Unusual Thoracic Tumours- A Concise Imaging Approach

Introduction: There are certain uncommon large thoracic masses sharing overlapping radiological features with commoner ones except few salient characteristic features. Diagnosing these uncommon tumours has practical implications for patient management and prognosis including obviating unnecessary surgeries. Aim: To demonstrate characteristic Computed Tomography (CT) features of large common and certain uncommon intra-thoracic masses Materials and Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional search was done in January 2020, from the archives of patients record in Radiology Department from December 2017 to January 2019 for intra-thoracic tumours. Those tumors or masses meeting inclusion criteria were analysed by two radiologists who were blinded about the histopathologic reports. A probable radiological diagnosis was made and it was later matched-up with the histopathologic reports to reach to a confirmed diagnosis. The unique CT features were separately tabulated and their p-value for a particular diagnosis was calculated using Fisher’s-exact test. Results: Out of total 23 cases studied, 12 bronchogenic carcinomas and 11 uncommon diagnoses including Solitary fibrous tumour, Synovial sarcoma, Pulmonary blastoma, Askin’s tumour, Schwannoma and Metastasis were found. Subtle rib erosion in Askin’s tumour (p-value=0.004), intra-tumoural vessels in Synovial sarcomas (p-value=0.0006) and intense enhancement in some non-bronchogenic tumours (p-value=0.0137) were found to be significantly associated features. Conclusion: When encountering an opaque hemithorax on chest radiograph and a large mass on CT, one should look for certain peculiar features of these unusual lung masses to suggest them as a differential diagnosis, as “Our eyes see only what our mind knows”.

Partnering Effects on Joint Motion Range and Step Length in the Competitive Waltz Dancers

Competitive dance, also known as DanceSport, is one of the official sports of the World Games. The most salient characteristic of ballroom dance is the closed-hold position, during which the upper body segments of partner-dancers are linked. This study aimed to investigate partnering effects on joint motion ranges of the lower extremity and step lengths during the waltz in 13 national level competitive dance couples and a world champion couple. A Xsens MVN system was used to record movement at 240 Hz. Solo and pair conditions were examined. Compared with the highly skilled couples, the world champion couple demonstrated superior dance skills for generating the first step length in the pair condition of the waltz. This was particularly evident in the step length and joint motion range of the champion female dancer.

“Listen to the Music”

This chapter defines K-pop with a focus on hybridity that reveals citational practices that draw on African American popular music and are confirmed as authentic by fans functioning as K-pop’s music press. This definition goes beyond “idols,” or Korean performers who sing and dance, to capture the diversity of K-pop artists that share characteristics that transcend genre. Hybridity, K-pop’s most salient characteristic, is largely informed by African American popular music. It reflects intertextuality through the emulation of R&B genres and improvisation spurred by Korean popular music aesthetics that expands those genres. K-pop’s music citational practices are deemed authentic by a transcultural fandom that produces critical cultural production and, in doing so, function as part of the music press for K-pop.

Developing multimodal communicative competence in emerging academic and professional genres

In this paper, we propose a pedagogical approach for teaching and learning multimodal literacy, specifically, the application of multimodal discourse analysis for genre awareness. The mastery of specific oral genres is seen as desirable to help students become competent professionals. This is the case of Product Pitches (PPs) in the business field and Research Pitches (RPs) in the academic field. The former are short presentations that introduce a product to the market, the latter constitute an emerging way of disseminating ongoing research to the general public. A salient characteristic of both is their multimodal nature, which has raised an increasing interest in multimodal approaches to genre pedagogy. Our aim is to develop students’ analytical skills to make them aware of the variety of semiotic modes and the importance of using them coherently. The pedagogical approach is facilitated by specialised software that supports the systematic teaching and learning of multimodal genres.

The Jewish Fusgeyer Migration Movement from Early Twentieth-Century Romania as Transcultural Rhetorical Tool in US Memorial Literary Culture

From 1900 to 1907, a so-called fusgeyer phenomenon was the most salient characteristic of Jewish emigration from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews who were on the brink of starvation and started to go on foot in the attempt to leave the country. My essay considers the literary representation of this fusgeyer movement over time as a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the United States. To that end, I will examine the representation of fusgeyers in the literature produced by immigrant fusgeyers to the United States immediately after emigration (M. E. Ravage’s 1917 An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant and Jacob Finkelstein’s 1942 “Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America”) and in the literature created in contemporary times in the United States (Stuart Tower’s 2003 historical novel The Wayfarers). In my analysis, I rely on Astrid Erll’s demonstration that literature can be a powerful conduit of cultural memory by its use of “four modes of a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’: the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic, and the reflexive mode.” I will show which of these modes of rhetoric apply to the literary works I consider and how they highlight a dynamic movement toward a transcultural type of rhetoric shaping Jewish memory forms in contemporary US literature.

Political Consent, Promissory Fidelity and Rights Transfers in Grotius

Grotius (1583–1645) is now widely acknowledged as an important figure in early modern contractual and consensual theories of political authority and legitimacy. However, as his thoughts on these debates are disseminated throughout his works rather than systematically ordained, it remains difficult to assess what, if anything, constitutes his distinctive mark. In the present paper, I will argue that his works contain a combination of two conceptual elements that have come to constitute a salient characteristic of early modern contract and consent theories: first, a strong obligation to keep one’s promises, and second, an account of perfect promises as transferrals of rights. In the political sphere, this means that citizens who have promised their obedience to the authorities are obligated to keep faith, which provides a solid foundation for political obligations. In addition, their promise implies that authorities receive the right to rule over them, which accounts for the legitimacy of these authorities’ power.

A Novel Adaptive Gain of Optimal Sliding Mode Controller for Linear Time-Varying Systems

In this study, a new optimal control law associated with the sliding mode control is developed for the linear time-varying system based on the Bolza-Meyer criterion. The salient characteristic of the controller proposed in this work is to have adjustable gains in which the gain values can be larger than 1. This leads to the enhancement of control performances with the given cost function. It is noted here that conventional optimal control laws have a constant gain of 1 or less than 1, and hence, control performances such as the convergence speed are not satisfactory. After formulating the proposed optimal control law for linear time-varying systems, several illustrative examples are adopted and control performances were evaluated to show some benefits of the proposed controller. In particular, three crucial index values of control gain index, main input control index and the state index were investigated. Among illustrative examples, one is related to vibration control problem of the vehicle seat suspension system with magnetorheological (MR) damper. This example is specially treated to evaluate the practical applicability of the proposed optimal controller by considering the measured road profiles; two different random road excitations.

Students of color show health advantages when they attend schools that emphasize the value of diversity

As the United States becomes more diverse, the ways in which mainstream institutions recognize and address race and ethnicity will be increasingly important. Here, we show that one novel and salient characteristic of an institutional environment, that is, whether a school emphasizes the value of racial and ethnic diversity, predicts better cardiometabolic health among adolescents of color. Using a diverse sample of adolescents who attend more than 100 different schools in predominantly urban locations, we find that when schools emphasize the value of diversity (operationalized as mentioning diversity in their mission statements), students of color, but not white students, have lower values on a composite of five biomarkers of inflammation, have less insulin resistance and compensatory β-cell activity, and have fewer metabolic syndrome signs and score lower on a continuous metabolic syndrome composite. These results suggest that institutions that emphasize diversity may play an unacknowledged role in protecting the health of people of color and, thus, may be a site for future interventions to reduce health disparities.