Academic literature on the topic 'Shorting fee'

Abstract. Slots in metallic ground planes are very promising candidates for conformal antenna applications. However, a low-profile unidirectional antenna requires a back reflector close to the slot and the resulting stripline feed causes strong excitation of parallel-plate modes. In this contribution, we consider unidirectional reflector-backed slot configurations with parallel-plate mode suppression by shorting pins. Starting from a parametric study with respect to shorting pin location and back reflector distance, we present a stripline-fed rectangular slot element with radiation efficiency of more than 80% and a bandwidth of about 5% at centre frequency 10GHz. A careful optimisation of shorting pin locations guarantees reliable parallel-plate mode suppression without deteriorating the slot radiation behaviour. Coupling coefficients between parallel and aligned rectangular slot elements are presented. For increased bandwidth applications, a bow-tie slot element with about 8% bandwidth and radiation efficiency of close to 80% is proposed.

This paper presents a social spider optimization (SSO) design of a small-size microstrip antenna. Two antenna miniaturization techniques, based on the use of a Koch fractal contour and a shorting post (connecting the patch to the ground plane), are combined to enable a major size reduction. The antenna is inset fed by a microstrip line. The developed SSO algorithm is used to find out the best radius and position of the shorting post and the length of the inset feed, to achieve the desired resonant frequency with good impedance matching. Antenna prototypes have been fabricated and measured. The good agreement obtained between numerical simulation and experimental results has validated the design procedure. Compared with a conventional rectangular patch, the antenna resonance frequency is reduced from 2.45 GHz to 730 MHz, which corresponds to a remarkable miniaturization of about 70%. The proposed antenna is suitable for applications in the 700-800 MHz frequency range, such as 4G mobile communication systems.

<p>A microstrip dipole UHF-RFID tag antenna that can be mounted on metal object is presented in this paper. The antenna, which has a very simple structure without any shorting pin and shorting plate, is composed of ladder feed line, rectangular loop, capacitive tip-loading and T-match structure. The insertion of ground plane in the tag antenna design reduces the negative impact of metal object to the performance of the tag antenna. The tag is designed to operate in the Malaysia frequency range with the center frequency of 921 MHz. The performance of the tag is evaluated through simulation and measurement in terms of impedance matching, antenna reflection coefficient and tag reading range. The measured reading range obtained when the tag is in free air and on metal object is 2.3 m and 2.2 m respectively.</p>

In this work a complex structured shorted vias microstrip leaky wave antenna is designed and analysed. A Leaky wave antenna is a travelling wave structure with complex propagation constant. When shorting vias are loaded in a periodic structure the fundamental resonant mode shows some stop band characteristics and some of the modes will strongly attenuated. Three different types of iterations are examined in this work with and without defected ground structures. The defected ground structure based leaky wave antennas are showing better performance characteristics with respect to efficiency and phase. A micro strip line feeding with impedance of 50 ohms at both ports are providing excellent impedance matching to the conducting path on the microstrip surface. The shorting vias are suppressing certain higher order frequency bands and providing excellent wide band characteristics with low loss.

In this work a complex structured shorted vias microstrip leaky wave antenna is designed and analysed. A Leaky wave antenna is a travelling wave structure with complex propagation constant. When shorting vias are loaded in a periodic structure the fundamental resonant mode shows some stop band characteristics and some of the modes will strongly attenuated. Three different types of iterations are examined in this work with and without defected ground structures. The defected ground structure based leaky wave antennas are showing better performance characteristics with respect to efficiency and phase. A micro strip line feeding with impedance of 50 ohms at both ports are providing excellent impedance matching to the conducting path on the microstrip surface. The shorting vias are suppressing certain higher order frequency bands and providing excellent wide band characteristics with low loss.

Time-series power flow simulations are consecutive power flow calculations on each time step of a set of load and generation profiles that represent the time horizon under which a network needs to be analyzed. These simulations are one of the fundamental tools to carry out cost-benefit analyses of grid planing and operation strategies in the presence of distributed energy resources, unfortunately, their execution time is quite substantial. In the specific case of cost-benefit analyses the execution time of time-series power flow simulations can easily become excessive, as typical time horizons are in the order of a year and different scenarios need to be compared, which results in time-series simulations that require a rather large number of individual power flow calculations. It is often the case that only a set of aggregated simulation outputs is required for assessing grid operation costs, examples of which are total network losses, power exchange through MV/LV substation transformers, and total power provision from PV generators. Exploring alternatives to running time-series power flow simulations with complete input data that can produce approximations of the required results with a level of accuracy that is suitable for cost-benefit analyses but that require less time to compute can thus be beneficial. This thesis explores and compares different methods for shortening time-series power flow simulations based on reducing the amount of input data and thus the required number of individual power flow calculations, and focuses its attention on two of them: one consists in reducing the time resolution of the input profiles through downsampling while the other consists in finding similar time steps in the input profiles through vector quantization and simulating them only once. The results show that considerable execution time reductions and sufficiently accurate results can be obtained with both methods, but vector quantization requires much less data to produce the same level of accuracy as downsampling. Vector quantization delivers a far superior trade-off between data reduction, time savings, and accuracy when the simulations consider voltage control or when more than one simulation with the same input data is required, as in such cases the data reduction process can be carried out only once. One disadvantage of this method is that it does not reproduce peak values in the result profiles with accuracy, which is due to the way downsampling disregards certain time steps in the input profiles and to the averaging effect vector quantization has on the them. This disadvantage makes the simulations shortened through these methods less precise, for example, for detecting voltage violations.

Over the past few decades, there has been a revolution in the approach to scale development. Called item response theory (IRT), this approach challenges the notion that scales must be long in order to be reliable, and that psychometric properties of a scale derived from one group of people cannot be applied to different groups. This chapter provides an introduction to IRT, and discusses how it can be used to develop scales and to shorten existing scales that have been developed using the more traditional approach of classical test theory. IRT also can result in scales that have interval-level properties, unlike those derived from classical test theory. Further, it allows people to be compared to one another, even though they may have completed different items, allowing for computer-adapted testing. The chapter concludes by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of IRT.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

AbstractThe rate of genetic gain in wheat improvement programs must improve to meet the challenge of feeding a growing population. Future wheat varieties will need to produce record high yields to feed an anticipated 25% more inhabitants on this planet by 2050. The current rate of genetic gain is slow and cropping systems are facing unprecedented fluctuations in production. This instability stems from major changes in climate and evolving pests and diseases. Rapid genetic improvement is essential to optimise crop performance under such harsh conditions. Accelerating breeding cycles shows promise for increasing the rate of genetic gain over time. This can be achieved by concurrent integration of cutting-edge technologies into breeding programs, such as speed breeding (SB), doubled haploid (DH) technology, high-throughput phenotyping platforms and genomic selection (GS). These technologies empower wheat breeders to keep the pace with increasing food demand by developing more productive and robust varieties sooner. In this chapter, strategies for shortening the wheat breeding cycle are discussed, along with the opportunity to integrate technologies to further accelerate the rate of genetic gain in wheat breeding programs.

AbstractEven after a decade of use, CAR-T cell therapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is still evolving, and disease control is now the main concern in the majority of experienced centres. Indeed, despite highly appealing objective response (OR) rates in refractory patients, the long-term overall survival (OS) of this population has only slightly improved. Pivotal studies have suggested that 2-year OS rates do not surpass 30%, even though results improve when complete response (CR) is achieved within the first 3 months after treatment (Wang et al. 2020; Schuster et al. 2019; Neelapu et al. 2017). Although achieving this exceptionally high level of OR is praiseworthy, similar improvements have not been made regarding OS, and current OS probabilities are not satisfactory. Of course, there are multiple reasons for this; a substantial proportion of patients either do not achieve an initial response or experience progression very soon after treatment, with poor OS (Chow et al. 2019). Both populations present with disease burden or aggressive cancer prior to CAR-T cell therapy, possibly having been referred too late in the course of treatment or waited too long before CAR-T cells were processed for them. Both of these issues have potential solutions, such as more widely publicizing the efficacy of CAR-T cells, which may increase referrals at an earlier stage, and developing methods, which are already being heavily investigated, for shortening the manufacturing process (Rafiq et al. 2020). In the latter case, the use of allogeneic lymphocytes could allow for already prepared cells to be readily used when needed and would most likely be the most efficient strategy as long as the risk of graft-versus host disease is offset (Graham and Jozwik 2018). Thus, achieving CR is a crucial step in increasing OS, as patients with partial response (PR) or stable disease (SD) present with lower OS, while currently, recurrence appears to be rare when CR is maintained for more than 6 months (Komanduri 2021). However, the disease will likely recur in more than half of patients in the months following treatment, possibly due to issues such as the poor persistence of CAR-T cells (which may not be as crucial as once thought for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (Komanduri 2021)) or the loss of target antigen expression (which has been regularly documented (Rafiq et al. 2020)). Both of these mechanisms could potentially be used to develop methods that reduce recurrence after CAR-T cell therapy. In fact, the most popular approaches currently being investigated are attempting to either use two CAR-T cell types that each target different antigens or to create CAR-T cell constructs that target either multiple antigens or an antigen other than CD19 (Shah et al. 2020). The concomitant infusion of CAR-T cells with targeted therapies is also being explored in other B-cell malignancies and appears to both increase the CR rate and decrease recurrence (Gauthier et al. 2020). When recurrence does occur, patient OS is rather dismal, and the best remaining option would most likely be inclusion in a clinical trial. If this option is not available, salvage therapy may be attempted, although cytotoxic treatments are extremely limited given that most diseases have been refractory to numerous lines of treatment prior to immunotherapy. A few case reports and studies with a small patient population receiving anti-PD-1 antibodies, ibrutinib, or ImiDs have been reported with largely anecdotal supporting evidence (Byrne et al. 2019). However, even in the case of a new objective response (OR), the subsequent risk of recurrence is substantial and may invite further consolidation with allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (Byrne et al. 2019), which has already been performed in patients treated for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (Hay et al. 2019). However, the efficacy of this strategy remains to be validated in NHL patients in clinical trials. Further supporting evidence, although limited, has recently been reported concerning an additional treatment with CAR-T cells inducing an OR. Of the 21 NHL patients included in the study, the OR rate after the second infusion was 52% (CR, n = 4; PR, n = 7), with some durable responses inviting further investigations (Gauthier et al. 2021). Overall, with such poor outcomes after recurrence, current efforts are also focused on predicting the patients most likely to experience disease progression and that are potential candidates for preemptive consolidation therapy, although there is no doubt that patients who do not achieve a rapid CR should be the first candidates. Additionally, immune monitoring should encompass not only CAR-T cell survival but also the detection of circulating tumour DNA (Komanduri 2021) because this could aid in detecting subclinical recurrence and in deciding whether consolidation or maintenance therapy should be administered. However, currently, all these approaches are highly speculative and require further clinical study.

Gut strings sound, feel and react very differently to today’s strings. At the heart of this lesson is the need for a constant two-way flow of information between the ear and the hand, for which both must be in a state of total awareness. The strings are in a constant state of flux, shortening and lengthening as the hand moves around the fingerboard, and responding to the needs of the music with its continual shifts of dynamics. The seven exercises in this lesson help the gut string novice establish a living relationship with the strings, testing their resistance via the bow and the fingers. This process has two phases, the Experimental Phase, in which the fingers, through tactile awareness, feel the string and gauge the correct amount of pressure for obtaining a clear, basic sound, and the Evaluation Phase, when the ear evaluates its resultant quality.

The word senescence is derived from the Latin word “senex” (meaning old). In biology, senescence is a process by which a cell ages and permanently stops dividing. Senescence is a natural universal phenomenon affecting all living organisms (e.g., humans, animals, and plants). It is the process of growing old (aging). The underlying mechanisms of senescence and aging at the cellular level are not fully understood. Senescence is a multifactorial process that can be induced by several stimuli including cellular stress, DNA damage, telomere shortening, and oncogene activation. The most popular theory to explain aging is the free radical theory. Senescence plays a role in the development of several age-related chronic diseases in humans (e.g., ischemic heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer). Lifespan is a biological characteristic of every species. The lifespan of living organisms ranges from few hours (with mayfly) to potential eternity (with jellyfish and hydra). The maximum theoretical lifespan in humans is around 120 years. The lifespan in humans is influenced by multiple factors including genetic, epigenetic, lifestyle, environmental, metabolic, and endocrine factors. There are several ways to potentially extend the lifespan of humans and eventually surpass the maximum theoretical lifespan of 120 years. The tools that can be proposed include lifestyle, reduction of several life-threatening diseases and disabilities, hormonal replacement, antioxidants, autophagy inducers, senolytic drugs, stem cell therapy, and gene therapy.

<em>Abstract</em>.-The location of the spawning grounds of the three species of <em>Anguilla </em>that occur in New Zealand and Australia, shortfin eel <em>A. australis</em>, Australian longfin eel <em>A. dieffenbachii</em>, and Australian longfin eel (also known as speckled longfin eel) <em>A. reinhardtii</em>, are unknown. No larvae of New Zealand longfin eels have been collected, and too few shortfin eel and speckled longfin eel larvae have been collected to use conventional back-tracking of progressively smaller larvae to determine likely spawning areas. The limited larval material together with results from satellite tracking pop-up tags from New Zealand longfin eels indicate that spawning of all three species will be in the tropics, and possible areas were further demarcated by developing a Lagrangian trajectory model based on surface currents derived from hydrography, satellite altimetry, and wind stress. The initial model assumed passive drift of larvae, a third of the total time spent in near-surface layers, and arrival within the larval lifetimes indicated by ages of metamorphosing glass eels. The proportion of successful trajectories enabling arrival offshore of New Zealand or Australia was substantially improved by addition to the model of directed swimming of the larvae towards a destination. The model indicated that possible spawning areas for all three species would be in the northeast of New Caledonia, perhaps within the North Fiji basin between Vanuatu and Fiji. Spawning within this region is consistent with the locations of known larvae, probable migration routes, and the distribution of adult eels in both countries.

Globalization in international research and development is changing the way universities need to educate and train students. As universities prepare their graduates for the needs of the 21st century and the global market economy, they face significant pressure to overhaul their well-established traditional curriculums and adapt the conventional delivery of course materials to new methodologies appropriate for the cooperative environment. Engineering Science is an emerging area with the potential to provide graduates with the skills needed to meet the challenges of complex designs of cyber-physical systems and shorten their time to market window. To ensure that university graduates are prepared to meet the challenges of a global market, the instructional methodology needs to be broadened. Such technology-enhanced learning is required to provide engineering students with the skills, tools, and training needed to verify and validate the details of complex cyber-physical systems designs and to understand the risk involved in development of inaccurate models. The results obtained from the accurate models can be analyzed to ensure the design of a cyber-physical system will be error-free and the system developed will perform according to the design specification and requirements.

The cultivated strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) is derived from Fragaria chiloensis and Fragaria virginiana species a few centuries ago, and it is one of the most preferred and consumed berries all over the world because of its a good source in terms of many nutritional elements. Strawberry has high genetic variability and adaptation to different environmental conditions due to its highly heterozygous nature. In the last decades, many farmers, breeders, researchers even consumers have started to focus on berry quality traits such as large fruit, uniform shape, high fruit firmness, high fruit sensorial quality (aroma contents), color, gloss, and resistance to pathogens. Thus, the development of novel strawberry cultivars or genotypes with high nutritionally quality traits has become one of the main aims in strawberry breeding programs. Biotechnological tools such as the identification of quantitative trait loci (QTL) and marker-assisted selection (MAS) are the most widely used technologies in fruit breeding programs for shortening the breeding period. Identification of QTLs in agnomical important traits are very valuable tools for early selection in strawberry breeding programs. This chapter is focused on QTL and marker assisted breeding studies in strawberry to date and provides new perspectives on molecular breeding in strawberry breeding.

ABSTRACT The paleogeographic evolution of the western U.S. Great Basin from the Late Cretaceous to the Cenozoic is critical to understanding how the North American Cordillera at this latitude transitioned from Mesozoic shortening to Cenozoic extension. According to a widely applied model, Cenozoic extension was driven by collapse of elevated crust supported by crustal thicknesses that were potentially double the present ~30–35 km. This model is difficult to reconcile with more recent estimates of moderate regional extension (≤50%) and the discovery that most high-angle, Basin and Range faults slipped rapidly ca. 17 Ma, tens of millions of years after crustal thickening occurred. Here, we integrated new and existing geochronology and geologic mapping in the Elko area of northeast Nevada, one of the few places in the Great Basin with substantial exposures of Paleogene strata. We improved the age control for strata that have been targeted for studies of regional paleoelevation and paleoclimate across this critical time span. In addition, a regional compilation of the ages of material within a network of middle Cenozoic paleodrainages that developed across the Great Basin shows that the age of basal paleovalley fill decreases southward roughly synchronous with voluminous ignimbrite flareup volcanism that swept south across the region ca. 45–20 Ma. Integrating these data sets with the regional record of faulting, sedimentation, erosion, and magmatism, we suggest that volcanism was accompanied by an elevation increase that disrupted drainage systems and shifted the continental divide east into central Nevada from its Late Cretaceous location along the Sierra Nevada arc. The north-south Eocene–Oligocene drainage divide defined by mapping of paleovalleys may thus have evolved as a dynamic feature that propagated southward with magmatism. Despite some local faulting, the northern Great Basin became a vast, elevated volcanic tableland that persisted until dissection by Basin and Range faulting that began ca. 21–17 Ma. Based on this more detailed geologic framework, it is unlikely that Basin and Range extension was driven by Cretaceous crustal overthickening; rather, preexisting crustal structure was just one of several factors that that led to Basin and Range faulting after ca. 17 Ma—in addition to thermal weakening of the crust associated with Cenozoic magmatism, thermally supported elevation, and changing boundary conditions. Because these causal factors evolved long after crustal thickening ended, during final removal and fragmentation of the shallowly subducting Farallon slab, they are compatible with normal-thickness (~45–50 km) crust beneath the Great Basin prior to extension and do not require development of a strongly elevated, Altiplano-like region during Mesozoic shortening.

This paper focuses on shortening drill-movement time in an X-Y plane. Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been applied to determine a moving route of Printed Wiring Board (PWB) hole arrangements. Thus, some papers dealt with shortening the calculating time and increasing the accuracy of the TSP method to obtain the shortest route in geometrical problems. However, considering both the characteristics of PWB hole arrangements and the feed-control characteristics of machine tools, the shortest route for geometrical problems by TSP is not always in agreement with that of the moving time problem. Therefore, we propose a CAM system for PWB drilling considering the feed-control characteristics of machine tools using a new TSP method to obtain the shortest moving time.

The changeover from eutectic Sn-Pb solder to lead-free solder (Sn-Ag-Cu) has been driven by environmental concerns in the last few years. In this study, in order to obtain the low-cycle fatigue characteristic of Sn-Ag-Cu lead-free solder joints, an isothermal mechanical fatigue test with a large strain range, which can clarify the crack generation process and shorten the examination time, was carried out. FEM analysis was also performed in order to evaluate the relationship between the inelastic strain range and the low-cycle fatigue life. As a result, compared with fatigue life longer than 1000 cycles, the scatter of the fatigue cycles from 100 to several hundred cycles becomes larger. So, it seems that it is necessary to carefully evaluate the low-cycle fatigue life in the reliability evaluation. Moreover, in large chip components, not only crack initiation, but also crack propagation, affects the failure life. Thus, the crack path was simulated and the failure cycle of the large chip was evaluated based on Miner’s rule, and reliability of including the fatigue crack propagation can be evaluated by the analytical approach.

Review question / Objective: The type of study was clinical randomized controlled trial (RCT). The object of study is the patients with HFMD. There is no limit to gender and race. In the case of clear diagnosis standard, curative effect judgment standard and consistent baseline treatment, the experimental group was treated with pure oral liquid of traditional Chinese medicine(A: Fuganlin oral liquid, B: huangzhihua oral liquid, C: Lanqin oral liquid, D: antiviral oral liquid, E: Huangqin oral liquid, F: Pudilan oral liquid, G: Shuanghuanglian oral liquid.)and the control group was treated with ribavirin or any oral liquid of traditional Chinese medicine. The data were extracted by two researchers independently, cross checked and reviewed according to the pre-determined tables. The data extraction content is (1) Basic information (including the first author, published journal and year, research topic). (2) Relevant information (including number of cases, total number of cases, gender, age, intervention measures, course of treatment of the experimental group and the control group in the literature). (3) Design type and quality evaluation information of the included literature. (4) Outcome measures (effective rate, healing time of oral ulcer, regression time of hand and foot rash, regression time of fever, adverse reactions.). The seven traditional Chinese medicine oral liquids are comparable in clinical practice, but their actual clinical efficacy is lack of evidence-based basis. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to use the network meta-analysis method to integrate the clinical relevant evidence of direct and indirect comparative relationship, to make quantitative comprehensive statistical analysis and sequencing of different oral liquid of traditional Chinese medicine with the same evidence body for the treatment of the disease, and then to explore the advantages and disadvantages of the efficacy and safety of different oral liquid of traditional Chinese medicine to get the best treatment plan, so as to provide reference value and evidence-based medicine evidence for clinical optimization of drug selection. Condition being studied: Hand foot mouth disease (HFMD) is a common infectious disease in pediatrics caused by a variety of enteroviruses. Its clinical manifestations are mainly characterized by persistent fever, hand foot rash, oral herpes, ulcers, etc. Because it is often found in preschool children, its immune system development is not perfect, so it is very vulnerable to infection by pathogens and epidemic diseases, resulting in rapid progress of the disease. A few patients will also have neurogenic pulmonary edema Meningitis, myocarditis and other serious complications even lead to death, so effectively improve the cure rate, shorten the course of disease, prevent the deterioration of the disease as the focus of the study. In recent years, traditional Chinese medicine has played an important role in the research of antiviral treatment. Many clinical practices have confirmed that oral liquid of traditional Chinese medicine can effectively play the role of antiviral and improve the body's immunity.