Education gradients in health for Asian immigrant adults in the United States

textThis dissertation examined the association between education and health among Asian immigrants in the United States. Despite being the second-largest immigrant population and the largest new immigrant group in the United States since 2009, Asian immigrants in the United States have received limited, although growing, attention in the literature on immigrants' health. Asian immigrants have a weaker education gradient in health in comparison to non-Hispanic whites, and this weak gradient raises questions on the role of education for Asian immigrants and, more broadly, on Asian immigrants' health. In this dissertation, I first documented the relationship between education and adult health for Asian immigrants and examined whether the education gradient in health for Asian immigrants' is weaker than that for U.S.-born whites. Second, I studied the underlying reasons for the modest education gradient in health for Asian immigrants. Using the National Health Interview Survey, the New Immigrant Survey, and the China Health and Nutrition Survey, I found that Asian immigrants do have a weaker education gradient in health than U.S.-born whites. This weaker gradient is mostly due to the fact that Asian immigrants with high education have worse health than their U.S.- born white counterparts, while Asian immigrants with low education are healthier than their U.S.-born white counterparts. Lower economic returns to education and a positive association between education and health behaviors can account for some health disadvantages for highly educated Asian immigrants. Also, some of the health advantage of less-educated Asian immigrants may be attributed to positive health selection among Asian immigrants. This dissertation provides a much-needed understanding of Asian immigrants' health and has implications for immigration policies and public health programs.Sociolog

A CORPUS-BASED QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEVEN ENGLISH VERSIONS OF "SHU DAO NAN" CONCERNING THE HARMONY-GUIDED THREE-LEVEL POETRY TRANSLATION CRITERIA

This paper makes a comparative study of seven English versions of "Shu Dao Nan" at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels. It carries out an objective quantitative study on the theory, Harmony-Guided Three-Level Poetry Translation Criteria -- "Harmony-Resemblance in Style, Sense and Poetic Conception-Eight Beauties" criteria, to reveal the styles of different translated versions and to provide reference and inspiration for the comparative study of poetry translation.  Article visualizations

Controlled Levofloxacin Release and Antibacterial Properties of β-Cyclodextrins-Grafted Polypropylene Mesh Devices for Hernia Repair.

Mesh infection is a major complication of hernia repair. After knitted mesh implantation, bacteria can grow within textile structures causing infection. In this work, polypropylene (PP) mesh devices were two-step grafted with hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) and β⁻cyclodexrins (CD) and then loaded with suitable antimicrobial levofloxacin HCL for hernia mesh-infection prevention. First, oxygen plasma was able to create surface roughness, then HDI was successfully grafted onto PP fiber surfaces. Afterwards, CD was covalently grafted onto the HDI treated PP meshes, and levofloxacin HCL (LVFX) was loaded into the CD cavity of the modified meshes. The modified devices were evaluated for sustained antibiotic properties and drug-release profiles in a phosphate buffer, and sustained drug release was observed between interfaces of meshes and aqueous environment. The antibiotic-loaded PP mesh samples demonstrated sustained antibacterial properties for 7 and 10 days, respectively, against both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. The CD-captured levofloxacin HCL showed burst release after 6 h but later exhibited sustained release for the next 48 h. Among all samples, the modified mesh LVFX-6 was more stable and showed more sustained drug release and could be employed in future clinical applications

Large-scale 16S gene assembly using metagenomics shotgun sequences.

MotivationCombining a 16S rRNA (16S) gene database with metagenomic shotgun sequences promises unbiased identification of known and novel microbes.ResultsTo achieve this, we herein report reference-based ribosome assembly (RAMBL), a computational pipeline, which integrates taxonomic tree search and Dirichlet process clustering to reconstruct full-length 16S gene sequences from metagenomic sequencing data with high accuracy. By benchmarking against the synthetic and real shotgun sequences, we demonstrated that full-length 16S gene assemblies of RAMBL were a good proxy for known and putative microbes, including Candidate Phyla Radiation. We found that 30-40% of bacteria genera in the terrestrial and intestinal biomes have no closely related genome sequences. We also observed that RAMBL was able to generate a more accurate determination of environmental microbial diversity and yield better disease classification, suggesting that full-length 16S gene assemblies are a powerful alternative to marker gene set and 16S short reads. RAMBL first realizes the access to full-length 16S gene sequences in the near-terabase-scale metagenomic shotgun sequences, which markedly improve metagenomic data analysis and interpretation.Availability and implementationRAMBL is available at https://github.com/homopolymer/RAMBL for academic [email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Raman spectroscopy and imaging of graphene

Graphene has many unique properties that make it an ideal material for fundamental studies as well as for potential applications. Here we review the recent results on the Raman spectroscopy and imaging of graphene. Raman spectroscopy and imaging can be used as a quick and unambiguous method to determine the number of graphene layers. Following, the strong Raman signal of single layer graphene compared to graphite is explained by an interference enhancement model. We have also studied the effect of substrates, the top layer deposition, the annealing process, as well as folding (stacking order) on the physical and electronic properties of graphene. Finally, Raman spectroscopy of epitaxial graphene grown on SiC substrate is presented and strong compressive strain on epitaxial graphene is observed. The results presented here are closely related to the application of graphene on nano-electronic device and help on the better understanding of physical and electronic properties of graphene.Comment: 32 pages, 14 figure

A generic theory for Majorana zero modes in 2D superconductors

It is well known that non-Abelian Majorana zero modes (MZM) harbor at vortex cores in a $p_{x}+\text{i}p_{y}$ topological superconductor, which can be realized in a 2D spin-orbit coupled system with a single Fermi surface and by proximity coupling to an $s$-wave superconductor. Here we show that existence of non-Abelian MZMs is unrelated to the bulk topology of a 2D superconductor, and propose that such exotic modes can be resulted in much broader range of superconductors, being topological or trivial. For a generic 2D system with multiple Fermi surfaces and gapped out by superconducting pairings, we show that at least a single MZM survives if there are only odd number of Fermi surfaces of which the corresponding superconducting orders have vortices, and such MZM is protected by an emergent Chern-Simons invariant, irrespective of the bulk topology of the superconductor. This result may enrich new experimental schemes for realizing non-Aelian MZMs. In particular, we propose a minimal scheme to realize the MZMs in a 2D superconducting Dirac semimetal with trivial bulk topology, which can be well achieved based on the recent cold atom experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, plus Supplementary Materia