The Russian-Chinese encounter in Harbin, Manchuria, 1898-1932

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Sergei Tret'iakov's Roar, China! : between Moscow and China

The writer, poet and dramatist Sergei Tret'iakov was a central figure of the early Soviet literary and artistic avant-garde. Born in 1892 in Kuldiga, a town in what is now Latvia and was then the Governorate of Courland, one of the three Baltic provinces of the Russian empire, he was educated in prerevolutionary Riga and Moscow. Fluent also in Latvian and German, he started out as a poet in Russian and came under the influence of futurism when living in Vladivostok in 1919. During the Russian Civil War, Tret'iakov spent several months in Harbin, Tianjin, and Beijing in 1920 and 1921, and he returned to China as a teacher of Russian at Peking University between 1924 and 1925. The mid-1920s were also his most productive period as a writer for the theatre. Back in the Soviet Union, he went on to write experimental documentary prose, reportage and film scenarios while making radical statements in literary theory. He collaborated closely with the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the cinema director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), and as a translator and critic he brought the plays and poetry of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) to Soviet readers.</jats:p

A Frugal Approach to Reduce RCU Grace Period Overhead

Grace period computation is a core part of the Read-Copy-Update (RCU) synchronization technique that determines the safe time to reclaim the deferred objects' memory. We first show that the eager grace period computation employed in the Linux kernel is appropriate only for enterprise workloads such as web and database servers where a large amount of reclaimable memory awaits the completion of a grace period. However, such memory is negligible in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and mostly idling environments due to limited OS kernel activity. Hence an eager approach is not only futile but also detrimental as the CPU cycles consumed to compute a grace period leads to jitter in HPC and frequent CPU wake-ups in idle environments. We design frugal grace periods, an economical grace period computation for non-enterprise environments that consume fewer CPU cycles. In addition, we reduce the number of grace periods either by using heuristics or by letting the memory allocator to explicitly request for a grace period only when it is running out of free objects. Our implementation in the Linux kernel reduces the number of grace periods by 68% to 99%, reduces the CPU time consumed by grace periods by 39% to 99%, improves the throughput by up to 28% for NAS parallel benchmarks and increases the CPU time spent in low power states by 2.4x when the system is idle

Smoked cannabis for chronic neuropathic pain: a randomized controlled trial

Background: Chronic neuropathic pain affects 1%–2 % of the adult population and is often refractory to standard pharmacologic treatment. Patients with chronic pain have reported using smoked cannabis to relieve pain, improve sleep and improve mood. Methods: Adults with post-traumatic or postsurgical neuropathic pain were randomly assigned to receive cannabis at four potencies (0%, 2.5%, 6 % and 9.4 % tetrahydrocannabinol) over four 14-day periods in a crossover trial. Participants inhaled a single 25-mg dose through a pipe three times daily for the first five days in each cycle, followed by a nine-day washout period. Daily average pain intensity was measured using an 11-point numeric rating scale. We recorded effects on mood, sleep and quality of life, as well as adverse events