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Efficient removal of nitrogen from wastewater is vital to ensure the safekeeping of waterways and their biota. Increased demand for meat supplies worldwide has led to increased wastewater production consisting of higher nitrogen levels. In order to reduce nitrogen treatment costs using biological denitrification, slaughterhouses need to start looking at the potential of producing by-products from wastewater. The production of viable products from industry-based wastewater has been shown to reduce treatment costs and also generate a source of revenue for the company. The sources of nitrogen in slaughterhouse wastewater are discussed, and the risk it poses to the environment and the different treatment methods are reviewed. Additionally, the need for new methods of ammonia treatment is outlined, including the potential of recovering nitrogen to produce viable products. The use of hydrophobic membranes to recover ammonia from challenging wastewaters is critically analysed and the possible implications it may encounter with slaughterhouse wastewater. The viable products which can be derived from the nitrogen in slaughterhouse wastewater are identified and studies by multiple authors show that the production of ammonium-salts can be used to aid in agricultural fertiliser production, flame retardant compositions, food additives and protein purification precipitation. A comprehensive review of studies evaluating the composition of slaughterhouse wastewater is presented, including the impact of the challenging matrix on membrane materials, which has not being reviewed to date. Additionally, a detailed discussion on how the nitrogen content is recovered using hydrophobic membranes in order to produce viable products is also presented, which has not been discussed before in relation to slaughterhouse wastewater.

The goal of this paper is to help coastal managers and elected officials think about how to fund beach renourishment and coastal restoration projects. The paper briefly reviews the evolution of funding policies, introduces funding considerations based on project characteristics, and outlines funding tools or mechanisms to consider.

The mental health issues that can follow sexual assault are well described. Mental health service (MHS) referrals can be beneficial but can be challenging to obtain. Absence of MHS can exacerbate mental health issues and lead to subsequent emergency visits. Sexual assault victims may therefore have an increased risk of returning to the emergency department (ED). OBJECTIVES The primary purpose of this study was to identify the prevalence of patients who are victims of sexual assault who subsequently return to the ED with behavioral health (BH) concerns. The secondary purpose of this study was to explore potential factors that may affect whether a patient returns to the ED. METHODS Using a retrospective design, we examined electronic medical records and a quality improvement database of patients aged 12 to 15 years (inclusive) who sought care in a large, urban, freestanding, tertiary care children's hospital ED after an acute sexual assault. RESULTS Our primary finding was that of 192 included patients, 24.5% (95% confidence interval, 18.6%-31.2%) subsequently returned to the ED with BH concerns. Of these, 14 (7.3%) returned within 6 months. Secondary aim results included observed trust and mistrust in providers as documented in ED provider notes among patients with previous experience in the MHS system. CONCLUSIONS A substantial proportion of patients who are victims of sexual assault return to the ED for BH concerns at some point. Further investigation is needed to determine factors affecting a return visit to the ED, which can lead to improved services when caring for sexual assault victims.

This study aims at improving the knowledge on the effects of gas injection, bubbles sizes and contaminants on oxygen transfer in microbubble clouds. First the effects of gas injection on oxygen transfer are studied and linked to several parameters that change together with changes in flow rate, namely bubble sizes and rise velocities. Oxygen transfer is then studied in the presence of contaminants that are shown to affect bubble size distribution, modify bubble dynamics and interfacial mass transfer. Oxygen transfer efficiencies are also measured in wastewater and compared with those obtained in aqueous solutions. The agreement between contaminated water in the lab (Triton X100) and wastewater experiments is emphasised as this offers the possibility to develop fundamental understanding relevant to wastewater under laboratory conditions. The role of the surfactants on the volumetric oxygen transfer coefficient is further analysed in terms of specific interfacial area and transfer coefficients, respectively. Interestingly, this shows that the increase in oxygen transfer efficiency as the concentration in Pentanol increases is due to the increase in interfacial area while the transfer coefficients decrease.

Within the collected works of Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century Latin poet who wrote verse for kings, royal officials, bishops, and nuns in Frankish Gaul, there are found three acrostic poems. One, on the themes of captivity and release (5.6) is accompanied by a prose letter (5.6a) in which the poet discusses his methods in composing this work, which he intended for decorative display on a wall. The other two acrostics are written on the theme of the Holy Cross (2.4; 2.5). This paper, which offers a new interpretation of the figurative acrostics on the Holy Cross, begins first by examining the compositional strategies discussed by Fortunatus in 5.6a and his use there of the extended metaphor of weaving for the composition of acrostic poetry. The paper then moves to a wider discussion of weaving as a metaphor in Fortunatus's poetry before exploring how the poet played with metaphors and materiality, particularly in those instances when he was writing verse intended to be actually placed on material objects or sent with them. It finally goes on to argue, on the basis of indications within the acrostic poems on the Holy Cross themselves and much circumstantial evidence external to them, that these poems (2.4; 2.5) were written for public display in the chapel of the Holy Cross convent at Poitiers. It argues that these acrostics were most probably intended as textile designs for church vela or “hangings.”

Objective The primary objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of (a) additional injuries, (b) abuse as determined by a standardized scale, and (c) reports to child protective services (CPS) among children younger than 5 years in whom a rib fracture was the first presenting injury concerning for abuse. Methods A retrospective study of children younger than 5 years diagnosed with rib fractures at a tertiary pediatric hospital between 2007 and 2018 was performed. Children in motor vehicle crashes, hospitalized after birth, or with previously diagnosed metabolic bone disease were excluded. We included only those children whose rib fractures were the first presenting injury. Demographic and clinical information was abstracted from the records. Prevalence of additional injuries, a diagnosis of abuse, and a report to CPS were calculated. Associations between patient demographic and clinical characteristics and the outcomes of interest were examined. Results Of the 67 cases included, additional injuries concerning for abuse were identified in 40 (60%), and 58% were deemed likely or definite abuse. Reports to CPS were filed in 72% of cases. Posterior rib fractures, multiple rib fractures, and presence of rib fractures of multiple ages were all associated with presence of additional injuries and classification as definite or likely abuse (all P ≤ 0.05). Conclusions The presence of a rib fracture in young children is associated with a high likelihood of additional concerning injuries and should prompt a thorough evaluation for child abuse.

Since the original ACE Study was published in 1998, the challenge to the medical, social services, legal, and policy communities has been how to prevent the occurrence and/or recurrence of these and other adversities, given the poor health outcomes with which they are associated. Understanding the root causes of some of these experiences, and developing a prevention framework around those experiences, helps to better target interventions for vulnerable children and families. Many attempts have been made to establish valid, reliable detection methods with targeted screening of patients and families that can then be coupled with proven evidence-based interventions to reduce the long-term negative outcomes from these childhood adversities. These interventions include a number of different approaches, including home visitation programs, positive parenting programs, enhanced medical homes, and community-based interventions.

Microwave assisted extraction derivatization (MAED) was investigated for preparing fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) derivatives to analyse the fatty acid (FA) composition of Nannochloropsis sp. algae. This method was compared against the conventional methods of oven assisted derivatization and direct derivatization without prior extraction. The derivatized FAMEs were analysed using GC-MS to identify and quantify the FAs present. Conventional methods have been carried out for years, but they are time consuming and require high temperatures and harmful chemicals. The MAED approach developed is 5 times (15 min) faster compared to the conventional and direct derivatization methods (75 min) optimised for FA analysis of Nannochloropsis sp. algae. The MAED method recovered significantly more FAs (51 wt%) from algal samples compared to conventional (42 wt%) and direct derivatization (34 wt%). Additionally it was shown that a sample extraction step is critical to improving the derivatization yield of algal samples for both oven assisted and MAED techniques. Fourteen FA components were identified in Nannochloropsis sp. algal samples and were evaluated for their potential use for biodiesel and biopharmaceutical products. The developed MAED method allows for a rapid, robust and accurate preparation of algal samples in order to determine their FA composition.

We consider a time-harmonic mathematical model for a coupled thermal-acoustic model. We demonstrate coercivity of the PDE system and hence well-posedness and optimal error estimates for standard Galerkin methods. The large scale and ill-conditioning of the discrete system motivates the study of preconditioners. Three block preconditioners are studied. The first two, applying block Jacobi and block Gauss-Seidel approaches to our problem, give provably mesh-independent spectral bounds. The third preconditioner, based on problem-specific physical reasoning, does not have this property. However, on moderate-sized meshes, it considerably outperforms the existing mesh techniques. Numerical experiments in two and three dimensions confirm the theoretical results.

Inscribed on the wall of the expiatory Basilica of Sacré Coeur, at Montmartre, the 1873 ‘national vow’ of France interprets the nation's recent misfortunes as divine chastisement of an errant and irreligious people. Since it was Napoleon III's withdrawal of French troops from Rome that had made it possible for the Italian forces to capture the papal city in September 1870, the ‘national vow’ reflects a strong sense of French responsibility for the pope's loss of his temporal power. The Catholic Right interpreted France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and her subsequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine, as God's punishment on ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ for her desertion of the Vicar of Christ, and the ‘national vow’ pledged prayer for the Roman pontiff's deliverance from his enemies. This study analyses the devotion of French Catholics to ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’ during the Third Republic through an exploration of some of the religious and political meanings of pilgrimage to visit ‘Peter in chains’. It also charts the process by which promotion in the Catholic press, rapid train transportation and cheaper package fares opened an era of mass pilgrimage to Rome and paved the way for a new popular papal style.

Describes a system for using the World Wide Web to distribute computational tasks to multiple hosts on the Web. A programmer with a computation to distribute registers it with a Web server. An idle host uses this server to identify available computations and downloads a Java class to perform the computation ‐ we call this class a distriblet. The paper describes the programs written to carry out the load distribution, the structure of a distriblet class, and our experience in using this system.

Statuary groups, countless illustrations, and colorful stained glass all preserve for us the most famous medieval image of the charitable soldier-saint, Martin of Tours (336–397). The young Martin is depicted seated on his horse dividing his soldier's cape to share it with Christ disguised as a freezing beggar at the gate of Amiens. After abandoning the Roman army, Martin became a monk, an ascetic “soldier of Christ,” and was chosen by the people of Tours as their bishop. Renowned in his lifetime as a wonderworker, Martin's tomb remained for centuries an important pilgrimage center. The later Carolingian kings carried a fragment of Martin's cape into battle as a victory-giving talisman, and French monarchs invoked the saint as their patron. Because of its royalist associations, Saint Martin's basilica at Tours was almost completely destroyed in the French Revolution, and subsequently houses and new municipal streets encroached on the sacred space.

Utilising the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–600), this article explores the literary fashioning of an idealized episcopal identity for the sixth-century bishops of Tours as successors to Martin, the celebrated fourth-century saint of the city. It is argued that the poet’s deployment of the model was of political use to his patron, Bishop Gregory of Tours, both in the establishment of his authority in the town and in dealings with the Frankish kings about matters of taxation. It is suggested that this crafting of an episcopal identity allowed the poet to put pressure on Gregory himself to be Martin and intervene in such matters as a legal case or the affairs of a diocese outside his jurisdiction as metropolitan. The legitimating Martinian model of episcopal behaviour is presented therefore as potentially coercive.

The Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530–600) is known today for his Holy Cross hymns, for the classicizingepithalamiumthat he wrote for the wedding of the Frankish king Sigibert, and for his panegyrics of the royal and powerful in Merovingian society. Yet despite the attention that has been lavished on Fortunatus's other major works, his ambitious four hundred line poemDe Virginitate(8.3) has been noticeably neglected, perhaps because of its subject matter. A highly original work nevertheless, this poem was written in the late 560s for his patroness, the royal nun Radegund. Most probably, it was recited by the poet at the installation of Radegund's “spiritual daughter” Agnes as abbess of the Convent of the Holy Cross, which Radegund had founded at Poitiers. It is a work equal in importance to Fortunatus's episcopal panegyrics and other ceremonial poems for church occasions.

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

The sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus has left us over three hundred works which constitute a valuable historical source for sixth-century Gaul. His collected works contain a number of episcopal panegyrics as well as metrical epitaphs for bishops' tombs and commemorative verse designed for inscription on walls or church plate. This source material has much to contribute to the modern debate about the power and prestige of the Merovingian bishop. By drawing out the significance of acts of episcopal piety and benefaction Fortunatus sought to mould and guide public opinion in support of the bishop. As a consequence there crystallises in Fortunatus' verse an image of the ideal bishop as the loved first citizen of his urban community. Yet we must remember that we are dealing with literary productions that were specifically designed to magnify the bishop's status. Rather than enjoying that plentitude of power that has sometimes been claimed for the bishop, recent studies have stressed the insecure nature of his power base and his need to rally public support. It is suggested here that the Merovingian bishop who stood in need of public affirmation of his status found in Fortunatus' panegyrical and inscriptional poems a useful bolster to his social standing.

Inhaled furosemide has been recently demonstrated to inhibit the bronchoconstrictive effects of exercise, ultrasonically nebulized distilled water, and antigen challenge. The presumed mechanism of action of these challenges is through mast cell degranulation. We report on the effect of inhaled furosemide on cold-air hyperventilation challenge (CAHC) and methacholine challenge. We studied 10 subjects with mild to moderate asthma in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study. Inhaled furosemide did not affect FEV1 in the hour after inhalation, and there was no significant difference between placebo or furosemide on the dose of methacholine causing a 20% fall in FEV1. Our results demonstrated inhaled furosemide significantly attenuated the bronchoconstrictive effect at 6 and 9 minutes after CAHC (p less than 0.05 and 0.029, respectively) when furosemide was compared to placebo and approached significance at 12 and 15 minutes after CAHC (p = 0.052 and 0.56, respectively). Inhaled furosemide attenuates CAHC but does not effect methacholine-induced bronchoconstriction.

The poetry of Venantius Fortunatus is a sadly neglected historical source for sixth-century Gaul. Amongst the literary material that has survived from that age, the works of Gregory of Tours loom large. Since Gregory provides us with the sole narrative history of Gaul for much of this century, we are forced to see Merovingian society through his eyes. Venantius wrote panegyric, and an age such as ours, which values sincerity of expression, finds little that is attractive in that genre. Despite this, Venantius' poetry affords us a vantage point from which to view the Frankish kings. It also provides important evidence for the nature of the cultural fusion of Germanic, Roman and Christian elements that was taking place in the Gaul of Gregory of Tours and King Chilperic. The poems written for the Merovingian monarchs suggest that Venantius sensed a Frankish hankering after the trappings of Roman imperial authority. He wrote, perhaps with didactic intent, to give full exposition to the traditional Roman conce...

In the historical and hagiographical writings of Gregory of Tours and in the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus we encounter a group of men who make the claim that they are descendants of the Roman senators of an earlier time. This paper sets out to examine the status of this group in the light of the suggestion by Frank D. Gilliard that in the imprecise Latin of Gregory of Tours the word senator was often used to denote someone who was merely a large landowner. Since Gilliard has suggested that the blanket term senator may mask the parvenus in sixth-century society, discussion of the status of sixth-century senators has here been set in the wider context of social mobility in Merovingian church and state. It is the suggestion of this paper that it was a claim to senatorial family background, rather than the possession of wealth or land, that qualified one, in Gregory's eyes as a senator. Further, there is such ample evidence of upward social mobility, to positions of power and prestige outside the senatorial ranks, and often in royal service, that the conclusion is drawn that for the ambitious in Merovingian society, the patronage of the Frankish kings may have come to mean more than the much vaunted illustrious descent of the senators.

There is something immediately appealing about a wandering bard such as the sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus, who left his native Italy to seek the hospitality and patronage of the kings and bishops of Merovingian Gaul. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fortunatus attracted the attention of a succession of scholars such as Thierry, Caron, Dostal, Meyer, and Koebner, but it is now over fifty years since the last full-scale treatment of the poet was written: that of the Abbé Tardi in 1927. As a consequence of this, a number of rather questionable biographical details, as they are given in these standard accounts of the poet, have come to be somewhat uncritically accepted. Some re-examination of the evidence for Fortunatus' travels and career is long overdue. My aim here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the poet's career, nor indeed a full biographical sketch, but rather to discuss critically some key issues within these accounts of Fortunatus' career, in the light of the elements of autobiography found in Venantius' poems. As we shall see, an outline of the various stages of his career, both before his arrival in Gaul and during the many years of his residence in his adopted homeland, may be pieced together with the aid of the scattered evidence contained in his poems, yet this evidence is often obviously incomplete and is at times frustratingly ambiguous. Still, we can best proceed in the reconstruction of Venantius' career and travels by investigating what may be established, or brought into question, by the evidence of the poems themselves.

The sixth-century Gallic episcopacy contained within its ranks three distinct groups of men. The first group comprised those who had come to the episcopacy from a monastic background; the tradition of the monk-bishop, nurtured in the fifth century by the monastery of Lérins, was still strong, particularly in southern Gaul. The second group consisted of men who, although celibate, were not monks. The third group was composed of married clerics who at the time of ordination had taken a vow of sexual continence. Since source material for this period is comparatively scanty and many bishops are little more than names to us, we have no means by which to establish the proportion of men in the Gallic episcopacy who fit in this third category.1 The most we can say is that the married bishop was a familiar figure in the Merovingian church.

A fiber optic fluid level sensor based on transmission attenuation due to bending loss is described. Fibers formed with reverse curvatures of decreasing radii will induce an increasing amount of lower mode light loss to the cladding as the light propagates along the multimode fiber. The sensor is arranged in the fluid in a vertical orientation such that the light travels along the fiber from the bottom or low fluid point to the top or full point. As the fluid covers increasing lengths of the exposed fiber, it strips ever more power from the cladding (assuming the fluid refractive index is greater than the cladding). Data taken with a sensor of this configuration show a monotonic decrease of output intensity as a function of increasing fluid level. As much as a -14dB change occurred over a one-foot fluid level change. Comparison of these results with a mathematical model shows good agreement.© (1986) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Augustine's less well known works, his treatise De Musica.' Although in the Renaissance period, following the rediscovery of the treatise, Augustine was once again acknowledged as a Christian musical theorist,2 our own age does not immediately see him in this light. Carpaccio's reference long remained obscure. Written as part of a projected series of works on the liberal arts, Augustine's De Musica deals not with practical music making but with music as a speculative science. At the time of his baptism at Milan in 387 Augustine began a series of works on the liberal arts, each of which was to be reinterpreted from a Christian perspective. It was as part of this series that the treatise De Musica was written, but only after Augustine's return to North Africa.3 Since the work betrays the influence of both the Neo-Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean traditions and stresses the value of music in its ethical and paedeutic aspect, modern discussion has tended to focus on the philosophical antecedents to Augustine's theories.4 My aim here is to stress also the personal element that links Augustine's philosophical speculations on the nature of music to his own experience of the Ambrosian music of the Milanese church at the time of his conversion. Here the treatise will be presented as Augustine's extended intellectual justification for an intensely felt emotional response to music.