scholarly journals Rapid growth in the COVID-19 era

MRS Bulletin ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yerim Lee ◽  
Michelle Ng ◽  
Kristin Daniel ◽  
Elizabeth Wayne

Abstract From Operation Warp Speed to the lipid mRNA vaccine, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a watershed moment for technological development, production, and implementation. The scale and pace of innovation and global collaboration has likely not been experienced since World War II. This article highlights some of the engineering accomplishments that occurred during the pandemic. We provide a broad overview of the technological achievements in vaccine design, antibody engineering, drug repurposing, and rapid diagnostic testing. We also discuss what the future of these technologies and the future of large-scale collaborations might look like moving forward. Graphic abstract

Author(s):  
Kazuya Inaba

Oil and petrochemical companies are in the severe situation where they shoulddeal with various problems. In Europe, America, the Middle East, and East Asia (China, Taiwan,and South Korea), one company usually builds a large-scale factory, and consistently producesoil and petrochemical goods in the system of one company. Differently from it, two or morecompanies are concentrated in the coast landfills in Japan, and generally manufacture in thesystem of groups. The system of production in a petrochemical complex would be a mediumscalelevel if it sees worldwide. After World War II, capital was insufficient in Japan. Manycompanies advanced to the oil and petrochemical industry which seemed to have a big future.Small and medium scale factories were constructed. As a result, petrochemical complexeshave been formed with the system of groups.After the defeat of World War II, many oil companies excluding Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd. wereorganized for the supply of crude oil from European and American oil majors. They weredevoted to refining oil and selling it only in Japan. Moreover, the oil market in Japan had beendefended by restriction of the government. Such a system continued for years. Therefore,domestic oil companies had been aiming at improvement and efficiency of refining capacity.Their concentrating on technological development, cost reduction, and domestic share foughtin the same industry had become a main activity. The construction of global competitiveness hadbeen postponed for a while. However, after repealing protected laws, the import liberalizationof petroleum product had been taken since 1996, and cheap petroleum products had flown infrom foreign countries. The sales price had not become the same, and free competition undermarket mechanism had started. As a result, the movement of industry reorganization hadbeen accelerated.In such a severe situation, oil and petrochemical companies came up with the idea of businesscooperation in the same region in order to acquire global competitiveness. 20 companies inoil industry and chemical industry gathered round at first. Under the Research Associationof Technology Law, Research Association of Refinery Integration for Group-Operation (RING)was established in 2000. In order to gain global competitiveness, RING has acted groupoperationprograms in the industrial complexes in Japan. In this paper, I describe the historicalformation and development of petrochemical complexes in Japan.And I consider and analyzethe approach to and ways of the high-level integration for group operation. And I will explainthe meaning of the plans, and the economies arising from the group operation business.


2020 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Burhanettin Duran

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the domestic and foreign policy agendas of all countries have been turned upside down. The pandemic has brought new problems and competition areas to states and to the international system. While the pandemic politically calls to mind the post-World War II era, it can also be compared with the 2008 crisis due to its economic effects such as unemployment and the disruption of global supply chains. A debate immediately began for a new international system; however, it seems that the current international system will be affected, but will not experience a radical change. That is, a new international order is not expected, while disorder is most likely in the post-pandemic period. In an atmosphere of global instability where debates on the U.S.-led international system have been worn for a while, in the post-pandemic period states will invest in self-sufficiency and redefine their strategic areas, especially in health security. The decline of U.S. leadership, the challenging policies of China, the effects of Chinese policies on the U.S.-China relations and the EU’s deepening crisis are going to be the main discussion topics that will determine the future of the international system.


1968 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Epstein

Schwarz's study Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the single most important book on the occupation studyperiod in Germany after World War II that has yet appeared. It is not an ordinary narrative history—indeed, it presupposes a good deal of prior knowledge—but is rather a topical analysis of the following problems: the various possible solutions to the German question in the years after 1945; the policies toward Germany of the four victorious powers—Russia, France, Britain, and the United States; the development of German attitudes on the future political orientation of one or two Germanies; and finally, the factors that led to the voluntary acceptance of Western integration by most West Germans even though this integration meant the partition of Germany.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Simeone ◽  
Advaith Gundavajhala Venkata Koundinya ◽  
Anandh Ravi Kumar ◽  
Ed Finn

The trajectory of science fiction since World War II has been defined by its relationship with technoscientific imaginaries. In the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein dreamed of the robots and rocket ships that would preoccupy thousands of engineers a few decades later. In 1980s cyberpunk, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling imagined virtual worlds that informed generations of technology entrepreneurs. When Margaret Atwood was asked what draws her to dystopian visions of the future, she responded, "I read the newspaper." This is not just a reiteration of the truism that science fiction is always about the present as well as the future. In fact, we will argue, science fiction is a genre defined by its special relationship with what we might term "scientific reality," or the set of paradigms, aspirations, and discourses associated with technoscientific research.


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Porto Bozzetti ◽  
Gustavo Saldanha

The purpose of this paper, considering the relevance of Shera thoughts and its repercussions, is to reposition, in epistemological-historical terms, Jesse Shera’s approaches and their impacts according to a relation between life and work of the epistemologist. Without the intention of an exhaustive discussion, the purpose is to understand some unequivocal relations between the Shera critique for the context of its theoretical formulation and the consequences of this approach contrary to some tendencies originating from the technical and bureaucratic roots of the field (before and after World War II). It is deduced that Shera, rather than observing the sociopolitical reality and technical partner in which the texture of alibrary-based thought (but visualized by him as documentaryinformational), establishes, in his own praxis, social epistemology as a sort of "critique of the future," that is, as a praxis of the reflexive activity of the subject inserted in this episteme. In our discussion, the epistemological-social approach represents a vanguard for the context of its affirmation, a reassessment for the immediate decades to its presentation(years 1960 and 1970) and a critique for the future of what was consolidated under the notion of information Science, anticipating affirmations of "social nature" of the 1980s and 1990s in the field of information.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Spissu

In the novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), the German writer W. G. Sebald recounts his solitary journey to the town of Suffolk (UK) at the end of his years, while he also reflects on some of the dramatic events that shaped World War II and his personal memories. In this work, he takes on a particular narrative tactic defined by the interaction between the text and images that creates a special type of montage in which he seems to draw from cinematic language. I argue that, drawing on Sebald’s work, we can imagine a form of ethnographic observation that involves the creation of a cinematic map through which to explore the memories and imagination of individuals in relation to places where they live. I explore the day-to-day lived experiences of unemployed people of Sulcis Iglesiente, through their everyday engagement with, and situated perceptions of, their territory. I describe the process that led me to build Moving Lightly over the Earth, a cinematic map of Sulcis Iglesiente through which I explored how women and men in the area who lost their jobs as a result of the process of its deindustrialization give specific meaning to the territory, relating it to memories of their past and hopes and desires for the future.


2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonah Rockoff

A vast majority of adults believe that class size reductions are a good way to improve the quality of public schools. Reviews of the research literature, on the other hand, have provided mixed messages on the degree to which class size matters for student achievement. Here I will discuss a substantial, but overlooked, body of experimental work on class size that developed prior to World War II. These field experiments did not have the benefit of modern econometrics, and only a few were done on a reasonably large scale. However, they often used careful empirical designs, and the collective magnitude of this body of work is considerable. Moreover, this research produced little evidence to suggest that students learn more in smaller classes, which stands in contrast to some, though not all, of the most recent work by economists. In this essay, I provide an overview of the scope and breadth of the field experiments in class size conducted prior to World War II, the motivations behind them, and how their experimental designs were crafted to deal with perceived sources of bias. I discuss how one might interpret the findings of these early experimental results alongside more recent research.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 59 (6) ◽  
pp. 952-952
Author(s):  
John E. Wennberg

For half a century, the tonsil has been the target of a large-scale, uncontrolled surgical experiment-tonsillectomy. In the fourth and fifth decades of this century, well over 50% of children appear to have undergone the procedure; since World War II, opinion has swung away from mass use and by 1973 about 25% of children appear to have been affected. Pediatricians have been the weathermen in the change of clinical climate, pressing for reduction in use of tonsillectomy in their journal articles. Among a sample of California physicians, the offspring of pediatricians underwent fewer tonsillectomies than the children of other types of physicians.


Author(s):  
Daishiro Nomiya

High modernity claims that the modernity project gave rise to institutional organs of modern nation states, culminating in an emergence of ultra-military states with wartime economy in the early twentieth century. It also argues that the same developmental pattern continued to dominate in the post-World War II period. This chapter examines this high-modernity thesis, employing Japan and Hiroshima as cases to be analyzed. Against the high-modernity thesis, many believe that Japan had a historical disjuncture in 1945, being ultramilitary before the end of World War II and a peaceful nation after. Examinations show that, while the modernity project controlled a large-scale historical process in Japan, it met vehement resistance, and became stranded in Hiroshima.


1996 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia L. Wurtz ◽  
Anthony F. Gasbarro

The Native peoples of Alaska used wood for fuel, for the construction of shelters, and for a variety of implements. Explorers, fur traders, gold miners, and settlers also relied on Alaska's forest resource. The early 20th century saw the creation of the Tongass and Chugach National Forests in coastal Alaska, where large-scale harvesting began shortly after World War II. By 1955, two 50-year contracts had been signed, committing 13 billion board feet of sawlogs and pulpwood. The commercial forest land base in Alaska has been dramatically reduced by a variety of legislative acts, including the Statehood Act of 1959 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. Key words: forest history, Alaska, aboriginal use of forests, fuelwood, stemwheeled riverboats, gold mining, land classification, National Forests, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act


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