Authorship Attribution for a Resource Poor Language—Urdu

Authorship attribution refers to examining the writing style of authors to determine the likelihood of the original author of a document from a given set of potential authors. Due to the wide range of authorship attribution applications, a plethora of studies have been conducted for various Western, as well as Asian, languages. However, authorship attribution research in the Urdu language has just begun, although Urdu is widely acknowledged as a prominent South Asian language. Furthermore, the existing studies on authorship attribution in Urdu have addressed a considerably easier problem of having less than 20 candidate authors, which is far from the real-world settings. Therefore, the findings from these studies may not be applicable to the real-world settings. To that end, we have made three key contributions: First, we have developed a large authorship attribution corpus for Urdu, which is a low-resource language. The corpus is composed of over 2.6 million tokens and 21,938 news articles by 94 authors, which makes it a closer substitute to the real-world settings. Second, we have analyzed hundreds of stylometry features used in the literature to identify 194 features that are applicable to the Urdu language and developed a taxonomy of these features. Finally, we have performed 66 experiments using two heterogeneous datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of four traditional and three deep learning techniques. The experimental results show the following: (a) Our developed corpus is many folds larger than the existing corpora, and it is more challenging than its counterparts for the authorship attribution task, and (b) Convolutional Neutral Networks is the most effective technique, as it achieved a nearly perfect F1 score of 0.989 for an existing corpus and 0.910 for our newly developed corpus.

Social Media Use and Misinformation Among Asian Americans During COVID-19

Social media has been crucial for seeking and communicating COVID-19 information. However, social media has also promulgated misinformation, which is particularly concerning among Asian Americans who may rely on in-language information and utilize social media platforms to connect to Asia-based networks. There is limited literature examining social media use for COVID-19 information and the subsequent impact of misinformation on health behaviors among Asian Americans. This perspective reviews recent research, news, and gray literature to examine the dissemination of COVID-19 misinformation on social media platforms to Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian Americans. We discuss the linkage of COVID-19 misinformation to health behaviors, with emphasis on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and vaccine decision-making in Asian American communities. We then discuss community- and research-driven responses to investigate misinformation during the pandemic. Lastly, we propose recommendations to mitigate misinformation and address the COVID-19 infodemic among Asian Americans.

Evidence of On-Going Disparate Levels of Care for South Asian Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in the United Kingdom during the Quinquennium 2015–2019

Over the last decade, there have been a number of studies which have documented disparate levels of care in the management of inflammatory bowel disease amongst various minority communities in the UK. Similar findings had previously been described in the USA, where access to biologics has been an issue. In this study, data on admissions to hospital of South Asian and White British patients with inflammatory bowel disease between 2015 and 2019 were collected from 12 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England, three Health Boards in Wales and two Scottish health organizations using Freedom of Information requests. The analyses of data were based on the assumption that inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has the same prevalence in the South Asian community and the White British community in the UK. Comparisons were made between the proportion of hospitalised patients who were South Asian and the proportion who were White British in the local community using a z statistic. In Leicester, Bradford, Croydon and Lothian, the proportion of patients from the South Asian community admitted to hospital was significantly greater than the proportion from the local White British community, which is consistent with the greater frequency and severity of the disease in the South Asian community in the UK. However, in Coventry, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Acute Pennine Trust in the north-west of England, Barking, Havering and Redbridge and Glasgow, South Asian patients were significantly under-represented, indicating significant issues with access to hospital-based healthcare for inflammatory bowel disease. This study provides evidence of on-going evidence of disparate levels of care for patients from a South Asian background, with inflammatory bowel disease being underserved by a number of NHS Trusts, Health Boards and comparable organisations. When there is on-going failure to achieve the objectives of the NHS of achieving equality in the delivery of care, it is critical to introduce effective policies which will alter the in-built inertia to change within such organisations.

Barriers and Facilitators to Accessing Digital Health Tools Faced by South Asian Canadians in Surrey, British Columbia: Community-Based Participatory Action Exploration Using Photovoice

Background South Asian community members in Canada experience a higher burden of chronic disease than the general population. Digital health innovations provide a significant opportunity to address various health care challenges such as supporting patients in their disease self-management. However, South Asian community members are less likely to use digital tools for their health and face significant barriers in accessing them because of language or cultural factors. Objective The aim of this study is to understand the barriers to and facilitators of digital health tool uptake experienced by South Asian community members residing in Canada. Methods This study used a qualitative community-based participatory action research approach. Residents from Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, who spoke 1 of 4 South Asian languages (Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, or Tamil) were invited to participate in focus group discussions. A subsample of the participants were invited to use photovoice methods in greater depth to explore the research topics. Results A total of 197 participants consented to the focus group discussions, with 12 (6.1%) participating in the photovoice phase. The findings revealed several key obstacles (older age, lack of education, and poor digital health literacy) and facilitators (social support from family or community members and positive attitudes toward technology) to using digital health tools. Conclusions The results support the value of using a community-based participatory action research approach and photovoice methods to engage the South Asian community in Canada to better understand digital health competencies and needs. There were several important implications for policy makers and future research, such as continued engagement of community leaders by health care providers and administrators to learn about attitudes and preferences.

South Asian Rituals of Self-torture

The expression “South Asian rituals of self-torture,” chosen as the all-encompassing title of this bibliographic article, indicates a complex of inherently painful, injurious, hazardous, or, in any event, trying religious practices falling either within the domain of the mystic-ecstatic experience or within that of possession in both theistic (i.e., Hindu) and shamanistic (i.e., tribal) cult traditions of South Asia. Such practices, generally not observed within Brahmanical contexts, are also commonly termed “religious ordeals.” The English-language term ordeal is a modern reflex of Proto-Germanic *uz-dailjam, lit. “that which is dealt out (by the gods),” namely, “God’s judgment,” and it etymologically denotes an ancient mode of trial by divine judgment consisting of an arduous physical test a person charged with guilt could be occasionally forced to undergo; the result of the test was believed to determine that person’s guilt or innocence by immediate judgment of the deity. By introducing a shift in meaning that excludes from the definition of ordeal such judicial concepts as “guilt,” “trial,” “test,” and “judgment,” a number of historians of religion have used this term to designate self-torture rituals as a whole within diverse religious traditions. In the South Asian context, Hindu votive (or devotional) ordeals aim at purifying or healing the bodies and souls of devotees keeping a religious vow who have resolved to practice self-torture in order to enter into a spiritual communion with their own elected deity (by whom they are often considered to be possessed during their performance of the ordeal) so as to be temporarily identified with him/her. Whereas in theistic Hindu cults religious ordeals are performed in fulfilment of a vow and out of devotion to acquire the favor and power of a personal deity and, in certain cases, to become his/her oracles, in shamanistic tribal cults they are undertaken as rites of passage performed to authenticate a change of state in both the body and the soul of a sacred specialist (who can be variously a shamanistic figure, a medium, a diviner, or a traditional healer); the goal of the ordeal is, in this case also, the transcending of the profane human condition. In either case undergoing an extreme physical experience is equated with being initiated into a new and closer relationship with the divine, which is reflected in a person’s manifest ability to bear the physical discomfort caused by acts of self-torture while in a self-transcending or in a possession/trance state that is interpreted by both the actors and the audience as a radically transforming experience. Thus, the aim of both votive/devotional and shamanistic ordeals is achieved only when the vow-keeper’s or the shamanistic specialist’s indifference to self-torture is exhibited before an audience of devotees, and this substantial fact marks the difference between them and the individualistic, private penances involving self-torture carried out by Hindu ascetics. In this article, sections dealing with the diverse South Asian rituals of self-torture are organized in terms of both phenomenal typology and geographical area (the most parsimonious method for classifying them).

Simulation of Severe Thunderstorms in Conjugation of Westerly and Easterly on 31 March 2019 in Bangladesh

The diagnostic and prognostic studies of thunderstorms/squalls are very important to save live and loss of properties. The present study aims at diagnose the different tropospheric parameters, instability and synoptic conditions associated the severe thunderstorms with squalls, which occurred at different places in Bangladesh on 31 March 2019. For prognostic purposes, the severe thunderstorms occurred on 31 March 2019 have been numerically simulated. In this regard, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to predict different atmospheric conditions associated with the severe storms. The study domain is selected for 9 km horizontal resolution, which almost covers the south Asian region. Numerical experiments have been conducted with the combination of WRF single-moment 6 class (WSM6) microphysics scheme with Yonsei University (YSU) PBL scheme in simulation of the squall events. Model simulated results are compared with the available observations. The observed values of CAPE at Kolkata both at 0000 and 1200 UTC were 2680.4 and 3039.9 J kg-1 respectively on 31 March 2019 and are found to be comparable with the simulated values. The area averaged actual rainfall for 24 hrs is found is 22.4 mm, which complies with the simulated rainfall of 20-25 mm for 24 hrs. Journal of Engineering Science 12(3), 2021, 29-43