This book systematically reviews the most important findings on cancer immune checkpoints, sharing essential insights into this rapidly evolving yet largely unexplored research topic. The past decade has seen major advances in cancer immune checkpoint therapy, which has demonstrated impressive clinical benefits. The family of checkpoints for mediating cancer immune evasion now includes CTLA-4, PD-1/PD-L1, CD27/CD70, FGL-1/LAG-3, Siglec-15, VISTA (PD-1L)/VSIG3, CD47/SIRPA, APOE/LILRB4, TIGIT, and many others. Despite these strides, most patients do not show lasting remission, and some cancers have been completely resistant to the therapy. The potentially lethal adverse effects of checkpoint blockade represent another major challenge, the mechanisms of which remain poorly understood. Compared to the cancer signaling pathways, such as p53 and Ras, mechanistic studies on immune checkpoint pathways are still in their infancy. To improve the responses to checkpoint blockade therapy and limit the adverse effects, it is essential to understand the molecular regulation of checkpoint molecules in both malignant and healthy cells/tissues. This book begins with an introduction to immune checkpoint therapy and its challenges, and subsequently describes the regulation of checkpoints at different levels. In closing, it discusses recent therapeutic developments based on mechanistic findings, and outlines goals for future translational studies. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers in the cancer immunotherapy field, helping to form a roadmap for checkpoint regulation and develop safer and more effective immunotherapies.

This book is a collection of seven articles published in the past decade by the author. These articles are concerned with various issues including possessor raising, null subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made a contribution to its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, also constitute a window through which readers may look at the issues from a formal syntactic perspective and get a sense as how works have been conducted in the framework concerned, how arguments have been constructed, and how justifications have been provided in the field.

This book is a collection of seven articles published in the past decade by the author. These articles are concerned with various issues including possessor raising, null subject, null object, pied-piping in logical form, focus marker, question formation, and adverbial reflexive. Each article has made a contribution to its topic. More importantly, these seven articles, taken as a whole, also constitute a window through which readers may look at the issues from a formal syntactic perspective and get a sense as how works have been conducted in the framework concerned, how arguments have been constructed, and how justifications have been provided in the field.

As business becomes increasingly globalized and China establishes its growing role in the international business environment, developing an understanding of the complex culture is important to anyone acting in the global arena. This book offers readers a thorough and nuanced resource to that end, describing the ever-evolving Chinese way of life circa 2014, based on extensive primary and secondary data. Taking an anthropological approach to achieve a well-rounded representation, the book covers 51 topics that would have been studied if China were a newly discovered civilization. It explores the culture through its examination of the nine core concepts that best represent the Chinese way of life. While the book is a rigorous treatment of the Chinese way of life, it is also filled with personal stories and perspectives from close to 1000 successful Chinese from academia, business, and government. The Chinese Way equips international business students, scholars, and practitioners with a deep understanding of a society that is a major player in global business today and offers a foundation for successful business interactions with Chinese companies, organizations, and people.

This book systematically reviews the most important findings on cancer immune checkpoints, sharing essential insights into this rapidly evolving yet largely unexplored research topic. The past decade has seen major advances in cancer immune checkpoint therapy, which has demonstrated impressive clinical benefits. The family of checkpoints for mediating cancer immune evasion now includes CTLA-4, PD-1/PD-L1, CD27/CD70, FGL-1/LAG-3, Siglec-15, VISTA (PD-1L)/VSIG3, CD47/SIRPA, APOE/LILRB4, TIGIT, and many others. Despite these strides, most patients do not show lasting remission, and some cancers have been completely resistant to the therapy. The potentially lethal adverse effects of checkpoint blockade represent another major challenge, the mechanisms of which remain poorly understood. Compared to the cancer signaling pathways, such as p53 and Ras, mechanistic studies on immune checkpoint pathways are still in their infancy. To improve the responses to checkpoint blockade therapy and limit the adverse effects, it is essential to understand the molecular regulation of checkpoint molecules in both malignant and healthy cells/tissues. This book begins with an introduction to immune checkpoint therapy and its challenges, and subsequently describes the regulation of checkpoints at different levels. In closing, it discusses recent therapeutic developments based on mechanistic findings, and outlines goals for future translational studies. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers in the cancer immunotherapy field, helping to form a roadmap for checkpoint regulation and develop safer and more effective immunotherapies.

As business becomes increasingly globalized and China establishes its growing role in the international business environment, developing an understanding of the complex culture is important to anyone acting in the global arena. This book offers readers a thorough and nuanced resource to that end, describing the ever-evolving Chinese way of life circa 2014, based on extensive primary and secondary data. Taking an anthropological approach to achieve a well-rounded representation, the book covers 51 topics that would have been studied if China were a newly discovered civilization. It explores the culture through its examination of the nine core concepts that best represent the Chinese way of life. While the book is a rigorous treatment of the Chinese way of life, it is also filled with personal stories and perspectives from close to 1000 successful Chinese from academia, business, and government. The Chinese Way equips international business students, scholars, and practitioners with a deep understanding of a society that is a major player in global business today and offers a foundation for successful business interactions with Chinese companies, organizations, and people.

Driven by counter-terrorism efforts, marketing analysis and an explosion in online social networking in recent years, data mining has moved to the forefront of information science. This proposed Special Issue on Data Mining for Social Network Data will present a broad range of recent studies in social networking analysis. It will focus on emerging trends and needs in discovery and analysis of communities, solitary and social activities, activities in open for a and commercial sites as well. It will also look at network modeling, infrastructure construction, dynamic growth and evolution pattern discovery using machine learning approaches and multi-agent based simulations. Editors are three rising stars in world of data mining, knowledge discovery, social network analysis, and information infrastructures, and are anchored by Springer author/editor Hsinchun Chen (Terrorism Informatics; Medical Informatics; Digital Government), who is one of the most prominent intelligence analysis and data mining experts in the world.

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a process aimed at providing accurate and in-time information concerning structural health condition and performance. The information obtained from monitoring is generally used to increase the safety, plan and design maintenance activities, verify hypotheses, reduce uncertainty, and to widen the knowledge concerning the structure being monitored. How to realize the effective monitoring is what the researchers devoted to in the past and recent studies. This book, therefore, is focused on the research of critical phenomena in different size-scaled structures, from earth-scale, macro-scale to micro-scale. By analyzing the energy emission from their critical processes, some useful information or suggestion is extracted and to be provided in SHM. Three different forms of energies, acoustic emission (AE), electromagnetic emission (EM) and neutron emission (NE), are selected to be studied in our research. The book is useful for the civil engineers, graduate students, researchers, practitioners, consultants, contractors, infrastructure managers interested in the application of new technologies to structural health monitoring.

The results of marketing research can inform marketing decisions such as in concept/product testing, market segmentation, competitive analysis, customer satisfaction studies, etc. and illustrates the need for measurement.

The book summarizes all essential measurements widely adopted by researchers with insightful perception. It consists of three indispensable sections of market research: market general, competitor analysis, and consumer analysis. Each specific measurement contains in-depth understanding of measurement starting from definition through method explanation to practical case study. Specifically, it discloses many valuable research techniques and experienced application know-how from the professional research agencies.

The book can be a useful reference for practitioners and excellent supplementary reading material for students. Different from other academic market research book, the book contains numerous case studies derived from customized projects at research agencies which also make this book easy to understand for student and beginners.

Database systems have been driving dynamic web sites since the early 90s; nowadays, even seemingly static web sites employ a database back-end for personalization and advertising purposes. In order to keep up with the high demand fuelled by the rapid growth of the Internet, a number of caching and materialization techniques have been proposed for web databases over the years. The main goal of these techniques is to improve performance, scalability, and manageability of database-driven dynamic web sites, in a way that the quality of data is not compromised. Although caching and materialization are well understood concepts in the traditional database and networking/operating systems literature, the Web and web databases bring forth unique characteristics that warrant new techniques and approaches. In this survey, the authors adopt a data management point of view to describe the system architectures of web databases, and analyze the research issues related to caching and materialization in such architectures. They also present the state of the art in caching and materialization for web databases and organize current approaches according to the fundamental questions, namely how to store, how to use, and how to maintain cached/materialized web data. Finally, they associate work in caching and materialization for web databases to similar techniques in other related areas, such as data warehousing, distributed systems, and distributed databases.