Latinos have a higher rate of mortality and lower rate of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening than most racial groups in the United States. This study examines the predictors of screening colonoscopy (SC) for CRC among Latinos in a patient navigation (PN) intervention. Participants were randomized to either a culturally-targeted PN group (n = 225) or a standard PN group (n = 167). Each completed an interview assessing sociodemographic and intrapersonal information. There was no difference in SC completion between PN groups (80.9 and 79.0 %). Logistic regression revealed that low language acculturation (OR = 2.22) and annual income above $10,000 (OR = 1.97) were independent predictors of completion. Both standard and culturally-targeted PN successfully increased SC completion by nearly 30 % above the recent estimation for physician-referred patients. Our findings suggest a need to further reduce barriers to SC in low income and highly acculturated Latino groups.

Perceived discrimination is associated with increased odds of asthma and poorer control among African American youth. SES exacerbates the effect of perceived discrimination on having asthma among Mexican American and other Latino youth.

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In this paper we report our work on building a POS tagger for a morphologically rich language-Hindi. The theme of the research is to vindicate the stand that-if morphology is strong and harnessable, then lack of training corpora is not debilitating. We establish a methodology of POS tagging which the resource disadvantaged (lacking annotated corpora) languages can make use of. The methodology makes use of locally annotated modestly-sized corpora (15,562 words), exhaustive morpohological analysis backed by high-coverage lexicon and a decision tree based learning algorithm (CN2). The evaluation of the system was done with 4-fold cross validation of the corpora in the news domain (www.bbc.co.uk/hindi). The current accuracy of POS tagging is 93.45% and can be further improved.

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