Vietnamese American women’s beliefs and perceptions on cervical cancer, cervical cancer screening, and cancer prevention vaccines: A community-based participatory study

Cervical cancer remains commonly diagnosed in Vietnamese American women. Despite efforts to increase cervical cancer screening among Vietnamese American women, participation rates are persistently lower than the national goal. The objective of this study is to explore beliefs of Vietnamese American women about cervical cancer, cervical cancer screening, and cancer prevention vaccines. A qualitative descriptive investigation captured group perceptions about meaning and beliefs of cervical cancer, screening, and cancer prevention vaccines, and participants’ stories using a community-based participatory research approach. Forty Vietnamese American women were recruited from the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area into four focus groups. Using a process of directed content analysis, focus group transcripts were coded for themes. We found that cervical cancer continues to be a difficult topic to discuss, and Vietnamese American women may not bring the topic up themselves to their health care providers. Some women experienced intense emotions of fear or shame of having their cervix examined. Women delayed seeking cervical cancer screening and needed to have early warning signs, which guided them as to when to seek health care. Women focused on cleanliness through vaginal and/or perineal washing as primary prevention for cervical cancer. There were limited awareness and knowledge about cancer prevention vaccines, specifically the human papillomavirus. Some women relied heavily on their informal social networks of family, friends, or community for health knowledge. Fear and misunderstanding dominated the beliefs of Vietnamese American women about cervical cancer screening and prevention. These findings underscored the importance of having culturally-specific findings, which will inform a multicomponent intervention to promote cervical cancer screening and cancer prevention vaccine uptake within this population

Towards Speech Emotion Recognition "in the wild" using Aggregated Corpora and Deep Multi-Task Learning

One of the challenges in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) "in the wild" is the large mismatch between training and test data (e.g. speakers and tasks). In order to improve the generalisation capabilities of the emotion models, we propose to use Multi-Task Learning (MTL) and use gender and naturalness as auxiliary tasks in deep neural networks. This method was evaluated in within-corpus and various cross-corpus classification experiments that simulate conditions "in the wild". In comparison to Single-Task Learning (STL) based state of the art methods, we found that our MTL method proposed improved performance significantly. Particularly, models using both gender and naturalness achieved more gains than those using either gender or naturalness separately. This benefit was also found in the high-level representations of the feature space, obtained from our method proposed, where discriminative emotional clusters could be observed.Comment: Published in the proceedings of INTERSPEECH, Stockholm, September, 201

Learning spectro-temporal features with 3D CNNs for speech emotion recognition

In this paper, we propose to use deep 3-dimensional convolutional networks (3D CNNs) in order to address the challenge of modelling spectro-temporal dynamics for speech emotion recognition (SER). Compared to a hybrid of Convolutional Neural Network and Long-Short-Term-Memory (CNN-LSTM), our proposed 3D CNNs simultaneously extract short-term and long-term spectral features with a moderate number of parameters. We evaluated our proposed and other state-of-the-art methods in a speaker-independent manner using aggregated corpora that give a large and diverse set of speakers. We found that 1) shallow temporal and moderately deep spectral kernels of a homogeneous architecture are optimal for the task; and 2) our 3D CNNs are more effective for spectro-temporal feature learning compared to other methods. Finally, we visualised the feature space obtained with our proposed method using t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (T-SNE) and could observe distinct clusters of emotions.Comment: ACII, 2017, San Antoni

Art for science communication: The transformation in the personal sphere of adolescents in response to climate change

At the core of the study, it aims to make an in-depth and critical interpretation based on the data analysis through codes. The codes vary in the length of the text to highly conceptual answers (given by four groups: control and experimental groups). The study advocates that proper science communication through art-informed collaboration should be considered to achieve sustainability outcomes. The findings are expected to develop and show how arts can influence and effectively communicate with young people as the future generation through creative and attractive narratives with proper knowledge of climate change adaptation. The study results may have implications for climate change policymakers

Handheld Transvaginal Probe for Pap Smear Exams

This project aims to discard the use of the speculum in pap smear exams. A pap smear is a procedure that tests for cervical cancer in individuals assigned female at birth (AFAB) by screening cells collected from the cervix. Speculums are utilized in these examinations, as well as other gynecologic examinations and procedures. Due to the stigma and racist and misogynistic history of the speculum, we moved to design a device that removes the need for specula in pap smear exams. This device will aim to decrease the cervical cancer mortality rate and reduce the stigma around pap smear exams

Ethnic minority development in Vietnam : a socioeconomic perspective

The authors examine the latest quantitative evidence on disparities in living standards between and among different ethnic groups in Vietnam. Using data from the 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Survey and 1999 Census, they show that Kinh and Hoa ("majority") households have substantially higher living standards than"minority"households from Vietnam's other 52 ethnic groups. Subdividing the population into five broad categories, the authors find that while the Kinh, Hoa, Khmer, and Northern Highland minorities have benefited from economic growth in the 1990s, the growth of Central Highland minorities has stagnated. Disaggregating further, they find that the same ethnic groups whose living standards have risen fastest are those that have the highest school enrollment rates, are most likely to intermarry with Kinh partners, and are the least likely to practice a religion. The authors then estimate and decompose a set of expenditure regressions which show that even if minority households had the same endowments as Kinh households, this would close no more than a third of the gap in per capita expenditures. While some ethnic minorities seem to be doing well with a strategy of assimilating (both culturally and economically) with the Kinh-Hoa majority, other groups are attempting to integrate economically while retaining distinct cultural identities. A third group comprising the Central Highland minorities, including the Hmong, is largely being left behind by the growth process. Such diversity in the socioeconomic development experiences of the different ethnic minorities indicates the need for similar diversity in the policy interventions that are designed to assist them.Anthropology,Primary Education,Social Inclusion&Institutions,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Public Health Promotion,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Anthropology,Poverty Assessment,Gender and Education

EFFECTS OF AL(2)O(3) NANOPARTICLES DEPOSITION ON CRITICAL HEAT FLUX OF R-123 IN FLOW BOILING HEAT TRANSFER

In this study, R-123 flow boiling experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of nanoparticle deposition on heater surfaces on flow critical heat flux (CHF) and boiling heat transfer. It is known that CHF enhancement by nanoparticles results from porous structures that are very similar to layers of Chalk River unidentified deposit formed on nuclear fuel rod surfaces during the reactor operation period. Although previous studies have investigated the surface effects through surface modifications, most studies are limited to pool boiling conditions, and therefore, the effects of porous surfaces on flow boiling heat transfer are still unclear. In addition, there have been only few reports on suppression of wetting for decoupled approaches of reasoning. In this study, bare and Al2O3 nanoparticle-coated surfaces were prepared for the study experiments. The CHF of each surface was measured with different mass fluxes of 1,600 kg/m(2)s, 1,800 kg/m(2)s, 2,100 kg/m(2)s, 2,400 kg/m(2)s, and 2,600 kg/m(2)s. The nanoparticle-coated tube showed CHF enhancement up to 17% at a mass flux of 2,400 kg/m(2)s compared with the bare tube. The factors for CHF enhancement are related to the enhanced rewetting process derived from capillary action through porous structures built-up by nanoparticles while suppressing relative wettability effects between two sample surfaces as a highly wettable R-123 refrigerant was used as a working fluid. Copyright (C) 2015, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC on behalf of Korean Nuclear Societyclose0