Modeling and Optimization of Rare Earth Element Chromatography

The Rare Earth Elements are a group of metals, that are of growing technical and economical importance. Current separation techniques can be detrimental to the environment, and a clean technology for separation has been devised, based on analytical chromatography of the REEs. The thesis presents column preparation and impregnation to give desired properties of the separation system, experimental and model based optimization for operating points and design of a chromatography step for separating REEs

United States v. Solis: Have the Government\u27s Supersniffers Come Down with a Case of Constitutional Nasal Congestion?

The propriety of using drug detection dogs to establish probable cause for search was argued in United States v. Solis. Because cases similar to Solis are sure to arise in the future, and because courts are unable to agree on the proper way to treat drug-sniffing dogs, the use of narcotic detection dogs is certain to be a persistent problem. Law enforcement agencies have too much invested in their dog training programs to placidly accept the Solis decision. If the Solis rational is followed in future decisions, the use of these highly trained dogs will be severely limited. Because the proper use of detection dogs is unclear it is necessary to discuss the consequences of Solis and how the case may be followed or overruled in the future

Assessment of risks related to agricultural use of sewage sludge, pig and cattle slurry

In April 2017, the Organic Business Development Team released a report with 25 recommendations for the Minister of Environment and Food (Det økologiske erhvervsteam 2017). Among these was a recommendation that organic farmers should have opportunities for utilizing nutrients from treated domestic wastewater for nutrient recycling. A prerequisite for future use of nutrients from treated wastewater is, that quality requirements are met and that application can be explained to (and accepted by) consumers. In partial fulfilment of this, the business team identified a need for a scientific overview of the risks of using nutrients from treated municipal wastewater in relation to other authorized fertilizer sources – e.g. conventional animal manures. Thus, it was assumed that a comparative approach to assess potential risk of using sewage sludge and conventional manures, could usefully inform decision makers in the future regulation of organic farming systems. Dependent on the result of the scientific investigation, the Organic Business Development Team foresaw that Denmark could chose to work to expand Annex 1 of the EU Ecology Regulation, to allow the organic farmers to use nutrients from municipal wastewater or other acceptable derived sludge products. Mobilization of support for this should be done by the Ministry of Environment and Food in collaboration with the Organic Farming Industry. Thus, based on available literature, this report aims at creating an overview of the environmental and human risks associated with application of pig and cattle slurry as well as sewage sludge to agricultural soils. The risk evaluation was performed for the following compound groups: Metals, Chlorophenyls, Dioxins, Furans, Halogenated aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons (HAH), Linear alkylbenzenesulfonates (LAS), Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), Poly- and perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAS), Phenols, Phosphate-triesters VII, Phthalates, Polychlorinated naphtalenes (PCN), Polychlorinated alkanes (PCA), Triclosan, Triclocarban, Medicines, Estrogens, Antibiotic resistance genes. Additionally the fertilizer potential of the two nutrient sources was characterized and compared

Welfare within planetary limits: deep transformation requires holistic approaches

In January 2023, Anders Rhiger Hansen visited Lund University to talk to Max Koch about sustainable welfare, human needs, social inequality and a little bit about Bourdieu. The message from Max was clear: politicians need to drop the idea of green growth and instead define a safe and just operating space to determine what can be done within this space. His sociological approach combines Marxian and Bourdieusean traditions, and he recommends that the Consumption and Society community investigates consumption in combination with processes of production, for example by engaging with critical political economy approaches such as the French regulation school or the Frankfurt School. According to Koch, the survival of the planet requires holistic approaches that would transform society and its exchanges with nature, based on principles of degrowth and on a scale that we have not yet seen

Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students

Recent federal initiatives in education, such as Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the flexibility policy for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are designed in part to ensure that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teaching. The initiatives respond to the concern that disadvantaged students may be taught by less effective teachers and that this could contribute to the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and other students. To address the need for evidence on this issue, the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education initiated a study to examine access to effective teaching for disadvantaged students in 29 diverse school districts. Mathematica Policy Research and its partner, the American Institutes for Research, conducted the study, which focused on English/ language arts (ELA) and math teachers in grades 4 through 8 from the 2008 -- 2009 to the 2010 -- 2011 school year

Statistical stopping criteria for automated screening in systematic reviews

Active learning for systematic review screening promises to reduce the human effort required to identify relevant documents for a systematic review. Machines and humans work together, with humans providing training data, and the machine optimising the documents that the humans screen. This enables the identification of all relevant documents after viewing only a fraction of the total documents. However, current approaches lack robust stopping criteria, so that reviewers do not know when they have seen all or a certain proportion of relevant documents. This means that such systems are hard to implement in live reviews. This paper introduces a workflow with flexible statistical stopping criteria, which offer real work reductions on the basis of rejecting a hypothesis of having missed a given recall target with a given level of confidence. The stopping criteria are shown on test datasets to achieve a reliable level of recall, while still providing work reductions of on average 17%. Other methods proposed previously are shown to provide inconsistent recall and work reductions across datasets