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During the worldwide pandemic, youth were isolated from each other. In response, New Jersey 4-H, a part of Rutgers Cooperative Extension, created the Junior Explorers, a virtual exchange program bringing together 4-H members with youth from other countries. This program provides youth ages 10-13 with access to international exchange opportunities that would otherwise be sparse for this age group. This program has demonstrated that Extension professionals can successfully adapt exchanges to a virtual platform. With youth the world over learning virtually, Extension professionals have a unique opportunity to learn from and collaborate with international partners to enhance existing programs.

Building on existing relationships with international youth development colleagues, we created the 4-H International Camp United Program (4-HICUP) as a leadership opportunity for international and U.S. teens. In 2019, teenagers from Azerbaijan, Italy, Russia, and the United States came together to build personal cross-cultural relationships, further develop leadership skills, and increase understanding of their role as global citizens. The program was inspired by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture 2025 Strategic Vision for 4-H suggesting that "youth and adults learn, grow, and work together as catalysts for positive change." With the success of 4-HICUP, we want to include more states/countries and expand our outreach, and we encourage others to implement similar programming.

PURPOSE High-dose methotrexate (HDMTX) is an antineoplastic dosing strategy used to treat various cancers including primary central nervous system lymphoma. Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP/SMX) is commonly used for antibiotic prophylaxis against Pneumocystis pneumonia infections in this patient population. Significant drug-drug interactions between TMP/SMX and methotrexate (MTX) leading to adverse outcomes have been documented, primarily in adult patients taking MTX for rheumatologic conditions. METHODS This study is a single-center, retrospective, cohort study comparing outcomes in patients where TMP/SMX was held during HDMTX and patients who received concurrent prophylactic TMP/SMX during treatment. The primary end point was mean MTX level at 24, 48, and 72 hours. Secondary end points included rate of nonhematologic toxicity, rate of hematologic toxicity, median days to MTX clearance, and frequency of glucarpidase utilization. RESULTS In total, 248 cycles of HDMTX were analyzed from 221 individual patients. One hundred ninety-one cycles were administered without prophylactic TMP/SMX, and 57 were administered with TMP/SMX. The median MTX level at 24, 48, and 72 hours in those without versus with prophylactic TMP/SMX was 4.30 versus 4.30, 0.29 versus 0.30, and 0.14 versus 0.15, respectively. Similarly, rates of hematologic and nonhematologic toxicities did not differ significantly between groups with the exception of neutropenia; however, there was no corresponding increased rate of neutropenic fever. Only one patient received glucarpidase and had not received TMP/SMX. CONCLUSION Prophylactic TMP/SMX had minimal interaction with HDMTX and does not lead to increased time to clearance or clinically relevant toxicities. Prophylactic TMP/ SMX can be safely administered with HDMTX in adult patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improved determination of ENSO predictability, teleconnections, and impacts requires a better understanding of event-to-event differences in ENSO spatial patterns and evolution.

The climate system can be numerically represented by a set of physically based dynamical equations whose solution requires substantial computational resources. This makes computationally efficient, low dimensional emulators that simulate trajectories of the underlying dynamical system an attractive alternative for model evaluation and diagnosis. We suggest that since such an emulator must adequately capture anomaly evolution, its construction should employ a grid search technique where maximum forecast skill determines the best reference model. In this study, we demonstrate this approach by testing different bases used to construct a Linear Inverse Model (LIM), a stochastically forced multivariate linear model that has often been used to represent the evolution of coarse‐grained climate anomalies in both models and observations. LIM state vectors are typically represented in a basis of the leading Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOFs), but while dominant large‐scale climate variations often are captured by a subset of these statistical patterns, key precursor dynamics involving relatively small scales are not. An alternative approach is balanced truncation, where the dynamical system is transformed into its Hankel space, whose modes span both precursors and their subsequent responses. Constructing EOF‐ and Hankel‐based LIMs from monthly observed anomalous Pacific sea surface temperatures, both for the 150‐year observational record and a perfect model study using 600 years of LIM output, we find that no balanced truncation model of any dimension can outperform an EOF‐based LIM whose dimension is chosen to maximize independent skill. However, the dynamics of a high‐dimensional EOF‐based LIM can be efficiently reproduced by far fewer Hankel modes. Plain Language Summary: The climate system may be physically and dynamically represented by a set of partial differential equations, from which one can obtain various numerical models and typically require substantial computational resources to solve. It is therefore attractive to find a low order representation of the dynamical system that captures key climate phenomena. One such approach is the Linear Inverse Model (LIM), a multivariate linear empirical model that builds on the large scale climate variability, identified from principal component analysis, and infers the lagged response relationship between two temporally varying climate states. This approach, however, may not adequately identify the small scale precursor dynamics, the occurrences of which often leads to large scale phenomena. Alternatively, the balanced truncation approach is capable of capturing the precursor dynamics and the large‐scale response, by which we find the balanced truncation is more effective in approximating the dynamical system using a lower dimension than LIM. Our finding implies potential use of the balanced truncation approach in many numerical dynamical systems that may benefit from reducing the dimensions and improving the efficiency. Key Points: Low dimensional emulators of the climate system should capture predictable dynamics, which may be evaluated using forecast skill metricsObserved predictable dynamics of high‐dimensional linear inverse model (LIM) can be reproduced by lower dimensional balanced truncationHowever, no balanced truncation model of any dimension can outperform a LIM whose dimension is chosen to maximize independent skill [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]