Gratitude communication in academic written acknowledgement

In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.

Gender Discrepancies in Online English Learning in Vietnam Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

The following research reports on a collaborative effort between two university field supervisors for an elementary teacher preparation program in the Pacific southwest. Utilizing practitioner inquiry and situated learning as conceptual frameworks, the authors qualitatively examine the experiences ten elementary education teacher candidates have with promoting student engagement during emergency response teaching because of the COVID-19 pandemic. An interpretive phenomenological analysis of 20 lesson reflections and supervisor observation notes reveals teacher candidates (TCs) need more support with questioning, feedback and formative assessment, and technology tools to keep students engaged when teaching at a distance. Recommendations suggest a need for teacher preparation programs to provide TCs with opportunities to practice engagement strategies in distance education settings.

Lo spaesamento delle viaggiatrici europee al nord

The displacement of European female Travellers in the North Estrangements in travel writing The present paper focuses on the travel accounts written by four women who decided to visit the European North in mid- and late-Nineteenth century: Ida Laura Pfeiffer’s Visit to Iceland and Scandinavian North (1853), Carla Serena’s Mon voyage personnels: souvenirs De la Baltique à la Mer Caspienne (1881), Ethel Brianna Tweedies’ A girl’s ride in Iceland (1889), and Elisa Cappelli’s In Svezia. Impressioni di viaggio (1902). The aim is to analyse these travel diaries to identify the various forms of displacement and estrangement presented to the readers. The term ‘displacement’ is here to be understood as the condition of the ‘outsider’, the perception of being ‘the Other’, whereas ‘estrangement’ could be considered the reformulation of this awareness. This paper highlights real displacements that derive from social, cultural, geographical, and gender discrepancies adopting a comparative approach, which concentrates on the textual and semantic solutions, also taking into account the interdependence of travel and writing and of space and people. These aspects intertwine with the factual reality of the travel discourse, ultimately leading to both ‘literary’ and ‘existential’ estrangements.

COPILOT: a Containerised wOrkflow for Processing ILlumina genOtyping daTa

Background: The Illumina genotyping microarrays generate data in image format, which is processed by the platform-specific software GenomeStudio, followed by an array of complex bioinformatics analyses. This process can be time-consuming, lead to reproducibility errors, and be a daunting task for novice bioinformaticians. Results: Here we introduce the COPILOT (Containerised wOrkflow for Processing ILlumina genOtyping daTa) protocol, which provides an in-depth and clear guide to process raw Illumina genotype data in GenomeStudio, followed by a containerised workflow to automate an array of complex bioinformatics analyses involved in a GWAS quality control (QC). The COPILOT protocol was applied to two independent cohorts consisting of 2791 and 479 samples genotyped on the Infinium Global Screening (GSA) array with Multi-disease (MD) drop-in (~750,000 markers) and the Infinium H3Africa consortium array (~2,200,000 markers) respectively. Following the COPILOT protocol, an average sample quality improvement of 1.24% was observed across sample call rates, with notable improvement for low-quality samples. For example, from the 3270 samples processed, 141 samples had an initial sample call rate below 98%, averaging 96.6% (95% CI 95.6-97.7%), which is considered below the acceptable sample call rate threshold for a typical GWAS analysis. However, following the COPILOT protocol, all 141 samples had a call rate above 98% after QC and averaged 99.6% (95% CI 99.5-99.7%). In addition, the COPILOT pipeline automatically identified potential data issues, including gender discrepancies, heterozygosity outliers, related individuals, and population outliers through ancestry estimation. Conclusions: The COPILOT protocol makes processing Illumina genotyping data transparent, effortless and reproducible. The container is deployable on multiple platforms, improves data quality, and the end product is analysis-ready PLINK formatted data, with a comprehensive and interactive summary report to guide the user for further data analyses.

The silenced voices of desire in the novel Eating Wasps

The present paper analyses the women characters Urvashi, Sreelakhmi, Brinda and Najma in the novel Eating Wasps. The protagonist is the ghost of Sreelakshmi and she takes the readers through the lives of other women in the novel. Anita Nair portrays the confined lives of women even in the modern society. She portrays a society that considers women’s desires as a sin. Gender roles are deeply engrained in the minds of both men and women in a patriarchal society. The family and society consider women’s desires as unnatural. They are silenced and are forced to live a life they despise. The paper discusses the shame and guilt faced by the women in the novel and the gender discrepancies in the society.

Reversals in initially denied Department of Veterans Affairs’ PTSD disability claims after 17 years: a cohort study of gender differences

Background In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) strengthened its disability claims processes for military sexual trauma, hoping to reduce gender differences in initial posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) disability awards. These process improvements should also have helped women reverse previously denied claims and, potentially, diminished gender discrepancies in appealed claims’ outcomes. Our objectives were to examine gender differences in reversals of denied PTSD claims’ outcomes after 2011, determine whether disability awards (also known as “service connection”) for other disorders offset any PTSD gender discrepancy, and identify mediating confounders that could explain any persisting discrepancy. Methods From a nationally representative cohort created in 1998, we examined service connection outcomes in 253 men and 663 women whose initial PTSD claims were denied. The primary outcome was PTSD service connection as of August 24, 2016. Secondary outcomes were service connection for any disorder and total disability rating. The total disability rating determines the generosity of Veterans’ benefits. Results 51.4% of men and 31.3% of women were service connected for PTSD by study’s end (p < 0.001). At inception, 54.2% of men and 63.2% of women had any service connection—i.e., service connection for disorders other than PTSD (p = 0.01) and similar total disability ratings (p = 0.50). However, by study’s end, more men than women had any service connection (88.5% versus 83.5%, p = 0.05), and men’s mean total disability rating was substantially greater than women’s (77.1 ± 26.2 versus 66.8 ± 30.7, p < 0.001). History of military sexual assault had the largest effect modification on men’s versus women’s odds of PTSD service connection. Conclusion Even after 2011, cohort men were more likely than the women to reverse initially denied PTSD claims, and military sexual assault history accounted for much of this difference. Service connection for other disorders initially offset women’s lower rate of PTSD service connection, but, ultimately, men’s total disability ratings exceeded women’s. Gender discrepancies in service connection should be monitored beyond the initial claims period.

Gender disparities in the prevalence, awareness, treatment, and control of high blood pressure

: The gender effects in arterial hypertension (HT) epidemiology remains poorly clarified to date. We present an up-to-date review of the data regarding gender disparities in HT’s prevalence, awareness, treatment, and control. Based on the data from three consecutive national-representative SEPHAR (Study for the Evaluation of Prevalence of Hypertension and Cardiovascular Risk in Romania) surveys conducted between 2005 and 2016, we provide insights into gender differences in HT’s epidemiology and their 11- years evolutionary trend in a high-CV risk European country. Our data displays gender effects in different age-dependent epidemiological patterns in terms of hypertension prevalence, awareness, treatment, and control, mainly due to hormonal status. Hypertension’s prevalence is higher in younger men and older women. Although women are more often aware of their hypertensive condition and receive more often antihypertensive treatment, BP control is lower in older women compared to men of the same age, mainly due to a higher treatment side-effect rate. There is no solid evidence that different antihypertensive drugs exhibit different effects in lowering BP values between genders. In high CV risk European countries like Romania, if all the influencing conditions remain similar to those in the past 11 years, gender discrepancies in terms of HT's prevalence will diminish over time, awareness and treatment of hypertension will continue to be higher in females than in men, with an upward trend of BP control predicted only for women, while in men HT treatment control rate is expected to stagnate.

Gendered Tweets: Computational Text Analysis of Gender Differences in Political Discussion on Twitter

Politics is an area that is traditionally believed to be gender divided. According to intergroup communication theory, this gender-salient context might cause differences in political communications between genders. Moreover, the internet and social media, which creates a computer-mediated interactive context, might also impact the traditional gender discrepancies in political discourse. This study used Twitter trace-data and computational text analysis to examine such suppositions. By analyzing over one million tweets, we found that compared to men, women generally had a stronger sense of group awareness and cohesion and showed a desire to promote their tweets while avoiding addressing other users in political discussions. Women also focused on family- and home-related issues more than men did. These findings suggest that Twitter is not an ideal public sphere where differences and inequalities are eliminated, but it might be a counter-public sphere that promotes the voices and increases the publicity of marginalized groups.