Barriers to and Incentives for Health Behaviors among African Women.

This dissertation looks at health behaviors of African women and the way those behaviors are affected by information, incentives, peers, and own past experiences. This first chapter causally evaluates the relative importance of psychic costs as channels for low vaccination take-up compared to monetary costs and priming about disease severity. I measure each channel by evaluating a field experiment among women which randomizes several factors that affect tetanus vaccine take-up in rural Nigeria. Although conventional wisdom drawn from observational studies highlights the relevance of psychic costs, I found no evidence that psychic costs limit vaccination take-up. 95.7 percent of women who were incentivized just to show up at a clinic, unconditional on vaccine take-up, chose to receive the vaccine anyway. Priming about disease severity increased perceived costs of disease but did not affect vaccination take-up. Rather than these psychic costs being important barriers, direct cash incentives had large effects on vaccination take-up. Small cash incentives increased vaccination take-up by almost 20 percentage points. The results in this paper confirm economic barriers to take-up, rather than psychic barriers. The second chapter examined the effect of the death of an infant on their mothers' health behaviors for their subsequent children, using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 26 African countries. I found that mothers who experienced the death of their first child were 1.5 percentage points more likely to deliver their second child with some assistance and 2.5 percentage points more likely to deliver their second child at health facilities than mothers who did not experience the first child's death. The third chapter analyzes the effect of social networks on vaccination behaviors among women in rural Nigeria, using the same experimental data that I used in Chapter 1. Social networks within village, neighborhoods, and among friends all influence one's vaccination decision to a great extent. Focusing on best friends, I additionally find that the effect of a best friend receiving a vaccine on one's vaccination decision varies by the distance to a health clinic, by the distance between a woman and her best friend, and by the belief about vaccine safety.PhDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111473/1/ryokos_1.pd

Global issues : A communicative activity with integrated grammar

Global issues has become a buzz word among language teachers. When worldwide problems are adopted in English classes, grammar can be integrated into these areas of study. Since EFL students need to learn grammar, this method may be an effective way to have them think and speak on global problems and develop "output" or "productive interaction" skills. This paper\u27s challenge is to combine these three fields into one. First, its theoretical background will be explained, and then a practical sample activity will be presented

Place of pitavastatin in the statin armamentarium: promising evidence for a role in diabetes mellitus

Inhibitors of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase, known as statins, have revolutionized the treatment of hypercholesterolemia and coronary artery disease prevention. However, there are considerable issues regarding statin safety and further development of residual risk control, particularly for diabetic and metabolic syndrome patients. Pitavastatin is a potent statin with low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol-lowering effects comparable to those of atorvastatin or rosuvastatin. Pitavastatin has a high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol raising effect, may improve insulin resistance, and has little influence on glucose metabolism. Considering these factors along with its unique pharmacokinetic properties, which suggest minimal drug–drug interaction, pitavastatin could provide an alternative treatment choice, especially in patients with glucose intolerance or diabetes mellitus. Many clinical trials are now underway to test the clinical efficacy of pitavastatin in various settings and are expected to provide further information

Complex formation of collagen model peptides with polyelectrolytes and stabilization of the triple helical structure

Terao K., Kanenaga R., Sato T., et al. Complex formation of collagen model peptides with polyelectrolytes and stabilization of the triple helical structure. Macromolecules, 45(1), 392-400, December 7, 2011. Copyright © 2011, American Chemical Society. https://doi.org/10.1021/ma202176w

Bipartite-play Dialogue Collection for Practical Automatic Evaluation of Dialogue Systems

Automation of dialogue system evaluation is a driving force for the efficient development of dialogue systems. This paper introduces the bipartite-play method, a dialogue collection method for automating dialogue system evaluation. It addresses the limitations of existing dialogue collection methods: (i) inability to compare with systems that are not publicly available, and (ii) vulnerability to cheating by intentionally selecting systems to be compared. Experimental results show that the automatic evaluation using the bipartite-play method mitigates these two drawbacks and correlates as strongly with human subjectivity as existing methods.Comment: 9 pages, Accepted to The AACL-IJCNLP 2022 Student Research Workshop (SRW

Adding measurement error to location data to protect subject confidentiality while allowing for consistent estimation of exposure effects

In public use data sets, it is desirable not to report a respondent's location precisely to protect subject confidentiality. However, the direct use of perturbed location data to construct explanatory exposure variables for regression models will generally make naive estimates of all parameters biased and inconsistent. We propose an approach where a perturbation vector, consisting of a random distance at a random angle, is added to a respondent's reported geographic co‐ordinates. We show that, as long as the distribution of the perturbation is public and there is an underlying prior population density map, external researchers can construct unbiased and consistent estimates of location‐dependent exposure effects by using numerical integration techniques over all possible actual locations, although coefficient confidence intervals are wider than if the true location data were known. We examine our method by using a Monte Carlo simulation exercise and apply it to a real world example using data on perceived and actual distance to a health facility in Tanzania.Published versio

Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning

Prior studies addressing target-oriented conversational tasks lack a crucial notion that has been intensively studied in the context of goal-oriented artificial intelligence agents, namely, planning. In this study, we propose the task of Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning (TGCP) task to evaluate whether neural conversational agents have goal-oriented conversation planning abilities. Using the TGCP task, we investigate the conversation planning abilities of existing retrieval models and recent strong generative models. The experimental results reveal the challenges facing current technology.Comment: 9 pages, Accepted to The 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2022