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Soft-tissue metastasis from urothelial carcinoma is a rare but advanced disease entity. We report a patient with muscle-invasive bladder cancer who experienced rapid disease recurrence following radical surgery and adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy. Despite further treatment with taxane-based chemotherapy and immune checkpoint inhibitors, the patient developed diffuse soft-tissue metastases, including in the skin, muscles of the extraocular area, extremities, and trunk. Salvage treatment with enfortumab vedotin (EV) was administered along with local radiation therapy to the orbital metastasis for better symptom control. Unexpectedly, the soft-tissue metastases showed a dramatic response after the first cycle of EV. However, after two cycles of EV treatment, the skin and extremity muscular metastases progressed, while the extraocular metastasis remained controlled. Four months after EV treatment, the patient died due to systemic progression and infection.

In the field of automatic optical inspection (AOI), this study presents innovative strategies to enhance object detection accuracy while minimizing dependence on large annotated datasets. We initially developed a defect detection model using a dataset of 3579 images across 32 categories, created in collaboration with a major Taiwanese panel manufacturer. This model was evaluated using 12,000 ambiguously labeled images, with improvements achieved through data augmentation and annotation refinement. To address the challenges of limited labeled data, we proposed the Adaptive Fused Semi-Supervised Self-Learning (AFSL) method. This approach, designed for anchor-based object detection models, leverages a small set of labeled data alongside a larger pool of unlabeled data to enable continuous model optimization. Key components of AFSL include the Bounding Box Assigner, Adaptive Training Scheduler, and Data Allocator, which together facilitate dynamic threshold adjustments and balanced training, significantly enhancing the model’s performance on AOI datasets. The AFSL method improved the mean average precision (mAP) from 43.5% to 57.1% on the COCO dataset and by 2.6% on the AOI dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving high levels of precision and efficiency in AOI with minimal labeled data.

This study investigates the crystal structure, epitaxial relation, and magnetic properties in CoFe thin films deposited on a flexible mica substrate. The epitaxial growth of CoFe thin films was successfully achieved by DC magnetron sputtering, forming three CoFe(002) domains exhibiting four-fold symmetry on the mica substrate. A notable achievement of this work was the attainment of the highest anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) value reported to date on a flexible substrate. Additionally, it was observed that the magnetic characteristics of the CoFe films on the flexible mica substrate display reversibility upon strain release. More importantly, the AMR effect of epitaxial CoFe films on flexible mica shows lesser dependence on the crystalline orientation and remains the same under different bending states. These findings demonstrate the potential of utilizing CoFe films on flexible substrates to develop wearable magnetoresistance sensors with diverse applications.

Abstract Interest in providing Mandarin foreign language at K-12 schools in the United States has grown steadily since the language was identified as critical to the U.S. finance and social security. However, the shortage of qualified Mandarin teachers is widely recognized as the key bottleneck to building capacity in Mandarin education. Drawing from research on teacher learning and teaching as well as effective bilingual education, this paper highlights a specific challenge that might influence Mandarin teachers’ capacity to carry out effective and successful teaching in the US classroom, that is, their implicit cultural knowledge of teaching. Data from a case study that examined a Mandarin classroom taught by two teachers from Taiwan illustrated how their actual classroom practices were mediated by their understandings of the culture of teaching in Taiwan and the United States. Some fundamental differences between the two cultures embedded in education might account for these teachers’ frustration in teaching and limited language teaching in the classroom. The findings point to the need to engage Mandarin teachers with critical reflection of their own understanding of teaching in their countries of origin and the United States.

While Chinese in the form of Mandarin is currently heavily emphasized in language teaching arenas, little research has looked at the maintenance of other equally relevant Chineses. “Chinese†has been highly diversified in the U.S. and Asian contexts for centuries. Inattention to this diversity sparks the need for a critical viewing of placing too much worth in the political economy of Mandarin at the expense of all the other varieties of Chinese in the local ecologies. In looking at local-level processes we can better understand how to bring minoritized varieties forward. This paper will begin with background information on the varieties of Chinese, followed by a description of the methodology and data collected by the authors, along with the implications this data have on “Chinese†language teaching for Chinese diasporic communities in the U.S. We call for the re-envisioning and reconceptualization of the multiple discourses of “Chinese.â€

This paper examines the term “Chinese” in light of the prevalent rhetoric of Chinese as a critical language for the job market. As Mandarin has received rapid recognition and usage in “professional” contexts such as academia and international business, we call for a critical viewing of placing too much worth in the political economy of Mandarin at the expense of overlooking all the other varieties of Chinese in the local ecologies. Using data from the authors’ own experiences as instructors of Mandarin and Cantonese in secondary and university contexts, this paper speaks to the possibility of multiple Chinese languages being taught and used together, or, conversely, what the negative consequences have been in neglecting multiple varieties of Chinese in a Mandarin-only language classroom. We argue that while it is currently not the case, Mandarin can be “professional”with its fellow Chinese varieties while still being considered a LCTL used at the “professional” level.