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Background Many people infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) never develop substantial symptoms. With more than 34 million people in the United States already infected and highly transmissible variants rapidly emerging, it is highly probable that post- and presymptomatic people will form an important fraction of those seeking dental care. Salivary carriage rates in these populations are not known. Moreover, although preventing transmission is critical for controlling spread, the efficacy of mouthrinses in reducing oral viral load is poorly studied. Methods The authors recruited 201 asymptomatic, presymptomatic, postsymptomatic, and symptomatic people and measured copy numbers of SARS-CoV-2 in unstimulated saliva using real-time reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction. Subsequently, the authors inducted 41 symptomatic people into a randomized, triple-blinded study and instructed them to rinse with saline, 1% hydrogen peroxide, 0.12% chlorhexidine, or 0.5% povidone-iodine for 60 seconds. The authors measured viral load 15 and 45 minutes after rinsing. Results Salivary SARS-CoV-2 was detected in 23% of asymptomatic, 60% of postsymptomatic, and 28% of presymptomatic participants. Neither carriage rate nor viral load correlated with COVID-19 symptomatology, age, sex, or race or ethnicity. All 4 mouthrinses decreased viral load by 61% through 89% at 15 minutes and by 70% through 97% at 45 minutes. The extent of reduction correlated significantly with initial viral load. Conclusions Nonsymptomatic people can pose a risk of transmitting the virus, and mouthrinses are simple and efficacious means of reducing this risk, especially when the load is less than 104 copies per milliliter. Practical Implications At a time when resources are stretched, the findings of this study contribute to evidence-based selection of personal protection equipment and simple infection-control practices to reduce contagion at source. This clinical trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov . The registration number is NCT04603794.

Historically, patients who developed malignant hyperthermia had an extremely high rate of mortality. Today, if treated appropriately, patients who experience an episode of malignant hyperthermia will most likely survive. This dramatic decrease in mortality associated with malignant hyperthermia is due to several factors, including an increased understanding of the disease, improved diagnostic and monitoring equipment, and the development of lifesaving pharmacologic agents. This article presents the very likely case of acute malignant hyperthermia in a 24-year-old man with special needs, who presented for restorative dentistry under general anesthesia in the outpatient clinic of The Ohio State University's College of Dentistry.

We demonstrate a novel illumination technique for extrinsic photoconductive switches based on the creation of a total internal reflection trap to increase the optical path length. The optimal geometry is a square substrate illuminated from one of the corners along the diagonal, ensuring that the total internal reflection condition is maintained after any reflection off the device lateral sides. The optical absorption uniformity throughout the device bulk was improved by designing the entry window to have a cylindrical shape and by using a square core optical fiber as an illumination source. The concept is experimentally validated on a vanadium-doped silicon carbide device that shows approximately four-fold improvement in responsivity compared to normal illumination.

Plasma-etched micropillars in 4H-SiC were etched in forming gas (4% H2, 96% N2) at 1500, 1550, and 1600 °C at 2.4 and 9.4 standard liters per min (slm). At 2.4 slm, oxygen from the aluminum oxide components of the tube furnace oxidized the SiC surface, and the pillars etched isotropically. At 9.4 slm, the pillars etched crystallographically at 1500 and 1550 °C, and sharp 4H-SiC needless with tips as narrow as 15 nm were produced. The lateral etch rates of both 4H- and 6H-SiC were measured with the a-plane etching faster than the m-plane at 1500 and 1550 °C. At 1600 °C, the m-plane and a-plane etch at comparable rates. Due to the difference in etch rates between the m-plane and a-plane, convex surfaces tend to produce facets parallel to the a-plane, while concave surfaces produce facets parallel to the m-plane.

An optical pump–probe technique was used to detect spatial distribution of carrier lifetimes across the thickness of a high-quality diamond device structure. Two samples with as-received and boron implanted surfaces were compared to assess the role of implantation and related processing on carrier recombination mechanisms. It was found that the two implanted surfaces show very different behaviors despite undergoing the same treatment. At one of the surfaces, carrier lifetimes remained relatively unchanged, indicating surface recombination rates in the 102–103 cm/s range. At the other surface, carrier lifetimes were almost a magnitude lower and correlated with the locally detected nitrogen vacancy defect that was attributed to the elevated concentration of residual nitrogen.

In classical Chinese philosophy, zhi, conventionally translated as ‘knowing’, is not so much a knowing ‘what’, which provides some understanding of the natural world, as it is a knowing ‘how’ to be adept in relationships, and ‘how’, in optimizing the possibilities that these relations provide, to develop trust in their viability. The cluster of terms that define knowing are thus programmatic and exhortative, encouraging the quality of the roles and associations that define us. Propositions may be true, but it is more important that husbands and friends be so.

Dao, conventionally translated ‘the Way’, is probably the most pervasive and widely recognized idea in Chinese philosophy. The specific character of Chinese philosophy arises because a dominant cultural factor in the tradition, now and then, has been the priority of process and change over form and stasis, a privileging of cosmology over metaphysics. That the Yijing (Book of Changes) is first among the Chinese Classics in every sense bears witness to the priority of cosmological questions – how, or in what way (dao) should the world hang together? – over metaphysical and ontological questions – what is the reality behind appearance, the Being behind the beings, the One behind the many, the true behind the false? The contrast lies in finding a way rather than seeking the truth.

In the West, questions of the distinguishability of mind and matter and of rationality and emotion or sentiment are central issues within the philosophy of mind. Neither of these topics is of much interest, however, to the mainstream of Chinese thought. On the one hand, the notion of qi, the vital energizing field that constitutes all natural processes, renders discussions of the relevance of any psychophysical dualism moot. On the other hand, xin, normally translated as ‘heart-and-mind’, preludes the assumption of distinctions between thinking and feeling, or idea and affect. Xin is often translated simply as ‘heart’, but since it is the seat of thinking and judgment, the notion of mind must be included in its characterization if the term is to be properly understood. Indeed, what we often think of as ‘will’ or ‘intention’ is likewise included in the notion of xin.

Tian, conventionally translated as ‘Heaven’, is both what our world is and how it is. The myriad things are not the creatures of tian or disciplined by a tian which stands independent of what is ordered; rather, they are constitutive of it. Tian is both creator and the field of creatures. There is no apparent distinction between the order itself and what orders it. This absence of superordination is a condition made familiar in related notions of the Daoist dao and the Buddhist dharma, which also refer to concrete phenomena and the order that obtains among them. On this basis, tian can be described as an inhering, emergent order negotiated out of the dispositioning of the particulars that are constitutive of it. In the human world, tian is the experience of meaningful context felt differently by each person in the fellowship of family and community.

Xing is conventionally translated as ‘nature’ or ‘human nature’. Some read xing as meaning a heavenly endowed tendency, directionality, or potentiality of growth in the individual. On this essentialistic reading, xing is an innate and unchanging ‘given’, a defining condition of all human beings. Others have given a historicist interpretation of xing, reading it as an achievement concept rather than as a given. In this view, xing is derived from, and is a refinement on, sheng, denoting the entire process of birth, growth and ultimate demise that constitutes the life of a living creature.

Early Daoist philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the development of Chinese philosophy and culture. Philosophical Daoism is often called ‘Lao–Zhuang’ philosophy, referring directly to the two central and most influential texts, the Daodejing (or Laozi) and the Zhuangzi, both of which were composite, probably compiled in the fourth and third centuries bc. Beyond these two texts we might include the syncretic Huainanzi (circa 140 bc) and the Liezi, reconstituted around the fourth century ad, as part of the traditional Daoist corpus. Second in influence only to the Confucian school, the classical Daoist philosophers in many ways have been construed as both a critique on and a complement to the more conservative, regulatory precepts of their Confucian rivals. Daoism has frequently and unfortunately been characterized in terms of passivity, femininity, quietism and spirituality, a doctrine embraced by artists, recluses and religious mystics. Confucianism, by contrast, has been cast in the language of moral precepts, virtues, imperial edicts and regulative methods, a doctrine embodied in and administered by the state official. The injudicious application of this yin–yang-like concept to Daoism and Confucianism tends to impoverish our appreciation of the richness and complexity of these two traditions. Used in a heavy-handed way, it obfuscates the fundamental wholeness of both the Confucian and Daoist visions of meaningful human existence by imposing an unwarranted conservatism on classical Confucianism, and an unjustified radicalism on Daoism. There is a common ground shared by the teachings of classical Confucianism and Daoism in the advocacy of self-cultivation. In general terms, both traditions treat life as an art rather than a science. Both express a ‘this-wordly’ concern for the concrete details of immediate existence rather than exercising their minds in the service of grand abstractions and ideals. Both acknowledge the uniqueness, importance and primacy of the particular person and the person’s contribution to the world, while at the same time stressing the ecological interrelatedness and interdependence of this person with their context. However, there are also important differences. For the Daoists, the Confucian penchant for reading the ‘constant dao’ myopically as the ‘human dao’ is to experience the world at a level that generates a dichotomy between the human and natural worlds. The argument against the Confucian seems to be that the Confucians do not take the ecological sensitivity far enough, defining self-cultivation in purely human terms. It is the focused concern for the overcoming of discreteness by a spiritual extension and integration in the human world that gives classical Confucianism its sociopolitical and practical orientation. But from the Daoist perspective, ‘overcoming discreteness’ is not simply the redefinition of the limits of one’s concerns and responsibilities within the confines of the human sphere. The Daoists reject the notion that human experience occurs in a vacuum, and that the whole process of existence can be reduced to human values and purposes. To the extent that Daoism is prescriptive, it is so not by articulating rules to follow or asserting the existence of some underlying moral principle, but by describing the conduct of an achieved human being – the sage (shengren) or the Authentic Person (zhenren) – as a recommended object of emulation. The model for this human ideal, in turn, is the orderly, elegant and harmonious processes of nature. Throughout the philosophical Daoist corpus, there is a ‘grand’ analogy established in the shared vocabulary used to describe the conduct of the achieved human being on the one hand, and the harmony achieved in the mutual accomodations of natural phenomena on the other. The perceived order is an achievement, not a given. Because dao is an emergent, ‘bottom-up’ order rather than something imposed, the question is: what is the optimal relationship between de and dao, between a particular and its environing conditions? The Daoist response is the self-dispositioning of particulars into relationships which allow the fullest degree of self-disclosure and development. In the Daoist literature, this kind of optimally appropriate action is often described as wuwei, ‘not acting wilfully’, ‘acting naturally’ or ‘non-assertive activity’. Wuwei, then, is the negation of that kind of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ which requires that a particular sacrifice its own integrity in acting on behalf of something ‘other’, a negation of that kind of engagement that makes something false to itself. Wuwei activity ‘characterizes’ – that is, produces the character or ethos of – an aesthetically contrived composition. There is no ideal, no closed perfectedness. Ongoing creative achievement itself provides novel possibilities for a richer creativity. Wuwei activity is thus fundamentally qualitative: an aesthetic category and, only derivatively, an ethical one. Wuwei can be evaluated on aesthetic grounds, allowing that some relationships are more productively wuwei than others. Some relationships are more successful than others in maximizing the creative possibilities of oneself in one’s environments. This classical Daoist aesthetic, while articulated in these early texts with inimitable flavour and imagination, was, like most philosophical anarchisms, too intangible and impractical to ever be a serious contender as a formal structure for social and political order. In the early years of the Han dynasty (206bc–ad 220), there was an attempt in the Huainanzi to encourage the Daoist sense of ethos by tempering the lofty ideals with a functional practicality. It appropriates a syncretic political framework as a compromise for promoting a kind of practicable Daoism – an anarchism within expedient bounds. While historically the Huainanzi fell on deaf ears, it helped to set a pattern for the Daoist contribution to Chinese culture across the sweep of history. Over and over again, in the currency of anecdote and metaphor, identifiably Daoist sensibilities would be expressed through a range of theoretical structures and social grammars, from military strategies, to the dialectical progress of distinctively Chinese schools of Buddhism, to the constantly changing face of poetics and art. It can certainly be argued that the richest models of Confucianism, represented as the convergence of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism itself, were an attempt to integrate Confucian concerns with human community with the broader Daoist commitment to an ecologically sensitive humanity.

Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader shares, at least tacitly, many of the assumptions underlying that tradition. However, no such commonalities can be assumed in attempting to introduce Asian thinking to Western readers. Until the first Jesuit incursions in the late sixteenth century, China had developed in virtual independence of the Indo-European cultural experience and China and the Western world remained in almost complete ignorance of one another. The dramatic contrast between Chinese and Western modes of philosophic thinking may be illustrated by the fact that the tendency of European philosophers to seek out the being of things, the essential reality lying behind appearances, would meet with little sympathy among Chinese thinkers, whose principal interests lie in the establishment and cultivation of harmonious relationships within their social ambiance. Contrasted with Anglo-European philosophic traditions, the thinking of the Chinese is far more concrete, this-worldly and, above all, practical. One reason for this difference is suggested by the fact that cosmogonic and cosmological myths played such a minor role in the development of Chinese intellectual culture and that, as a consequence, Chinese eyes were focused not upon issues of cosmic order but upon more mundane questions of how to achieve communal harmony within a relatively small social nexus. The rather profound linguistic and ethnic localism of what Pliny the Elder described as a ‘stay-at-home’ China, reinforced by a relative freedom from intercultural contact, generated traditional radial communities in which moral, aesthetic and spiritual values could remain relatively implicit and unarticulated. By contrast, in the West these norms had to be abstracted and raised to the level of consciousness to adjudicate conflicts occasioned by the complex ethnic and linguistic interactions associated with the development of a civilization rooted almost from the beginning in the confluence of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin civilizations. The distinctive origins and histories of Chinese and Western civilizations are manifested in a number of important ways. The priority of logical reasoning in the West is paralleled in China by the prominence of less formal uses of analogical, parabolic and literary discourse. The Chinese are largely indifferent to abstract analyses that seek to maintain an objective perspective, and are decidedly anthropocentric in their motivations for the acquisition, organization and transmission of knowledge. The disinterest in dispassionate speculations upon the nature of things, and a passionate commitment to the goal of social harmony was dominant throughout most of Chinese history. Indeed, the interest in logical speculations on the part of groups such as the sophists and the later Mohists was short-lived in classical China. The concrete, practical orientation of the Chinese toward the aim of communal harmony conditioned their approach toward philosophical differences. Ideological conflicts were seen, not only by the politicians but by the intellectuals themselves, to threaten societal well-being. Harmonious interaction was finally more important to these thinkers than abstract issues of who had arrived at the ‘truth’. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the way the Chinese handled their theoretical conflicts is to be found in mutual accommodation of the three emergent traditions of Chinese culture, Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 bc–ad 220), the diverse themes inherited from the competing ‘hundred schools’ of pre-imperial China were harmonized within Confucianism as it ascended to become the state ideology. From the Han synthesis until approximately the tenth century ad, strong Buddhist and religious Daoist influences continued to compete with persistent Confucian themes, while from the eleventh century to the modern period, Neoconfucianism – a Chinese neoclassicism – absorbed into itself these existing tensions and those that would emerge as China, like it or not, confronted Western civilization. In the development of modern China, when Western influence at last seemed a permanent part of Chinese culture, the values of traditional China have remained dominant. For a brief period, intellectual activity surrounding the May Fourth movement in 1919 seemed to be leading the Chinese into directions of Western philosophic interest. Visits by Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, coupled with a large number of Chinese students seeking education in Europe, Great Britain and the USA, promised a new epoch in China’s relations with the rest of the world. However, the Marxism that Mao Zedong sponsored in China was ‘a Western heresy with which to confront the West’. Mao’s Marxism quickly took on a typically ‘Chinese’ flavour, and China’s isolation from Western intellectual currents continued essentially unabated.

With the recent proliferation of service-oriented architectures (SOA), cloud computing technologies, and distributed-interconnected systems, distributed fusion is taking on a larger role in a variety of applicationsfrom environmental monitoring and crisis management to intelligent buildings and defense. Drawing on the work of leading experts around the world, Distributed Data Fusion for Network-Centric Operations examines the state of the art of data fusion in a distributed sensing, communications, and computing environment. Get Insight into Designing and Implementing Data Fusion in a Distributed Network Addressing the entirety of information fusion, the contributors cover everything from signal and image processing, through estimation, to situation awareness. In particular, the work offers a timely look at the issues and solutions involving fusion within a distributed network enterprise. These include critical design problems, such as how to maintain a pedigree of agents or nodes that receive information, provide their contribution to the dataset, and pass to other network components. The book also tackles dynamic data sharing within a network-centric enterprise, distributed fusion effects on state estimation, graph-theoretic methods to optimize fusion performance, human engineering factors, and computer ontologies for higher levels of situation assessment. A comprehensive introduction to this emerging field and its challenges, the book explores how data fusion can be used within grid, distributed, and cloud computing architectures. Bringing together both theoretical and applied research perspectives, this is a valuable reference for fusion researchers and practitioners. It offers guidance and insight for those working on the complex issues of designing and implementing distributed, decentralized information fusion.