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"Chew, Ming"
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Measurement accuracy and reliability of self-reported versus measured weight and height among adults in Malaysia: Findings from a nationwide blood pressure screening programme
Most studies reporting prevalence of obesity use actual weight and height measurements. Self-reported weight and height have been used in epidemiological studies as they have been shown to be reliable, convenient, and inexpensive alternatives to actual measurements. However, the accuracy of self-reported weight and height might vary in different regions because of the difference in health awareness and social influences. This study aims to determine the accuracy and reliability of self-reported weight and height compared to actual measured weight and height among adults in Malaysia. This was a cross-sectional study conducted at the community level during blood pressure screening campaigns. Participants self-reported their weight and height in a questionnaire survey. Their weight and height were validated using measurements by researchers on the same setting. Body mass index (BMI) was defined as underweight (<18.5kg/m 2 ), normal (18.5–22.9 kg/m 2 ), overweight (23–27.4 kg/m 2 ) and obesity (≥27.5 kg/m 2 ). Bland-Altman analysis, intraclass correlation coefficients and weighted Kappa statistics were used to assess the degree of agreement between self-reported and measured weight and height. A total of 2781 participants were recruited in this study. The difference between the mean self-reported and measured weight and height were 0.4 kg and 0.4 cm respectively. Weighted Kappa statistics analysis showed that there was a substantial agreement between the BMI classifications derived from self-reported and actual measurement (ҡ = 0.920, p<0.001). There was no marked difference in the sensitivity and specificity of self-reported BMI among Malaysian adults by gender. We observed substantial agreement between self-reported and measured body weight and height within a sample of Malaysian adults. While self-reported body weight showed weaker agreement with actual measurements particularly for obese and overweight individuals, BMI values derived from self-reported weight and height were accurate for 88.53% of the participants. We thus conclude that self-reported height and weight measures may be useful for tracking and estimating population trends amongst Malaysian adults.
Journal Article
How the “Commercialized Performance of Affiliative Race and Ethnicity” Disrupts Ethnoracial Hierarchy: Boundary Processes of Customers’ Encounter with South Asian Waitpersons in Hong Kong’s Restaurants
This study analyzes how the “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAE) generates boundary processes that disrupt established ethnoracial hierarchies. The CPOARAE involves three parties: managers of a service workplace, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarchy, and ethnoracial majority customers. The managers hire workers to carry out affiliative racial and/or ethnic performance to make customers feel that they are being served by workers who belong to highly positioned ethnoracial groups. I analyze the symbolic boundary disorientations of Han-Chinese Hongkonger customers, which result from customers’ confrontation with ethnoracial ambiguity during CPOARAEs. These boundary processes show that despite being a capitalistic product and a popular cultural practice, CPOARAEs have the potential to disrupt and remake ethnoracial hierarchy. This study’s data are primarily collected from multiple in-depth interviews with 24 customers and participant observation in several restaurants, and secondarily from interviews with managers and workers.
Journal Article
Are There Service Work-Games of Resistance? “Work-Play” and Relational Resistance in Dance Club Waitstaff Work
This study tackles an important yet marginalized question in the sociology of work: Are there service work-games of resistance? Sociologists kept trying to find them but had little success. Current studies only find service work-games of consent. Building on Lopez’s idea of “successful social interactions” (SSIs), this study searches for service work-games of resistance. The author finds that worker-customer relations resembling SSIs are already reported in some studies, though it remains unclear whether these SSIs are recurrent enough to qualify as work-games and how much they contribute to resistance. Then, the author coins the term work-play to demarcate between ludic informal work routines that resemble play (i.e., work-plays) and those that resemble games (i.e., work-games). After that, the author explains why work-plays have better resistance potential than work-games and why SSIs likely constitute work-plays instead of work-games. On the basis of the qualitative analysis of waitstaff work in a dance club in Beijing, the author found four recurrent SSIs that constitute work-plays and elaborates how these work-plays operated as relational resistance and triggered conventional resistance. These findings confirm the existence of service work-plays of resistance. This study’s data were collected through 19 months of participant observation at a club and interviews with 57 informants.
Journal Article
Are the Rising Anti-China Sentiments Across the Globe Populist? Assessing an Established Case-Hong Kong Localism
Anti-China sentiments have been sharply rising across the globe in the past decade. Although concepts such as the ＂Thucydides Trap＂ and ＂China threat＂ are often used to interpret them, ＂anti-China populism＂ becomes an increasingly adopted interpretation. Nonetheless, current discussions of anti-China populism are cursory; they have not empirically substantiated that anti-China sentiments are populist. They also pay little attention to formal theoretical definitions of populism. This study helps fill the research gap by evaluating whether populism is an empirically tenable interpretation of anti-China sentiments. This evaluation is operationalized based on current populism theories and studies on ＂measuring populism.＂ This study's empirical case is one of the earliest instances of anti-China sentiments: Hong Kong localism. The main dataset is composed of multiple rounds of in-depth interviews with 23 main informants. The supplementary dataset contains a variety of documentary sources that reflect the political stance of Hong Kong localists.
Journal Article
Guanxi Work Processes in Chinese Banquets: Varied Styles, Contingency, and Failure in Pay-Back for Favours
This study analyses “guanxi work processes” – strategic practices that initiate, develop, shape, suspend, manipulate, and terminate guanxi relations – in Chinese banquets. It explores (i) different styles of carrying out guanxi work in banquets and (ii) guanxi work processes that are relatively unsuccessful and/or shaped by contingencies. Both are research gaps in the relevant scholarship. Adopting a robust processual perspective, this study analyses guanxi work processes that occur during the banquet without losing sight of those that occur pre-banquet and post-banquet. It identifies two styles of doing banquet guanxi work: one that emphasises pseudo-kin declaration and ritualistic toasting, and another that stresses non-reciprocal relational gifting and associated social skills. It also clarifies how guanxi work can fail in various ways and yield unexpected guanxi outcomes. Our data were collected from participant observation of fifteen banquets and multiple rounds of interviews with thirty-nine participants of these banquets.
Journal Article
A Review on the Use of Membrane Technology Systems in Developing Countries
Fulfilling the demand of clean potable water to the general public has long been a challenging task in most developing countries due to various reasons. Large-scale membrane water treatment systems have proven to be successful in many advanced countries in the past two decades. This paves the way for developing countries to study the feasibility and adopt the utilization of membrane technology in water treatment. There are still many challenges to overcome, particularly on the much higher capital and operational cost of membrane technology compared to the conventional water treatment system. This review aims to delve into the progress of membrane technology for water treatment systems, particularly in developing countries. It first concentrates on membrane classification and its application in water treatment, including membrane technology progress for large-scale water treatment systems. Then, the fouling issue and ways to mitigate the fouling will be discussed. The feasibility of membrane technologies in developing countries was then evaluated, followed by a discussion on the challenges and opportunities of the membrane technology implementation. Finally, the current trend of membrane research was highlighted to address future perspectives of the membrane technologies for clean water production.
Journal Article
The Instrumental Consumption of Ethnic Culture: Assessing Two Economically Driven Ways of Consuming the Cheongsam in China
Under the contemporary circumstances of symbolic consumption, multiculturalism, and accelerated globalization, ethnic cultures have become more available and more attractive to consumers. A consequence is that the instrumental consumption of ethnic culture becomes much more common. This study’s first objective is to clarify it by analyzing the instrumental consumption of the cheongsam, a Chinese traditional dress. This study’s second objective is to illustrate that the normative implications of instrumental consumption of ethnic culture are more complex and open-ended than currently understood. I substantiate this argument by contrasting two economically driven ways of consuming the cheongsam: non-wealthy women wearing cheongsams for their affordability and fashion businesses using the cheongsam style to generate profits. I show that the former case is relatively benign while the latter is not. They show that even when instrumental consumption is driven by purposes irrelevant to ethnicity, some instances of it can yield ethnicity-relevant outcomes. Among these ethnicity-relevant outcomes, some of them empower ethnic cultures. This study’s data include formal and informal interviews, participant observation in several Chinese cities, and a variety of documentary sources.
Journal Article
Alternative fat: redefining adipocytes for biomanufacturing cultivated meat
Cellular agriculture provides a potentially sustainable way of producing cultivated meat as an alternative protein source. In addition to muscle and connective tissue, fat is an important component of animal meat that contributes to taste, texture, tenderness, and nutritional profiles. However, while the biology of fat cells (adipocytes) is well studied, there is a lack of investigation on how adipocytes from agricultural species are isolated, produced, and incorporated as food constituents. Recently we compiled all protocols related to generation and analysis of adipose progenitors from bovine, porcine, chicken, other livestock and seafood species. In this review we summarize recent developments and present key scientific questions and challenges that need to be addressed in order to advance the biomanufacture of ‘alternative fat’.
Cultivated fat (adipocytes) utilizes an emerging cellular agriculture technology and serves to complement muscle and connective tissue components of alternative meat by enhancing taste, aroma, tenderness, texture, and palatability.While molecular functions and mechanisms of adipocytes have been relatively well investigated, more studies are necessary to develop expandable adipogenic stem/progenitor cell lines from meat animal species, food-grade culture conditions of mature adipocytes, and scalable protocols for constructing edible fat tissue.Key technological advances that are necessary for successful biomanufacturing of cultivated fat include derivation of food-compatible cell lines, development of culture media for optimal growth and differentiation, 3D culture conditions using bioreactors, supporting scaffolds, and structural integration into meat.
Journal Article
Colon Carcinogenesis: The Interplay Between Diet and Gut Microbiota
Colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence increases yearly, and is three to four times higher in developed countries compared to developing countries. The well-known risk factors have been attributed to low physical activity, overweight, obesity, dietary consumption including excessive consumption of red processed meats, alcohol, and low dietary fiber content. There is growing evidence of the interplay between diet and gut microbiota in CRC carcinogenesis. Although there appears to be a direct causal role for gut microbes in the development of CRC in some animal models, the link between diet, gut microbes, and colonic carcinogenesis has been established largely as an association rather than as a cause-and-effect relationship. This is especially true for human studies. As essential dietary factors influence CRC risk, the role of proteins, carbohydrates, fat, and their end products are considered as part of the interplay between diet and gut microbiota. The underlying molecular mechanisms of colon carcinogenesis mediated by gut microbiota are also discussed. Human biological responses such as inflammation, oxidative stress, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) damage can all influence dysbiosis and consequently CRC carcinogenesis. Dysbiosis could add to CRC risk by shifting the effect of dietary components toward promoting a colonic neoplasm together with interacting with gut microbiota. It follows that dietary intervention and gut microbiota modulation may play a vital role in reducing CRC risk.
Journal Article