The Effects of Recycling on Kenaf Handsheet Properties

Although wood has remained the dominant raw material for papermaking since the late 19th century, a number of recent financial and environmental contingencies have reverted attention back to the possible utilization of non-wood fibers for papermaking purposes. In particular, recycling remains an omnipresent facet of the forest products industry. Studies indicate that kenaf provides the greatest potential as a papermaking crop within the United States and can be employed to produce high-quality newsprint, and kenaf utilization provides a number of inherent and environmental benefits. Because the CTMP process produces the most functional kenaf pulp; this study of the effects of recycling on kenaf bast CTMP handsheets was conducted to establish trends and help determine the feasibility of incorporating kenaf fibers into recycled paper grades. After some kenaf bast CTMP was received from Mr. John Stahl of The Evanescent Press, the stock was dispersed using a valley beater and screened via a six-cut screen. Virgin handsheets were then created using the Noble and Wood apparatus, and some of those sheets were conditioned and tested for density, burst index, breaking length, scattering coefficient, brightness, folding endurance, and tear force. The remaining sheets were repulped using the valley beater, and this process was completed through four levels of recycling. Finally, two samples of recycled pulp were refined to different freeness levels using a PFI mill. The resultant pulp was used to create, condition and test handsheets as well. As expected, the directions of change of kenaf bast CTMP handsheet properties during recycling mimic those of chemical wood sheets: as burst index, breaking length, folding endurance, and density decrease, the tear force, scattering coefficient, and brightness increase. However, the magnitude of these changes far exceeds those of chemical wood sheets. Fortunately, refining the kenaf bast CTMP not only retrieves lost strength properties, but maintains the improved values of properties that showed increases. In general, kenaf will be utilized primarily as a reinforcement pulp. Assuming that most recycling procedures employ a refining stage, the appropriation of kenaf into recycled paper streams should increase recycled sheet quality and possibly facilitate quality control and efficiency of recycled paper operations

The Taxation of Defamation Recoveries: Toward Establishing Its Reputation

This Recent Development advocates that courts adopt the Ninth Circuit\u27s Roemer approach to determine the nature of dam-ages for injury to reputation by focusing on the attack rather than the effects of the injury, but suggests that courts replace the Ninth Circuit\u27s reliance on state law with a uniform standard. Part II of this Recent Development traces the evolution of the personal in-jury exemption and the confusing judicial treatment that courts have accorded economic damages which result from personal injuries. Part III of this Recent Development discusses the most recent treatment of economic damages by examining the Tax Court\u27s decisions in Glynn, Roemer, and Church and the Ninth Circuit\u27s decision in Roemer. Part IV advocates using the Ninth Circuit\u27s approach, which would allow courts to determine whether to tax awards for injury to personal or business reputation by examining the nature of the attacks rather than the effects of the injuries that those attacks cause. Part IV suggests, however, that courts replace the Roemer court\u27s reliance on state law for determining the personal or business character of damaging attacks with a uniform standard

On trial: agricultural biotechnology in Africa

Increasing agricultural productivity and adapting farming to climate change are central to Africa’s development prospects. There are important opportunities to enhance yields and increase resilience through the adoption of improved crop varieties. In some cases, biotechnology, and in particular genetic modification (GM), offers advantages over conventional plant-breeding approaches. Accordingly there are a various projects under way to develop new GM varieties for African farmers, ranging from drought-resistant maize to varieties of cassava, banana, sorghum, cowpea and sweet potato with resistance to pests and disease. In addition to government funds, these projects have also attracted the support of influential donor agencies and philanthropic foundations. However, despite the expenditure of considerable resources, the potential of GM in Africa is not being realized. So far no GM trait developed for African farmers has been put to use. Multiple barriers inhibit the development and adoption of pro-poor GM varieties in Africa. On the demand side, farmers may be reluctant to adopt GM varieties owing to a lack of export opportunities and distrust of the technology among local consumers. Farmers may also be concerned about exploitation by transnational seed companies (despite the fact that development of new GM technologies in Africa is dominated by the public sector). On the supply side, donor funding struggles to match the long timescales of research and development, while incentives among research scientists may be poorly aligned with farmer outcomes. Non-existent, poorly functioning or overly punitive regulatory regimes discourage investment. The most important barriers – such as regulatory constraints, consumer distrust and weak farmer demand – must be understood in the context of wider social and political dynamics surrounding GM, typified by misinformation, polarized public discourse, and dysfunctional and opportunistic politics. The result is most GM projects becoming ‘stuck’ at the field trial stage without ever progressing to release. This ‘convenient deadlock’ of continual field trials allows governments to manage political risks by effectively balancing the demands of pro-GM and anti-GM lobbies – proponents of GM have a pipeline of technologies, while opponents are appeased by the failure of any to gain approval. The disabling socio-political environment for GM development in Africa greatly reduces the efficacy of investment in this technology. This has two important implications. First, technology development needs to be located within a wider project of transformation that engages key actors – most notably politicians, policy-makers and farmers – as stakeholders from the outset, and includes strategies to address multiple demand- and supply-side barriers. Second, successful adoption is more likely in countries with less disabling political conditions, characterized by lower levels of consumer distrust and opposition, genuine farmer demand and demonstrable commitment from government. Focusing efforts and resources on a small number of ‘best bet’ countries will also allow donors and technology providers to support more ambitious, transformational projects led by national governments

The bacteriology of Atlantic halibut: Hippoglossus hippoglossus (L.) larval rearing

A bacteriological survey of three different UK halibut hatcheries was undertaken. These were the Seafish Industry Authority (SFIA) Marine Farming Unit at Ardtoe in Argyllshire, Mannin Seafarms, Isle of Man and Otter Ferry Seafish. Otter Ferry operates different rearing practices to the other two hatcheries in that it uses marine copepods, as well as enriched Artemia, as a start feed for developing halibut larvae. SFIA Ardtoe and Mannin Seafarms rear their larvae intensively, only supplying first-feeding larvae with unenriched Artemia metanauplii and ongrown enriched Artemia. The bacterial flora of hatchery-reared Atlantic halibut eggs, larvae, juveniles and adults were monitored. The water in the halibut rearing tanks, and some of the possible sources of microbial inputs into the rearing system, were simultaneously sampled and analysed. Characterisation was done using a combination of traditional biochemical tests, the BIOLOGGN bacterial identification system, PCR-RFLP of 16S rRNA genes and partial 16S rDNA gene analysis. The gut microflora appeared to be seeded towards the beginning of the nonfeeding yolk-sac stage; by the onset of first-feeding this exceeded 10

Actions speak louder than words: Semi-supervised learning for browser fingerprinting detection

As online tracking continues to grow, existing anti-tracking and fingerprinting detection techniques that require significant manual input must be augmented. Heuristic approaches to fingerprinting detection are precise but must be carefully curated. Supervised machine learning techniques proposed for detecting tracking require manually generated label-sets. Seeking to overcome these challenges, we present a semi-supervised machine learning approach for detecting fingerprinting scripts. Our approach is based on the core insight that fingerprinting scripts have similar patterns of API access when generating their fingerprints, even though their access patterns may not match exactly. Using this insight, we group scripts by their JavaScript (JS) execution traces and apply a semi-supervised approach to detect new fingerprinting scripts. We detail our methodology and demonstrate its ability to identify the majority of scripts ($\geqslant$94.9%) identified by existing heuristic techniques. We also show that the approach expands beyond detecting known scripts by surfacing candidate scripts that are likely to include fingerprinting. Through an analysis of these candidate scripts we discovered fingerprinting scripts that were missed by heuristics and for which there are no heuristics. In particular, we identified over one hundred device-class fingerprinting scripts present on hundreds of domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time device-class fingerprinting has been measured in the wild. These successes illustrate the power of a sparse vector representation and semi-supervised learning to complement and extend existing tracking detection techniques

Marriage and Materialism: Actor and Partner Effects Between Materialism, Importance of Marriage, and Marital Satisfaction

Drawing upon both the incompatibility of materialism and children model and marital paradigms theory, the purpose of the current study was to examine husband-wife actor and partner effects between materialism and marital satisfaction and to explore perception of the importance of marriage as a mediator of these relationships. Using a sample of 706 couples from the RELATE dataset, wives’ materialism negatively predicted both their own marital satisfaction as well as their husbands’ marital satisfaction. However, when controlling for financial problems in marriage, these effects became non-significant. Additionally, upon adding both wives’ and husbands’ importance of marriage (as well as combined couples’ “common fate” importance of marriage) to the model as mediators, indirect effects (actor and partner) between materialism and marital satisfaction were noted. Thus, when one partner (regardless of gender) places a high value on money and possessions, both spouses are less likely to place a high value on marriage, and are subsequently less likely to be satisfied in their marriage. Implications for financial therapists are discussed

Surface Laplacian of Central Scalp Electrical Signals is Insensitive to Muscle Contamination

Author version made available in accordance with the publisher's policy. "(c) 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works."Abstract—Objective: To investigate the effects of surface Laplacian processing on gross and persistent electromyographic (EMG) contamination of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals in electrical scalp recordings. Methods: We made scalp recordings during passive and active tasks, on awake subjects in the absence and in the presence of complete neuromuscular blockade. Three scalp surface Laplacian estimators were compared to left ear and common average reference (CAR). Contamination was quantified by comparing power after paralysis (brain signal, B) with power before paralysis (brain plus muscle signal, B+M). Brain:Muscle (B:M) ratios for the methods were calculated using B and differences in power after paralysis to represent muscle (M). Results: There were very small power differences after paralysis up to 600 Hz using surface Laplacian transforms (B:M> 6 above 30 Hz in central scalp leads). Conclusions: Scalp surface Laplacian transforms reduce muscle power in central and peri-central leads to less than one sixth of the brain signal, 2-3 times better signal detection than CAR. Significance: Scalp surface Laplacian transformations provide robust estimates for detecting high frequency (gamma) activity, for assessing electrophysiological correlates of disease, and also for providing a measure of brain electrical activity for use as a ‘standard’ in the development of brain/muscle signal separation methods