Reducing the Amount of Microbiological Growth Using Ultrasonic Treatment

This thesis explored the possibility of using ultrasonic treatment to reduce the amount of microbiological growth in a sample of contaminated mill wastewater. It was found that ultrasonic treatment reduces microbiological growth through the mechanism of cavitation. percent inhibition increases with both time of treatment and applied power. The most economical conditions were high power and a short treatment time. The increase in cell volume had an inverse effect on the percent inhibition. The increase in consistency of the treated solution also had an inverse effect on the percent inhibition and 6% was the maximum treatable consistency. Ultrasonic treatment was compared to three popular biocides at a 90% inhibition level. The biocides used were Methylene Bis(Thiocyanate), Isothiazolin, and a Thiadiazine type. Dosages to achieve 90% inhibition were 154 ppm., 161 ppm, and 127 ppm. respectively. The 90% inhibition level was reached with 0.0158 kW hrs. of energy, using ultrasonic treatment. This energy was scaled up to 8.030% HP day/ton. Further studies are recommended in the areas of cell geometry, determination of the maximum power efficiency, and the development of a dynamic model to test ultrasonic treatment in a situation oriented more towards the paper mill environment

Alcohol-related violence and disorder: new critical perspectives

This paper presents critical perspectives into alcohol-related violence and disorder. In doing so, we advance writing by geographers challenging ontological and epistemological orthodoxies which dominate ‘alcohol studies’. By engaging with work focused on playful or ludic urbanism, and literature considering emotions, embodiment and affect, we address an impasse between medical and social sciences approaches in order to better understand and tackle alcohol-related violence and disorder. We conclude with theoretical and policy-relevant insights

The Next Generation of Library Orientation: Discussion on the Application of Virtual and Immersive Reality, 360 Degree Movies, etc.

The rapid advent in the technologies of augmented and virtual reality (VR) in the last several years and the surge down in price creates possibilities for application in education. A collaboration by a librarian and VR specialist is testing the opportunities to apply 360 degree movies and VR in academic library orientation. The team seeks to bank on the inheriting interest of Millennials toward these technologies and their inextricable part of a rapidly becoming traditional gaming environment. The team relies on the constructivist theory of assisting students in building their knowledge in their own pace and on their own terms, rather than being lectured and guided by a librarian. Using inexpensive Google Cardboard goggles, students can explore a realistic set up of the actual library and familiarize themselves with its services. Students were polled on the effectiveness of such approach as well as on their inclination to entertain more comprehensive version of library orientation. Based on the lessons from this experiment, the team intends to pursue also a standardized approach to introducing VR to other campus services, thus bringing down further the cost of VR projects on campus. https://www.slideshare.net/aidemoreto/video-360-in-the-librar

Intelligence Studies: some thoughts on the state of the art

The paper is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the field of Intelligence Studies but summarises the major currents in research in this area, in the last twenty years. In addition, it suggests directions for future research concluding that Intelligence Studies represents a healthy and growing activity of great relevance to contemporary security governance. There are identified a few challenges for the development of the domain, mainly the fact that Anglo-American authors and subject matter continue to dominate the literature, and the fact that the relations between the academic institutions and intelligence agencies, the civil-military relations, have not always been easy

The league table of post-war leaders of the opposition according to academics: Corbyn not the worst and Starmer trending below Kinnock

Mark Gill and Kevin Theakston present the results of a survey of academics, asked to give their individual ratings of each UK leader of the opposition since 1945

Within-guild dietary discrimination from 3-D textural analysis of tooth microwear in insectivorous mammals

Resource exploitation and competition for food are important selective pressures in animal evolution. A number of recent investigations have focused on linkages between diversification, trophic morphology and diet in bats, partly because their roosting habits mean that for many bat species diet can be quantified relatively easily through faecal analysis. Dietary analysis in mammals is otherwise invasive, complicated, time consuming and expensive. Here we present evidence from insectivorous bats that analysis of three-dimensional (3-D) textures of tooth microwear using International Organization for Standardization (ISO) roughness parameters derived from sub-micron surface data provides an additional, powerful tool for investigation of trophic resource exploitation in mammals. Our approach, like scale-sensitive fractal analysis, offers considerable advantages over twodimensional (2-D) methods of microwear analysis, including improvements in robustness, repeatability and comparability of studies. Our results constitute the first analysis of microwear textures in carnivorous mammals based on ISO roughness parameters. They demonstrate that the method is capable of dietary discrimination, even between cryptic species with subtly different diets within trophic guilds, and even when sample sizes are small. We find significant differences in microwear textures between insectivore species whose diet contains different proportions of ‘hard’ prey (such as beetles) and ‘soft’ prey (such as moths), and multivariate analyses are able to distinguish between species with different diets based solely on their tooth microwear textures. Our results show that, compared with previous 2-D analyses of microwear in bats, ISO roughness parameters provide a much more sophisticated characterization of the nature of microwear surfaces and can yield more robust and subtle dietary discrimination. ISO-based textural analysis of tooth microwear thus has a useful role to play, complementing existing approaches, in trophic analysis of mammals, both extant and extinct

The harvest plot: a method for synthesising evidence about the differential effects of interventions.

BACKGROUND: One attraction of meta-analysis is the forest plot, a compact overview of the essential data included in a systematic review and the overall 'result'. However, meta-analysis is not always suitable for synthesising evidence about the effects of interventions which may influence the wider determinants of health. As part of a systematic review of the effects of population-level tobacco control interventions on social inequalities in smoking, we designed a novel approach to synthesis intended to bring aspects of the graphical directness of a forest plot to bear on the problem of synthesising evidence from a complex and diverse group of studies. METHODS: We coded the included studies (n = 85) on two methodological dimensions (suitability of study design and quality of execution) and extracted data on effects stratified by up to six different dimensions of inequality (income, occupation, education, gender, race or ethnicity, and age), distinguishing between 'hard' (behavioural) and 'intermediate' (process or attitudinal) outcomes. Adopting a hypothesis-testing approach, we then assessed which of three competing hypotheses (positive social gradient, negative social gradient, or no gradient) was best supported by each study for each dimension of inequality. RESULTS: We plotted the results on a matrix ('harvest plot') for each category of intervention, weighting studies by the methodological criteria and distributing them between the competing hypotheses. These matrices formed part of the analytical process and helped to encapsulate the output, for example by drawing attention to the finding that increasing the price of tobacco products may be more effective in discouraging smoking among people with lower incomes and in lower occupational groups. CONCLUSION: The harvest plot is a novel and useful method for synthesising evidence about the differential effects of population-level interventions. It contributes to the challenge of making best use of all available evidence by incorporating all relevant data. The visual display assists both the process of synthesis and the assimilation of the findings. The method is suitable for adaptation to a variety of questions in evidence synthesis and may be particularly useful for systematic reviews addressing the broader type of research question which may be most relevant to policymakers