Peracetic Acid Oxidation of Lignin Model Compounds

Peracetic acid is being used to a limited extent as a bleaching agent for newsprint (1), and to a lesser extent, as a pulping agent, at least at the laboratory level (2). Haas, Schoch, and Ströle (3) report that peracetic acid is an excellent reagent for the preparation of holocellulose from wood. Ogait (4) also found that bleached cellulose could be obtained in 60 to 65% yield from wood and straw by the reaction of peracetic acid at 60 to 80°C. Haney, Martin and Sherk (5), and Poljac (6) have patented methods of oxidizing lignin in wood by peracetic acid. The high yields often obtained in bleaching, and excellent physical properties that it gives the sheet, make peracetic acid a very promising method, but high cost and instability have limited the extent of its use. Also, Baily and Dence (7) found peracetic acid inferior to chlorine dioxide for bleaching, in contrast to an earlier, more optimistic report by Wayman, Anderson, and Rapson (8)

Turning an Idea into a Valuable Teaching Resource and Research Output

This paper describes the journey of a teacher who became an author in Higher Education. The journey began with a simple idea about a fundamental resource book, designed to improve teaching in design and illustration classes with ever increasing numbers of novice fashion students, back in 1991. This resource was a taxonomy of fashion, designed to increase the awareness of garment shapes, context, proportion, terminology, construction, production and finish with a view to improving student knowledge, design and visual communication skills. The paper reflects upon the subsequent publications that built on the previous resource, as outputs of rigour, significance and integrity in shaping the author‘s approaches to teaching and research in fashion and other disciplines. It describes the development of the original idea and the subsequent acceptance of this for publication and illustrates how this one idea allowed for further opportunities for publications in a partnership with a global publisher. There are resource issues around gathering content for publications of rigour and originality and there have been challenges around communicating in the publications themselves due to technological and economical constraints. There are also practical resource issues around creating and designing the publications as well as the need for the development of personal skills when keeping up with changes in technology and the fashion industry. Each publication requires careful planning and needs to have unique reasons for being‘ that make it different to the competition. It describes the positive aspects of working with a colleague who brings similar skills and understanding, but a different handwriting and point of view to the publications. It looks at the impact of updating original editions and keeping the works contemporary. It also looks at personal and practical insights learned across almost 20 years of being an author with the same publisher

New Challenges to Arbitration

[Excerpt] Today we face developments in practically every aspect of our lives portending changes within the next quarter century as great as any we have experienced. Changes in one\u27s own field, as in society in general, are often imperceptible at the time they are occurring. Yet, in looking back over my thirty years of teaching in the field of arbitration, I am struck not only by the major changes which have affected the concepts and practice of arbitration, but also, and more significantly, by the new challenges which are emerging to the whole profession of arbitration as well as to the continued viability of the institution itself

A Statistical View of Learning in the Centipede Game

In this article we evaluate the statistical evidence that a population of students learn about the sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium of the centipede game via repeated play of the game. This is done by formulating a model in which a player's error in assessing the utility of decisions changes as they gain experience with the game. We first estimate parameters in a statistical model where the probabilities of choices of the players are given by a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE) (McKelvey and Palfrey, 1995, 1996, 1998), but are allowed to change with repeated play. This model gives a better fit to the data than similar models previously considered. However, substantial correlation of outcomes of games having a common player suggests that a statistical model that captures within-subject correlation is more appropriate. Thus we then estimate parameters in a model which allows for within-player correlation of decisions and rates of learning. Through out the paper we also consider and compare the use of randomization tests and posterior predictive tests in the context of exploratory and confirmatory data analyses

The Shareholders’ Derivative-Claim Exception to the Attorney-Client Privilege

The use of an over-parametrized state-space model for system identification has some clear advantages: A single model structure covers the entire class of multivariable systems up to a given order. The over-parametrization also leads to the possibility to choose a numerically stable parametrization. During the parametric optimization the gradient calculations constitute the main computational part of the algorithm. Consequently using more than theminimal number of parameters requiredslows down thealgorithm. However, we show that for any chosen (over)-parametrization it is possible to reduce the gradientcalculations to the minimal amount by constructing the parameter subspace which is orthonormal to the tangent space of the manifold representing equivalent models

Income From Separate Property: Towards a Theoretical Foundation

The characterization of the rents, issues and profits from separate property brought into or acquired during marriage is discussed. There has been no comprehensive treatment of this issue in community property case law and literature in recent years

Helping design educators foster collaborative learning amongst design students

This paper discusses the development of online teaching resources that enable design educators to foster collaborative learning amongst students in the design disciplines. These online teaching resources will be made available through the Design Collaboration website. This website was recently set up by Northumbria University, a UK based institution, to provide an online resource for design educators wishing to develop collaborative pedagogies in design education. It currently contains case studies of collaborative student projects but lacks practical teaching resources. As a result, a research project was set up to compliment the current case studies by creating a suite of design-specific tools and resources that will help foster team management and development. Although various institutions have addressed the subject of group work and collaborative learning, there has been no online resource dedicated to the development of practical teaching tools to help design students work and learn together. This paper focuses on showcasing the range of teaching tools and resources developed through classroom-based trials. These resources have been developed specifically in consultation with Northumbria University's design educators and trialled with undergraduate and postgraduate students from different design disciplines. In addition, issues surrounding the translation of these tools into a practical, easy to use and accessible in an online format is discussed. The Icograda World Design Congress 2009 Education Conference is the ideal international platform to share these tools with the wider design education community. More importantly, we hope to grow the website by encouraging other design educators to submit case studies to the website, using it not only as a means of sharing good practice but also as a tool for reflection. The research value is two-fold (a) translating implicit knowledge of collaborative learning into a practical teaching resource and, (b) helping tutors improve their teaching practice, by linking the teaching resource to real experiences through case studies and interviews