Comparison of characteristics and mortality in multidrug resistant (MDR) and non-MDR tuberculosis patients in China

BACKGROUND: We conducted a cohort study to compare the characteristics of MDR-TB with non-MDR-TB patients and to measure long term (9-year) mortality rate and determine factors associated with death in China. METHODS: We reviewed the medical records of 250 TB cases from a 2001 survey to compare 100 MDR-TB patients with 150 non-MDR-TB patients who were treated in 2001-2002. Baseline attributes extracted from the records were compared between the two cohorts and long-term mortality and risk factors were determined at nine-year follow-up in 2010. RESULTS: Among the 234 patients successfully followed up, 63 (26.9%) were female and 171 (73.1 %) were male. MDR-TB patients had poorer socioeconomic status compared to non-MDRTB. Nine years after the diagnosis of TB, 69 or 29.5 % of the 234 patients had died (32 or 21.6 % of non-MDR-TB versus 37 or 43.0 % of MDR-TB) and the overall mortality rate was 39/1000 per year (PY) (27/1000 PY among non-MDR versus 63/1000 PY among MDR-TB). Factors associated with death included: MDR status (hazard ratio (HR): 1.86; CI: 1.09-3.13), limited education of primary school or lower (HR: 2.51; CI 1.34-4.70) and received TB treatment during the nine-year period (HR 1.82; 95 % CI 1.02-3.26). CONCLUSIONS: MDR-TB was a strong predictor for poor long-term outcome. High quality diagnosis and treatment must be ensured. Greater reimbursement or free treatment may be needed to provide access for the poor and vulnerable populations, and to increase treatment compliance.Funding for the study was provided by the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, as the PhD study project for Yanni Sun, a PhD candidate at the Centre

Linguistic projection and the ownership of English: solidarity and power with the English language in Egypt

This thesis investigates aspects of English usage in Egypt, including any possible linguistic projection of solidarity or power with other Egyptians, and the degree, if any, of linguistic ownership of English. As in many other Expanding Circle contexts, English realizes its role in Egypt as lingua franca in order to fulfill educational and business transactions. English is used to such a degree in the Egyptian context that it could at some point become its own variety of World English. Yet, it is possible that a speaker could produce either English or Arabic in different situations in reaction to perceived social cleavages between him- or herself and the interlocutor. The research presented here is interested in the possible degrees of linguistic projection, the effect a speaker intends language choice to have on the hearer, and linguistic ownership, the degree to which a speaker of a language believes that he or she owns the language, that Egyptians may possess as they use English. The data was collected in an English-medium university environment in the greater Cairo area. Undergraduate participants completed a questionnaire, and a limited number also participated in a follow-up interview. Data suggest that participants use English to project solidarity with other English-speaking Egyptians. Participants are aware of how others may use English to project power, yet no one admitted to projecting power. In line with other research, participants also demonstrated a weak sense of ownership of the language at best, however through the use of English mixed with Arabic, Egyptians do use an endonormative form of English that may demonstrate ownership. Finally, there is little evidence to demonstrate a relationship between linguistic projection and ownership, but the investigator speculates that a linguistic projection of solidarity, which implies mixing of Arabic and English, would encourage a greater sense of ownership of English. Classroom implications are also discussed, including encouraging greater use of Arabic in the classroom, supporting Egyptian influences in English speech, and managing relations between English speakers of different perceived proficiencies

Creativity and Autism Spectrum Conditions: a Hypothesis on Lewis Carroll

The hypothesis formulated by Simon Baron-Cohen and his collaborators on the onset of autistic syndromes and their link with an excess of the so-called S brain is reflected in the work of Lewis Carroll, a formal logic and mathematics professor deeply inclined to visual and spatial descriptions, interested in affordances and systemic circuits, and devoid of empathic tendencies in creating his characters. In the future, this finding may serve as a test for predicting autism spectrum disorders and support the elaboration of narrative artefact for therapeutic purposes in relation to people with autism

Creativity and Autism Spectrum Conditions: a Hypothesis on Lewis Carroll

The hypothesis formulated by Simon Baron-Cohen and his collaborators on the onset of autistic syndromes and their link with an excess of the so-called S brain is reflected in the work of Lewis Carroll, a formal logic and mathematics professor deeply inclined to visual and spatial descriptions, interested in affordances and systemic circuits, and devoid of empathic tendencies in creating his characters. In the future, this finding may serve as a test for predicting autism spectrum disorders and support the elaboration of narrative artefact for therapeutic purposes in relation to people with autism

Exile Vol. XLV No. 2

43rd Year Title Page 3 Epigraph by Ezra Pound 5 Table of Contents 7 Contributors Notes 74-75 Editorial Board 76 INTERVIEWS The Art of Hearing: Interview with Stanley Plumly by Alison Stine \u2700 23-27 ART Self-Portrait by Angela Bliss \u2799 8 For a Living by Angela Bliss \u2799 12 Untitled by Frazier Taylor \u2702 22 Untitled by Amy Deaner \u2799 29 Perfect Knee by David Tulkin \u2701 34 Untitled by Amy Deaner \u2799 43 Still Light by Angela Bliss \u2799 62 Hiding Nature by Amy Deaner \u2799 64 Self-Portrait A by Sarah Leyrer \u2701 73 POETRY Bolted Back by Michelle Grindstaff \u2702 9 Squall by Georgia Riepe \u2702 10 Loaves and Fishes by Maeghan Demmons \u2701 11 World Cafe by Katie Kroner \u2701 28 Gurney Surfer by Tom Hankinson \u2702 31 Japanese Beetles by Alison Stine \u2700 32-33 Shoveling by Bekah Taylor \u2700 40 Tobacco Country by K. Moore \u2701 41 Winton Place by Rachel Colina \u2702 42 Bottom of the Ninth by Michelle Grindstaff \u2702 61 Fall Burning by Alison Stine \u2700 63 rocking by Bekah Taylor \u2700 71 The Armor of the Beach by Georgia Riepe \u2702 72 PROSE In the Aisles of the Night by Tom Dussel \u2701 13-21 From Those Uninvolved by Justin Walker \u2799 30 Frame by Paul Durica \u2700 35-39 The Rose by Rachel Bolton \u2799 44-60 Stop at the Soldier by Hillary Campbell \u2700 65-70 All submissions are reviewed on an anonymous basis, and all editorial decisions are shared equally among the members of the Editorial Board. -76 Cover Art Untitled by Kris Lewis \u2799 / Back Cover Art Figure 25 by Todd Gys \u2799 -76 Printed by Printing Arts Press -7

Movie101: A New Movie Understanding Benchmark

To help the visually impaired enjoy movies, automatic movie narrating systems are expected to narrate accurate, coherent, and role-aware plots when there are no speaking lines of actors. Existing works benchmark this challenge as a normal video captioning task via some simplifications, such as removing role names and evaluating narrations with ngram-based metrics, which makes it difficult for automatic systems to meet the needs of real application scenarios. To narrow this gap, we construct a large-scale Chinese movie benchmark, named Movie101. Closer to real scenarios, the Movie Clip Narrating (MCN) task in our benchmark asks models to generate role-aware narration paragraphs for complete movie clips where no actors are speaking. External knowledge, such as role information and movie genres, is also provided for better movie understanding. Besides, we propose a new metric called Movie Narration Score (MNScore) for movie narrating evaluation, which achieves the best correlation with human evaluation. Our benchmark also supports the Temporal Narration Grounding (TNG) task to investigate clip localization given text descriptions. For both two tasks, our proposed methods well leverage external knowledge and outperform carefully designed baselines. The dataset and codes are released at https://github.com/yuezih/Movie101.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202