Inside the Hallowed Walls: Convent Life through Material History

This paper is an inquiry into the nature of convent life through an examination of the material history of a religious community. Consideration is given to the spatial structure of the first convent built in southern New Brunswick, convent artifacts, and religious habits. This discussion touches upon the tension within apostolic communities of having to address both the services dimension and the prayer life. In this paper it is observed that in the course of attempting to improve the services dimension much of the externals of the prayer life receded in importance. These artifacts, now relegated to museums, serve today as a poignant material legacy of a Catholic religious social organization that once functioned as a compelling career route for women. Résumé La communication étudie la nature de la vie dans un couvent, en examinant l'histoire matérielle d'une communauté religieuse. Elle décrit, entre autres, la structure spatiale du premier couvent établi dans le sud du Nouveau-Brunswick, des objets et des habits religieux. La discussion fait état des difficultés auxquelles se heurtaient les communautés apostoliques pour servir le public tout en continuant à mener une vie de prière. On mentionne que les efforts consacrés à améliorer le service à la population ont grandement diminué l'importance de nombreuses formes extérieures de dévotion. Ces objets, maintenant relégués dans les musées, constituent le poignant témoignage laissé par une organisation sociale catholique et religieuse qui représentait autrefois la carrière féminine par excellence

Best practice litter management manual for Australian meat chicken farms : Covering fresh, in-shed, reuse and spent litter management

Litter is most likely one of the largest operational investments on meat chicken farms. Litter management can affect meat chicken health, human health, odour and dust. Despite the issue being important for all industry participants, there hasn’t been a single point where information has been brought together and maintained in an up-to-date format. While the industry has done a large amount of work in this area, the results are documented in a variety of reports, scientific papers and guides, without there being one document that synthesises this information and makes it applicable and relevant to the various industry participants. This Best practice litter management manual for Australian meat chicken farms collects this knowledge in one place. The manual covers: litter selection; management of litter in sheds, including reuse; and options and use of spent litter following removal from sheds. It has been structured so that users can access concise information and guidance on the best management practice for each process involving litter

Ellipsometric determination of optical constants for silicon and thermally grown silicon dioxide via a multi-sample, multi-wavelength, multi-angle investigation

Optical constant spectra for silicon and thermally grown silicon dioxide have been simultaneously determined using variable angle of incidence spectroscopic ellipsometry from 0.75 to 6.5 eV. Spectroscopic ellipsometric data sets acquired at multiple angles of incidence from seven samples with oxide thicknesses from 2 to 350 nm were analyzed using a self-contained multi-sample technique to obtain Kramers–Kronig consistent optical constant spectra. The investigation used a systematic approach utilizing optical models of increasing complexity in order to investigate the need for fitting the thermal SiO2 optical constants and including an interface layer between the silicon and SiO2 in modeling the data. A detailed study was made of parameter correlation effects involving the optical constants used for the interface layer. The resulting thermal silicon dioxide optical constants were shown to be independent of the precise substrate model used, and were found to be approximately 0.4% higher in index than published values for bulk glasseous SiO2. The resulting silicon optical constants are comparable to previous ellipsometric measurements in the regions of overlap, and are in agreement with long wavelength prism measurements and transmission measurements near the band gap

Sparsity driven ultrasound imaging

An image formation framework for ultrasound imaging from synthetic transducer arrays based on sparsity-driven regularization functionals using single-frequency Fourier domain data is proposed. The framework involves the use of a physics-based forward model of the ultrasound observation process, the formulation of image formation as the solution of an associated optimization problem, and the solution of that problem through efficient numerical algorithms. The sparsity-driven, model-based approach estimates a complex-valued reflectivity field and preserves physical features in the scene while suppressing spurious artifacts. It also provides robust reconstructions in the case of sparse and reduced observation apertures. The effectiveness of the proposed imaging strategy is demonstrated using experimental data