196 research outputs found
Morbid Obesity and Mortality in Patients With VTE: Findings From Real-Life Clinical Practice
No full textBackground: The influence of morbid obesity on mortality in patients receiving anticoagulant therapy for VTE has not been consistently evaluated. Methods: Data from the RIETE (Registro Informatizado Enfermedad TromboEmbólica) registry were used to compare the mortality risk during anticoagulation in patients with VTE and morbid obesity (BMI ≥ 40 kg/m2) vs those with normal weight (BMI, 18.5-24.9 kg/m2). Patients with or without active cancer were analyzed separately. Results: By September 2018, there were 1,642 patients with VTE and morbid obesity and 14,848 with normal weight in RIETE. Of these, 245 (5.5%) and 1,397 (11.6%), respectively, had cancer. Median duration of anticoagulant therapy was longer in the morbidly obese patients, with cancer (185 vs 114 days) or without cancer (203 vs 177 days). Among cancer patients, 44 (18.0%) morbidly obese and 1,377 (32.8%) patients with normal weight died during anticoagulation. Among those without cancer, 44 (3.1%) morbidly obese died and 601 (5.6%) with normal weight died. On bivariate analysis, morbid obesity was associated with a lower mortality rate, both in patients with cancer (hazard ratio, 0.34; 95% CI, 0.25-0.45) and in those without cancer (hazard ratio, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.32-0.58). Multivariable analysis confirmed a lower hazard of death in morbidly obese patients with cancer (hazard ratio, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.50-0.94) and without cancer (hazard ratio, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.49-0.96). The risk for VTE recurrences or major bleeding did not differ in patients with or without morbid obesity. Conclusions: In patients with VTE, the risk for death during anticoagulation was about one-third lower in morbidly obese patients than in those with normal weight, independently of the presence of cancer
Un/Becoming Chinese: Huaqiao, the Non-Perishable Sojourner Reinvented, and Alterity of Chineseness
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2013This dissertation explores the construction of huaqiao, the Chinese sojourner, and its representation in modern Chinese literature. By interrogating and problematizing the concepts of Chineseness and huaqiao, this project argues that ¡°huaqiao¡± is essentially a misnomer warranting further examination at various levels. While unpacking and decoding the term ¡°huaqiao¡± and simultaneously delineating its historical inception and configurations, it critiques how ¡°huaqiao,¡± as a product of the Chineseness discourse, has become the unifying category used to label ¡°overseas Chinese.¡± Since the term was originally created, and is still being used to disseminate, reinforce, and perpetuate, a monolithic and essentialist Chinese identity, one cannot overlook or underestimate its entanglement with the construction and articulations of Chineseness. However, as this whole project contends, even though huaqiao has been construed as a displaced Chinese subject, at its inception it is already an identity in alterity. The sojourner¡&hibar;s trajectories across times and places have acquired various definitions and meanings, making huaqiao as much a contested category as that of ¡°Chineseness.¡± Chapter One examines the discourse of Chineseness and how it has spawned the term ¡°huaqiao¡± at different historical junctures and cultural spaces. It further engages in debates with various scholars to seek alternatives for critical interventions. Chapters Two explores a body of Nanyang (the South Seas) narratives produced by modern Chinese writers who sojourned in Nanyang between the 1920s and 1940s. It demonstrates how these writers, through travelogues, essays, memoirs, and fictions, construct Nanyang (and) huaqiao vis-¨¤-vis the discourses of Chineseness, colonialism, and tropicality. Chapter Three examines mainly Eileen Chang¡&hibar;s essays and novellas by focusing on an aspect rarely explored before, namely, how Chang uses the figures of (Nanyang) huaqiao to explore the construction of racial and cultural identities pertaining to notions of Chineseness. Chapter Four explores how the concept of racial and ethnic degeneration is projected onto the Nanyang huaqiao in Ding Ling¡&hibar;s ¡°Miss Sophia¡&hibar;s Diary.¡± It argues that the construction of native Chinese female subjectivity is foremost predicated upon the construction of a Nanyang huaqiao body conceived as deviant and pathological
Comments on ‘Fingero Imbibition in Artificial Replenishment of Ground Water through Cracked Porous Medium’ by A. P. Verma
No full textPacific Crossings: Travel, Writing, and Literary Transition in the Sino-American Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-11Animated by the goal of drawing substantial comparisons between the transitions to literary modernity in China and the United States, Pacific Crossings explores the beginnings of Sino-American transpacific travel in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent rise in production of cultural knowledge about the transpacific other for the home audience. While the impact of travel on the development of modernism has been widely observed in many contexts, this study attempts to address a general lack of scholarly attention to this particular field of transnational production—the zone centered on the Pacific—in the literary histories of both national contexts. Through a bi-partite analysis that juxtaposes Chinese and American traditions of travel and writing, historical trajectories and geographics, interrelationships, and depictions of the Chinese or American other, it shows that travel comes to have a negative effect on the possibility of writing “domestic” literature in both national contexts. Whereas travel renders the foreign present in national space (whether embodied or as text or object), depictions of locality as domesticated, enclosed, and totalized evaporate in the modern era, and are supplanted by “local” fiction that by its very nature shows interfluence with what is outside. The traits associated with global modernism, such as shifts in perception of selfhood and the fragmentation of epistemological coherence, are prefigured in nineteenth-century travel accounts, which, by their essential engagement of unassimilable foreignness within, always unsettle universalisms and foreground the lien of the transpacific imaginary on the production of literature. The process of comparison reveals several parallel discourses in the contexts of China and the American west—including “failure” narratives, preoccupations with essentiality and authenticity, and discourses of utility and benevolence—which propose further frameworks for fruitful Sino-American comparison. Part One traces the shifts in Chinese fictional space-time from the transitional nineteenth century, as exemplified by Li Ruzhen’s travel novel Jing hua yuan, to the early twentieth-century Chinese local fictional representations by Liu E, Li Boyuan, Xiao Hong, and Qian Zhongshu that employ the American and foreign as trope. It explores the impact the generic changes in international travel writing had on these shifts, through the lens of the early eyewitness accounts of America by Zhang Deyi and Lin Zhen. Part Two follows a similar methodological and historical trajectory. It draws connections between the shape early American travel writing in China took (as exemplified by eyewitness accounts by missionary Samuel Wells Williams and journalist Bayard Taylor) and the traditions of American westerly travel writing (including the nonfictional accounts of Lewis and Clark and Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional “hoax,” The Journal of Julius Rodman). It connects those traditions to the development of modernism in the American west and the configuration of fictional images of Chinese in America by Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, and John Steinbeck
Urban and Rural Encounters in Chinese Postsocialist Film and Media
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019This dissertation examines mainstream popular forms of nonfiction film and media in postsocialist Mainland China. I trace how these programs reflect and shape contemporary Chinese visions of reality—in particular, how these programs capture China’s rural-urban divide, and the way it shapes social structure, class, and identity within China. The primary areas of inquiry include nonfiction viewer address, the adaptation of foreign media forms, and the consumption of images of rural space by an implicitly urban viewer. These popular documentary and reality television shows use an essentialized vision of rural space to instruct viewers in proper social behavior and orientation. While new media offers rural users themselves an opportunity to participate in the creation of the rural imaginary, the videos these users create complicate but do not efface rural-urban divisions. Each chapter focuses on a different television program or new media platform, and the dissertation proceeds roughly chronologically from television documentary in the 2000s to contemporary mobile video sharing on Kwai. Chapter one considers how a China Central Television (CCTV) documentary update program rebroadcasted and updated documentaries from the 1990s, a period of upheaval in the representation of regular people on television. These updates depict reform era change through a developmental logic that leaves little space for the ambivalence and varied perspectives the original films represent. Chapter two focuses on a Hunan Satellite Television (HSTV) reality program, X-Change, which was loosely inspired by the UK reality program Wife Swap. The HSTV show, which depicts urban and rural youth swapping places to learn from each other’s lifestyle, reinforces a spatially determined understanding of social division. Chapter three looks at how predominantly urban-oriented dating shows (focusing on Jiangsu Satellite Television’s If You Are the One) assist viewers and contestants alike in navigating a mediatized reality and use data and expert commentary to rationalize romance. Chapter four focuses on Kwai (Kuaishou), a popular video sharing application that is associated with rural users, and argues that Kwai is structured as a social space that allows users to engage in alternative forms of visibility
The Myth of Voluntary Death: The Representation of Sacrifice and Martyrdom in the Maoist Films (1949-1976)
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017-06The dissertation investigates into the layered narratives of sacrifice and revolutionary martyrdom in Maoist films. Martyr’s death is abstracted and elevated from unpredictable personal event to be a collectively controllable and foreseeable public event. I refer to such ideological control over citizen’s death necropolitics. Maoist necropower interpellates revolutionary subjects, justifies the nation’s secular necropower transmitted from the transcendental ideals, surrogates martyrs bodies and minds to speak for them, and conceals martyr’s marginalized position as the sacrificial object and martyr’s dead body as disposable abject. I argue that the key mechanism of the Maoist necropolitics lies in the absent causes that originate from the transcendental revolutionary ideals. These socialist ideals can never be realized completely and are catachresis that lack sufficient referents. In other words, any socialist ideal essentially stands for a collective historical experience that cannot be fully presented but must be presupposed to regulate personal lived experience. Respectively, these three absent causes are: the future ideal of perfection, the ideal socialist female type, and “the absolute spirit of selflessness.” Chapter 2 argues for the homogeneity of the onscreen Maoist male martyrdom, which follows a constant formula both in theme and in style. Although the orthodox representation of male sacrifice looks formulaic and stiff, I argue that the flawless sublime heroic figure is exactly the embodiment of the communist ideal of the future perfection. Its impossibility of being sufficiently represented opens up the room for audience’s unlimited imagination of the future totality. During the process of fantasy construction, the future ideal of perfection is implanted into the present reality. Chapter 3 argues that the onscreen female martyrdom is far more complicated than the simple generalization of the “erasure of femininity.” The Maoist ideology requires femininity to be emphasized when women are called to die for the nation, to show that the communist revolution is inclusive and universal regardless of any gender difference. However, sexuality needs to be concealed when the libidinal force is uncontrollable and runs the risk of threatening male authority and revolutionary purity. By a close reading of the film Dr.Bethune, Chapter 4 unveils the entangled implications of foreignness and selflessness in constructing and keeping the sameness of the revolutionary individual and collective identity. By the representation of an influential foreign martyr, the revolutionary narrative and the cinematic strategies cooperate to minimize the potential threats of disintegration of the local solidarity from the benevolent foreignness, while maximizing the validity of transnational communism. I argue that the ideal revolutionary individual identity, “the spirit of absolute selflessness” as Mao called for, is a void. But it is exactly such a void that keeps the homogeneity and sameness of the individual identity which defies any change occurred in time and becomes permanent. Chapter 5 investigates the rarity of the Maoist films where unconventional martyrdom is represented through genre twists. These film genres include comedy, suspense thriller, and children’s films. The genre twists potentially expose the original paradox and the inherent problems of martyrdom. Being subjects, objects and abjects at the same time, martyrs are at once celebrated and marginalized
Interpretative Dubbing: The Voice Stars in the 1980s China
No full textThesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2017-06The thesis is a study of the voice actors’ reading of foreign films in the late 1970s and 1980s China. The specific group of voice actors who achieved stardom constitutes the subject of this study. By delving into the professional and personal experiences of the voice actors, the thesis theorizes the group of voice actors as an “interpretative community” possessing regular reading strategies and practices as a result of their similar social position. To account for the voice actors’ patterned reading of foreign films, I consider two layers of the identity of being a voice actor in the cultural and social context in 1980s China, that is, state employee and celebrity, and juxtapose the reading of the voice actors with those of the official and the public. In other words, I contemplate questions such as what it was like in working as state-employee and celebrity, and how the two layers of identity affect the voice actors’ interpretation of foreign films. Accordingly, the thesis is divided into two parts with the first part looking at the voice actors’ subversion of and compliance with the official narrative of foreign films, and the second part examining the interaction between the public and the voice stars. Journal articles and (auto-) biographies written by the voice actors and interviews in which they participated consist of the major sources for analysis in this study. I also highlight the dubbing style of the voice actors as expressive and constitutive of their reading of foreign films. It is through examining these written and audiovisual materials that I discern the limitation and freedom of interpretation within a politically ambivalent regime, attribute the popularity of the voice actors to Chinese people’s cultural orientation towards the West, economic transition, and distinctive celebrity culture in the early 1980s China, and demonstrate interwoven relations among the voice actors, the public, and the officials. The study is intended to inspire and promote further research into issues that are critical in understanding contemporary and historical cinema across the world, such as the multiple actors engaged in the dubbing industry, the role of translation in transnational films, and the possibility of agency in working in a politically ambiguous environment
A Study of Flow Through a Fracture Network Described by Statistically Distributed Properties
No full textExpose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Revolutionary China
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020My dissertation traces a history of how class struggle was made of and through moving images in China. Whereas many existing studies concerning socialism and leftist cultural politics treat class struggle as a given fact, my dissertation draws back the curtain on how class struggle was constructed in China. Much emphasis has been put on either the violent components of Mao’s class war or Chinese class struggle as a project saturated with displays, performances, and spectacles. However, the intersection of class struggle as both spectacular violence and spectatorial violence remains largely underexplored. Through historicizing the merging of violence and spectacle within an overarching class-coded system, however, my dissertation suggests the mutual constitution of image making and justice, upon which the project of class struggle was legitimized, and in effect produced everyday violence. Drawing on archives, fieldwork, and an audiovisual corpus, the project examines the mass production of what I call looks of enmities—penal spectacles, incriminating media, hate images, antagonistic ideologies, and encounters of watching-as-judging. Overall, the project is a dual history of trial as media and media as trial. Concerning the complex interrelation between photographic media vis-Ã -vis socialist criminal justice and violence driven by a singular and overarching system of partitioning coded in the term class, my dissertation intends to challenge established boundaries within which both film/art-historical scholarship and legal historiographies are usually approached and disseminated. I address the following questions: Historically, how did (audio)visual media and trial/execution, whether legal or extralegal, intersect in China? How did moving images enact and, in turn, shape punishment and the politics of enemy-making in the age of class struggle? Theoretically, (how) is justice visible? How does an image shame or judge, and how does cinema punish? Methodologically, what is the role of the archive in history, historiography, and historical thinking? How do archival images live their own lives
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