The structure and permiability of protective coverings secreted by certain insect species

Imperial Users onl

Transnational writing program administration: mobility, entanglement, work.

This dissertation advances the global turn in writing studies by examining academic mobilities through an ethnographic study of transnational writing program administrative (TWPA) work outside of the United States. The literature review reads global writing studies scholarship through a critical-transnational lens to locate the gap for new knowledge in TWPA work. Influenced by Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography, this dissertation grounds the findings of its interview-based study in the terms of everyday lived experiences by internationally mobile scholars currently doing WPA work in order to construct more nuanced narratives of navigation and sensemaking. Participants discussed the consequences and limitations of us/them or local/global binaries, traced commitments and policies across time and space, then accounted for and described the labor required to resist stable notions of difference. The study contributes terms and anecdotes for depicting TWPA sensemaking work as shifting, ever-changing, partial, layered, and complex. The core findings are theorizations of mobility and transnationality through discursive work, relative mobility, scaling practices, and co-constituted space

Effect of Tidal Cycling Rate on the Distribution and Abundance of Nitrogen-Oxidizing Bacteria in a Bench-Scale Fill-and-Drain Bioreactor

Most domestic wastewater can be effectively treated for secondary uses by engineered biological systems. These systems rely on microbial activity to reduce nitrogen (N) content of the reclaimed water. Such systems often employ a tidal-flow process to minimize space requirements for the coupling of aerobic and anaerobic metabolic processes. In this study, laboratory-scale tidal-flow treatment systems were studied to determine how the frequency and duration of tidal cycling may impact reactor performance. Fluorescent in situ hybridization and epifluorescence microscopy were used to enumerate the key functional groups of bacteria responsible for nitrification and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox), and N-removal efficiency was calculated via a mass-balance approach. When water was cycled (i.e., reactors were filled and drained) at high frequencies (16–24 cycles day−1), nitrate accumulated in the columns—presumably due to inadequate periods of anoxia that limited denitrification. At lower frequencies, such as 4 cycles day−1, nearly complete N removal was achieved (80–90%). These fill-and-drain systems enriched heavily for nitrifiers, with relatively few anammox-capable organisms. The microbial community produced was robust, surviving well through short (up to 3 h) anaerobic periods and frequent system-wide perturbation

BNP Paribas: Enterprise Architecture

The goal of the project, sponsored by the Global Equities and Commodity Derivatives (GECD) at BNP Paribas, was to create a graphical management application that allows the group to better visualize a wide array of system flows. It was required for the application to have bi-directional communication with internal BNP databases and clearly show any possible problems with the data, such as an overloaded server. The outcome of the project is an integrated application that graphically displays and interactively manages business flows and their underlying data and builds performance/capacity dashboards

The Attributes, Teaching Effectiveness, and Educational Commitment of Part-time Faculty in North Carolina Community Colleges

This study evaluated the attributes, teaching effectiveness and educational commitment of part-time faculty in enrollment-funded community colleges. The Student Instructional Rating instrument was used to measure student perceptions of instructors in the community college. Twenty four community colleges were randomly selected from North Carolina. Within each college, four full-time and four part-time faculty were randomly selected to participate in the study. Attributes of part-time faculty were compared to attributes of full-time faculty. Teaching effectiveness was assessed from dimensions on the Student Instructional Rating instrument. Various dimensions on the SIR including Faculty/Student Interaction, Overall Quality of the Course, Course Difficulty, and Lectures were used to evaluate instructional effectiveness. A regression model was used to evaluate the attributes of teaching effectiveness for both full-time and part-time faculty and the slopes of regression coefficients were evaluated to determine how effective part-time instruction differed from effective full-time instruction. Part-time faculty were perceived as effective when compared to their full-time counterpart on the dimensions of Faculty/Student Interaction. Other demographic attributes of part-time faculty were evaluated with no significant difference between full-time and part-time faculty. However, full-time faculty were perceived more effective on Overall Quality of the Course, Lectures, Textbooks, and Reading Assignments. Part-time faculty commitment to non-instructional tasks was assessed and the implications for teaching effectiveness were examined. This study also discussed the shift in instructional workloads from part-time to full-time faculty as the number of part-time faculty increase

Volatility

Volatility is a crucial component the movement of the stock market. Although each transaction operates under relatively simple principals the movement as a whole is chaotic and unpredictable. The model presented simulates this movement using a simple methodology. In order to accurately simulate the movement of the stock market, the model uses a random number for each transaction. The culmination of all the random numbers used creates the familiar sporadic look of the stock market

Antibiotic Maximalism: Legislative Assaults on the Evidence-Based Treatment of Lyme Disease

Antibiotics, and the deadly pathogens that have evolved to resist them, are one of the major public health concerns of our time. The introduction of penicillin in the early 1940s signaled a new era—not only for the treatment of devastating infections, but also for the out-witting of antibiotics by fast-evolving bacteria. If the middle of the twentieth century saw the era of antibiotic innovation, the past several years might be labeled the era of antibiotic resistance, when untreatable infections have become a modern scourge. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the most notorious antibiotic resistant “superbug”; this antibiotic-resistent pathogen has emerged as an endemic problem in hospital and long-term care settings. In 2011, bills were introduced in both houses of Congress to encourage the development of new antibiotics to replace those that have become ineffective. Yet, unless or until a truly “miracle” antibiotic (i.e., one which may not be resisted by bacteria) is someday developed, the only solution to antibiotic resistance is to reduce the use of antibiotics. Surprisingly, amidst public-health efforts to prevent antibiotic-resistant pathogens by reining in excessive antibiotic use, several states have passed laws that legitimize intensive antibiotic regimens even when those regimens contradict the best available medical evidence. Although this unprecedented legislative activity has occurred in the context of a controversial medical diagnosis, chronic Lyme disease, the legal and political repercussions threaten the established role of state medical licensing boards in promoting evidence-based standardization of medical practice. The most intrusive of these statutes prevents state licensing boards from disciplining physicians who prescribe regimens of long-term antibiotic therapy that are specifically proscribed by mainstream clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) on Lyme disease treatment. Such laws promote the view of non-standard practitioners who favor the intensive, maximalist use of antibiotics for a condition that mainstream physicians dispute even exists. In an attempt to protect unnecessary antibiotic regimens, recent legislation legitimizes a treatment paradigm that poses an undue risk of harm to individual patients and to the public health. By enacting laws that protect and legitimize repudiated treatments, state legislatures have responded to a movement of non-standard “Lyme literate medical doctors” (LLMDs)—a movement that has been described as an “antiscience” and “parallel universe of pseudoscientific practitioners” by mainstream practitioners. In addition, by interfering with the legal authority of state medical boards to enforce evidence-based standards on antibiotic use, states have also sided with a fringe movement of physicians who oppose the “encroachment” of third-parties, including the government, upon the physician-patient relationship. These advocates decry the influence of evidence-based clinical guidelines and state medical licensing boards on the medical practice. Removing the power of state regulators to discipline physicians for dangerous, non-standard Lyme disease treatment is perceived as an opening salvo in the attack on the legitimacy of state medical oversight