Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim.

Explores the poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim alongside her critical writings. Lim's successful career as an Asian American poet, novelist and academic after having left Malaysia, where non-Malay Anglophone writers suffer multiple exclusions from a Malay nationalism that discriminates on the basis of race and language, and from British and American academies that traditionally confer second-class status on to non-British or American writers; Third source of exclusion that stems from patriarchal oppression; Reading of Lim's poetry as national allegories and fictional autobiography; Exploration of how Lim's Asian American feminist poetics interrogate the ideological enclosures.postprin

Results at 24 months from the prospective, randomized, multicenter Investigational Device Exemption trial of ProDisc-C versus anterior cervical discectomy and fusion with 4-year follow-up and continued access patients.

BackgroundCervical total disk replacement (TDR) is intended to address pain and preserve motion between vertebral bodies in patients with symptomatic cervical disk disease. Two-year follow-up for the ProDisc-C (Synthes USA Products, LLC, West Chester, Pennsylvania) TDR clinical trial showed non-inferiority versus anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF), showing superiority in many clinical outcomes. We present the 4-year interim follow-up results.MethodsPatients were randomized (1:1) to ProDisc-C (PDC-R) or ACDF. Patients were assessed preoperatively, and postoperatively at 6 weeks and 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, and 48 months. After the randomized portion, continued access (CA) patients also underwent ProDisc-C implantation, with follow-up visits up to 24 months. Evaluations included Neck Disability Index (NDI), Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for pain/satisfaction, and radiographic and physical/neurologic examinations.ResultsRandomized patients (103 PDC-R and 106 ACDF) and 136 CA patients were treated at 13 sites. VAS pain and NDI score improvements from baseline were significant for all patients (P < .0001) but did not differ among groups. VAS satisfaction was higher at all time points for PDC-R versus ACDF patients (P = .0499 at 48 months). The percentage of patients who responded yes to surgery again was 85.6% at 24 months and 88.9% at 48 months in the PDC-R group, 80.9% at 24 months and 81.0% at 48 months in the ACDF group, and 86.3% at 24 months in the CA group. Five PDC-R patients (48 months) and no CA patients (24 months) had index-level bridging bone. By 48 months, approximately 4-fold more ACDF patients required secondary surgery (3 of 103 PDC-R patients [2.9%] vs 12 of 106 ACDF patients [11.3%], P = .0292). Of these, 6 ACDF patients (5.6%) required procedures at adjacent levels. Three CA patients required secondary procedures (24 months).ConclusionsOur 4-year data support that ProDisc-C TDR and ACDF are viable surgical options for symptomatic cervical disk disease. Although ACDF patients may be at higher risk for additional surgical intervention, patients in both groups show good clinical results at longer-term follow-up

Some Notes on the Malayan Law of Negligence

In the annals of the spread of the common law to other lands and other ways, Malaya may deserve a modest place, but, as the selection here no doubt shows, so far it has made no significant contribution to the intellectual content of that law. It has neither produced nor harboured a Cardozo or a Dixon. At best, its judges have applied common law principles simply but soundly; they have never, at least in tort, been subtle or illuminating. Its legal history is of interest for its own sake; its legal achievement awaits us in the future, not in the past

Goodbye, Microsoft Academic – hello, open research infrastructure?

The announcement of the closure of Microsoft Academic later this year, may have left the research community largely unmoved, although its demise has significant implications for those working with the service’s substantial database. Here, Aaron Tay, Alberto Martín-Martín, and Sven E. Hug¸ discuss what set Microsoft Academic apart from its competitors and the potential consequences of Microsoft’s withdrawal from scholarly metadata for the development of open research infrastructures

An ultrastructural study of bonding to dentin smear layers

Abstract no. 998published_or_final_versio

Forecasting electricity consumption using the second-order fuzzy time series

There is a great development of Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) infrastructure since its formation in 1993. The development will be accompanied by the increasing demand for electricity. Hence, there is a need to forecast UTHM electricity consumption accurately so that UTHM can plan for future energy demand and utility saving decisions. Previous studies on UTHM electricity consumption prediction have been carried out using time series models, multiple linear regression and first-order fuzzy time series (FTS). The first-order FTS yield the best accuracy among these three methods. Previous forecasting problem showed higher order FTS can yield better accuracy. Therefore, in this study, the second-order FTS with trapezoidal membership function was implemented on the UTHM monthly electricity consumption from January 2009 to December 2018 to forecast January to December 2019 monthly electricity consumption. The procedure of the FTS and trapezoidal membership function was described together with January data. The second-order FTS forecast UTHM electricity consumption better than the first-order FTS