

Intonational Phrases for Speech Summarization

Extractive speech summarization approaches select relevant segments of spoken documents and concatenate them to generate a summary. The extraction unit chosen, whether a sentence, syntactic constituent, or other segment, has a significant impact on the overall quality and fluency of the summary. Even though sentences tend to be the choice of most the extractive speech summarizers, in this paper, we present the results of an empirical study indicating that intonational phrases are better units of extraction for summarization. Our study compared four types of input segmentation: sentences, two pause-based segmentation, and intonational phrases (IP). We found that IPs are the best candidates for extractive summarization, improving over the second highest-performing approach, sentence-based summarization, by 8.2% F-measure

The effect of HIV counselling and testing on HIV acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review

Annually, millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) receive HIV counselling and testing (HCT), a service designed to inform persons of their HIV status and, if HIV-uninfected, reduce HIV acquisition risk. However, the impact of HCT on HIV acquisition has not been systematically evaluated. We conducted a systematic review to assess this relationship in SSA