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California’s agricultural employers hired an average of 413,000 workers between 2018 and 2021 and reported an average of 882,000 farmworkers during these years, a ratio of 2.1 workers for each job. Average agricultural employment has been relatively stable since 2000, while the number of workers reported by agricultural employers declined. Despite concerns about farm labor shortages, the data show a relatively stable pool of farmworkers, including a rising share who are brought to farms by farm labor contractors.

Employment in California agriculture has increased over the past 30 years and has become less seasonal. There were an average of 404,000 farm jobs in California in 2020, 10% more than average employment of 367,000 in 1990. Meanwhile, seasonality, as measured by peak month employment divided by trough month employment, fell 22% over three decades, from 1.8 in 1990 to 1.4 in 2020. Most farmworkers have one farm employer a year, although that employer may be a labor contractor who moves workers from one farm to another. Most new workers in the California farm workforce are H-2A guest workers, the young and flexible Mexican workers who are legally authorized to work in the United States and who are often brought to farms by labor contractors. In the future, rising employment and declining seasonality, combined with an aging and settled farm workforce, may reduce farmworker migration and flexibility.

Quality control in Additive Manufacturing (AM) is vital, as process parameters can lead to defects, impacting mechanical properties. The present study proposes the use of a lattice structure coupon sample as a proxy for build quality control. Lattices are sensitive to variations in process parameters, impacting the resulting mechanical properties, more so than bulk mechanical test specimens. The sensitivity of lattice structures allows for the detection of subtle changes in process parameters, which can be valuable for quality control efforts, i.e. maintaining constant manufacturing quality. In this study, a series of lattice coupon samples were manufactured with varying factors as a proof of concept to demonstrate this concept. Non-destructive micro-computed tomography (CT) was used to quantify the manufacturing variations/defects. The lattice coupons are subjected to quasi-static compression testing to evaluate their mechanical properties, with differences shown indicative of changes in the manufacturing process. The work reported here acts as a proof of concept for a low-cost build quality evaluation methodology using lattice coupons and compression testing alone. When the build quality deteriorates or parameters change without the knowledge of this by the operator, this will be observed in changes in the compressive test results for lattice coupons.

BACKGROUND. Phase 1 study of ATR inhibition alone or with radiation therapy (PATRIOT) was a first-in-human phase I study of the oral ATR (ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related) inhibitor ceralasertib (AZD6738) in advanced solid tumors. METHODS. The primary objective was safety. Secondary objectives included assessment of antitumor responses and pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) studies. Sixty-seven patients received 20-240 mg ceralasertib BD continuously or intermittently (14 of a 28-day cycle). RESULTS. Intermittent dosing was better tolerated than continuous, which was associated with dose-limiting hematological toxicity. The recommended phase 2 dose of ceralasertib was 160 mg twice daily for 2 weeks in a 4-weekly cycle. Modulation of target and increased DNA damage were identified in tumor and surrogate PD. There were 5 (8%) confirmed partial responses (PRs) (40-240 mg BD), 34 (52%) stable disease (SD), including 1 unconfirmed PR, and 27 (41%) progressive disease. Durable responses were seen in tumors with loss of AT-rich interactive domain-containing protein 1A (ARID1A) and DNA damageresponse defects. Treatment-modulated tumor and systemic immune markers and responding tumors were more immune inflamed than nonresponding. CONCLUSION. Ceralasertib monotherapy was tolerated at 160 mg BD intermittently and associated with antitumor activity. TRIAL REGISTRATION. Clinicaltrials.gov: NCT02223923, EudraCT: 2013-003994-84. FUNDING. Cancer Research UK, AstraZeneca, UK Department of Health (National Institute for Health Research), Rosetrees Trust, Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre., Introduction ATR (ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3-related) is a critical kinase in the DNA damage response (DDR) (1, 2). Preclinical data have identified multiple cancer-related phenotypes sensitizing tumor cells to monotherapy [...]

Prostate cancer is generally considered an immunologically 'cold' tumor type that is insensitive to immunotherapy. Targeting surface antigens on tumors through cellulartherapy can induce a potent antitumor immune response to 'heat up' the tumor microenvironment. However, many antigens expressed on prostate tumor cells are also found on normal tissues, potentially causing on-target, off-tumortoxicities and a suboptimal therapeutic index. Our studies revealed that six-transmembrane epithelial antigen of prostate-2 (STEAP2) was a prevalent prostate cancer antigen that displayed high, homogeneous cell surface expression across all stages of disease with limited distal normal tissue expression, making it ideal for therapeutic targeting. A multifaceted lead generation approach enabled development of an armored STEAP2 chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapeutic candidate, AZD0754. This CAR-T product was armored with a dominant-negative TGF-[beta] type II receptor, bolstering its activity in the TGF-[beta]-rich immunosuppressive environment of prostate cancer. AZD0754 demonstrated potent and specific cytotoxicity against antigen-expressing cells in vitro despite TGF-[beta]-rich conditions. Further, AZD0754 enforced robust, dose-dependent in vivo efficacy in STEAP2- expressing cancer cell line-derived and patient-derived xenograft mouse models, and exhibited encouraging preclinical safety. Together, these data underscore the therapeutic tractability of STEAP2 in prostate cancer as well as build confidence in the specificity, potency, and tolerability of this potentially first-in-class CAR-T therapy., Introduction Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer diagnosed in men and has the second-highest mortality rate of any cancer (1). Despite advancements in biomarkers and therapeutic approaches, the [...]

The H-2A visa program allows farmers in the United States to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor to recruit and employ guest workers, usually for a maximum of 10 months, when they are unable to find enough workers living in the United States (including U.S. citizens, other legally authorized workers, and workers not authorized to work in the United States). We analyzed U.S. and California H-2A job certification data to determine how the program is currently used and how a proposed H-2A wage freeze would likely affect future farm labor costs. Our analysis suggests that changes in the H-2A visa program would likely expand the program while reducing labor costs in California and elsewhere.

COVID-19 may accelerate trends in California agriculture toward mechanization and the use of guest-worker programs.

California Employment Development Department data suggest that almost 5% of California's workers were employed in agriculture, in 2016. In that year, monthly average employment in agriculture was 425,400, but the number of workers with at least one job in agriculture was 2.3 times that figure, 989,500. The number of hired farmworkers, including supervisors and office personnel, rose almost 20% between 2015 and 2016. Most workers employed in agriculture do not work year-round, so there is a gap between the average earnings of a full-time equivalent job in agriculture ($32,316 in 2016) and the average earnings of actual agricultural workers ($19,800 in 2016). This gap was widest for the third of all farmworkers employed by farm labor contractors (FLCs). Over half of the workers whose maximum earnings were in agriculture had only one farm job. Almost 20% of farmworkers received unemployment insurance benefits in 2016, including half of those whose maximum earnings were in logging and cotton ginning. Public policy has long favored a farm labor market in which most workers are employed year-round; these data indicate that the farm labor market in California is, on average, heading in the opposite direction.

This paper introduces a new adaptive framework for fault detection and diagnosis using neural-based PCA. This framework addresses the limitations of traditional PCA in handling time-varying processes. The adaptive framework updates the correlation matrix recursively, allowing it to adapt to the natural time-varying behavior of processes. It also recursively determines the number of principal components and the confidence limits for three process monitoring statistics (T2, Q, and the combined index φ). To diagnose faults, four different types of contribution plots are used as follows: complete decomposition contributions (CDC), partial decomposition contributions (PDC), diagonal-based contributions (DBCs), and reconstruction-based contributions (RBCs). The evaluation through three simulation studies—including a numerical example, the continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) process, and water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs)—demonstrates that the combined statistics provided superior fault detection and diagnosis performance compared with individual statistics. Additionally, the study of the isolation method shows that no single method can definitively be claimed as superior. Overall, our study highlights the strength and versatility of neural-based PCA for detecting and diagnosing faults in dynamic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The inverse finite element method is a technique that can be used for material model parameter characterization. The literature shows that this approach may get caught in the local minima of the design space. These local minimum solutions often fit the material test data with small errors and are often mistaken for the optimal solution. The problem with these sub-optimal solutions becomes apparent when applied to different loading conditions where significant errors can be witnessed. The research of this paper presents a new method that resolves this issue for Mooney–Rivlin and builds on a previous paper that used flat planes, referred to as hyperplanes, to map the error functions, isolating the unique optimal solution. The new method alternatively uses a constrained optimization approach, utilizing equality constraints to evaluate the error functions. As a result, the design space’s curvature is taken into account, which significantly reduces the amount of variation between predicted parameters from a maximum of 1.934% in the previous paper down to 0.1882% in the results presented here. The results of this study demonstrate that the new method not only isolates the unique optimal solution but also drastically reduces the variation in the predicted parameters. The paper concludes that the presented new characterization method significantly contributes to the existing literature.

This paper introduced a comparison method for three explicitly defined intermediate encoding methods in generative design for two-dimensional soft robotic units. This study evaluates a conventional genetic algorithm with full access to removing elements from the design domain using an implicit random encoding layer, a Lindenmayer system encoding mimicking biological growth patterns and a compositional pattern producing network encoding for 2D pattern generation. The objective of the optimisation problem is to match the deformation of a single actuator unit with a desired target shape, specifically uni-axial elongation, under internal pressure. The study results suggest that the Lindenmayer system encoding generates candidate units with fewer function evaluations than the traditional implicitly encoded genetic algorithm. However, the distribution of constraint and internal energy is similar to that of the random encoding, and the Lindenmayer system encoding produces a less diverse population of candidate units. In contrast, despite requiring more function evaluations than the Lindenmayer System encoding, the Compositional Pattern Producing Network encoding produces a similar diversity of candidate units. Overall, the Compositional Pattern Producing Network encoding results in a proportionally higher number of high-performing units than the random or Lindenmayer system encoding, making it a viable alternative to a conventional monolithic approach. The results suggest that the compositional pattern producing network encoding may be a promising approach for designing soft robotic actuators with desirable performance characteristics.

The average employment of hired workers in California agriculture (NAICS 11) rose over 10% between 2005 and 2015, when some 16,400 agricultural establishments hired an average 421,300 workers who were paid a total of $12.8 billion, which was 27% of the state's $47 billion in farm sales. This means that a full-time equivalent (FTE) employee would earn $30,300, implying an hourly wage of $14.55 for 2,080 hours of work. We extracted all Social Security numbers reported by California agricultural establishments and found that the average annual pay received by the 848,000 workers who had at least one job on California farms was $20,500 in 2015, two-thirds of the average annual wage of an FTE worker, reflecting some combination of lower wages and less than full-year work.

Four ways farmers are responding to the tightening labor market.