Baiben Zhang (Hundred Volumes Zhang): A Scribal Publisher in Nineteenth-century Beijing

In the 19th century, a flourishing literature of entertainment circulated through the handwritten medium in the urban center of Beijing. Thousands of manuscripts collected in the area in the early 20th century trace their origins to scribal publishers which specialized in the handwritten production of stories and songs, nourished by the vibrant musical culture of the capital and competing with printed librettos in the urban book market. This article takes a close look at Baiben Zhang (“Mr. Zhang of the hundred volumes”), the most prominent of these venues, and its operational model from branding and pricing to sales and distribution. With products spanning the range of northern performance genres and titles numbering at least in the hundreds, the success of Baiben Zhang calls to attention important channels of commercial manuscript production and distribution in the late Qing. The article concludes with questions on the distinctness of Beijing as a locale, the circulation of Chinese popular literature in the urban setting, and the factors behind the continuity of scribal operations in an age perceived to be dominated by print

Touched by a tale of friendship: An early nineteenth-century Zidishu manuscript

Zidishu is a genre of sung verse narrative that flourished in northern China between the mid-eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries. This article examines the earliest dated manuscript containing a text in this genre, copied in 1815 in Beijing, titled Yu Boya shuaiqin xie zhiyin zidishu (Yu Boya smashes his zither to mourn a friend, a youth book). The preface, appendix, marginal and chapter comments added to the main text by the copyist reveal him to have been a fashionable and erudite reader, whose diverse literary interests offer insights into zidishu\u27s early audience and the ways in which elite readers engaged with popular texts. © 2021 Zhenzhen Lu, published by De Gruyter

The Vernacular World Of Pu Songling

Pu Songling (1640-1715) is known to the world for his Liaozhai zhiyi, which has come to represent the epitome of the Chinese classical tale. Yet there is also a large and lesser-known body of ballads, plays and songs attributed to him, transmitted through local manuscript and oral culture in Pu’s native Zichuan, Shandong. Presenting these works in the context of the locality’s textual culture, this dissertation reveals them to be informed by both literary tradition and the sights and sounds of a village world. The first chapter introduces the vernacular oeuvre attributed to Pu Songling and the sources of this study, mainly from the Ryōsai Bunko at Keio University. It tells the early 20th century story of the collection and the discovery of Pu’s vernacular works in China at the time, and analyzes aspects of Zichuan’s textual culture as discernable from the collection. The second chapter focuses on Pu’s Riyong suzi (Popular characters for daily use), a rhymed educational text in local language on the vocabularies of everyday life, belonging to a vibrant literature of vernacular primers. Riyong suzi mediated not only between standard script and local speech, but also the spheres of textual and living knowledge. The third chapter employs filial piety as a lens into the world of popular entertainment, focusing on ballads and plays attributed to Pu on the subject of the family. Comparing vernacular ballad against classical tale, it calls into question elements of these works which ostensibly make them “elite” or “popular,” while bringing to attention the ballads’ skillful evocations of a village world alive with oral exchanges and verbal duels. The final chapter is devoted to depictions of history in the play Monan qu (Song of tribulations) attributed to Pu and in drum ballads from Shandong. These vernacular engagements with local and dynastic history reveal a range of literati experiments with popular performance genres. Colloquial song and narrative formed a common, informal literary medium in the region, tied intimately to the classical tradition while providing alternative channels for diversion, dissent, and innovation

Global dynamics for a class of reaction–diffusion multigroup SIR epidemic models with time fractional-order derivatives

This paper investigates the global dynamics for a class of multigroup SIR epidemic model with time fractional-order derivatives and reaction–diffusion. The fractional order considered in this paper is in (0; 1], which the propagation speed of this process is slower than Brownian motion leading to anomalous subdiffusion. Furthermore, the generalized incidence function is considered so that the data itself can flexibly determine the functional form of incidence rates in practice. Firstly, the existence, nonnegativity, and ultimate boundedness of the solution for the proposed system are studied. Moreover, the basic reproduction number R0 is calculated and shown as a threshold: the disease-free equilibrium point of the proposed system is globally asymptotically stable when R0 ≤ 1, while when R0 > 1, the proposed system is uniformly persistent, and the endemic equilibrium point is globally asymptotically stable. Finally, the theoretical results are verified by numerical simulation

Evaluation of Finnish Diabetes Risk Score in screening undiagnosed diabetes and prediabetes among U.S. adults by gender and race: NHANES 1999-2010.

ObjectiveTo evaluate the performance of Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (FINDRISC) in detecting undiagnosed diabetes and prediabetes among U.S. adults by gender and race.MethodsThis cross-sectional analysis included participants (aged ≥20 years) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2010. Sensitivity, specificity, area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and the optimal cutoff points for identifying undiagnosed diabetes and prediabetes were calculated for FINDRISC by gender and race/ethnicity.ResultsAmong the 20,633 adults (≥20 years), 49.8% were women and 53.0% were non-Hispanic White. The prevalence of undiagnosed diabetes and prediabetes was 4.1% and 35.6%, respectively. FINDRISC was positively associated with the prevalence of diabetes (OR = 1.48 for 1 unit increase, p<0.001) and prediabetes (OR = 1.15 for 1 unit increase, p<0.001). The area under ROC for detecting undiagnosed diabetes was 0.75 for total population, 0.74 for men and 0.78 for women (p = 0.04); 0.76 for White, 0.76 for Black and 0.72 for Hispanics (p = 0.03 for White vs. Hispanics). The area under ROC for detecting prediabetes was 0.67 for total population, 0.66 for men and 0.70 for women (p<0.001); 0.68 for White, 0.67 for Black and 0.65 for Hispanics (p<0.001 for White vs. Hispanics). The optimal cutoff point was 10 (sensitivity = 0.75) for men and 12 (sensitivity = 0.72) for women for detecting undiagnosed diabetes; 9 (sensitivity = 0.61) for men and 10 (sensitivity = 0.69) for women for detecting prediabetes.ConclusionsFINDRISC is a simple and non-invasive screening tool to identify individuals at high risk for diabetes in the U.S. adults

Chemical, Thermal, Time, and Enzymatic Stability of Silk Materials with Silk I Structure

The crystalline structure of silk fibroin Silk I is generally considered to be a metastable structure; however, there is no definite conclusion under what circumstances this crystalline structure is stable or the crystal form will change. In this study, silk fibroin solution was prepared from B. Mori silkworm cocoons, and a combined method of freeze-crystallization and freeze-drying at different temperatures was used to obtain stable Silk I crystalline material and uncrystallized silk material, respectively. Different concentrations of methanol and ethanol were used to soak the two materials with different time periods to investigate the effect of immersion treatments on the crystalline structure of silk fibroin materials. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Raman scattering spectroscopy (Raman), Scanning electron microscope (SEM), and Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) were used to characterize the structure of silk fibroin before and after the treatments. The results showed that, after immersion treatments, uncrystallized silk fibroin material with random coil structure was transformed into Silk II crystal structure, while the silk material with dominated Silk I crystal structure showed good long-term stability without obvious transition to Silk II crystal structure. α-chymotrypsin biodegradation study showed that the crystalline structure of silk fibroin Silk I materials is enzymatically degradable with a much lower rate compared to uncrystallized silk materials. The crystalline structure of Silk I materials demonstrate a good long-term stability, endurance to alcohol sterilization without structural changes, and can be applied to many emerging fields, such as biomedical materials, sustainable materials, and biosensors

The Yeast GSK-3 Homologue Mck1 Is a Key Controller of Quiescence Entry and Chronological Lifespan.

Upon starvation for glucose or any other core nutrient, yeast cells exit from the mitotic cell cycle and acquire a set of G0-specific characteristics to ensure long-term survival. It is not well understood whether or how cell cycle progression is coordinated with the acquisition of different G0-related features during the transition to stationary phase (SP). Here, we identify the yeast GSK-3 homologue Mck1 as a key regulator of G0 entry and reveal that Mck1 acts in parallel to Rim15 to activate starvation-induced gene expression, the acquisition of stress resistance, the accumulation of storage carbohydrates, the ability of early SP cells to exit from quiescence, and their chronological lifespan. FACS and microscopy imaging analyses indicate that Mck1 promotes mother-daughter cell separation and together with Rim15, modulates cell size. This indicates that the two kinases coordinate the transition-phase cell cycle, cell size and the acquisition of different G0-specific features. Epistasis experiments place MCK1, like RIM15, downstream of RAS2 in antagonising cell growth and activating stress resistance and glycogen accumulation. Remarkably, in the ras2∆ cells, deletion of MCK1 and RIM15 together, compared to removal of either of them alone, compromises respiratory growth and enhances heat tolerance and glycogen accumulation. Our data indicate that the nutrient sensor Ras2 may prevent the acquisition of G0-specific features via at least two pathways. One involves the negative regulation of the effectors of G0 entry such as Mck1 and Rim15, while the other likely to involve its functions in promoting respiratory growth, a phenotype also contributed by Mck1 and Rim15.This work was funded by a scholarship from Lucy Cavendish College (ZQ) and a scholarship awarded by National University of Defense Technology of China (LC). This work was also supported by the UNICELLSYS Collaborative Project (No. 201142) of the European Commission awarded to SGO.This is the published version. It first appeared at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.100528

Pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics of marbofloxacin in a Pasteurella multocida serious murine lung infection model

The ARRIVE Guidelines Checklist. Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments. (PDF 391 kb