Intersections of Gender and Ethnicity in "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Nalo Hopkinson : Haitian Diaspora and Hybridity, and the Controlling Images of Black Women

The topic of my thesis is the analysis of intersections of gender and ethnicity in Nalo Hopkinson's debut novel, "Brown Girl in the Ring" (1998). I do this by focusing on the two main characters, Gros-Jeanne, and Ti-Jeanne. Gros-Jeanne's section concentrates on Haitian diaspora and hybridity while Ti-Jeanne's section centers the controlling images of Black women. The aim is to answer the following questions: (1) How does gender intersect with ethnicity by emphasising the oppression of Black women? (2) How does Gros-Jeanne and Ti-Jeanne fight the oppression? The framework for my analysis comes from Black Feminism and intersectionality. Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and Patricia Hill Collins form the base of the theory, but other critics are also used throughout the thesis. The purpose is to shed light onto the unique experiences of Black women. The analysis revealed that being Black and female are always intra-connected. Having Haitian heritage makes Gros-Jeanne the Other of the society, and her Haitian practices of herbal medicine are simultaneously shunned and exploited. Ti-Jeanne, on the other hand, is forced to live with the images of the matriarch and the sapphire created for Black women to justify their oppression. They both fight the injustice by demonstrating their Black womanhood is what also makes them strong

Contrastive pretraining in discourse change detection

The thesis presents and evaluates a model for detecting changes in discourses in diachronic text corpora. Detecting and analyzing discourses that typically evolve over a period of time and differ in their manifestations in individual documents is a challenging task, and existing approaches like topic modeling are often not able to reach satisfactory results. One key problem is the difficulty of properly evaluating the results of discourse detection methods, due in large part to the lack of annotated text corpora. The thesis proposes a solution where synthetic datasets containing non-stable discourse patterns are generated from a corpus of news articles. Using the news categories as a proxy for discourses allows both to control the complexity of the data and to evaluate the model results based on the known discourse patterns. The complex task of extracting topics from texts is commonly performed using generative models, which are based on simplifying assumptions regarding the process of data generation. The model presented in the thesis explores instead the potential of deep neural networks, combined with contrastive learning, to be used for discourse detection. The neural network model is first trained using supervised contrastive loss function, which teaches the model to differentiate the input data based on the type of discourse pattern it belongs to. This pretrained model is then employed for both supervised and unsupervised downstream classification tasks, where the goal is to detect changes in the discourse patterns at the timepoint level. The main aim of the thesis is to find out whether contrastive pretraining can be used as a part of a deep learning approach to discourse change detection, and whether the information encoded into the model during contrastive training can generalise to other, closely related domains. The results of the experiments show that contrastive pretraining can be used to encode information that directly relates to its learning goal into the end products of the model, although the learning process is still incomplete. However, the ability of the model to generalise this information in a way that could be useful in the timepoint level classification tasks remains limited. More work is needed to improve the model performance, especially if it is to be used with complex real world datasets

Tehohoitopotilaan deliriumin ennaltaehkäisy hoitotyön keinoin

Opinnäytetyö kuuluu Helsingin ja Uudenmaan sairaanhoitopiirin, HYKS-sairaanhoitoalueen operatiivisen toimialan ja Laurea-ammattikorkeakoulun väliseen hoitotyön laadunkehittämishankkeeseen, joka toteutetaan vuosina 2007–2012. Opinnäytetyön lähtökohtana on Laurea-ammattikorkeakoulun ja Töölön teho-osaston yhteistyö, jonka tavoitteena on parantaa hoitotyön laatua. Opinnäytetyön aihe on tehohoitopotilaan deliriumin ennaltaehkäisy hoitotyön keinoin. Se on muodostunut Töölön teho-osaston sairaanhoitajan ehdotuksen pohjalta. Teho-osaston henkilökunta kokee tehohoitopotilaan deliriumin ennaltaehkäisyn haastavaksi työssään. Enimmäkseen deliriumia on hoidettu lääkkeellisillä hoitokeinoilla. Opinnäytetyön tekijät lähestyvät ongelmaa näyttöön perustuvan hoitotyön näkökulmasta. Opinnäytetyön aihe on rajattu käsittelemään tehohoidosta johtuvan deliriumin ennaltaehkäisyä. Opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena on kehittää tehohoitopotilaan hoitotyötä deliriumin ennaltaehkäisyn näkökulmasta. Tavoitteena opinnäytetyössä on päivittää teho-osaston henkilökunnan tietoja tuomalla esiin keinoja deliriumin ennaltaehkäisemiseksi. Tavoitteena on myös perustella deliriumin ennaltaehkäisyn tärkeyttä. Deliriumissa olevat potilaat ovat raskashoitoisia, koska he vaativat henkilökunnalta aikaa ja kärsivällisyyttä. Delirium pidentää tehohoitoaikaa ja lisää hoitokustannuksia. Tehohoidon aikana koettu delirium heikentää usein potilaan elämänlaatua vielä hoidon jälkeen. Myös tehohoidon aikainen kuolleisuus lisääntyy. Huomioimalla deliriumille altistavat, myötävaikuttavat ja laukaisevat tekijät voidaan vaikuttaa deliriumia ennaltaehkäisevästi. Hoitajan työkaluina ovat erilaiset hoitotyön auttamismenetelmät, kuten tukeminen, tarkkaileminen ja ohjaaminen. Näitä hoitotyön keinoja käyttämällä ja soveltamalla voidaan ennaltaehkäistä deliriumin kehittymistä. Jokapäiväisessä työssä hoitajat käyttävät näitä keinoja, ja tiedostamattaan he samalla ehkäisevät deliriumin kehittymistä. Tieto deliriumin ennaltaehkäisystä on pilkottuna eri tietolähteisiin. Opinnäytetyössä kootaan tieto yhteen ja tiivistetään se myös innovatiiviseksi julisteeksi. Opinnäytetyön tuloksena on tietopaketti, jota teho-osaston hoitajat voivat hyödyntää työssään. Jatkossa voisi tutkia, miten Töölön teho-osaston henkilökunta käyttää ja soveltaa ennaltaehkäiseviä keinoja. Olisi myös hyvä selvittää, mikä estää ennaltaehkäisyn toteuttamista.Preventing intensive care unit delirium with nursing interventions This thesis is part of the quality development project between the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, the department of Surgery of Helsinki University Central Hospital and Laurea University of Applied Sciences during the years 2007- 2012. This thesis was initiated by the cooperation between Laurea UAS and Töölö Hospital Intensive Care Unit. The aim is to im-prove the quality of nursing care. This thesis discusses the prevention of delirium in the intensive care unit with nursing interventions. It is assigned by an ICU nurse at Töölö Hospital. The ICU personnel regard the prevention of an intensive care patient's delirium as challenging. The delirium is for the most part treated with medication. The authors approach the problem from the perspective of evidence-based nursing. The topic of this thesis is outlined to deal with the prevention of delirium due to intensive care. The purpose of this thesis is to develop critical care nursing. It aims to update the knowledge of intensive care unit personnel by enhancing the means to prevent delirium. The aim is also to justify the importance of preventing the delirium. Patients with delirium require staff time and patience. Delirium increases the length of the hospital stay in the intensive care unit as well as the hospital costs. Delirium due to intensive care weakens the patient’s quality of life even after the hospital stay. Delirium leads also to increased mortality. To prevent delirium it is important to observe the factors that expose, contribute to and trigger delirium. The nursing care can consist of different interventions, such as supporting, monitoring and guiding. The use of these nursing interventions can prevent the development of delirium. The nurses use these interventions daily, and unconsciously prevent the development of delirium at the same time. The information about the prevention of delirium is scattered in different sources. In this thesis the information is compiled together and summarised in an innovative poster. The thesis produced a guide that the ICU nurses can use in their work. The future research could aim to investigate how Töölö Hospital ICU personnel use and apply preventive measures. It would also be useful to study the reasons that inhibit the prevention of delirium

Interactive Symptom Elicitation for Diagnostic Information Retrieval

Medical information retrieval suffers from a dual problem: users struggle in describing what they are experiencing from a medical perspective and the search engine is struggling in retrieving the information exactly matching what users are experiencing. We demonstrate interactive symptom elicitation for diagnostic information retrieval. Interactive symptom elicitation builds a model from the user's initial description of the symptoms and interactively elicitates new information about symptoms by posing questions of related, but uncertain, symptoms for the user. As a result, the system interactively learns the estimates of symptoms while controlling the uncertainties related to the diagnostic process. The learned model is then used to rank the associated diagnoses that the user might be experiencing. Our preliminary experimental results show that interactive symptom elicitation can significantly improve user's capability to describe their symptoms, increase the confidence of the model, and enable effective diagnostic information retrieval.Peer reviewe

Mentalizing : Seeking the underlying dimensions

Peer reviewe

The development of cortical processing of speech differs between children with cochlear implants and normal hearing and changes with parental singing

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate speech processing development in children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI) groups using a multifeature event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. Singing is associated to enhanced attention and speech perception. Therefore, its connection to ERPs was investigated in the CI group. Methods: The paradigm included five change types in a pseudoword: two easy- (duration, gap) and three difficult-to-detect (vowel, pitch, intensity) with CIs. The positive mismatch responses (pMMR), mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and late differentiating negativity (LDN) responses of preschoolers (below 6 years 9 months) and schoolchildren (above 6 years 9 months) with NH or CIs at two time points (T1, T2) were investigated with Linear Mixed Modeling (LMM). For the CI group, the association of singing at home and ERP development was modeled with LMM. Results: Overall, responses elicited by the easy- and difficult to detect changes differed between the CI and NH groups. Compared to the NH group, the CI group had smaller MMNs to vowel duration changes and gaps, larger P3a responses to gaps, and larger pMMRs and smaller LDNs to vowel identity changes. Preschoolers had smaller P3a responses and larger LDNs to gaps, and larger pMMRs to vowel identity changes than schoolchildren. In addition, the pMMRs to gaps increased from T1 to T2 in preschoolers. More parental singing in the CI group was associated with increasing pMMR and less parental singing with decreasing P3a amplitudes from T1 to T2. Conclusion: The multifeature paradigm is suitable for assessing cortical speech processing development in children. In children with CIs, cortical discrimination is often reflected in pMMR and P3a responses, and in MMN and LDN responses in children with NH. Moreover, the cortical speech discrimination of children with CIs develops late, and over time and age, their Frontiers in Neuroscience 01 frontiersin.org Torppa et al. 10.3389/fnins.2022.976767 speech sound change processing changes as does the processing of children with NH. Importantly, multisensory activities such as parental singing can lead to improvement in the discrimination and attention shifting toward speech changes in children with CIs. These novel results should be taken into account in future research and rehabilitation.Peer reviewe

Self-organized InP islands on (100) GaAs by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy

The effect of growth temperature, deposition rate, and substrate misorientation angle on size, density, and uniformity of InP islands grown on (100) GaAs by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy is investigated. The density of InP islands is observed to remain constant as a function of growth temperature in the temperature range of 620–680 °C. Below 620 °C the island density increases with decreasing temperature. Above 605 °C a subset of islands having a uniform size is observed. The degree of uniformity depends largely on the deposition rate and the size of the uniform islands on the growth temperature.Peer reviewe

The development of cortical processing of speech differs between children with cochlear implants and normal hearing and changes with parental singing

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate speech processing development in children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI) groups using a multifeature event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. Singing is associated to enhanced attention and speech perception. Therefore, its connection to ERPs was investigated in the CI group. Methods: The paradigm included five change types in a pseudoword: two easy- (duration, gap) and three difficult-to-detect (vowel, pitch, intensity) with CIs. The positive mismatch responses (pMMR), mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and late differentiating negativity (LDN) responses of preschoolers (below 6 years 9 months) and schoolchildren (above 6 years 9 months) with NH or CIs at two time points (T1, T2) were investigated with Linear Mixed Modeling (LMM). For the CI group, the association of singing at home and ERP development was modeled with LMM. Results: Overall, responses elicited by the easy- and difficult to detect changes differed between the CI and NH groups. Compared to the NH group, the CI group had smaller MMNs to vowel duration changes and gaps, larger P3a responses to gaps, and larger pMMRs and smaller LDNs to vowel identity changes. Preschoolers had smaller P3a responses and larger LDNs to gaps, and larger pMMRs to vowel identity changes than schoolchildren. In addition, the pMMRs to gaps increased from T1 to T2 in preschoolers. More parental singing in the CI group was associated with increasing pMMR and less parental singing with decreasing P3a amplitudes from T1 to T2. Conclusion: The multifeature paradigm is suitable for assessing cortical speech processing development in children. In children with CIs, cortical discrimination is often reflected in pMMR and P3a responses, and in MMN and LDN responses in children with NH. Moreover, the cortical speech discrimination of children with CIs develops late, and over time and age, their Frontiers in Neuroscience 01 frontiersin.org Torppa et al. 10.3389/fnins.2022.976767 speech sound change processing changes as does the processing of children with NH. Importantly, multisensory activities such as parental singing can lead to improvement in the discrimination and attention shifting toward speech changes in children with CIs. These novel results should be taken into account in future research and rehabilitation.Peer reviewe