This thesis provides an innovative strategy for rail crack monitoring using the acoustic emission (AE) technique. The field study presented is a significant improvement on laboratory studies in the literature in terms of complex rail profile and crack conditions as well as high operational noise. AE waves induced by crack propagation, crack closure, wheel-rail impact and operational noise were obtained through a series of laboratory and field tests, and analyzed by wavelet transform (WT) and synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SWT). A wavelet power-based index and the enhanced SWT scalogram were sequentially proposed to classify AE waves induced by different mechanisms according to their energy distributions in the time-frequency domain. A novel crack sizing method taking advantage of crack closure-induced AE waves was developed based on fatigue tests in the laboratory. The propagation characteristics of AE waves in the rail were investigated, and Tsallis synchrosqueezed wavelet entropy (TSWE) with time was finally brought forward to detect and locate rail cracks in the field. The proposed strategy for detection, location and sizing of rail cracks helps to ensure the safe and smooth operation of the railway system. This thesis is of interest to graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the area of structural health monitoring.

Tu Youyou's Journey in the Search for Artemisinin is an autobiographical science book chronicling in detail the great experiences of Tu Youyou from her childhood to winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.As Tu Youyou is the first female scientist from China to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, this win created a sudden wave of interest in medicine, resulting in numerous autobiographical books about Tu Youyou appearing on the market. Contrary to these mass market titles, this book is uniquely different as it is fully authorized by the Nobel laureate herself. Her once-confidential experimental data and Artemisinin research reports are now revealed in this book for all to learn and comprehend. In addition, one of the book authors, Dr Wang Manyuan, is the only PhD student supervised by Professor Tu.Pharmaceutical researchers can use the book's valuable contents to reference, quote and analyse while searching for their own scientific inspirations. It also successfully serves as a guide for budding scientists and future Nobel Prize winners as it provides the proper guidance and methods of scientific research.

Tu Youyou's Journey in the Search for Artemisinin is an autobiographical science book chronicling in detail the great experiences of Tu Youyou from her childhood to winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.As Tu Youyou is the first female scientist from China to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, this win created a sudden wave of interest in medicine, resulting in numerous autobiographical books about Tu Youyou appearing on the market. Contrary to these mass market titles, this book is uniquely different as it is fully authorized by the Nobel laureate herself. Her once-confidential experimental data and Artemisinin research reports are now revealed in this book for all to learn and comprehend. In addition, one of the book authors, Dr Wang Manyuan, is the only PhD student supervised by Professor Tu.Pharmaceutical researchers can use the book's valuable contents to reference, quote and analyse while searching for their own scientific inspirations. It also successfully serves as a guide for budding scientists and future Nobel Prize winners as it provides the proper guidance and methods of scientific research.

This volume LNCS 14163 constitutes the refereed proceedings of 14th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2023, in Thessaloniki, Greece, during September 18–21, 2023.   The 10 full papers and one short paper included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The conference focuses on authorship attribution, fake news detection and news tracking, noise-detection in automatically transferred relevance judgments, impact of online education on children’s conversational search behavior, analysis of multi-modal social media content, knowledge graphs for sensitivity identification, a fusion of deep learning and logic rules for sentiment analysis, medical concept normalization and domain-specific information extraction. In addition to this, the volume presents 7 “Best of the labs� papers which were reviewed as full paper submissions with the same review criteria. 13 lab overview papers were accepted and represent scientific challenges based on new datasets and real world problems in multimodal and multilingual information access.

This thesis provides an innovative strategy for rail crack monitoring using the acoustic emission (AE) technique. The field study presented is a significant improvement on laboratory studies in the literature in terms of complex rail profile and crack conditions as well as high operational noise. AE waves induced by crack propagation, crack closure, wheel-rail impact and operational noise were obtained through a series of laboratory and field tests, and analyzed by wavelet transform (WT) and synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SWT). A wavelet power-based index and the enhanced SWT scalogram were sequentially proposed to classify AE waves induced by different mechanisms according to their energy distributions in the time-frequency domain. A novel crack sizing method taking advantage of crack closure-induced AE waves was developed based on fatigue tests in the laboratory. The propagation characteristics of AE waves in the rail were investigated, and Tsallis synchrosqueezed wavelet entropy (TSWE) with time was finally brought forward to detect and locate rail cracks in the field. The proposed strategy for detection, location and sizing of rail cracks helps to ensure the safe and smooth operation of the railway system. This thesis is of interest to graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the area of structural health monitoring.

Symposium Y, Functional Two-Dimensional Layered Materials, held at the 2011 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California, April 25 29, was the first MRS symposium to focus on graphene, topological insulator thin films, and other 2D and quasi-2D materials together, aiming to highlight breakthroughs, progress, and challenges in the synthesis, processing, structure, and assembly of 2D layered materials, and how these factors affect their properties and applications. The session topics included, materials synthesis and processing; structure and characterization; physical and chemical properties; electronic, thermal management and energy applications; topological insulators; and non-carbon 2D materials. This volume presents a selection of the papers given and provides an overview of the research topics and possible applications of 2D materials and related systems."

Triple bill of Japanese crime dramas directed by Takashi Miike. In 'Shinjuku Triad Society' (1995), when the Dragon's Claw gang from Taiwan attempts a take-over of the dope, extortion and prostitution rackets run by the ruling Japanese Yakuza, a lone cop predicts carnage. In a crusade against the gangs, the cop single-handedly attempts to stem the growing tide of violence. But, when he discovers that the cop's younger brother is in fact the lover of one of the gang leaders, chaos ensues. 'Rainy Dog' (1997) follows Yuuji (Shô Aikawa), a Japanese mobster holed up in Taipei working as a hitman for a Triad boss. Added to this complicated existence is the fact that his ex-wife has just dumped a young boy on his doorstep. As Yuuji continues to do business as usual, only a final, brutal shoot-out will bring him and the boy closer together. Finally, in 'Ley Lines' (1999), three boys attracted by the excitement of Tokyo city find themselves caught up in the notorious Shinjuku district and a gangster lifestyle they can't escape. Before long they find themselves on the wrong side of the local crime lord and start fearing for their lives.

We study the fragility of discretionary liquidity provision by major financial intermediaries during systemic events. The laboratory of our study is the recent collapse of the auction rate securities (ARS) market. Using a comprehensive dataset constructed from auction reports and intraday transactions data on municipal ARS, we present quantitative evidence that auction dealers acted at their own discretion as "market makers" before the market collapsed. We show that this discretionary liquidity provision greatly affected both net investor demand and auction clearing rates. Importantly, such discretionary liquidity provision is fragile. As auction dealers suffered losses from other financial markets and faced increasing inventory pressure, they stopped making markets. Moreover, the drop in support occurred suddenly, apparently triggered by the unexpected withdrawal of one major broker-dealer.