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South Asians are one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in North America. Domestic violence (DV) in the South Asian community is at least as prevalent as it is in the general population, yet is massively underreported. Several reasons have been cited for the silence of South Asian immigrant women about DV. While some of these are financial, social and structural, there are others that arise from discourses specific to South Asian communities. The aim of this study was to examine the origins of these discourses using the framework of historical critical discourse analysis. This paper presents the results of this analysis and provides evidence that challenges the dominant discourses and beliefs that are commonly used by South Asian immigrant families to silence women. The findings have implications for health and wellbeing of South Asian women experiencing abuse and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a compact feature representation based on the elements of Colour Co-occurrence Matrices {CCM) in HSV space. The feature vector consists of all diagonal elements and one representative value for all non-diagonal elements of the CCM. To reduce semantic gap we use Relevance Feedback, and describe how the integration and synergy of existing feature re-weighting techniques can lead to better retrieval accuracy. We experimented with three image databases of sizes 2000, 2020 and 8365, and having number of semantic categories 10, 12 and 98 respectively. The results demonstrated the superiority of our feature representation and feature re-weighting method in terms of retrieval accuracy and online computation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]