Predicting Human Lifespan Limits

Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of industrialized countries, which is described by extended Weibull model with age-dependent stretched exponent. The maximum survival tendency suggests that human survival dynamics may possess its intrinsic limit, beyond which survival is inevitably forbidden. Based on such tendency, we develop the model and explore the patterns in the maximum lifespan limits from industrialized countries during recent three decades. This analysis strategy is simple and useful to interpret the complicated human survival dynamics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables; Natural Science (in press

Migrant Labor and Massacres: A Comparison of the 1923 Massacre of Koreans and Chinese during the Great Kanto Earthquake and the 1931 Anti-Chinese Riots and Massacre of Chinese in Colonial Korea

This article compares two historical massacres that resulted from ethnic antagonism during the Japanese colonial period: the massacre of Koreans and Chinese by the Japanese during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and a series of anti-Chinese riots and the massacre of Chinese that erupted in colonial Korea in 1931. A similar trajectory led up to both massacres: most of the assailants and victims were lower-class male workers, and both incidents occurred during economic depressions when competition between indigenous workers and immigrants had intensified due to a massive influx of migrant labor. The fact that the majority of the assailants were from the lower class suggests that their own resentment, long condensed from years of experiencing discrimination in their home society, combined with nationalism and anti-foreignism to explode in the form of massacres. In addition, the reality that all assailants were male workers implies that their value system, their mode of life, and the consciousness of a patriarchal hierarchy, which dominated the everyday lives of the male workers of the lower class, were transformed into violence under exceptional circumstances. Lastly, the fact that the victims of the two massacres were migrant workers means that, from the outset, the trigger for the massacres can be understood from a transnational perspective on migrant labor and cannot be confined to the boundary of a single nation. Keywords: Japanese empire, colonial Korea, massacres, riots, Great Kanto Earthquake, scaremongering, ethnic prejudice, migrant labor, masculinity, East Asian migration histor

The Politics of Decolonization: Race, Power, and Ideology in Contemporary American Drama.

This dissertation traces the politics of decolonization dramatized in selected plays from the contemporary American playwrights: African Americans (Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson), white Americans (Arthur Kopit and David Rabe), and a Chinese American (David Hwang). Through the application of cultural theory to an analysis of dramatic texts, I demonstrate how the plays enact the struggle for decolonization on social, political, and cultural levels. In keeping with the interactions of race, power, and ideology, the plays deconstruct the white cultural formulations of racial minorities. I explore the ways in which the playwrights reclaim the authority of racial minorities over their own ethnic identity, self-determination, and independence through the recovery of voice and power. In exploring racial minorities\u27 struggle for decolonized freedom, I examine in what context and how racial minorities are internally colonized. Fundamental to the internal colonization is the idea of space whose projections produce various limits in terms of its physical places, social roles or status, and stereotypes. This colonization is conceptualized through differentiation or discrimination stemming from spatial binarism. I argue that this system of difference is internalized in the social structure and even in the psychological field. Behind this system lies the prestige for which white ideology serves to inscribe racial minorities within the world of discursive hierarchies based on the racial order. The playwrights utilize their writing as a vehicle for interrogating the legitimation of white ideology as they expose its contradictions. Thus problematized, white ideology and its production of racial difference become an object to be disrupted for the formulation of a distinctive cultural identity. The plays call for a new order essential to racial minorities\u27 autonomy, by decentering the white authority over the officially sanctioned force and reterritorializing the arbitrarily drawn yet degrading space. The playwrights\u27 writing as revision thus has the power to act upon human consciousness necessary for refashioning history

Predictive factors for breast cancer in patients diagnosed atypical ductal hyperplasia at core needle biopsy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Percutaneous core needle biopsy (CNB) is considered to be the standard technique for histological diagnosis of breast lesions. But, it is less reliable for diagnosing atypical ductal hyperplasia (ADH). The purpose of the present study was to predict, based on clinical and radiological findings, which cases of ADH diagnosed by CNB would be more likely to be associated with a more advanced lesion on subsequent surgical excision.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Between February 2002 and December 2007, consecutive ultrasound-guided CNBs were performed on suspicious breast lesions at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital. A total of 69 CNBs led to a diagnosis of ADH, and 45 patients underwent follow-up surgical excision. We reviewed the medical records and analyses retrospectively.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Sixty-nine patients were diagnosed with ADH at CNB. Of these patients, 45 underwent surgical excision and 10 (22.2%) were subsequently diagnosed with a malignancy (ductal carcinoma <it>in situ</it>, n = 8; invasive cancer, n = 2). Univariate analysis revealed age (≥ 50-years) at the time of core needle biopsy (p = 0.006), size (> 10 mm) on imaging (p = 0.033), and combined mass with microcalcification on sonography (p = 0.029) to be associated with underestimation. When those three factors were included in multivariate analysis, only age (p = 0.035, HR 6.201, 95% CI 1.135-33.891) was an independent predictor of malignancy.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Age (≥ 50) at the time of biopsy is an independent predictive factor for breast cancer at surgical excision in patients with diagnosed ADH at CNB. For patients diagnosed with ADH at CNB, only complete surgical excision is the suitable treatment option, because we could not find any combination of factors that can safely predict the absence of DCIS or invasive cancer in a case of ADH.</p

Topological Structure of Dense Hadronic Matter

We present a summary of work done on dense hadronic matter, based on the Skyrme model, which provides a unified approach to high density, valid in the large $N_c$ limit. In our picture, dense hadronic matter is described by the {\em classical} soliton configuration with minimum energy for the given baryon number density. By incorporating the meson fluctuations on such ground state we obtain an effective Lagrangian for meson dynamics in a dense medium. Our starting point has been the Skyrme model defined in terms of pions, thereafter we have extended and improved the model by incorporating other degrees of freedom such as dilaton, kaons and vector mesons.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Talk given at the KIAS-APCTP Symposium in Astro-Hadron Physics "Compact Stars: Quest for New States of Dense Matter", November 10-14, 2003, Seoul, Korea, published by World Scientific. Based on talk by B.-Y. Par