Evangelizing a Nation: Catholic Priests in America

According to the most recent statistics provided by the American bishops, there are an astonishing seventy million Catholics who call the United States home. Five hundred years ago, there was not a single Roman Catholic to be found anywhere in this vast expanse of forests, prairies, and mountains. (Moreover, presumably no one living at that time in what is now the United States had any knowledge of Jesus Christ, for the episcopacy of Erik Gnupsson in twelfth century Greenland hardly resulted in any evangelization of the Christian faith in the western hemisphere.) As the European authorities competed to establish colonies and settlements in the New World, each journeyed across the Atlantic with three primary intentions: to amass wealth, to establish glorious and prestigious settlements, and to spread the Christian faith. In the centuries that followed, several religious orders—perhaps the most well-known of which were the Jesuits and the Franciscans—washed up on the shores of America, forever shaping the progress and expansion of Roman Catholicism in America

The social impacts of stormwater management techniques

This paper presents the results of research into the social impacts of stormwater management techniques applied within urban environments. The main aim of the study was to compare public and professional attitudes of stormwater management practices such as Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) and river management techniques. Any new and innovative technology used in residential areas, besides being economically and environmentally acceptable, must also be accepted by the residents. There has been considerable interest in the assessment of the public perception of SUDS in the UK by consultants, developers, the Environment Agency of England and Wales as well as by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). This research was undertaken to inform such interest and also to obtain a more holistic view of the perception by professionals of SUDS. A comparative study of the perceptions of river management in three densely populated European cities facing similar storm water management problems was carried out. The selected cities were Glasgow in Scotland – U. K., an area in west London, England - U.K., and part of Athens – Greece. All sites were located within flood-prone suburban areas, and different river management techniques have been proposed or adopted

Future research perspectives on environment and health: the requirement for a more expansive concept of translational cancer research

The last two decades have seen exciting advances in understanding the human genome, aided by the development of powerful analytical laboratory tools. These advances have enabled genome-wide association studies to link specific genetic variants with an altered risk of cancer. Unfortunately there has not been an analogous refinement of tools on such a comprehensive scale to permit an equally thorough investigation of environmental factors, yet it is known that these play a major role in cancer etiology. This limitation led to the suggested need for an exposome to match the genome. Major advances both in understanding mechanisms of carcinogenesis as well as in the technology to investigate these underlying steps in the disease process offer the potential to redress this imbalance between exposome and genome. This is all the more important in order to fully exploit the large prospective cohort studies with biological specimens now being established to investigate the environmental and genetic basis of common chronic diseases. Currently translational cancer research is understood to equate to a “bench to bedside” process, focused on improved clinical management of cancer. Unfortunately, alone, this is an inadequate response to the growing burden of cancer worldwide. Priority also needs to be placed on understanding the causes of cancer, its prevention and, critically, how to implement promising interventions into health care structures. The need therefore is to translate basic science to the population in parallel to the translation into the clinic. This “two-way” translational cancer research encourages the common soil of basic science to be applied both to the prevention of cancer and to its treatment. In this way the notable advances in relation to carcinogenesis will yield a richer benefit to society through balanced initiatives to understand the causes and prevention of cancer in addition to more effective treatment and care of those people developing the disease

A Decision Making Methodology in Support of the Business Rules Lifecycle

The business rules that underlie an enterprise emerge as a new category of system requirements that represent decisions about how to run the business, and which are characterized by their business-orientation and their propensity for change. In this report, we introduce a decision making methodology which addresses several aspects of the business rules lifecycle: acquisition, deployment and evolution. We describe a meta-model for representing business rules in terms of an enterprise model, and also a decision support submodel for reasoning about and deriving the rules. The possibility for lifecycle automated assistance is demonstrated in terms of the automatic extraction of business rules from the decision structure. A system based on the metamodel has been implemented, including the extraction algorithm. This is the final report for Daniela Rosca's PhD fellowship. It describes the work we have done over the past year, current research and the list of publications associated with her thesis topic

Heat Matters: The Missing Link in REPowerEU:2030 District Heating Deployment for a long-term Fossil-free Future

This report employs a Smart Energy System approach to redesign Europe's energy infrastructure, emphasizing the expansion of district heating as a strategic move to eliminate gas-based heating in European buildings. It introduces a novel quantification of waste heat potentials and integrates it with analyses of future potential district heating market shares in Europe. Both in a REPowerEU 2030 and long-term decarbonization temporal perspective. Additionally, it provides a quantification of the investment required in district heating infrastructure to achieve substantial reductions in the EU's natural gas consumption. This report contributes to the ongoing the Heat Roadmap Europe project series

Liver fibrosis markers and all cause mortality in people with type 2 diabetes:a population based study (The Ayrshire Diabetes Outcomes Cohort (ADOC) Study)

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The propagation of strike-slip faults using 3D seismic data

The application of 3D seismic data to the study of fault evolution has greatly increased our understanding of how normal and thrust faults propagate. Specifically, by combining displacement distribution plots and a thorough analysis of the fault geometry, we can determine: linkage history, restrictions to fault growth, and blind versus emergent propagation. However, these methods have never been applied to strike-slip faults in seismic data due to the difficulty in imaging kinematic indicators or piercing points that quantify displacement. This thesis presents a novel technique that allows for the rapid identification of kinematic indicators in two 3D seismic datasets from the Levant Basin, Eastern Mediterranean, which enables the displacement distribution of strike-slip faults to be analysed beyond what has been accomplished by traditional field-based studies. The high quality of the data also enables the detailed investigation into the 3D geometry of strike-slip faults to be used in conjunction with the displacement data to better understand the upward vertical propagation history. Results indicate that high displacement faults show distinctly different geometries from low displacement faults, and that strain rate and propagation mode may be integral in controlling geometry type. Furthermore, the geometry of the naturally occurring examples presented here, shows distinct differences from analogue studies, and suggests future work should be applied to understanding what controls these discrepancies. The displacement distribution also allowed insight into fault network relationships at the regional scale, in addition to individual faults. In particular, the 3D geometry of conjugate intersections, branching intersections, and tip structures was explored. The results yielded very complex and confounding structural relationships, which suggest that deformation is rarely as simple as 2D interpretations show, and thus may have significant consequences to precious resource extraction