Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia

Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia – two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery – this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful stylization and reconfiguration of what the local means. On the other hand, they engage in stylization and reflexive language use, often involving exaggerated linguistic variation, mixing, and other semiotic resources in order to produce and perform a range of social and cultural identities. The paper hence shows how the circulation and takeup of popular cultural flows around Asia can involve diverse processes of linguistic and cultural stylization.     

The attributable estimand: A new approach to account for intercurrent events

The term “intercurrent events” has recently been used to describe events in clinical trials that may complicate the definition and calculation of the treatment effect estimand. This paper focuses on the use of an attributable estimand to address intercurrent events. Those events that are considered to be adversely related to randomized treatment (eg, discontinuation due to adverse events or lack of efficacy) are considered attributable and handled with a composite estimand strategy, while a hypothetical estimand strategy is used for intercurrent events not considered to be related to randomized treatment (eg, unrelated adverse events). We explore several options for how to implement this approach and compare them to hypothetical “efficacy” and treatment policy estimand strategies through a series of simulation studies whose design is inspired by recent trials in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and we illustrate through an analysis of a recently completed COPD trial.