Beyond cultural and national identities : current re-evaluation of the Kominka literature from Taiwan\u27s Japanese period

This paper is an offshoot of a larger, ongoing project that intends to deal with the relationship between various artistic formations and the dominant culture in Taiwan\u27s post-1949 era. Though the lifting of martial law in 1987 has demarcated this era into two drastically different periods and a clearer contour of the new period seems to be just beginning to emerge in the mid-1990s, various cultural forces are still busily negotiating with each other. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general consensus as to what constitutes a core of the new dominant culture: the spirit of pen-t\u27u, or a nativist imperative that obliges one to treat Taiwan as the center in one\u27s cultural mapping. The primary driving force for this recent reconstitution of Taiwan\u27s dominant culture undoubtedly came from the momentous changes in the political arena in the post-martial law period. This rather crude factor, however, should not obscure our vision of the longer, more far-reaching evolutionary process of cultural change in contemporary Taiwan. Simply put, since the early 1980s, the older cultural hegemony has been seriously contested by forces coming from the Taiwanese cultural nationalism advocated in a vibrant pen-t\u27u (nativization) trend on the one hand, and from various radical cultural formations on the other. Limited by space, this paper will only deal with specific aspects of the nativization trend, with the main paradigm taken from the literary field. The paper will begin with a brief overview of the indigenous literary discourse in Taiwan’s post-1949 era, followed by analyses of recent scholarly re- evaluations of the Kominka literature from Taiwan’s Japanese period. Through this investigation, I hope to reach a better understanding of some important issues pertaining to contemporary cultural transformation in Taiwan, such as the role of cultural nationalism, the problem of identity construction, and efforts toward institutionalizing Taiwanese literary studies as an academic discipline

Guidance of sentinel lymph node biopsy decisions in patients with T1-T2 melanoma using gene expression profiling.

AIM: Can gene expression profiling be used to identify patients with T1-T2 melanoma at low risk for sentinel lymph node (SLN) positivity? PATIENTS & METHODS: Bioinformatics modeling determined a population in which a 31-gene expression profile test predicted \u3c5% SLN positivity. Multicenter, prospectively-tested (n = 1421) and retrospective (n = 690) cohorts were used for validation and outcomes, respectively. RESULTS: Patients 55-64 years and ≥65 years with a class 1A (low-risk) profile had SLN positivity rates of 4.9% and 1.6%. Class 2B (high-risk) patients had SLN positivity rates of 30.8% and 11.9%. Melanoma-specific survival was 99.3% for patients ≥55 years with class 1A, T1-T2 tumors and 55.0% for class 2B, SLN-positive, T1-T2 tumors. CONCLUSION: The 31-gene expression profile test identifies patients who could potentially avoid SLN biopsy

3-bounded property in a triangle-free distance-regular graph

Let $\Gamma$ denote a distance-regular graph with classical parameters $(D, b, \alpha, \beta)$ and $D\geq 3$. Assume the intersection numbers $a_1=0$ and $a_2\not=0$. We show $\Gamma$ is 3-bounded in the sense of the article [D-bounded distance-regular graphs, European Journal of Combinatorics(1997)18, 211-229].Comment: 13 page

Distance-regular graphs, pseudo primitive idempotents, and the Terwilliger algebra

Let $\Gamma$ denote a distance-regular graph with diameter $D\geq 3$ and Bose-Mesner algebra $M$. For $\theta\in C\cup \infty$ we define a 1 dimensional subspace of $M$ which we call $M(\theta)$. If $\theta\in C$ then $M(\theta)$ consists of those $Y$ in $M$ such that $(A-\theta I)Y\in C A_D$, where $A$ (resp. $A_D$) is the adjacency matrix (resp. $D$th distance matrix) of $\Gamma.$ If $\theta = \infty$ then $M(\theta)= C A_D$. By a {\it pseudo primitive idempotent} for $\theta$ we mean a nonzero element of $M(\theta)$. We use pseudo primitive idempotents to describe the irreducible modules for the Terwilliger algebra, that are thin with endpoint one.Comment: 17 page

The flipping puzzle on a graph

Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with coordinates of the vector indexed by the vertex set $S$. For each configuration $u$ with a coordinate $u_s=1$, there exists a move that sends $u$ to the new configuration which flips the entries of the coordinates adjacent to $s$ in $u.$ We completely determine if one configuration can move to another in a sequence of finite steps.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure and 1 tabl