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Papermaking is one of the four great inventions in ancient China; the most influential genre of Chinese literature is poetry; and paper and poetry are therefore both our "national quintessence" of which the Chinese people are proud. The period people use the tablets of bamboo or pieces of silk had lasted several thousand years before paper was created, when the instantaneous exchange of emotion had to be oral, and that is why the way of verbal expression used to be oral songs, but not textual poetry; meanwhile, owing to the heaviness and inconvenience of the media, the written texts were only used for conveying the diachronic tradition, not suitable for special circulation. The invention of paper and its wide usage made the Chinese culture step into the Middle Ancient Time and hence led to the boom of textual literature in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Thereafter, poetry changed its form from oral to written texts, which in turn led to the changes in the importance of the literary nature and the poetic ambience of poetry. The revolution of poetry relevant to the aesthetic nature and the formal rhyme was hence the result by using the material media of paper, demonstrating the influence of the material upon the spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of paper for social communication in early modern India, with focus given to the circulation of puranic manuscripts, or Hindu religious manuscripts. The author demonstrates how paper influenced communication and helped develop an Indian public sphere in spite of a lack of Indian print culture in the early modern period. Particular focus is given to the movement of texts within the Brahman social networks of Maratha, India, as well as the Maratha state's efforts to regulate communication deemed subversive to Brahman elites.

The decisions of if and when to have a first child are very important for any woman or couple. This paper develops a model to examine when a woman should begin trying to conceive, which depends on the personal circumstances and values of each woman. The model incorporates separate objectives for a woman's professional, social, and family aspects of life and integrates them into a quality-of-life function that includes the changing relative importance of these aspects with age over a woman's life. Descriptions of the relative quality of each of these three aspects of a woman's life are modeled over time for different cases. One case involves no child and other cases involve the woman giving birth at different ages from 21 to 50. The probabilities of conceiving when trying, as a function of a woman's age, are included. The relative pros and cons of waiting until the late thirties to have a child to avoid perceived detrimental impacts on one's career or social life are investigated. Several illustrations are included in the paper to demonstrate insights that can be generated using the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper, the author introduced a collection of rings that control a categorification of the quantum sl(2) invariant of tangles. We prove that centers of these rings are isomorphics to the cohomology rings of the (n, n) Springer varieties and show that the braid group action in the derived category of modules over these rings descends to the Springer action of the symmetric group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]