Ethnicity and health: key themes in a developing field

Ethnicity is a social division that is increasingly difficult to ignore. Ethnicity has to be considered alongside other social divisions including socioeconomic status which is crucial to explaining minority disadvantages in health. Identity is a key dimension of ethnicity, which encompasses self-ascribed and externally-imposed elements. The stigma associated with particular conditions, combined with the effects of racism and economic marginalization, can be central to some minority groups' ability to discuss disease and seek treatment. In a world where human rights are taken seriously, minority ethnic groups' presence in research has to become a routine consideration, rather than an optional extra. In research, as in service provision, planning for linguistic and cultural diversity represents additional work and will require extra resources

Locating ethnicity and health: exploring concepts and contexts

With the rapid development of ethnicity and health as a field of sociological research, this paper seeks to re-evaluate the development of ideas around ethnicity, 'race' and culture and consider how they have been applied to the question of health. Ethnicity as a social characteristic is contingent on the situation in which it is manifest. The process of marking 'other' ethnic groups includes stereotyping and racialisation, a process through which 'racial' or ethnic differences predominate to the exclusion of a consideration of social, economic and power relations. In the British context, the history of empire and medicine's justification of racist treatment of enslaved and colonised people, is relevant to understanding how ethnic and cultural differences have come to be essentialised and pathologised. Immigration to Britain only became a mass phenomenon after World War II, with settlement patterns following employment opportunities and kinship alliances. The state has a longstanding history of 'managing' diversity, sometimes essentialising differences between groups, at other times tackling disadvantage and discrimination experiences through policy action. Sociologists of health were slow to study ethnicity, with initial research coming from tropical disease specialists. The tendency of medicine to pathologise minority cultures is explored through case studies of the approach to rickets and the assessment of health risks associated with consanguineous marriage. Anti-racist approaches have encouraged the consideration of discrimination against and socioeconomic position of minorities. The field has developed with work on nomenclature and the operationalisation of ethnic identity, necessary to study health inequalities between ethnic groups and paying due heed to the contribution of socioeconomic position and racism to group experiences. Research into chronic conditions with complex analysis of a number of distinct contributory variables has been published of late. However, the excessive focus on South Asians and the record of measuring, analysing, but not necessarily tackling health disadvantage, are problems that remain to be addressed

High-Level Synthesis Based VLSI Architectures for Video Coding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is state-of-the-art video coding standard. Emerging applications like free-viewpoint video, 360degree video, augmented reality, 3D movies etc. require standardized extensions of HEVC. The standardized extensions of HEVC include HEVC Scalable Video Coding (SHVC), HEVC Multiview Video Coding (MV-HEVC), MV-HEVC+ Depth (3D-HEVC) and HEVC Screen Content Coding. 3D-HEVC is used for applications like view synthesis generation, free-viewpoint video. Coding and transmission of depth maps in 3D-HEVC is used for the virtual view synthesis by the algorithms like Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR). As first step, we performed the profiling of the 3D-HEVC standard. Computational intensive parts of the standard are identified for the efficient hardware implementation. One of the computational intensive part of the 3D-HEVC, HEVC and H.264/AVC is the Interpolation Filtering used for Fractional Motion Estimation (FME). The hardware implementation of the interpolation filtering is carried out using High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools. Xilinx Vivado Design Suite is used for the HLS implementation of the interpolation filters of HEVC and H.264/AVC. The complexity of the digital systems is greatly increased. High-Level Synthesis is the methodology which offers great benefits such as late architectural or functional changes without time consuming in rewriting of RTL-code, algorithms can be tested and evaluated early in the design cycle and development of accurate models against which the final hardware can be verified

Rural Development in the 21st Century: Some Issues

Rural development is essentially a part of the process of structural transformation characterised by diversification of the economy away from agriculture. This process is facilitated by rapid agricultural growth, at least initially, but leads ultimately to significant decline in the share of agriculture to total employment and output and in the proportion of the rural population to total population [Johnston (1970)]. Rural development, as such, is not an end in itself but a means to an end and can provide the basis for a sustained and equitable economic growth of all sectors of the economy. The main theme of the paper is to contribute to the perception of rural development in Pakistan by delineating the pros. and cons. of past rural development efforts and the ensuing crisis in agriculture. Possible strategies for sustainable agricultural growth and rural development and the formal approach for their implementation are described in subsequent sections. It is argued that the whole scenario requires courage and political will of politicians to decentralise the development process. Concluding comments and future options for research appear at the end.

Urdu Speech and Text Based Sentiment Analyzer

Discovering what other people think has always been a key aspect of our information-gathering strategy. People can now actively utilize information technology to seek out and comprehend the ideas of others, thanks to the increased availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs. Because of its crucial function in understanding people's opinions, sentiment analysis (SA) is a crucial task. Existing research, on the other hand, is primarily focused on the English language, with just a small amount of study devoted to low-resource languages. For sentiment analysis, this work presented a new multi-class Urdu dataset based on user evaluations. The tweeter website was used to get Urdu dataset. Our proposed dataset includes 10,000 reviews that have been carefully classified into two categories by human experts: positive, negative. The primary purpose of this research is to construct a manually annotated dataset for Urdu sentiment analysis and to establish the baseline result. Five different lexicon- and rule-based algorithms including Naivebayes, Stanza, Textblob, Vader, and Flair are employed and the experimental results show that Flair with an accuracy of 70% outperforms other tested algorithms.Comment: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Urdu language, polarity assessment, lexicon-based metho

The distribution and fate of chlorpropham in commercial potato stores

The thesis consists of a study of chlorpropham distribution patterns and its behaviour within tuber components in commercial potato stores in the UK. The store examined were both cold (3-4 °C) and conventional (8-10 °C) stores. As a large number of samples from different stores were taken, it was important to have a quick and reliable analytical method for chlorpropham determination. This was developed and compared against the original accepted method. Both methods were more or less similar in their precision of results, with recoveries of 83.80 2.25 and 93.14 3.51 from spiked samples by blending and reflux extracting methods respectively. When the methods were compared for extracting the amount of chlorpropham in commercially treated stored samples, it gave recoveries of 2.49 0.25 and 2.58 0.17 for the blending and reflux methods respectively. Overall the reflux extracting method was quicker and easier and it was used for further work with some slight modification. The present study showed that the level and distribution pattern of chlorpropham was significantly different within the store and as well as between different commercial stores. The overall range of chlorpropham levels in the examined stores was 2.11-236.56 mg/kg. The amount of chlorpropham varied with respect to sampling sites of the examined stores. Each store has its own distribution pattern with some similarities. However there was a common trending all the stores examined in that the maximum level of chlorpropham was on the top surface and minimum on the lower levels of the stores. In the cold store examined 'A' ( 3-4 °C) the level of chlorpropham decreased continuously from the top height towards the bottom height of the store. However the amount of chlorpropham was excessive throughout the store, even in the middle of the boxes it exceeded the MRL (Maximum Recommended Level). The level of chlorpropham dropped from 128.39 mg/kg in the middle layer samples of the top box to 49.14, 20.15, 19.01, 8.03 3.97 and 4.54 mg/kg towards the bottom boxes of a six high column of boxes in the store respectively