”Potato seeking rice”: language, culture, and identity in gay personal ads in Hong Kong

This paper examines the relationship between language, culture, and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in Hong Kong in the three years before the 1997 transition of sovereignty. Gay personal ads are seen äs an "island of discourse," whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in turn reflects issues of marginalization in the larger social context. Using Fairclough's (1992, 1993) three- dimensional model for critical discourse analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure and issues ofpower/ideology in the society that produces the texts. On the level of text, it was found that structural components, particularly the degree of grammatical elaboration, differ according to the stated race or cultural background of the authors and their targets. On the level of discourse practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of "voices"from the larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation of particular classes of individuals. Finally, on the level of social practice, the ads were found to reflect and re-create both the racial stereotypes and heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture.

The use of culture-independent tools to characterize bacteria in endo-tracheal aspirates from pre-term infants at risk of bronchopulmonary dysplasia

Although premature infants are increasingly surviving the neonatal period, up to one-third develop bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). Despite evidence that bacterial colonization of the neonatal respiratory tract by certain bacteria may be a risk factor in BPD development, little is known about the role these bacteria play. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of culture-independent molecular profiling methodologies to identify potential etiological agents in neonatal airway secretions. This study used terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and clone sequence analyses to characterize bacterial species in endo-tracheal (ET) aspirates from eight intubated pre-term infants. A wide range of different bacteria was identified in the samples. Forty-seven T-RF band lengths were resolved in the sample set, with a range of 0-15 separate species in each patient. Clone sequence analyses confirmed the identity of individual species detected by T-RFLP. We speculate that the identification of known opportunistic pathogens including S. aureus, Enterobacter sp., Moraxella catarrhalis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus sp., within the airways of pre-term infants, might be causally related to the subsequent development of BPD. Further, we suggest that culture-independent techniques, such as T-RFLP, hold important potential for the characterization of neonatal conditions, such as BPD.