The Residential Segregation of Same-Sex Partnered Households from Heterosexual Partnered Households: Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S., 2010

Reliable data are the key for studying LGBT population, and U.S. census data provides the largest and most geographically representative sample of gay and lesbian families available in the United States. By using census data, this dissertation offers a better understanding of the location and segregation patterns of same-sex couples in metropolitan areas in the U.S. It also fills an important information gap by providing an empirical perspective to the vibrant policy and intellectual debates affecting the lives of gay men and lesbians. This dissertation seeks to examine the extent to which same-sex partnered households are residentially segregated from heterosexual partnered households in 100 U.S. metropolitan areas. It also answers: Which factors are related to the homosexual-heterosexual segregation in the U.S.? Do gay and lesbian couples voluntarily or involuntarily segregate from heterosexual couples? How might metropolitan areas be expected to vary in their levels of homosexual-heterosexual segregation? I calculated the segregation index, D-index (conventional version and unbiased version) for 100 U.S. metropolitan areas by using the 2010 census data. Interesting findings emerged from the results: Over all, there was a higher level of homosexual-heterosexual segregation in the 100 U.S. metropolitan areas in 2010. However, the level of homosexual-heterosexual segregation decreased after changing the D-index from the conventional version to the unbiased version. That is to say, within the metropolitan areas, residential segregation between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples might be partially caused by random segregation, but the levels of segregation were still significant even after controlling for the biases of the conventional D-index. Results of this dissertation also showed that same-sex male couples tended to be more segregated from heterosexual couples than same-sex female couples; “Gayborhood” and “Lesbianville” might not always be located at the same place, and partnered gays and lesbians did not necessarily follow the same patterns of segregation; Lastly, both gay and lesbian couples tended to be more residentially segregated from married heterosexual partners than they were from unmarried heterosexual partners. In order to provide explanations for homosexual-heterosexual segregation, I raised my research questions and developed my hypotheses by applying ethnic enclave models in the literature. Three models were developed to test the hypotheses: Voluntary Model, Involuntary Model, and Welcome Model. Finally, the hypotheses were highly confirmed by the multiple regression results, and I had evidence to conclude that the segregation between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples was voluntary, and gay and lesbian couples settled down more often in places that were liberal and friendly

Residential Segregation of China’s Minority Nationalities from the Han, 2000

Although a relatively large amount of literature dealing with the demography of the People’s Republic of China has been published in recent decades, few sociologists and demographers have engaged in comparative studies of China’s ethnic minority populations. In fact, one of the major problems associated with China’s attempts at modernization today has been the uneven development of the Han majority, and its 55 different minority nationalities. This paper is an attempt to fill this void. I focus on the residential segregation of China’s minority populations from the Han majority in 2000. I calculate dissimilarity indexes of the degree of residential segregation from the majority Han for each of the 55 minority groups. I conduct my analyses at both the provincial and county levels. I then analyze the variation in residential segregation with independent variables, measuring for each minority group its levels of socioeconomic and demographic development and women’s status. Major contributions of my paper are advancing our understanding of the patterns of residential segregation of China’s minority nationalities from the Han majority and rethinking some of the possible causes of ethnic conflict in China today

Effects of a traditional Chinese medicine, Longdanxiegan formula granule, on Toll-like receptor pathway in female guinea pigs with recurrent genital herpes

AbstractObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of Longdanxiegan formula granule (LDXGFG), a Chinese traditional medicine on Toll-like receptor (TLR) pathway in recurrent genital herpes.Materials and MethodsAn experimental recurrent genital herpes model was constructed using herpes guinea pig model. The effect of LDXGFG on expression levels of TLR pathway genes were detected using real-time polymerase chain reaction. Furthermore, the dendritic cells and Langerhans cells were isolated and the TLR pathway genes of these cells were assayed after LDXGFG treatment.ResultsThe result suggested two different expression patterns of TLR pathway genes in genital herpes and recurrent genital herpes, including upregulated genes and downregulated genes. TLR1, TLR4, TLR6, TLR7, TLR8, TLR9, and TLR10 showed a significant decrease while, TLR2, TLR3, and TLR5 increased in genital herpes and recurrent genital herpes guinea pigs. Meanwhile, the downregulated genes in genital herpes and recurrent genital herpes were stimulated by LDXGFG. By contrast, the upregulated genes decreased significantly after LDXGFG treatment. In both dendritic cells and Langerhans cells, the TLR pathway genes exhibited same pattern: the LDXGFG corrected the abnormal expression of TLR pathway genes.ConclusionThe present results suggest that LDXGFG is an alternative, inexpensive, and lasting-effect medicine for herpes simplex virus 2 infection

Intra and Inter-PON ONU to ONU Virtual Private Networking using OFDMA in a Ring Topology

Abstract—In this paper, we propose a novel WDM-PON architecture to support efficient and bandwidth-scalable virtual private network (VPN) emulation over both inter-PON and intra- PON. The virtual ring link for the VPN communications among ONUs is realized by using additionally low-cost optical passive components and OFDMA technology. Moreover, the downstream traffic wavelength is reused for the upstream traffic signal by using re-modulation technology. We report on a successful transmission of 10.7 Gbps OOK upstream and 10.7 Gbps DPSK downstream, together with 1.25 Gbps 16-QAM OFDM VPN traffic, over 20 km no-zero dispersion shifted fiber (NZDSF). In this paper, we propose a novel WDM-PON architecture to support efficient and bandwidth-scalable virtual private network (VPN) emulation over both inter-PON and intra-PON. The virtual ring link for the VPN communications among ONUs is realized by using additionally low-cost optical passive components and OFDMA technology. Moreover, the downstream traffic wavelength is reused for the upstream traffic signal by using re-modulation technology. We report on a successful transmission of 10.7 Gbps OOK upstream and 10.7 Gbps DPSK downstream, together with 1.25 Gbps 16-QAM OFDM VPN traffic, over 20 km no-zero dispersion shifted fiber (NZDSF)

Bidirectional Graph Reasoning Network for Panoptic Segmentation

Recent researches on panoptic segmentation resort to a single end-to-end network to combine the tasks of instance segmentation and semantic segmentation. However, prior models only unified the two related tasks at the architectural level via a multi-branch scheme or revealed the underlying correlation between them by unidirectional feature fusion, which disregards the explicit semantic and co-occurrence relations among objects and background. Inspired by the fact that context information is critical to recognize and localize the objects, and inclusive object details are significant to parse the background scene, we thus investigate on explicitly modeling the correlations between object and background to achieve a holistic understanding of an image in the panoptic segmentation task. We introduce a Bidirectional Graph Reasoning Network (BGRNet), which incorporates graph structure into the conventional panoptic segmentation network to mine the intra-modular and intermodular relations within and between foreground things and background stuff classes. In particular, BGRNet first constructs image-specific graphs in both instance and semantic segmentation branches that enable flexible reasoning at the proposal level and class level, respectively. To establish the correlations between separate branches and fully leverage the complementary relations between things and stuff, we propose a Bidirectional Graph Connection Module to diffuse information across branches in a learnable fashion. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our BGRNet that achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on challenging COCO and ADE20K panoptic segmentation benchmarks.Comment: CVPR202