A Dynamic Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment for Norovirus in Potable Reuse System

This study describes the results of a dynamic quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) for norovirus (NoV) that was used to evaluate the relative significance of foodborne, person-to-person, and person-to-sewage-to-person transmission pathways. This last pathway was incorporated into simulated potable reuse systems to evaluate the adequacy of typical treatment trains, operational conditions, and regulatory frameworks. The results confirm that secondary and foodborne transmission dominate the overall risk calculation and that waterborne NoV likely contributes no appreciable public health risk, at least in the scenarios modeled in this study. De facto reuse with an environmental buffer storage time of at least 30 days was comparable or even superior to direct potable reuse (DPR) when compound failures during advanced treatment were considered in the model. Except during these low-probability failure events, DPR generally remained below the 10−4 annual risk benchmark for drinking water. Based on system feedback and the time-dependent pathogen load to the community\u27s raw sewage, this model estimated median raw wastewater NoV concentrations of 107–108 genome copies per liter (gc/L), which is consistent with high-end estimates in recent literature

A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the sectional geography of freedom and mobility as they were tied to conceptions of liberalism in the antebellum United States. Whereas previous scholars, especially those whose work focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, have tended to regard forms of marronage in relation to their potential for large-scale emancipatory schemes like those made famous by the maroons of Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil (among others), I am less interested in the concrete or imagined connections between marronage and enslaved revolt and more interested in those between marronage and freedom-seeking practices via flight in their many possible forms and manifestations. In this sense, marronage becomes an optic through which I investigate the production of alternate formations of community, sociality, belonging, space, and ultimately geography and freedom that primarily African American writers in the 1850s were exploring through literary discourse. The texts I examine ultimately form a constellation which articulates a black-centered politics of resistance based on a freedom of movement disarticulated from liberal conceptions of citizenship and the nation state. The emphasis on the 1850s reflects a rise in attention to marronage after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which effectively nationalized the institution of slavery in the eyes of the law. The mobility exhibited by runaway enslaved people who sought freedom by heading north, sometimes via the Underground Railroad, has been made to comport with the teleological narrative of the liberal subject in US history so as to appear as an example of those wrongfully denied liberal subjecthood valiantly striking out in search of it. The mobility exhibited by maroons, on the other hand, has been largely ignored in the US context because it does not comport with racial ideologies of assimilation and integration. This dissertation aims to demonstrate the extent to which marronage engages with contested, complicated, often nonliberal meanings of freedom for enslaved and fugitive African Americans in the antebellum United States as they were explored and articulated through representations of maroons in literary texts

The Cost of Culture The Impact of National Culture on the Pass-Through of Commodity Shocks

This study analyzes the impact of national culture on the pass-through of commodity price shocks to retail goods. In particular, this study explores the commodities of coffee, cotton and steel. Through the use of regression analysis, this study looks to determine the relationship between two key predictive variables: risk tolerance of a country and commodity shocks within a company’s associated commodity market, and their impact on the value of companies within that country. Additional factors are explored at the firm financial level and the firm country level. The purpose of this study is to examine if consumers of one country will pay more overall for retail goods than consumers of another country, based on the culture of companies involved in the supply chain of that good. An analysis of firms in countries with varying levels of risk tolerance will indicate which countries absorb or pass more of the shock to consumers. Findings indicate that national culture and commodity shocks do not have an overall influential effect on the price that consumers are paying across the commodity chains explored. Culture, in terms of the level of uncertainty avoidance in the country of incorporation, plays no significant role in the pass-through of commodity price shocks. While it was seen that culture does not have significant implications on commodity price shocks, it does begin to suggest that the recent globalization phenomenon has taken a formal standing in the way that businesses are performing internationally. Implications for global managers are found within the context of this research and its application henceforth in the field of international finance

The Impact of Capsid Proteins on Virus Removal and Inactivation During Water Treatment Processes

This study examined the effect of the amino acid composition of protein capsids on virus inactivation using ultraviolet (UV) irradiation and titanium dioxide photocatalysis, and physical removal via enhanced coagulation using ferric chloride. Although genomic damage is likely more extensive than protein damage for viruses treated using UV, proteins are still substantially degraded. All amino acids demonstrated significant correlations with UV susceptibility. The hydroxyl radicals produced during photocatalysis are considered nonspecific, but they likely cause greater overall damage to virus capsid proteins relative to the genome. Oxidizing chemicals, including hydroxyl radicals, preferentially degrade amino acids over nucleotides, and the amino acid tyrosine appears to strongly influence virus inactivation. Capsid composition did not correlate strongly to virus removal during physicochemical treatment, nor did virus size. Isoelectric point may play a role in virus removal, but additional factors are likely to contribute

Reflections on a Third Grade Social Studies Curriculum

This curriculum study is a narrative account of a teacher and the social studies curriculum she uses with her third grade class. The curriculum is divided into two main parts. One is a study of the students\u27 culture and family history which involves interviews with the children\u27s parents, an examination of maps and literature from those cultures, and a description of the way the students experience the study through their writings, drawings, and conversation. The second part of the study is an investigation of the students\u27 neighborhood and community. Through interviews with community members, neighborhood walks, and their own observations, the children learn about their environment. Their observations are documented by writings, drawings, and a neighborhood history time line. Interspersed in the explanation of this curriculum study is an explanation of the learning process this teacher goes through as she creates and implements curriculum. This study also describes the joys and sorrows of teaching in an urban public school

TOWARD THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF ACTIVE AUTHENTICATION RESEARCH

Authentication is the vital link between your real self and your digital self. As our digital selves become ever more powerful, the price of failing authentication grows. The most common authentication protocols are static data and employed only once at login. This allows for authentication to be spoofed just once to gain access to an entire user session. Behaviometric protocols continuously consume a user’s behavior as a token of authentication and can be applied throughout a session, thereby eliminating a fixed token to spoof. Research into these protocols as viable forms of authentication is relatively recent and is being conducted on a variety of data sources, features and classification schemes. This work proposes an extensible research framework to aid the systemization and preservation of research in this field by standardizing the interface for raw data collection, processing and interpretation. Specifically, this framework contributes transparent management of data collection and persistence, the presentation of past research in a highly configurable and extensible form, and the standardization of data forms to enhance innovative reuse and comparative analysis of prior research