Self-Reflections of a Gay Immigrant Social Worker

Social workers strive to end various forms of social injustice that cause the marginalization of people and their suffering. One way to dismantle social injustice is to engage in a self-reflective process. As a form of self-discovery, self-reflection guides us to recognize our own experiences of privilege and power as well as inequality and oppression. In this article, I utilize intersectionality as a method of self-reflection to examine the ways race/ethnicity, sexuality, and immigration status intersect and create a particular form of vulnerability. Making private experiences public takes courage. Nevertheless, through self-reflection, I reinforce my moral and ethical commitment to fairness, respect for diversity, and human rights for all

Subsurface Characterization using Ensemble-based Approaches with Deep Generative Models

Estimating spatially distributed properties such as hydraulic conductivity (K) from available sparse measurements is a great challenge in subsurface characterization. However, the use of inverse modeling is limited for ill-posed, high-dimensional applications due to computational costs and poor prediction accuracy with sparse datasets. In this paper, we combine Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP), a deep generative model that can accurately capture complex subsurface structure, and Ensemble Smoother with Multiple Data Assimilation (ES-MDA), an ensemble-based inversion method, for accurate and accelerated subsurface characterization. WGAN-GP is trained to generate high-dimensional K fields from a low-dimensional latent space and ES-MDA then updates the latent variables by assimilating available measurements. Several subsurface examples are used to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method and the main features of the unknown K fields are characterized accurately with reliable uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, the estimation performance is compared with a widely-used variational, i.e., optimization-based, inversion approach, and the proposed approach outperforms the variational inversion method, especially for the channelized and fractured field examples. We explain such superior performance by visualizing the objective function in the latent space: because of nonlinear and aggressive dimension reduction via generative modeling, the objective function surface becomes extremely complex while the ensemble approximation can smooth out the multi-modal surface during the minimization. This suggests that the ensemble-based approach works well over the variational approach when combined with deep generative models at the cost of forward model runs unless convergence-ensuring modifications are implemented in the variational inversion

The Role of Culture in Making Psychiatric Diagnosis: Hwabyung (火病) and Neurasthenia (神經衰弱)

The Role of Culture in Making Psychiatric Diagnosis: Hwabyung (火病) and Neurasthenia (神經衰弱) My paper looks at two psychiatric illnesses and discusses their social and cultural dimensions. The two illnesses to be compared are the Korean affliction called hwabyung, and the once-popular Western malady labeled neurasthenia, a common ailment in 19th century America. Neurasthenia was defined as “a disorder characterized by feelings of fatigue and lassitude,” which is caused by the nervous system. That definition could fit most people at some time or another. Hwabyung, on the other hand, means “fire illness.” Koreans believe that chronic distress can cause the onset of hwabyung, which manifests itself mainly through somatic symptoms of chest pressure, unease and fatigue. It, too, could afflict many people. While focusing on symptoms and relevant diagnoses, psychiatric knowledge unfortunately fails to explain the social and cultural dimensions of the illness process. Using neurasthenia and hwabyung, in this paper I examine the ways gender, class, and medical knowledge intersect with each other and produce psychiatric diagnoses in two distinctive historical times and cultures. This form of illness analysis lets us take a new perspective in order to understand psychiatric illness not as a cluster of symptoms but as a product of culture and the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions of a particular time. Key words: Hwabyung (火病), Neurasthenia (神經衰弱), Culture, History, Psychiatric Diagnosi