Monitoring corrosion under insulation utilising electrochemical testing.

This paper proposes a novel sensor-based instrumented monitoring system for the specific detection of corrosion at the CUI interface. Electrochemical Testing (ET), Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) were all used to gather, process and validate the sensor output. A comprehensive literature review was firstly completed to understand the current industrial and research practises. The experimental methodology featured an experiment using a stainless-steel wire mesh at the CUI interface. The experiment compared the behaviour between four samples without the mesh and four with the stainless-steel wire mesh at the CUI interface, in order to monitor any corrosive activity. The mesh was found to be useful in measuring key parameters such as; cell impedance, scale resistance, coating capacitance, charge transfer resistance and the total cell resistance and capacitance. SEM and EDS were used once the experiment had reached the end of its duration. Both methods provided information about the corrosion products and mechanisms at the interface validating the findings of the electrochemical investigation. Certain limitations of the mesh were identified such as its willingness to corrode and limited lifespan. However, it was concluded that the mesh was a valuable method for extracting key information about the condition of the CUI interface

Adelante! Military imaginaries, the Cold War and southern Africa’s liberation armies

Studies of southern Africa’s liberation movements have turned attention to the great importance of their transnational lives, but they have rarely focused on the effects of military training provided by Cold War-era allies in sites across the globe. This is a significant omission in the history of these movements: training turns civilians into soldiers and creates armies with not only military but also social and political effects, as scholarship on conventional militaries has long emphasized. Liberation movement armies differ from conventional armies, however. They were not subordinated to a single state, instead receiving training under the flexible rubric of international solidarity in a host of foreign sites and in interaction with a great variety of military traditions. We argue that the training provided in this context produced multiple ‘military imaginaries’ within liberation movement armies, at once creating deep tensions and enabling innovation. The article is based on oral histories of Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) veterans who were trained by Cuban and Soviet instructors in Angola in the late 1970s. These soldiers emerged from the Angolan camps with a military imaginary they summed up in the Cuban exhortation ‘Adelante!’ (Forward!). Forty years later, they stressed how different their training had made them from other ZIPRA cadres, in terms of their military strategy, mastery of advanced Soviet weaponry and aggressive disposition, as well as their ‘revolutionary’ performance of politics and masculinity in modes of address, salute, and drill. Such military imaginaries powerfully shaped the southern African battlefield. They also offer novel insight into the distinctive institutions, identities and memories forged through Cold War-era military exchanges

Towards an Embodied Sociology of War

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes

The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Decarbonising Queensland: Four Pillars toward a Resilient and Inclusive Low-Carbon Economy : Queensland Universities Vice Chancellors Forum

This policy brief provides an assessment of key policy and technical issues, opportunities and options and provides recommendations to support Queensland Government in the design and delivery of the Queensland Climate Action Plan (QCAP) toward net-zero emissions.1 The findings herein are based on presentations and discussions by leading experts from Queensland universities at the Vice Chancellor’s Queensland Decarbonisation Forum, 29 June 2022