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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we rapidly implemented a plasma coordination center, within two months, to support transfusion for two outpatient randomized controlled trials. The center design was based on an investigational drug services model and a Food and Drug Administration-compliant database to manage blood product inventory and trial safety.
Methods:
A core investigational team adapted a cloud-based platform to randomize patient assignments and track inventory distribution of control plasma and high-titer COVID-19 convalescent plasma of different blood groups from 29 donor collection centers directly to blood banks serving 26 transfusion sites.
Results:
We performed 1,351 transfusions in 16 months. The transparency of the digital inventory at each site was critical to facilitate qualification, randomization, and overnight shipments of blood group-compatible plasma for transfusions into trial participants. While inventory challenges were heightened with COVID-19 convalescent plasma, the cloud-based system, and the flexible approach of the plasma coordination center staff across the blood bank network enabled decentralized procurement and distribution of investigational products to maintain inventory thresholds and overcome local supply chain restraints at the sites.
Conclusion:
The rapid creation of a plasma coordination center for outpatient transfusions is infrequent in the academic setting. Distributing more than 3,100 plasma units to blood banks charged with managing investigational inventory across the U.S. in a decentralized manner posed operational and regulatory challenges while providing opportunities for the plasma coordination center to contribute to research of global importance. This program can serve as a template in subsequent public health emergencies.
We present the first of two papers dedicated to verifying the Australian Epoch of Reionisation pipeline (AusEoRPipe) through simulation. The AusEoRPipe aims to disentangle 21-cm radiation emitted by gas surrounding the very first stars from contaminating foreground astrophysical sources and has been in the development for close to a decade. In this paper, we build an accurate 21-cm sky model that can be used by the WODEN simulation software to create visibilities containing a predictable 21-cm signal. We verify that the power spectrum (PS) estimator CHIPS can recover this signal in the absence of foregrounds. We also investigate how measurements in Fourier-space are correlated and how their gridded density affects the PS. We measure and fit for this effect using Gaussian-noise simulations of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) phase I layout. We find a gridding density correction factor of 2.651 appropriate for integrations equal to or greater than 30 minutes of data, which contain observations with multiple primary beam pointings and LSTs. Paper II of this series will use the results of this paper to test the AusEoRPipe in the presence of foregrounds and instrumental effects.
As we have noted, two major interpretive challenges confront the exegete of 1 Corinthians 7, the first concerns reconstructing the question that the Corinthians raised to Paul and their motivations for asking it, and the second concerns understanding the relationship between the two major parts of the chapter introduced by περὶ δέ, 7:1–24 and 7:25–40, relative to the Corinthians’ question. The present chapter will examine a select series of essential preliminary questions before offering a proposal on the two major cruces interpretum.
For a variety of reasons, it is often presumed that the ancient Mediterranean world of Roman Corinth was a culture of near universal marriage. Peter Laslett, for example, classified household composition in traditional Europe into four broad categories based on geographical region: the West, the West/central, the Mediterranean, and the East.1 The Mediterranean household in Laslett’s typology (including Greece and what was Roman Corinth) was characterized by high proportions of both male and female marrying and a low proportion of solitary households.2 From her extensive analysis of Roman sources, Susan Treggiari also has concluded that there was a strong cultural disposition toward marriage and it was rare for a man to reach age sixty without having married, at least among the propertied classes.3 The case has been further bolstered by later studies and some demographic modelling from the same period.4
Having considered vital aspects of the shape of secular singleness in the Roman world, we turn attention now to examine Paul’s interaction in 1 Corinthians 7 on topics related to marriage and singleness. As we have observed, a major challenge of the chapter is evident in the opening clause: Περὶ δὲ ὧν ἐγράψατε (‘Now concerning the matters about which you wrote’), which indicates that what follows is Paul’s response to a question raised by his addressees. Any interpretation of the chapter requires some reconstruction of what the Corinthians had asked or written and the motivations they had for doing so. The resulting interpretation must also cohere with both the literary context of the remaining Corinthian correspondence and the historical-cultural context of the first-century Corinthian world.
The overall aim of the present study has been to advance the understanding of Paul’s discussion of singleness and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 by offering a fresh reconstruction of the Corinthian context in light of secular Graeco-Roman singleness. The intent of this project has been to develop further the proposal advocated by Will Deming that the fundamental basis for discussion between Paul and the Corinthians was the secular Graeco-Roman marriage question apart from ascetic motivations. We have done so first by extending the literary discussion to examine the Greek marriage debate beyond a strictly Stoic-Cynic caricature. We have also examined literary and non-literary evidence in support of the likelihood that a non-trivial unmarried population existed at Corinth generally. As a framework for considering factors that likely would have motivated first-century secular singleness, we have employed Ruth Dixon’s three variables for analysing the timing and quantity of nuptiality among various populations: the desirability of marriage, the availability of mates, and the feasibility of marriage. Based on the findings of the sources, we have proposed a non-ascetic reading of the text that resolves the lynchpin exegetical difficulty that primarily accounts for why interpreters have continued to ascribe ascetic motivations to the Corinthians – the statement in 7:1b, ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman’.
Given the proposed resolution of two major interpretive cruces in 1 Corinthians 7, we proceed next to show how the reconstruction provides an improved reading for the chapter as a whole. Here we show how the details of the chapter support the reconstruction and how the reconstruction improves our understanding of the text.
Paul’s discussion of marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 has long presented interpreters with an array of exegetical challenges. As William M. Ramsay once acknowledged, ‘There are not many passages in Paul’s writings that have given rise to so many divergent and incorrect views as this chapter.’1 A fundamental crux interpretum arises with the opening words of the chapter, ‘Now concerning the matters about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman.’ Paul is clearly responding to previous non-extant correspondence of the Corinthians, but the reader must make some conjecture of what the situation was that prompted the Corinthians to write to Paul, and the primary nature of their concern, whether it concerned their marital status or sexual behaviour. A related question is whether the statement in 7:1b, ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman’ reflects the Corinthians’ viewpoint, Paul’s viewpoint, both, or neither. A second major difficulty arises concerning the relationship of the issue that Paul responds to in 7:1 with the issue apparent in 7:25–26 that reflects very similar language. The latter may be an entirely separate concern or interconnected in some direct way to the prior. However readers navigate through the parts of the chapter, they are forced to proceed with some rudimentary reconstruction of what is prompting the overall discussion to which Paul responds. Such a reconstruction requires placing the Corinthians within some context with regard to how they thought about sexuality, singleness, and marriage and the motivations that prompted them to raise the questions they did with the apostle.
In his Progymnasmata, the first-century rhetorician, Aelius Theon, observes that as an exercise of verbal inquiry, thesis is to be differentiated from topos. Theon explains that whereas topos is an amplification of some matter of agreement, thesis admits controversy, such as whether one should marry or whether one should have children.1 Theon was not alone among rhetoricians of the Imperial period in using marriage to illustrate the bifurcated nature of rhetorical thesis.2 The Ars rhetorica indicates that the thesis of the desirability of marriage was assigned to young students for writing more often than any other subject.3