Patrick O’Brien has dedicated most of his career to studying British economic history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution, its antecedents, characteristics and consequences. He has always paid attention to long-term developments and never confined himself to strictly economic aspects. From the late 1990s onward, he increasingly turned ‘global’. His importance for global history cannot be overstated. His essay in this issue presents the outcome of his long intellectual journey. I will in this rejoinder try to assess his approach and his findings and comment on Patrick as a scholar and as a person. As we are close friends I will be critical.

In this paper, a novel miniaturized implantable circular antenna is presented. It supports both wireless information communication and wireless energy transmission at the Medical Device Radiocommunication band (MedRadio 402–405 MHz) and the industrial, scientific, and medical bands (ISM 902.8–928 MHz). The antenna is circular to avoid sharp edges while miniaturization is achieved by adding two circular slots to the patch. The main scenario includes embedding into the muscle layer of a cylindrical three-layer model of a human arm for which several parameters are analyzed (resonance, radiation pattern, and specific absorption rate). Power transmission efficiency and interaction distance limits to ensure connections are also evaluated. Finally, the design is validated by an experimental measurement in an anechoic chamber, and some new improvements are proposed.

In this paper, a complete wireless power transmission scenario is presented, including an external transmission antenna, an in-body embedded antenna, a rectifying circuit, and a powered sensor. This system operates at the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical bands (902.8–928 MHz). For the antenna design, important parameters including reflection coefficient, radiation pattern, and specific absorption rate are presented. As for the rectifying circuit, a precise model is created utilizing off-the-shelf components. Several circuit models and components are examined in order to obtain optimum results. Finally, this work is evaluated against various sensors' power needs found in literature.

The most compelling aspect of E. P. Thompson's work for labor historian of Southern Africa is his contention that class is a fluent group relationship or ‘happening’ – something workers do, in addition to what employers and the state impose upon them. However, by the 1970s, Thompson recognized that his earlier claim also had to resonate with other key assumptions about working class aspirations; especially the need of a shared group consciousness to be more meaningful for individuals than the laws of the state. The principal weakness of Thompson's for African historians, however, is the absence of a more explicit discussion about the demise of the English peasantry in his work.

In this paper, an implantable coplanar waveguide-fed tapered monopole antenna for industrial scientific and medical band (2.4–2.48 GHz) applications is proposed. This proposed design has an overall dimension of 44 × 44 × 0.5 mm3. The designed antenna is made compatible for implantation on human tissues such as skin, fat, or muscles by embedding it on the RT Duroid substrate and the 10 dB return loss bandwidth is 6.12% ranging from 2.35 to 2.5 GHz. This proposed antenna can be significantly used in implantable medical devices and radio frequency (RF), because of its merits such as conformability, flexibility in design and shape, biocompatibility, patient safety, miniaturization, power consumption, etc.

A novel coplanar waveguide-fed Z-monopole antennas are proposed for the first time for a industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band (2.4–2.48 GHz) applications. To make the designed antenna suitable for implantation, it is embedded in biocompatible Al2O3 ceramic substrate. The antenna operates at resonance frequency of 2.45 GHz to support wide band communication for high data rate implantable neural monitoring application. The size of the antenna is 38.675 mm3 (8.5 mm × 7 mm × 0.65 mm). The antenna was simulated and measured by immersing it in a phantom liquid, imitate the electrical properties of the human body phantom liquid. The simulated and measured bandwidths are 10.2 and 11.4% at the centre frequency. A study of the sensitivity of the antenna performance as a function of its dielectric parameters of the environment in which it is immersed was performed. The demonstration among the design EM characteristics of the antenna is presented by current distributions.

The need to store the trajectory information required by industrial robots, so that they may carry out tasks such as painting, has led to various data compression methods. The method proposed, simple to implement and adaptable to low cost systems, enables a best compromise to be reached for a given application between the detailed description of a complex movement and the use of as little memory as possible. This method was first used on a hydraulic prototype for the French Master-Slave firm PHAREMME.

Programming and control of industrial robots in a flexible manufacturing environment is a problem of increasing complexity. The paper deals with a software system, which is as much as possible independent of the real robot and suitable for different microprocessor configurations. It contains, furthermore, some components for off-line programming.

This Panel Session consisted of five country reports (India, Indonesia, Maldives, Thailand, andNepal) and the common issues identified during the Panel discussions relative to seismic events in the Southeast Asia Region. Important issues identified included the needs for: (1) a legal framework upon which to base preparedness and response; (2) coordination between the many organizations involved; (3) early warning systems within and between countries; (4) command and control; (5) access to resources including logistics; (6) strengthening the health infrastructure; (7) professionalizing the field of disaster medicine and management; (8) management of communications and information; (9) management of dead bodies; and (10) mental health of the survivors and health workers.

While the archaeological study of the early modern period was generally underplayed within Irish archaeology before the 1970s, since that time there has been a significant increase in research on post-medieval and industrial themes. The origins, achievements, and recent developments of post-medieval and industrial archaeology in Ireland are discussed, with a consideration of the future of these disciplines.