A composite system approach to aircraft cabin fire safety

The thermochemical and flammability characteristics of two polymeric composites currently in use and seven others being considered for use as aircraft interior panels are described. The properties studied included: (1) limiting oxygen index of the composite constituents; (2) fire containment capability of the composite; (3) smoke evolution from the composite; (4) thermogravimetric analysis; (5) composition of the volatile products of thermal degradation; and (6) relative toxicity of the volatile products of pyrolysis. The performance of high temperature laminating resins such as bismaleimides is compared with the performance of phenolics and epoxies. The relationship of increased fire safety with the use of polymers with high anaerobic char yield is shown. Processing parameters of one of the baremaleimide composites are detailed

Study circles improve the precision in nutritional care in special accommodations

Background: Disease-related malnutrition is a major health problem in the elderly population, but it has until recently received very little attention, especially are management issues under-explored. By identifying residents at the risk of undernutrition, appropriate nutritional care can be provided. Objectives: Do study circles and policy documents improve the precision in nutritional care and decrease the prevalence of low or high BMI? Design: Pre and post intervention study. Setting: Special accommodations (nursing homes) within six municipalities were involved. Participants: In 2005, 1726 (90.4%) out of 1910 residents agreed to participate and in 2007, 1526 (81.8%) out of 1866 residents participated. Intervention: Study circles in one municipality, having a policy document in one municipality and no intervention in four municipalities. Measurements: Risk of undernutrition was defined as involving any of: involuntary weight loss, low BMI, and/or eating difficulties. Overweight was defined as high BMI. Results: In 2005 and 2007, 64% of 1726 and 66% of 1526 residents respectively were at the risk of undernutrition. In 2007 significantly more patients in the study circle municipality were accurately provided protein and energy enriched food compared to in the no intervention municipalities. There was a decrease in the prevalence of low BMI in the study circle municipality and the prevalence of overweight increased in the policy document municipality between 2005 and 2007

Urban acupuncture: a catalyst for urban regeneration in the historic exchange district of Winnipeg

Bibliography: p. 65-66Some pages are in colour.When considering the existing urban syntax and the potentials for the implementation of change on a large scale through a series small interventions; parallels can be drawn to the Barcelona model. "Barcelona began to pull itself around with a seven-year plan in 1980: 140 small projects provided more plazas and better housing ... the central theme was: make the centre more functional and mediate the expansion of the outskirts." The Barcelona visionaries (Mayors: Joan Clos, Narcis Serra and Pasqual Maragall and Architects: Oriol Bohigas and Josep Acebillo) believe the successful development of a decaying city depends on taking a less fragmented approach. The title 'Urban Acupuncture' speaks to a comprehensive approach that seeks to respond to an existing urban condition through a diagnostical analysis which inherently elicits a prescriptive reaction whereby the illegibility and incohesiveness of the civic fabric of the City of Winnipeg is medicated by a series of small architectural interventions. The City of Winnipeg is plagued by a condition referred to in this document as WasteSpace. The term was coined by a Dutch firm, S333, whose work has responded to a similar condition in the Netherlands responding to a contextual climate where a deficiency of greenfield sites has elicited a new paradigm of brownfield reclamation. They have realized the importance of reclaiming wasted space is high. In Winnipeg we have not yet been met with this condition; a seemingly endless supply of greenfield sites has allowed for rampant suburban expansion that has left the core perforated with an immense series of vacant surface area and a high number of vacant buildings

'Ice or flame' : a thematic study of the fiction of Joseph Conrad

Conrad abandons as means of ‘seeing’ truth traditional formal logic and practical reason, idols worthipped in nineteenth-century positivist thought; and, like Calderon, he adopts a dream-logic of contradictions akin to Nicholas of Cusa's principle of the coincidentia oppositorum. Conrad, like a mystic, struggles ‘to see’ the Inconceivable by the light of a synthetic logic and to translate into verbal symbols the unspeakable truth within and without. -- Conrad's logic is the dream-logic of the infinite, the logic of analogy. Expressed analogically as sea, dream, mirror, woman and jungle, the Infinite is mutually-reflected within the craftsman, mankind and the universe. Conrad’s works are themselves dreams, dramatic performances of the absurd in a universal playhouse of multiple inter-changing optical and moral perspectives and identities, in which distinctions between reality and illusion, actor and spectator, good and evil, order and anarchy, dreaming and waking are ambiguous and obscure. Immersed in this dream-like, timeless element of contradictions, Conrad's protagonists, landsmen and seamen, initially ignorant of the truth of existence, become ‘raving somnambulists’ afloat in a sea of 'ice or flame.’ Their subsequent interior vision, a-learned unknowing of truth, coincides with catastrophe. -- The widespread failure of critics to perceive Conrad as a dream-logician and prose-poet of the Infinite, rather than as a craftsman of mere facts and surface logic, accounts for much of the mistranslation of Conrad's semantics of the Inscrutable, for the general misreading of his achievement within the tradition of Western letters, and for the mistaken charges that Conrad sentimentalized women and 'the seaman-self.’ Conrad's ironic dream-logic, the logic of the Inscrutable, pervades the corpus of his work and provides its single underlying formal theme. Mankind, 'the intimate alliance of contradictions,' is Conrad's perennial subject

Mechanistic Assessment of Metabolic Interaction between Single Oral Commensal Cells by Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy

The human oral microbiome heavily influences the status of oral and systemic diseases through different microbial compositions and complex signaling between microbes. Recent evidence suggests that investigation of interactions between oral microbes can be utilized to understand how stable communities are maintained and how they may preserve health. Herein, we investigate two highly abundant species in the human supragingival plaque, Streptococcus mitis and Corynebacterium matruchotii, to elucidate their real-time chemical communication in commensal harmony. Specifically, we apply nanoscale scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) using a submicropipet-supported interface between two immiscible electrolyte solutions as an SECM probe not only to image the permeability of S. mitis and C. matruchotii membranes to tetraethylammonium (TEA+) probe ions but also to real-time visualize the metabolic interaction between two microbes via lactate production/consumption at a single-cell level. The metabolic relationship between two strains is quantitatively assessed by determining (1) the passive permeability of both bacterial membranes of 2.4 × 10−4 cm/s to the free diffusion of TEA+, (2) 0.5 mM of the lactate concentration produced by a single S. mitis strain at a rate of 2.7 × 10−4 cm/s, and (3) a lactate oxidation rate ≥5.0 × 106 s−1 by an individual C. matruchotii strain. Significantly, this study, for the first time, describes a mechanism of in situ metabolic interaction between oral commensals at the single-cell level through quantitative analysis, which supports the observed in vivo spatial arrangements of these microbes