A Credible Utopia

A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter offers unique and personal insights into Schroeter’s cinematic universe. Many of the films discussed in this book are those upon which Schroeter’s worldwide reputation rests: Der Bomberpilot, an absurdist comedy; The Death of Maria Malibran, a film about ecstatic redemption in death; Willow Springs, about the complex relationships between men and women; Day of the Idiots, a visually baroque, operatic and highly dramatic film about madness; The Kingdom of Naples, Schroeter’s visually stunning depiction of Italy in the post-war years; and Palermo or Wolfsburg, for which Schroeter won the Golden Bear, an epic film about love, violence, and cultural malaise. But Valente also addresses Schroeter's early experimental films that don't get as much attention, such as Aggression, Neurasia, and Argila, all of which are about the struggle between repression and desire, and Deux, a late work that Schroeter considered his masterpiece, a film about the double and the ways in which identity is formed by integrating the abject part of ourselves with the good. Valente concludes with an analysis of Nuit de Chien, Schroeter's final film, a powerful summation of a live devoted to art, music, literature, and film. When the Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Schroeter's ouevre in 2012, there was hardly anything in English on his films and only one film available on DVD in the US, such that Schroeter's work as a director has remained largely invisible in the English-speaking world. A Credible Utopia repairs this lacuna in film history, and, in a detailed and intimate reading of Schroeter's queer ouevre, links all these films together through Schroeter's desire for a “credible utopia,” despite our shared awareness of disaster, torture, viciousness, and political corruption in the world

Production and characterization of activated carbons made from sunflower stems

Activated carbons (ACs) are artificial materials, prepared from natural or synthetic precursors that are worldwide extensively used. The ACs main characteristics are the noticeable adsorption capabilities provided by the highly developed porous structure and the rich surface chemistry. Because of their versatility and properties the final material can be tailored to have specific properties suitable for a wide range of applications such as medical uses, gas storage, removal of pollutants and odours, gas separation and purification as well as in catalysis. With the increase of activated carbon demand, one of the main challenges lies in the attempt to find new precursors, which are cheap and accessible with good valorisation potential, like industrial and agricultural residues. In the present work we report the production of ACs from sunflower stems, an agricultural by-product, through a physical activation process by CO2 and H2O, using a single step carbonisation at 400ºC, which as far as it came to our knowledge was never made for this precursor

Essays on the Peripheries

"Essays on the Peripheries contains essays written by translator and scholar Peter Valente over a twenty-year period, stretching from the 1990s to 2019. They are a record of literary exploration and discovery, concerned with the recovery of lost works, with those writers whose works were out of print or hard to find, and whose names were somehow not fashionable in the current discourse, but who are important nevertheless. Edouard Roditi, Barbara Barg, and Tom Savage, for example, should be better known, but their books are largely ignored. This collection of essays highlights those works on the periphery, such as Turkish poets Seyhan Erözçelik and Küçük İskender, while it also includes several essays on better-known queer authors like Pierre Guyotat and Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing on often overlooked qualities in their work that bear looking at closely. These essays on works of literature are complemented by a number of texts on jazz, again highlighting important and interesting figures in the world of jazz and free improvisation that may have fallen through the cracks, such as the pianist Richard Twardzick and the Ganelin trio, which recorded their great experimental work Ancora da Capo in 1980, behind the Iron Curtain. Attention is also to given to more popular figures such as Stan Getz. The volume is completed with a series of essays reappraising Roman poets in the twenty-first century, offering fresh new translations and readings of authors such as Catullus and Callimachus. A collection of essays, like an anthology, is by its nature incomplete. Essays on the Peripheries is a kind of sketch, rather than a finished portrait, of the author's changing impressions on various subjects over the years.

Decolourisation of a pulp mill effluent using commercial activated carbons

The decolourisation of industry effluents is a challenging and fundamental task related to pollution control, mainly in pulp mill and textile industries. The dark colour of the pulp mill effluent, depending on the river characteristics, can lead to the reduction of the light penetration into the aquatic environment with the consequent decrease of photosynthesis and aquatic life destruction. Also, the lignocelulosic material deposited on the margins and river bed can lead to a large depletion of the dissolved oxygen with the creation of anaerobic conditions that can give rise to the death of aquatic organisms (Ali, 2001). The chemical composition of the pulp mill effluent (referred as effluent) is very complex. Nevertheless, we can say that the lignin and tannin compounds are the main causes for the effluent´s dark brown colour. Among these compounds we can find hidroxyphenyl, siringyl and guaiacyl complexes (Mohan, 1997). These compounds are chemically stable, resistant to biodegradation and extremely difficult to separate by most methods in cost effective processes, such as membrane adsorption (Mutlu, 2002), cationic coagulants, ultrafiltration (Mutlu, 2002) and chemical oxidation (Malik, 2004). One of the most promising methods is the use of activated carbons for the removal of the effluent colour. In this work the use of 5 commercial activated samples with different shapes, origins and characteristics were tested for the decolourisation of a pulp mill effluent collected directly on the effluent discharge of a plant situated in Setúbal, Portugal, property of Portucel. The colour adsorption was done using batch and dynamic trials

Activated carbon fibres prepared from kenaf: Influence of the experimental consditions on the morphology and textural properties

Porous materials are usually heterogeneous both structurally and energetically. Activated carbon fibres (ACFs) are relatively novel fibrous adsorbents produced for example from pith, cellulose, lignocellulose, phenol resin and polyacrylonityile (Peebles, 1995; Ryu, 1999). ACFs show important advantages with respect to conventional activated carbons. Among these advantages it is worth noting their high adsorption capacity and easiness to handle. Their main inconvenience lays on the difficulty of choosing adequate activating agents and activation conditions that are required in order to maintain the fibrous morphology. The adsorption capacity of ACFs depends on many factors, such as raw materials, activation process, pore structure and surface functionalities (Suffet, 1981; Park, 1999). Surface roughness is an important factor that influences the adsorption properties of an activated carbon. Fractal dimension is a measure of roughness of a surface. The use of the fractal concept is becoming very popular as a tool to characterize the texture of complex materials, such as porous solids. The fractal properties of these porous systems were determined by means of several techniques such as gas adsorption, mercury porosimetry and Small-Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS and SANS). Kenaf is an herbaceous annual plant that belongs to the family of Malvaceae. Kenaf possesses both, long and short fibre. The aim of this work is to study the influence of the preparation conditions on the fractal dimension and porous texture of ACFs prepared from long fibres of kenaf by physical activation using carbon dioxide as activating agent

Fluoxetine adsorption from aqueous solution onto activated carbons

With these premises, this work aimed to prepare ACs from almond tree pruning by physical activation processes with steam and carbon dioxide, under different temperature conditions. Selected samples were impregnated with triethylenediamine (TEDA, 5%wt.) by sublimation. The ACs characterization was made by N2 adsorption at 77 K (AUTOSORB-1, Quantachrome), mercury porosimetry (AUTOPORE 4900 IV, Micromeritics), helium stereopycnometry (Quantachrome), FT-IR spectroscopy (Perkin Elmer model Paragon 1000PC) and pzc determination. The fluoxetine adsorption was studied under neutral pH at 25 ºC. Stock solutions of fluoxetine HCl (0.5 and 1 gL-1) were prepared in deionized water with variable amounts of ACs (0.010 and 0.200 g), maintaining the contact during 420 min. The determination of fluoxetine HCl was done by ultraviolet absorption at 274 nm (Perkin Elmer Lambda 850 Uv–Vis spectrophotometer)

Estudo da influência da composição de precursores lignocelulosicos nas propriedades adsortivas dos carvões activados produzidos

Embora existam muitas publicações sobre a produção de carvões activados muito pouco se sabe acerca da relação entre a constituição dos precursores e as características dos carvões produzidos, nomeadamente no que diz respeito a um dos precursores mais utilizados, os materiais lenhocelulósicos. Podemos também referir que uma das áreas que mais tem motivado, e que continua intensamente a motivar, os investigadores de todo o mundo é a procura de novos precursores e metodologias para a produção de carvões activados a custos mais moderados e que permitam obter materiais com características químicas e texturais controladas tendo em mente algumas aplicações específicas. A publicação de resultados tem sido contraditória e escassa no estabelecimento de uma relação entre a composição dos precursores e as características dos carvões produzidos. Assim, pretendemos com a apresentação desta comunicação contribuir para o preenchimento desta lacuna através da exposição de um estudo sistemático realizado num conjunto alargado de precusores lenhocelulósicos

Mission-Based Serious Games for Cross-Cultural Communication Training

Appropriate cross-cultural communication requires a critical skill set that is increasingly being integrated into regular military training regimens. By enabling a higher order of communication skills, military personnel are able to interact more effectively in situations that involve local populations, host nation forces, and multinational partners. The Virtual Cultural Awareness Trainer (VCAT) is specifically designed to help address these needs. VCAT is deployed by Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) on Joint Knowledge Online (JKO) as a means to provide online, mission-based culture and language training to deploying and deployed troops. VCAT uses a mix of game-based learning, storytelling, tutoring, and remediation to assist in developing the component skills required for successful intercultural communication in mission-based settings

Extremism propagation in social networks with hubs

One aspect of opinion change that has been of academic interest is the impact of people with extreme opinions (extremists) on opinion dynamics. An agent-based model has been used to study the role of small-world social network topologies on general opinion change in the presence of extremists. It has been found that opinion convergence to a single extreme occurs only when the average number of network connections for each individual is extremely high. Here, we extend the model to examine the effect of positively skewed degree distributions, in addition to small-world structures, on the types of opinion convergence that occur in the presence of extremists. We also examine what happens when extremist opinions are located on the well-connected nodes (hubs) created by the positively skewed distribution. We find that a positively skewed network topology encourages opinion convergence on a single extreme under a wider range of conditions than topologies whose degree distributions were not skewed. The importance of social position for social influence is highlighted by the result that, when positive extremists are placed on hubs, all population convergence is to the positive extreme even when there are twice as many negative extremists. Thus, our results have shown the importance of considering a positively skewed degree distribution, and in particular network hubs and social position, when examining extremist transmission

Pollutants removal onto novel activated carbons made from lignocellulosic precursors

The adsorption of phenol and mercury from dilute aqueous solutions onto new activated carbons was studied. These included activated carbons produced from novel precursors, namely rapeseed, vine shoots and kenaf, and samples oxidised with nitric acid in liquid phase. The results have shown the significant potential of rapeseed, vine shoots and kenaf for the activated carbon production. The activated carbons produced by carbon dioxide activation were mainly microporous with BET apparent surface area up to 1224m2g-1 and pore volume 0.5cm3g-1. The effects of concentration and pH were studied. The phenol adsorption isotherms at 25ºC followed the Freundlich model with maximum adsorption capacities of approximately 80mgg-1 and 60mgg-1 for the pristine and oxidised activated carbons, respectively. The influence of pH on the phenol adsorption has two trends for pH smaller and bigger than 10. The maximum adsorption capacity of mercury adsorption onto activated carbon made from vine shoots reaches 1103mgg-1. The adsorption depends on the mercury species and the on the adsorbent properties, namely porosity and net surface charge