600 years ago China was the greatest maritime nation in the world, but after the voyages of Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty withdrew from the sea, and China reverted to its traditional focus on ..."continental" interests. Today China is going back to sea. China's "Great Leap Outward" onto the world's oceans is visible in its growing merchant marine; rise in the global shipbuilding market; and efforts to develop a "blue water" navy. This paper will examine how, starting with Deng Xiaoping's reforms in 1978, China has developed a comprehensive strategy for maritime growth. China's return to the sea will be analyzed under these headings: 1) China has created "treasure fleets" of Chinese built and operated ships to carry China's trade, projected at $1 trillion by 2020. Chinese companies are building ports and providing management services as far afield as Greece and Panama. 2) Shipbuilding has been so successful that China's goal is to become the world's merchant shipbuilding leader by 2015. 3) China has created Asia's largest navy, building a "blue-water" navy to operate on the open ocean. 4) A "navalist" party has emerged, with the theories of Mahan added to the curriculum for military education of Peoples Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) officers. 5) When China has the ships, men, and money too, what will it do with its new maritime and naval capabilities? Do China's history, and world history, offer clues and parallels for what it may do once it becomes both a major shipping and naval power? The topic "The Great Leap Outward" fits the theme of China in World History. It will analyze China's maritime renaissance both 1) in the context of China's history and 2) in comparison to other states in the modern era that rose to become powers at sea. China, in fact, has a historical maritime heritage that long predates the modern period e.g., Chinese ships first entered the Indian Ocean when sailors of the Wu kingdom found a sea route to India via Southeast Asia. China's maritime spirit especially thrived under the southern Song, but there has always been a strong "continentalist" pull, and the debate over land/sea orientation continues today in the Peoples Republic. Second: comparisons will be made with states in the modern era that developed seapower as they rose to become great powers e.g., Germany and Japan. Is China following their footsteps, or is China unique in that it has developed a large merchant marine first, and only later is creating a navy to protect it, rather than building both simultaneously?
As an alternative fuel and hydrogen carrier, ammonia is believed to have good potential for future power generation. To explore the feasibility of co-firing ammonia with methane, studies involving ...robust numerical analyses with detailed chemistry are required to progress toward industrial implementation. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine a reduced mechanism for simulation studies of ammonia/methane combustion in practical gas turbine combustor conditions. First, five different-sized reduced mechanisms of the well-known Konnov’s mechanism were compared. The reduced mechanisms were tested for ignition delay time validation (zero dimensional) using ammonia/methane mixtures at high-pressure conditions relevant to gas turbine devices. Furthermore, the combustion products of ammonia/methane premixed laminar flames (one dimensional) were validated with the results from the full Konnov’s mechanism. Finally, computational fluid dynamics simulations of a turbulent flame (two dimensional) with all of the reduced mechanisms were performed under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions representative of industrial systems. Results show that several of the reduced mechanisms utilized performed reasonably well in combustion simulation studies under gas turbine conditions. Hence, a reaction mechanism with 48 species and 500 elementary reactions is recommended for future studies.
Ethyl levulinate (Ethyl 4-oxopentanoate) is a liquid molecule at ambient temperature, comprising of ketone and ethyl ester functionalities and is one of the prominent liquid fuel candidates that may ...be easily obtained from lignocellulosic biomass. The combustion kinetics of ethyl levulinate have been investigated. Shock tube and rapid compression machine apparatuses are utilised to acquire gas phase ignition delay measurements of 0.5% ethyl levulinate/O2 mixtures at ϕ = 1.0 and ϕ = 0.5 at ∼ 10 atm over the temperature range 1000–1400 K. Ethyl levulinate is observed not to ignite at temperatures lower than ∼1040 K in the rapid compression machine. The shock tube and rapid compression machine data are closely consistent and show ethyl levulinate ignition delay to exhibit an Arrhenius dependence to temperature. These measurements are explained by the construction and analysis of a detailed chemical kinetic model. The kinetic model is completed by establishing thermochemical-kinetic analogies to 2-butanone, for the ethyl levulinate ketone functionality, and to ethyl propanoate for the ethyl ester functionality. The so constructed model is observed to describe the shock tube data very accurately, but computes the rapid compression machine data set to a lesser but still applicable fidelity. Analysis of the model suggests the autooxidation mechanism of ethyl levulinate to be entirely dominated by the propensity for the ethyl ester functionality to unimolecularly decompose to form levulinic acid and ethylene. The subsequent reaction kinetics of these species is shown to dictate the overall rate of the global combustion reaction. This model is then use to estimate the Research and Motored Octane Numbers of ethyl levulinate to be ≥97.7 and ≥ 93, respectively. With this analysis ethyl levulinate would be best suited as a gasoline fuel component, rather than as a diesel fuel as suggested in the literature. Indeed it may be considered to be useful as an octane booster. The ethyl levulinate kinetic model is constructed within a state-of-the-art gasoline surrogate combustion kinetic model and is thus available as a tool with which to investigate the use of ethyl levulinate as a gasoline additive.
Patients with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer (BRPC) after radical prostatectomy and a short PSA doubling time are at risk for distant metastases. Apalutamide, an androgen receptor ...antagonist, and abiraterone acetate plus prednisone (AAP) prolong survival in the metastatic setting. We evaluated whether intensification of androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) improves outcomes in BRPC.
PRESTO is a randomized phase III, open-label trial in patients with BRPC and PSA doubling time ≤9 months (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03009981). Patients were randomly assigned 1:1:1 to receive a finite 52-week treatment course with ADT control, ADT + apalutamide, or ADT + apalutamide + AAP. The primary end point was PSA progression-free survival (PSA-PFS), defined as serum PSA >0.2 ng/mL after treatment completion.
Five hundred three patients were enrolled. The median PSA was 1.8 ng/mL (IQR, 1.0-3.6). At the first planned interim analysis, both experimental arms significantly prolonged PSA-PFS compared with the control arm (median, 24.9 months for ADT + apalutamide
20.3 months for ADT; hazard ratio HR, 0.52 95% CI, 0.35 to 0.77;
= .00047; median, 26.0 months for ADT + apalutamide + AAP
20.0 months for ADT; HR, 0.48 95% CI, 0.32 to 0.71;
= .00008). Median time to testosterone recovery did not differ across treatment arms. The most common grade ≥3 adverse event was hypertension (7.5%, 7.4%, and 18% in ADT, ADT + apalutamide, and ADT + apalutamide + AAP arms, respectively).
Intensified AR blockade for a finite duration prolongs PSA-PFS with a manageable safety profile, without adversely affecting time to testosterone recovery. The addition of apalutamide to ADT should be considered in patients with high-risk BRPC.
Daily 24-h sleep-wake cycles have important implications for health, however researcher preferences in choice and location of wearable devices for behavior measurement can make 24-h cycles difficult ...to estimate. Further, missing data due to device malfunction, improper initialization, and/or the participant forgetting to wear one or both devices can complicate construction of daily behavioral compositions. The Method for Activity Sleep Harmonization (MASH) is a process that harmonizes data from two different devices using data from women who concurrently wore hip (waking) and wrist (sleep) devices for ≥ 4 days.
MASH was developed using data from 1285 older community-dwelling women (ages: 60-72 years) who concurrently wore a hip-worn ActiGraph GT3X + accelerometer (waking activity) and a wrist-worn Actiwatch 2 device (sleep) for ≥ 4 days (N = 10,123 days) at the same time. MASH is a two-tiered process using (1) scored sleep data (from Actiwatch) or (2) one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D CNN) to create predicted wake intervals, reconcile sleep and activity data disagreement, and create day-level night-day-night pairings. MASH chooses between two different 1D CNN models based on data availability (ActiGraph + Actiwatch or ActiGraph-only). MASH was evaluated using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall curves and sleep-wake intervals are compared before (pre-harmonization) and after MASH application.
MASH 1D CNNs had excellent performance (ActiGraph + Actiwatch ROC-AUC = 0.991 and ActiGraph-only ROC-AUC = 0.983). After exclusions (partial wear n = 1285, missing sleep data proceeding activity data n = 269, and < 60 min sleep n = 9), 8560 days were used to show the utility of MASH. Of the 8560 days, 46.0% had ≥ 1-min disagreement between the devices or used the 1D CNN for sleep estimates. The MASH waking intervals were corrected (median minutes IQR: -27.0 -115.0, 8.0) relative to their pre-harmonization estimates. Most correction (-18.0 -93.0, 2.0 minutes) was due to reducing sedentary behavior. The other waking behaviors were reduced a median (IQR) of -1.0 (-4.0, 1.0) minutes.
Implementing MASH to harmonize concurrently worn hip and wrist devices can minimizes data loss and correct for disagreement between devices, ultimately improving accuracy of 24-h compositions necessary for time-use epidemiology.
In Christian civilization, the contest between crown and clergy ended in separation of church and state, but in its sibling it developed into "a malignant rivalry in which personal tyranny, ...accompanied by suppression of critical religious voices, developed as a self-fulfilling prophecy" (p. 62). Predicting that the next Islamic revitalization movements will come from the peripheries, he identifies the Islamic diaspora communities of America and Europe, democratic Islamic political parties in certain Muslim countries, and new religious universities in Indonesia and Turkey as sources that could generate the creativity and vitality to transform the Islam of the twenty-first century.
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