Epilogue to "Islam in China/China in Islam"

In my opening comments during the conference “The Everyday Life of Islam: Focus on Islam in China,” held at Cornell University on April 27 and 28, 2012, I proposed a number of themes, tensions, and conflicts on which we might focus our discussion of the papers. This epilogue will summarize some of the conversations that ensued and note areas of particular interest that emerged from revisions to the five essays presented in this special issue of Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Some conference participants attempted to make generalizations at national and transnational levels, while others stuck tenaciously to local details. Our discussions sometimes strayed from “everyday life,” but rarely from diverse, sometimes divisive, solutions to the everyday problem of “being Muslim and being Chinese” and its macrocosmic projection, “Islam in China/China in Islam,” or, in Rian Thum’s contribution, Islam not in China. The essays here, influenced by conversations and debates during the conference, suggest future agendas for study of Islam in China and research on Muslim minorities and comparative religion and politics..

Familiar Strangers

The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptiosn of Self and Other and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connectios with Central and West Asia as well as some cultural differences from their non-Muslim neighbors.Familiar Strangers narrates a history of the Muslims of northwest China, at the intersection of the frontiers of the Mongolian-Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic, and Chinese cultural regions. Based on primary and secondary sources in a variety of languages, Familiar Strangers examines the nature of ethnicity and periphery, the role of religion and ethnicity in personal and collective decisions in violent times, and the complexity of belonging to two cultures at once. Concerning itself with a frontier very distant from the core areas of Chinese culture and very strange to most Chinese, it explores the influence of language, religion, and place on Sino-Muslim identity

Secondary Vertex Finding in Jets with Neural Networks

Jet classification is an important ingredient in measurements and searches for new physics at particle coliders, and secondary vertex reconstruction is a key intermediate step in building powerful jet classifiers. We use a neural network to perform vertex finding inside jets in order to improve the classification performance, with a focus on separation of bottom vs. charm flavor tagging. We implement a novel, universal set-to-graph model, which takes into account information from all tracks in a jet to determine if pairs of tracks originated from a common vertex. We explore different performance metrics and find our method to outperform traditional approaches in accurate secondary vertex reconstruction. We also find that improved vertex finding leads to a significant improvement in jet classification performance

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

Population pharmacokinetics of vancomycin in critically ill patients receiving prolonged intermittent renal replacement therapy

The aim of this study was to describe the population pharmacokinetics of vancomycin during prolonged intermittent renal replacement therapy (PIRRT) in critically ill patients with acute kidney injury.Critically ill patients prescribed vancomycin across two sites had blood samples collected during 1-3 dosing intervals during which PIRRT was performed. Plasma samples were assayed with a validated immunoassay method. Population pharmacokinetic analysis and Monte Carlo simulations were performed using Pmetrics. The target vancomycin exposures were an AUC/MIC ratio of 400 for efficacy and AUC 700 for toxicity.Eleven critically ill patients (7 male) were enrolled and contributed 192 plasma samples. The patient's mean ± SD age, weight and BMI were 57 ± 13 years, 98 ± 43 kg and 31 ± 9 kg/m, respectively. A two-compartment linear model adequately described the data. The mean ± SD population pharmacokinetic parameter estimates were PIRRT clearance (CL) 3.47 ± 1.99 L/h, non-PIRRT CL 2.15 ± 2.07 L/h, volume of distribution of the central compartment (Vc) 41.85 ± 24.33 L, distribution rate constant from central to peripheral compartment 5.97 ± 7.93 h and from peripheral to central compartment 5.29 ± 6.65 h. Assuming a MIC of 1 mg/L, vancomycin doses of 25 mg/kg/day are suggested to achieve efficacious, whilst minimising toxic, exposures.This is the first population pharmacokinetic study of vancomycin in patients receiving PIRRT and we observed large pharmacokinetic variability. Empirically, weight-based doses that are appropriate for the duration of PIRRT should be selected and supplemented with therapeutic drug monitoring

The duration of protection of school-aged BCG vaccination in England: a population-based case-control study.

Background: Evidence of protection from childhood Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) against tuberculosis (TB) in adulthood, when most transmission occurs, is important for TB control and resource allocation. Methods: We conducted a population-based case-control study of protection by BCG given to children aged 12-13 years against tuberculosis occurring 10-29 years later. We recruited UK-born White subjects with tuberculosis and randomly sampled White community controls. Hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using case-cohort Cox regression, adjusting for potential confounding factors, including socio-economic status, smoking, drug use, prison and homelessness. Vaccine effectiveness (VE = 1 - hazard ratio) was assessed at successive intervals more than 10 years following vaccination. Results: We obtained 677 cases and 1170 controls after a 65% response rate in both groups. Confounding by deprivation, education and lifestyle factors was slight 10-20 years after vaccination, and more evident after 20 years. VE 10-15 years after vaccination was 51% (95% CI 21, 69%) and 57% (CI 33, 72%) at 15-20 years. Subsequently, BCG protection appeared to wane; 20-25 years VE = 25% (CI -14%, 51%) and 25-29 years VE = 1% (CI -84%, 47%). Based on multiple imputation of missing data (in 17% subjects), VE estimated in the same intervals after vaccination were similar [56% (CI 33, 72%), 57% (CI 36, 71%), 25% (-10, 48%), 21% (-39, 55%)]. Conclusions: School-aged BCG vaccination offered moderate protection against tuberculosis for at least 20 years, which is longer than previously thought. This has implications for assessing the cost-effectiveness of BCG vaccination and when evaluating new TB vaccines

The Qur'an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of Chinese Muslims (Hui) when the first full ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? But perhaps the fact that such a translation appeared so late in the history of the Muslim community in China, who have had a continuous presence since the ninth-century, is the best starting point. For it would be possible to address the relationship between the sacred text (as well as language) and identity among minority groups in a different way. This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined then embodied in literary texts authored by two prize-winning Chinese Muslim authors: Huo Da (b. 1945) and Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948). While Huo Da, who does not have access to the Arabic language, alludes to the Chinese Qur’an in her novel, The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), transforming the its teachings into ritual performances of alterity through injecting Arabic and Persian words for religious rituals into her narrative of a Muslim family’s fortunes at the turn of the twentieth century, Zhang Chengzhi, who learned Arabic as an adult and travelled widely in the Muslim world, involves himself in reconstructing the history of the spread and persecution of the Jahriyya Sufi sect (an off-shoot of the Naqshabandiyya) in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and in education reform in Muslim communities, inventing an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition and informed by the history of Islam not in China alone but in the global Islamic world, especially Arabic Islamic history

Nebulized Recombinant Tissue Plasminogen Activator (rt-PA) for Acute COVID-19-Induced Respiratory Failure : An Exploratory Proof-of-Concept Trial

Acknowledgments We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to all the colleagues and hospital staff who worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic and without whom this work would not have been possible. Firstly, we would like to thank our colleagues in the intensive care unit (ICU), in particular the matrons, Sean Carroll and Sinead Hanton, and research nurses, Filipe Helder and Amitaa Maharajh for their support, and bedside nurses who bore the responsibility of drug administration. We would also like to extend our thanks to ICU consultants who acted as professional legal consultees on behalf of critical care patients. Equally, we would like to thank colleagues within the respiratory team. Their expertise was instrumental to our role in treating patients on 8N and 8E wards. A special mention to lead Nurse Mary Emerson; we were grateful for her knowledge, support and for facilitating the training for the nebulizer and drug administration on the wards. We would like to thank Aarti Nandani and all the staff in the Royal Free clinical trials pharmacy for their immense support throughout the whole pandemic, especially considering their ever-increasing workload at the time. Thanks also to the HSL coagulation laboratory, the Trust R&D department and all the staff working to cover during a very challenging time. We are also very grateful to the Royal Free charity for funding this study. Finally, we would like to thank all the clinical nurses, physiotherapists, research data managers and healthcare professionals within the Haemophilia department (and wider hospital) for all their many efforts in supporting this study. This trial was overseen by an independent data monitoring committee, chaired by Najib Rahman, Director of the Oxford Respiratory Trials Unit, University of Oxford and comprises the following committee members: Mike Makris, Jonathan Silversides and Henry Watson. Funding Royal Free Charity Trust Fund 35 provided funding for this study. The study drug was provided by Boehringer Ingelheim (BI). BI had no role in the design, analysis, or interpretation of the results. They were given the opportunity to review the manuscript for medical and scientific accuracy since it relates to BI substances and intellectual property considerations.Peer reviewedPublisher PD