In Search of the National Soul: Writing Life in Chinese Literature 1918–1937

This dissertation offers a new perspective on the birth of modern Chinese literature by investigating the following question: How did literature come to be understood as an effective vehicle of national salvation? The following chapters locate the answer to this question in intertwining ideas on religion and realism. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an upsurge of vernacular literature portraying contemporary life in China alongside deliberations on the meaning of a newly introduced term: “religion” (zongjiao). This process launched a long lasting perception of literature as effective—capable of turning a country in flux to a strong nation. The story of modern Chinese literature’s rise to such prominence forms part of a transnational history, linking national literatures and Christian modernity. Across the colonial world, Protestant missionaries introduced the idea that a true-to-life literary portrayal can mobilize readers into action by appealing to their natural sympathy towards human suffering. These theories found a seedbed in China, Japan, India and Africa, where various authors modified the Christian evangelical message into a thorough critique of imperialist thought. Chapter One begins with the global rise of “Life” in the 1910’s as a new epistemology for understanding the human. In China, deliberations over the meaning of life hinged upon interactions with social Darwinism, American Protestant ideas on religious experience, Bergsonian vitalism, critiques of materialism in German Lebensphilosophie, and Chinese Neo-Confucian ethical thought. “Life” became the main axis pivoting debates on how to save China from its plight: Could evolutionary biology account for the truth of life? Could religion explain aspects of life that biology cannot? The task of representing the truth of life was entrusted upon the fledgling modern Chinese fiction and poetry. Chapters Two and Three trace this conviction in the powers of literature to nineteen-century missionary essay contests. Held in sites of imperial encroachment around the world, these contests promoted fiction writing as a miraculous endeavor. Similar to the way that reading the scriptures was supposed to produce a sense of connection to the great beyond, so too was the spiritual message of literary texts believed to ignite a “sympathetic resonance” (gongming) between authors and readers that would propel the latter to social action. The religious concept of sympathy inspired Chinese authors to further explore the connections between man and the universe in search of the perfect representation of life. This search led to an important encounter with the Bengali Renaissance Movement, explored in Chapters Four and Five. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit in China (1924) serves as a point of departure to investigate how prominent Chinese authors experimented with concepts such as “Eastern Spirituality” “The Poet’s Religion” and “Folktales”. Such literary interactions added important dimensions to the formation of Chinese realism, by envisioning Pan-Asian literary sympathies, which redefined the meaning of religion, life, and the nation. By foregrounding the transnational collaborations and interactions of religion, realism, and Asian solidarity in shaping Chinese literature, this dissertation offers a multi-sited perspective on the unmatched significance of modern literature to China’s national revival and, in turn, delivers a new understanding of China’s role in a global deliberation over the meaning of human life

Security Analysis of the COVID-19 Contact Tracing Specifications by Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

In a joint effort to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple Inc. and Google Inc. recently partnered to develop a contact tracing technology, inspired by the DP-3T and TCN protocols, to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design. The partnership announcement included technical specifications of the planned technology, which has great potential for widespread adoption due to the global reach of the two companies. At the same time, the anonymous distributed setting for contact tracing as well as other aspects of the specifications create opportunities for attackers to mount common attacks on the technology. In this work, we provide a security analysis of these specifications, the initial version of which was communicated early on to Apple Inc. in April this year, soon after announcement of the specifications. We show that the current specifications may introduce significant risks to society due to the common attacks and propose novel mitigation strategies for these risks that do not require major changes to the technology and are easy to adopt. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first contact tracing proposal to mitigate the risks of all these common attacks in the anonymous distributed setting without introducing architectural changes. Our analysis focuses mostly on system security considerations, which have not been well covered previously, yet also includes novel information security considerations. We leave out of scope a discussion on how important or effective the technology is in fighting the pandemic

BooLigero: Improved Sublinear Zero Knowledge Proofs for Boolean Circuits

We provide a modified version of the Ligero sublinear zero knowledge proof system for arithmetic circuits provided by Ames et. al. (CCS ‘17). Our modification BooLigero tailors Ligero for use in Boolean circuits to achieve a significant improvement in proof size. Although the original Ligero system could be used for Boolean circuits, Ligero generally requires allocating an entire field element to represent a single bit on a wire in a Boolean circuit. In contrast, our system performs operations over words of bits, allowing a proof size savings of between O(log(|F|)^1/4) and O(log(|F|)^1/2) compared to Ligero, where F is the field that leads to the optimal proof size in original Ligero. We achieve improvements in proof size of approximately 1.1-1.6x for SHA-2 and 1.7-2.8x for SHA-3. In addition to checking constraints of standard Boolean operations such as AND, XOR, and NOT over words, BooLigero also supports several other constraints such as multiplication in GF(2^w), bit masking, bit rearrangement within and across words, and bitwise outer product. Like Ligero, construction requires no trusted setup and no computational assumptions, which is ideal for blockchain applications. It is plausibly post-quantum secure in the standard model. Furthermore, it is public-coin, perfect honest-verifier zero knowledge, and can be made non-interactive in the random oracle model using the Fiat-Shamir transform

Rituximab Maintenance for the Treatment of Patients With Follicular Lymphoma: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Trials

Background Follicular lymphoma is characterized by slow growth and an initially high rate of response to treatment, but patients typically relapse and experience progressive disease. Rituximab in combination with chemotherapy has been shown to improve overall survival in patients with follicular lymphoma compared with chemotherapy alone, but data from randomized clinical trials evaluating rituximab maintenance treatment in these patients are limited. We aimed to evaluate the effect of maintenance treatment with rituximab on the overall survival of patients with follicular lymphoma. Methods We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that compared rituximab maintenance therapy with observation or treatment at relapse (no maintenance therapy). We searched The Cochrane Library, PubMed, EMBASE, LILACS, conference proceedings, databases of ongoing trials, and references of published trials. Two reviewers independently assessed the quality of the trials and extracted data. Hazard ratios for time-to-event data were estimated and pooled. Results Five trials including 1143 adult patients were included in this meta-analysis. Data for 985 patients with follicular lymphoma were available for the meta-analysis of overall survival. Patients treated with maintenance rituximab had statistically significantly better overall survival than patients in the observation arm or patients treated at relapse (hazard ratio [HR] for death = 0.60, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.45 to 0.79). The rate of infection-related adverse events was higher with rituximab maintenance treatment (HR = 1.99, 95% CI = 1.21 to 3.27). Patients with refractory or relapsed (ie, previously treated) follicular lymphoma had a survival benefit with maintenance rituximab therapy (HR for death = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.42 to 0.79), whereas previously untreated patients did not (HR for death = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.37 to 1.25). Conclusions These results suggest that maintenance therapy with rituximab, either as four weekly infusions every 6 months or as a single infusion every 2-3 months, should be added to standard therapy for patients with relapsed or refractory (ie, previously treated) follicular lymphoma after successful induction therapy. The higher rate of infections with rituximab therapy should be taken into consideration when making treatment decision

Rituximab Maintenance for the Treatment of Patients With Follicular Lymphoma: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Trials

In a previous systematic review and meta-analysis of five randomized controlled trials comparing rituximab maintenance with no maintenance (observation or rituximab at progression) for patients with follicular lymphoma, we reported that rituximab maintenance treatment improved the overall survival of patients. In this study, we did a similar search of the electronic databases updated through December 31, 2010, and included nine trials and 2586 follicular lymphoma patients. Hazard ratios (HRs) for time-to-event data were estimated and pooled using the inverse variance method. Risk ratios for dichotomous data were pooled using a fixed effect model. Patients treated with rituximab maintenance had improved overall survival (pooled HR of death = 0.76, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.62 to 0.92) compared with patients in the no maintenance group. Patients with refractory or relapsed (ie, previously treated) follicular lymphoma treated with rituximab maintenance had improved overall survival (pooled HR of death = 0.72, 95% CI = 0.57 to 0.91), whereas previously untreated patients had no survival benefit (pooled HR of death = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.60 to 1.25). The rate of infection-related adverse events was higher in the rituximab maintenance group (pooled risk ratio = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.40 to 2.00). These results further support the use of rituximab maintenance in the standard of care for refractory or relapsed follicular lymphom

TurboIKOS: Improved Non-interactive Zero Knowledge and Post-Quantum Signatures

In this work, we present a zero knowledge argument for general arithmetic circuits that is public-coin and constant rounds, so it can be made non-interactive and publicly verifiable with the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. The construction is based on the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, in which the prover jointly emulates all MPC protocol participants and can provide advice in the form of Beaver triples whose accuracy must be checked by the verifier. Our construction follows the Beaver triple sacrificing approach used by Baum and Nof [PKC 2020]. Our improvements reduce the communication per multiplication gate from 4 to 2 field elements, matching the performance of the cut-and-choose approach taken by Katz, Kolesnikov, and Wang [CCS 2018] and with lower additive overhead for some parameter settings. We implement our protocol and analyze its cost on Picnic-style post-quantum digital signatures based on the AES family of circuits

Downregulation of NFAT2 promotes melanogenesis in B16 melanoma cells

Nuclear factor of activated T-cells (NFAT) proteins are, calcium-regulated transcription factors, key regulator of stimulation-dependent gene activation. In our microarray analysis for the genes expressed in human black and white hairs, NFAT2 was significantly upregulated in the white hair, compared to the black hair. The aim of this study was to investigate functional role of NFAT2 in melanogenesis. Western blot analysis was performed to investigate the expression of NFAT2 protein in B16 melanoma cells. Our data showed that NFAT2 expression was increased in the hypopigmented B16 cells, while tyrosinase and MITF expression was decreased. To investigate the potential role of NFAT2, the recombinant adenovirus expressing microRNA specific for NFAT2 was transduced into the cultured B16 melanoma cells. Consistently, inhibition of NFAT2 enhanced tyrosinase activity and melanin content. Moreover, cyclosporine A, which is known as a calcineurin inhibitor blocking NFAT activation, enhanced tyrosinase activity and melanin content. These data suggest that NFAT2 may play an important role in regulation of melanogenesis in melanocyte

Response of iron overload to deferasirox in rare transfusion-dependent anaemias: equivalent effects on serum ferritin and labile plasma iron for haemolytic or production anaemias

Objectives: It is widely assumed that, at matched transfusional iron-loading rates, responses to chelation therapy are similar, irrespective of the underlying condition. However, data are limited for rare transfusion-dependent anaemias, and it remains to be elucidated if response differs, depending on whether the anaemia has a primary haemolytic or production mechanism. Methods: The efficacy and safety of deferasirox (Exjade (R)) in rare transfusion-dependent anaemias were evaluated over 1 yr, with change in serum ferritin as the primary efficacy endpoint. Initial deferasirox doses were 10-30 mg/kg/d, depending on transfusion requirements; 34 patients had production anaemias, and 23 had haemolytic anaemias. Results: Patients with production anaemias or haemolytic anaemias had comparable transfusional iron-loading rates (0.31 vs. 0.30 mL red blood cells/kg/d), mean deferasirox dosing (19.3 vs. 19.0 mg/kg/d) and baseline median serum ferritin (2926 vs. 2682 ng/mL). Baseline labile plasma iron (LPI) levels correlated significantly with the transfusional iron-loading rates and with serum ferritin levels in both cohorts. Reductions in median serum ferritin levels were initially faster in the production than the haemolytic anaemias, but at 1 yr, similar significant reductions of 940 and 617 ng/mL were attained, respectively (-26.0% overall). Mean LPI decreased significantly in patients with production (P < 0.0001) and haemolytic (P = 0.037) anaemias after the first dose and was maintained at normal mean levels (< 0.4 mu m) subsequently. The most common drug-related, investigator-assessed adverse events were diarrhoea (n = 16) and nausea (n = 12). Conclusions: At matched transfusional iron-loading rates, the responses of rare transfusion-dependent anaemias to deferasirox are similar at 1 yr, irrespective of the underlying pathogenic mechanism