“China is Near”

Review of National Ballet of China\u27s performances of its 1964 Cultural Revolutionary ballet Red Detachment of Women and its 2008 Peony Pavilion, at Lincoln Center Festival 2015

The First Chinese Swan Lake

The first Chinese Swan Lake was produced in July 1958 as a full-length work by Beijing Dance School, founded, remarkably, only four years earlier. This moment, enshrined in ballet history, is scrutinized here. This article shows the multiple actors and cultural-political forces that were brought together: the cultural build-up for Swan Lake, Premier Zhou Enlai\u27s personal interest, the distinguished ballet master and choreographer Pyotr Gusev, and the imperatives of the Great Leap Forward

“Soviet Ballet in Chinese Cultural Policy, 1950s”

The foundation of ballet in China was laid with the 1954 establishment of the Beijing Dance School with a division in ballet. How a Tsarist entertainment genre came to be a prized genre in socialist soil is a story with many parts. Its context is the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance (1950-1960), which included provisions for Soviet experts to be assigned in all areas to aid in China\u27s national construction. In the cultural arena, this included dance, both folk and ballet. This paper covers two necessary first steps: (1) how officials at the highest level came to learn about ballet; and (2) how the proponents of ballet used the inclusion of Galina Ulanova in a 1952 Sino-Soviet Friendship Tour to promote and explain ballet

Folk Dance in China: the Dance Pioneer Dai Ailian 1916-2006

The collecting of lyrics and music began in China in the 1920s, when anthropological studies introduced the cultures of the countryside and its villages to the urban elite and helped to create a more complex definition of Chinese culture. The skills for collecting the dance elements of ceremonies and rituals, however, lagged. This gap was first filled in the 1940s by the unusual talents of Dai Ailian (1916-2006). Born in Trinidad of Chinese ancestry, Dai received training in ballet and modern dance in England from 1931-37 when both dance forms were developing in that country. Chance and purpose brought about her work in folk dance: she left England for China during World War II and ended in the war time capital in the mountainous southwest, a region rich with the dance of minority peoples. She set to work learning and propagating with great energy. This paper details Dai’s work in the dance of minority peoples at this time and sets it against the trajectory of folk as it developed in the next seventy years

The Establishment of Beijing Dance School in the First-Hand Report of Soviet Specialist O. A. Il\u27ina: Introduction, Translation, Notes

The Beijing Dance School was founded in 1954 by China\u27s Ministry of Culture to develop the dance arts through professional training in Chinese classical dance, the folk dances of the ethnic minorities and Han Chinese, and ballet and character dance. Ol\u27ga Aleksandrovna Il\u27ina\u27s report, filed with the USSR Ministry of Culture, is the only known Soviet account, covering both the intense preparations for the school and the complexities of its first year of operation. Aspects of her report provide insights into 1) the Soviet model of dance propagation and the nuts and bolts of how it produced the ballet-inflected Chinese dance genres, 2) the convergence of the military dance performance system with the professionalization of civilian dance training, and 3) China\u27s role in the dance history of the Cold War, specifically the tours of Moiseyev Dance Company and Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre. This article translates Il\u27ina\u27s report and provides an introduction and notes

Quantifying the Implementation and Cost of a Multisite Antibiotic Stewardship Intervention for Asymptomatic Bacteriuria

OBJECTIVE: The intensity of an antibiotic stewardship intervention to achieve clinical impact is not known. We conducted a multisite dissemination project of an intervention to reduce treatment of asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) and studied: (1) the association between implementation metrics and clinical outcomes and (2) the cost of implementation. DESIGN/SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: A central site facilitated a multimodality intervention to decrease unnecessary urine cultures and antibiotic treatment in patients with ASB at 4 Veterans Affairs medical centers. METHODS: The intervention consisted of a decision support aid algorithm and interactive teaching cases that provided in the moment audit and feedback on how to manage ASB. Implementation outcomes included minutes spent in intervention delivery, number of healthcare professionals reached, and number of sessions delivered. Clinical outcomes included days of antibiotic therapy (DOT), length of antibiotic therapy (LOT), and number of urine cultures ordered per 1000 bed days. Personnel reported weekly time logs. RESULTS: Minutes spent in intervention delivery were inversely correlated with two clinical outcomes, DOT ( CONCLUSIONS: The amount of time local teams spent in delivery of an antibiotic stewardship intervention was correlated with the desired decrease in antibiotic use. Implementing this successful antibiotic stewardship intervention required minimal time

Prediction of peptide and protein propensity for amyloid formation

Understanding which peptides and proteins have the potential to undergo amyloid formation and what driving forces are responsible for amyloid-like fiber formation and stabilization remains limited. This is mainly because proteins that can undergo structural changes, which lead to amyloid formation, are quite diverse and share no obvious sequence or structural homology, despite the structural similarity found in the fibrils. To address these issues, a novel approach based on recursive feature selection and feed-forward neural networks was undertaken to identify key features highly correlated with the self-assembly problem. This approach allowed the identification of seven physicochemical and biochemical properties of the amino acids highly associated with the self-assembly of peptides and proteins into amyloid-like fibrils (normalized frequency of β-sheet, normalized frequency of β-sheet from LG, weights for β-sheet at the window position of 1, isoelectric point, atom-based hydrophobic moment, helix termination parameter at position j+1 and ΔGº values for peptides extrapolated in 0 M urea). Moreover, these features enabled the development of a new predictor (available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/appnn/index.html) capable of accurately and reliably predicting the amyloidogenic propensity from the polypeptide sequence alone with a prediction accuracy of 84.9 % against an external validation dataset of sequences with experimental in vitro, evidence of amyloid formation

The long-term effects of naprapathic manual therapy on back and neck pain - Results from a pragmatic randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Back and neck pain are very common, disabling and recurrent disorders in the general population and the knowledge of long-term effect of treatments are sparse. The aim of this study was to compare the long-term effects (up to one year) of naprapathic manual therapy and evidence-based advice on staying active regarding non-specific back and/or neck pain. Naprapathy, a health profession mainly practiced in Sweden, Finland, Norway and in the USA, is characterized by a combination of manual musculoskeletal manipulations, aiming to decrease pain and disability in the neuromusculoskeletal system.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Subjects with non-specific pain/disability in the back and/or neck lasting for at least two weeks (n = 409), recruited at public companies in Sweden, were included in this pragmatic randomized controlled trial. The two interventions compared were naprapathic manual therapy such as spinal manipulation/mobilization, massage and stretching, (<it>Index Group</it>), and advice to stay active and on how to cope with pain, provided by a physician (C<it>ontrol Group</it>). Pain intensity, disability and health status were measured by questionnaires.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>89% completed the 26-week follow-up and 85% the 52-week follow-up. A higher proportion in the Index Group had a clinically important decrease in pain (risk difference (RD) = 21%, <it>95% CI: 10-30</it>) and disability (RD = 11%, <it>95% CI: 4-22</it>) at 26-week, as well as at 52-week follow-ups (pain: RD = 17%, <it>95% CI: 7-27 </it>and disability: RD = 17%, <it>95% CI: 5-28</it>). The differences between the groups in pain and disability considered over one year were statistically significant favoring naprapathy (p ≤ 0.005). There were also significant differences in improvement in bodily pain and social function (subscales of SF-36 health status) favoring the Index Group.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Combined manual therapy, like naprapathy, is effective in the short and in the long term, and might be considered for patients with non-specific back and/or neck pain.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN56954776.</p

Psychometric Properties and factor structure of the spanish version of the HC-PAIRS questionnaire

Objective To develop a Spanish version of the Health Care Providers" Pain and Impairment Relationship Scale (HC-PAIRS) and to test its psychometric properties. Methods A forward and backward translation methodology was used to translate the questionnaire, which was then applied to 206 participants (174physiotherapy students and 32 family physicians). The intraclass correlation coefficient was calculated to assess testretest reliability. Internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach"s alpha and item analysis. Construct validity was measured using Pearson correlation coefficients between HC-PAIRS and FABQ, FABQ-Phys, FABQ-Work and the responses given by participants to three clinical case scenarios. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out following the Kaiser normalization criteria and principal axis factoring with an oblique rotation (quartimax). Sensitivity to change was assessed after a teaching module. Results Testretest reliability was ICC 0.50 (p\0.01)and Cronbach"s alpha was 0.825. The HC-PAIRS scores correlated significantly with the scores of the FABQ and also with the recommendations for work and activity given by the participants in the three clinical case scenarios. Sensitivity to change test showed an effect size of 1.5, which is considered a large change. Factor analysis suggests that the Spanish version of HC-PAIRS measures a unidimensional construct. Conclusion The Spanish version of the HC-PAIRS has proven to be a reliable, valid and sensitive instrument to assess health care providers" attitudes and beliefs about LBP. It can be used in evaluating clinical practice and in undergraduate acquisition of skills and knowledge

Attitudes towards complementary and alternative medicine in chronic pain syndromes: a questionnaire-based comparison between primary headache and low back pain

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is widely used and popular among patients with primary headache or low back pain (LBP). Aim of the study was to analyze attitudes of headache and LBP patients towards the use of CAM.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Two questionnaire-based surveys were applied comparing 432 primary headache and 194 LBP patients.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In total, 84.75% of all patients reported use of CAM; with significantly more LBP patients. The most frequently-used CAM therapies in headache were acupuncture (71.4%), massages (56.4%), and thermotherapy (29.2%), in LBP thermotherapy (77.4%), massages (62.7%), and acupuncture (51.4%). The most frequent attitudes towards CAM use in headache vs. LBP: "leave nothing undone" (62.5% vs. 52.1%; p = 0.006), "take action against the disease" (56.8% vs. 43.2%; p = 0.006). Nearly all patients with previous experience with CAM currently use CAM in both conditions (93.6% in headache; 100% in LBP). However, the majority of the patients had no previous experience.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Understanding motivations for CAM treatment is important, because attitudes derive from wishes for non-pharmacological treatment, to be more involved in treatment and avoid side effects. Despite higher age and more permanent pain in LBP, both groups show high use of CAM with only little specific difference in preferred methods and attitudes towards CAM use. This may reflect deficits and unfulfilled goals in conventional treatment. Maybe CAM can decrease the gap between patients' expectations about pain therapy and treatment reality, considering that both conditions are often chronic diseases, causing high burdens for daily life.</p