title: Medications, migration and the cultural texturing of familial healthcare

authors: Kamutingondo, Stanley

subjects: medications

abstract: Medications are a central part of health care systems, and are used to cure, halt or prevent diseases, and to easy symptoms. How medications are understood and used by people, including migrants in everyday life remains unclear. With globalisation on the increase, many people are no longer constrained to a single country. People often relocate to other countries where they may continue to maintain their cultural traditions and practices. Among the cultural traditions and practices maintained by migrants are their medication practices, customs and understandings. This thesis explores understandings, uses and social practices associated with medications in the everyday lives of three migrant groups. These groups are represented by three Zimbabwean, three Tongan and three Chinese households who have relocated to New Zealand. Householder experiences, medication practices and associated understandings were collated using a variety of methods. These included individual interviews with the households, household discussions, photographs, diaries, material objects, and media content to capture the complex and fluid nature of popular understandings and use of medications. This thesis provides insight into the cultural values and practices of these nine migrant households pertaining to how they acquire, use, share, and store their indigenous and biomedical medications. My focus on medications and the sourcing of these medicinal objects within New Zealand and from migrants’ countries of origin sheds new light on hybrid healthcare practices in the present epoch of global relocation. The study takes into account different forms of medications. These include biomedical drugs, alternative medicines, traditional medicines and dietary supplements.

text: Medications, migration and the cultural texturing of familial healthcare Medications are a central part of health care systems, and are used to cure, halt or prevent diseases, and to easy symptoms. How medications are understood and used by people, including migrants in everyday life remains unclear. With globalisation on the increase, many people are no longer constrained to a single country. People often relocate to other countries where they may continue to maintain their cultural traditions and practices. Among the cultural traditions and practices maintained by migrants are their medication practices, customs and understandings. This thesis explores understandings, uses and social practices associated with medications in the everyday lives of three migrant groups. These groups are represented by three Zimbabwean, three Tongan and three Chinese households who have relocated to New Zealand. Householder experiences, medication practices and associated understandings were collated using a variety of methods. These included individual interviews with the households, household discussions, photographs, diaries, material objects, and media content to capture the complex and fluid nature of popular understandings and use of medications. This thesis provides insight into the cultural values and practices of these nine migrant households pertaining to how they acquire, use, share, and store their indigenous and biomedical medications. My focus on medications and the sourcing of these medicinal objects within New Zealand and from migrants’ countries of origin sheds new light on hybrid healthcare practices in the present epoch of global relocation. The study takes into account different forms of medications. These include biomedical drugs, alternative medicines, traditional medicines and dietary supplements.

year: 2014

title: Syntax-driven argument identification and multi-argument classification for semantic role labeling

authors: Lin, Chi-San Althon

subjects: Semantic Role Labeling

abstract: Semantic role labeling is an important stage in systems for Natural Language Understanding.  The basic problem is one of identifying who did what to whom for each predicate in a sentence.  Thus labeling is a two-step process: identify constituent phrases that are arguments to a predicate, then label those arguments with appropriate thematic roles.

Existing systems for semantic role labeling use machine learning methods to assign roles one-at-a-time to candidate arguments.  There are several drawbacks to this general approach.  First, more than one candidate can be assigned the same role, which is undesirable.  Second, the search for each candidate argument is exponential with respect to the number of words in the sentence.  Third, single-role assignment cannot take advantage of dependencies known to exist between semantic roles of predicate arguments, such as their relative juxtaposition.  And fourth, execution times for existing algorithm are excessive, making them unsuitable for real-time use.

This thesis seeks to obviate these problems by approaching semantic role labeling as a multi-argument classification process.  It observes that the only valid arguments to a predicate are unembedded constituent phrases that do not overlap that predicate.  Given that semantic role labeling occurs after parsing, this thesis proposes an algorithm that systematically traverses the parse tree when looking for arguments, thereby eliminating the vast majority of impossible candidates.   

Moreover, instead of assigning semantic roles one at a time, an algorithm is proposed to assign all labels simultaneously; leveraging dependencies between roles and eliminating the problem of duplicate assignment.

Experimental results are provided as evidence to show that a combination of the proposed argument identification and multi-argument classification algorithms outperforms all existing systems that use the same syntactic information.

text: Syntax-driven argument identification and multi-argument classification for semantic role labeling Semantic role labeling is an important stage in systems for Natural Language Understanding.  The basic problem is one of identifying who did what to whom for each predicate in a sentence.  Thus labeling is a two-step process: identify constituent phrases that are arguments to a predicate, then label those arguments with appropriate thematic roles.

Existing systems for semantic role labeling use machine learning methods to assign roles one-at-a-time to candidate arguments.  There are several drawbacks to this general approach.  First, more than one candidate can be assigned the same role, which is undesirable.  Second, the search for each candidate argument is exponential with respect to the number of words in the sentence.  Third, single-role assignment cannot take advantage of dependencies known to exist between semantic roles of predicate arguments, such as their relative juxtaposition.  And fourth, execution times for existing algorithm are excessive, making them unsuitable for real-time use.

This thesis seeks to obviate these problems by approaching semantic role labeling as a multi-argument classification process.  It observes that the only valid arguments to a predicate are unembedded constituent phrases that do not overlap that predicate.  Given that semantic role labeling occurs after parsing, this thesis proposes an algorithm that systematically traverses the parse tree when looking for arguments, thereby eliminating the vast majority of impossible candidates.   

Moreover, instead of assigning semantic roles one at a time, an algorithm is proposed to assign all labels simultaneously; leveraging dependencies between roles and eliminating the problem of duplicate assignment.

Experimental results are provided as evidence to show that a combination of the proposed argument identification and multi-argument classification algorithms outperforms all existing systems that use the same syntactic information.

year: 2007

title: Exploring the constitution of environment education as situated, critical processes of learning and change: A collaborative synthesis across diverse regional contexts

authors: Eames, Chris W.

subjects: Critical approaches

abstract: This article offers a set of unique vignettes or stories that attempt to illustrate examples of critical approaches to environmental education (EE) in diverse contexts. It draws from the experiences of five environmental educators in four different regions of the world. We detail the history of the emergence of critical consciousness in education in Brazil, and its application in a Brazilian region, then move to examples of critical educational responses to oppression in New Zealand and Zimbabwe, before closing with a critical examination of innovative teaching and research in Europe. Through this breadth of endeavour, we identify commonalities across these contexts such as the importance of participatory action and research to examine peopleenvironment relations, particularly as constituted by indigenous peoples, and to interpret realities in ways that empower through learning-led social-ecological change. We argue that this critical approach can foster emancipation through individual and collective learning in EE processes within very different contexts.

text: Exploring the constitution of environment education as situated, critical processes of learning and change: A collaborative synthesis across diverse regional contexts This article offers a set of unique vignettes or stories that attempt to illustrate examples of critical approaches to environmental education (EE) in diverse contexts. It draws from the experiences of five environmental educators in four different regions of the world. We detail the history of the emergence of critical consciousness in education in Brazil, and its application in a Brazilian region, then move to examples of critical educational responses to oppression in New Zealand and Zimbabwe, before closing with a critical examination of innovative teaching and research in Europe. Through this breadth of endeavour, we identify commonalities across these contexts such as the importance of participatory action and research to examine peopleenvironment relations, particularly as constituted by indigenous peoples, and to interpret realities in ways that empower through learning-led social-ecological change. We argue that this critical approach can foster emancipation through individual and collective learning in EE processes within very different contexts.

year: 2018