This paper presents the design and analysis of a conformal dual-band quasi-Yagi antenna tailored for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and 5G-enabled Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications. The antenna is fabricated on a flexible polyimide substrate, ensuring mechanical conformability and stable performance on curved surfaces. The proposed design is based on a wedge-shaped quasi-Yagi radiator, incorporating a microstrip-to-slot transition for efficient excitation. The antenna features three pairs of wedge-shaped radiating arms and an arc-shaped director to enhance gain and directionality. Simulated results demonstrate dual-band operation at 2.45 and 3.4 GHz, with fractional bandwidths of 8.16% and 8.59%, respectively, and a reflection coefficient |S11| ≤ −10 dB. The design is further extended to an eight-element Multiple-Input Multiple-Output configuration, ensuring enhanced spatial diversity, low mutual coupling (<−15 dB), and improved gain (>5 dBi). The antenna’s performance is validated through simulations, demonstrating its suitability for real-time medical data transmission. With its compact size, high efficiency, and conformal nature, the proposed antenna effectively addresses the challenges of wearable IoMT and WBAN communication systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel online informative path planner for 3-D modeling of unknown structures using micro aerial vehicles. Different from the explore-then-exploit strategy, our planner can cope with exploration and coverage simultaneously and thus obtain complete and high-quality 3-D models. We first devise a set of evaluation metrics considering the perception constraints of the sensor for efficiently evaluating the coverage quality of the reconstructed surfaces. Then, the coverage quality is utilized to guide the subsequent informative path planning. Specifically, our hierarchical planner consists of two planning stages – a local coverage stage for inspecting surfaces with low coverage quality and a global exploration stage for transiting the robot to unexplored regions at the global scale. The local coverage stage computes the coverage path that takes into account both the exploration and coverage objectives based on the estimated coverage quality and frontiers, and the global exploration stage maintains a sparse roadmap in the explored space to achieve fast global exploration. We conduct both simulated and real-world experiments to validate the proposed method. The results show that our planner outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms and especially decreases the reconstruction error (at least 12.5% lower on average).

The nematodes isolated from three species of Chanodichthys were completely consistent with the morphological description of Rhabdochona coronacauda. We provide new morphometric data for R. coronacauda, which slightly differ from those of the original description. For the first time, we performed a phylogenetic analysis by using both primary (linear) and secondary (folded structures) sequences of the complete 18S rRNA gene for three superfamilies of Spiruromorpha. The interspecific genetic distances within the genus Rhabdochona were 0.13%–3.06% between 18 species. Rhabdochona coronacauda was sister to a sub-group consisting of the type species R. denudata, R. hospeti, R. hellichi, and R. turkestanica. The secondary structures reconstructed for 35 species of three superfamilies from the order Spiruromorpha comprised 16 conformations of the region including helix 39 and expansion segment 9, and two conformations of helix 17. Helix 39 can be used to differentiate single species or separate species groups of Rhabdochona. The structures of helix 39 in both Rhabdochonidae and Cystidicolidae with Salmonema had an identical 39a domain but differed in the 39b domain and expansion segment 9. In addition, the structure of the helix 39–expansion segment 9 domain within and between families of different superfamilies and their resolution on the phylogenetic tree in combination did not correspond to the accepted classification of spiruromorph nematodes. Helix 17 did not differ within Rhabdochona, or between Rhabdochonidae and Cystidicolidae. At the superfamily level, helix 17 can distinguish Thelazioidea, Spiruroidea, and Habronematoidea from Rhabdochonidae, and Cystidicolidae from Spirocercidae, Thelaziidae, and Pneumospiruridae.

My contribution to this Forum highlights the ways that Michael Willrich’s story of early-twentieth-century anarchism intersects with and complicates existing scholarly accounts of the development of the American “surveillance state.” My essay reflects on the way the subjects of Willrich’s history—immigrant radicals, those who sought to subdue and deport them, and those who defended them—shine a new light on ongoing struggles over the boundaries of modern social regulation.

A subset of a finite set of filling curves on a surface is not necessarily filling. However, when a filling set spans homology and curves intersect pairwise at most once, it is shown that one can always add a curve and subtract a different curve to obtain a filling set that spans homology. A motivation for filling sets of curves that span homology comes from the Thurston spine and the Steinberg module of the mapping class group.

Given a complex analytic family of complex manifolds, we consider canonical Aeppli deformations of $(p,q)$-forms and study its relations to the varying of dimension of the deformed Aeppli cohomology $\dim H^{\bullet ,\bullet }_{A\phi (t)}(X)$. In particular, we prove the jumping formula for the deformed Aeppli cohomology $H^{\bullet ,\bullet }_{A\phi (t)}(X)$. As a direct consequence, $\dim H^{p,q}_{A\phi (t)}(X)$ remains constant iff the Bott–Chern deformations of $(n-p,n-q)$-forms and the Aeppli deformations of $(n-p-1,n-q-1)$-forms are canonically unobstructed. Furthermore, the Bott–Chern/Aeppli deformations are shown to be unobstructed if some weak forms of ${ \partial }{ \bar {\partial } }$-lemma is satisfied.

With the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the American labor movement cemented the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. However, the NLRA explicitly excluded the public sector. Government employees did not achieve similar legal protections until decades later, and even then, the laws varied considerably by state. Because of this, scholarly accounts of the development of public-sector unions usually start in the 1960s and emphasize how public- and private-sector unions developed along separate paths. In this article, we analyze a new dataset and show that hundreds of cities had organized workers during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including firefighters, police, and other public-sector workers (like those in the sanitation and roads departments). By the 1950s, numerous employee unions had engaged in strikes and had achieved written agreements with their city employers. We also present evidence that public- and private-sector employee organization were correlated during this period. Thus, despite very different legal contexts before 1960, our evidence suggests that the timing and location of early public-sector organization may have had more in common with private-sector organization than is often recognized.

Existing approaches to conducting inference about the Local Average Treatment Effect or LATE require assumptions that are considered tenuous in many applied settings. In particular, Instrumental Variable techniques require monotonicity and the exclusion restriction while principal score methods rest on some form of the principal ignorability assumption. This paper provides new results showing that an estimator within the class of principal score methods allows conservative inference about the LATE without invoking such assumptions. I term this estimator the Compliance Probability Weighting estimator and show that, under very mild assumptions, it provides an asymptotically conservative estimator for the LATE. I apply this estimator to a recent survey experiment and provide evidence of a stronger effect for the subset of compliers than the original authors had uncovered.

A hidden consequence of the cumulative impact of poverty, ‘hygiene poverty’ compels people to make stark choices when allocating household budgets. To increase understanding of this understudied phenomenon, we explored the prevalence of factors leading to, and impacts of, hygiene poverty in Ireland. An online survey was completed by 258 respondents during September 2023 covering a broad range of topics relating to the affordability of hygiene products. The results were analysed to identify key themes of statistical relevance in the data. Our study found 65.1 per cent of respondents had personally experienced difficulty affording essential hygiene items. Whilst lower incomes and the presence of children in the household featured, inability to afford hygiene items was also felt by those in insecure housing, people with disabilities and those from ethnic minorities. Lack of access to basic essentials prevented people from engaging fully in social, work and educational activities with negative impacts on physical and mental health across all income brackets. Drawing on existing literature alongside reporting original research, the substantive argument in this article suggests that ‘hygiene poverty’ is most usefully thought of as an aspect of deprivation, and that hygiene-related needs often sit at the bottom of a range of deprivation types.