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This article examines the tactical changes made by the asylum seeker community in Hong Kong in negotiating local refugee assistance policies and practices. The analysis presented in this paper is grounded in my ethnographic fieldwork with an asylum seeker-led organization and supplemented by archival study and informal interviews. In recent years, the asylum seeker community has adopted a pragmatic approach to advocacy, increasingly asking the local community for support in providing humanitarian aid rather than calling for changes to the assistance system, a tactic that this group used in the past. I argue that these tactical changes cannot be separated from the social and political contexts of Hong Kong. The presence of stimulating events, particularly those involving local and global refugee and migrant communities, the space available for voicing dissent, and the level of institutional responsiveness, all affect how the asylum seeker community in Hong Kong participates in policy discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of studies have explored the ways how teachers contingently respond to students' unexpected responses or a lack of student responses in second language classrooms. From a sociocultural perspective, teacher contingency involves a departure from the lesson plan in local response to the unexpected or unforeseeable actions in the classroom interactions (van Lier, 2001). This study adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective in order to examine how a teacher employs various resources to contingently respond to students' initiatives and reformulate his utterances in order to prompt student participation. The data are based on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong English-Medium-Instruction secondary history classroom. This paper reconceptualizes the notion of teacher contingency and argues that the process of how the teacher contingently responds to the unexpected outcomes that arise in real-time interactions is a process of translanguaging. Such a process requires the teacher in orchestrating the available linguistic and multimodal resources to construct pedagogical actions on the spot, instead of being planned in advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning techniques are playing an increasing role in astronomy to deal with the data avalanche. Here we describe an application for finding resolved planetary nebulae (PNe) in crowded, wide-field, narrow-band Hα survey imagery in the Galactic plane, to test and facilitate more objective, reproducible, efficient and reliable trawls for them. PNe are important for studying the late-stage stellar evolution of low-mass to intermediate-mass stars. However, the confirmed ∼3800 Galactic PNe fall far short of the numbers expected. Traditional visual searching for resolved PNe is time-consuming because of the large data size and areal coverage of modern astronomical surveys. The training and validation data set of our algorithm was built with the INT Photometric Hα Survey (IPHAS) and true PNe from the Hong Kong/AAO/Strasbourg Hα (HASH) data base. Our algorithm correctly identified 444 PNe in the validation set of 454 PNe, with only 16 explicable 'false' positives, achieving a precision rate of 96.5 per cent and a recall rate of 97.8 per cent. After transfer learning, it was then applied to the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic plane and bulge (VPHAS+), examining 979 out of 2284 survey fields, each covering 1° × 1°. It returned ∼20 000 detections, including 2637 known PNe and other kinds of catalogued non-PNe. A total of 815 new high-quality PNe candidates were found, 31 of which were selected as top-quality targets for optical spectroscopic follow-up. We found that 74 per cent of them are true, likely, and possible PNe. Representative preliminary confirmatory spectroscopy results are presented here to demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques, with full details to be given in our forthcoming paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context Vitamin D inadequacy is globally prevalent among pregnant women; however, its impact on pregnancy remains inconclusive. Objective This study aims to explore the associations of maternal and umbilical cord serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) levels with pregnancy and neonatal outcomes. Method We used archived serum samples from the Hyperglycemia and Adverse Pregnancy Outcome (HAPO) Study participants in the Hong Kong center and assayed maternal 25(OH)D levels at midgestation and umbilical cord 25(OH)D at birth using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectroscopy. Data regarding pregnancy and perinatal outcomes were extracted from the HAPO study dataset and the hospital computerized medical system. Results Only 247 (16.4%) mothers and 66 (5.0%) neonates met the criteria for vitamin D sufficiency (ie, 25(OH)D ≥ 75 nmol/L). The ratio of umbilical cord to maternal vitamin D levels was positively associated with maternal age and ambient solar radiation at the month of delivery, while negatively associated with maternal serum total 25(OH)D at midgestation (all P <.001). Umbilical cord serum 25(OH)D was independently associated with a lower primary cesarean section rate (OR 0.990, 95% CI 0.982-0.999; P =.032). There were no associations of maternal and umbilical cord 25(OH)D levels with other adverse pregnancy and neonatal outcomes. Conclusion Placental vitamin D transfer was found to be higher with a lower maternal vitamin D level, older maternal age, and higher ambient solar radiation at the time of the delivery. The protective effect of sufficient vitamin D in a cesarean section will require further studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]