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The 1918 influenza pandemic stands out for its extreme virulence and unusual age pattern of mortality. Here, we aim to elevate a third unusual feature of its course through United States cities to the same level of scientific prominence: the pandemic produced strikingly small racial disparities in mortality, against a backdrop of extreme racial inequality in the era. We provide the most complete account of racial disparities in influenza and pneumonia mortality in U.S. cities in 1918, showing that they were almost uniformly small. We also advance and evaluate four hypotheses as to why racial disparities in the 1918-1919 pandemic were so small relative to those in proximate years. In particular, we assess hypotheses related to socio-demographic characteristics like segregation, city-level implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, racial differences in exposure to the 1918 herald wave, and racial differences in early-life exposures to other influenza strains that could have resulted in differences in immunological vulnerability to the 1918 flu. The results suggest the importance of considering in depth the interactions between the natural history of a particular microbial agent and the social history of the populations it infects., Minnesota Population Center Working Paper Series

Cooperation Command (JSACC). JSACCs will allow the United States to succeed in supporting a partner nation in an environment that is neither war nor peace. http://archive.org/details/usmilgpcolombitr109452471 Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

This study was conducted to address the controlling factors of biosolids stability as they relate to mesophilic anaerobic digestion, dewatering processes and digestion enhancement by wet sludge disintegration technologies. The working hypothesis of this study is that digestion performance; nuisance odor generation and the degree of digestion enhancement by wet sludge disintegration are directly related to anaerobic floc structure and its interaction with shearing forces. Mesophilic digestion was studied in two modes of operation, convention high rate and internal recycle mode to enhanced digestion using a wet sludge disintegration device. The internal recycle system operated on the premise that stabilized sludge would be removed from the digester disintegrated, either by mechanical shear or ultrasonic disintegration for this study, and returned it for to the digester further for further stabilization. Both benchscale and full-scale demonstrations found this mode of digestion enhancement to be effective for mechanical shear and ultrasonic disintegration. It was also determined that volatile solids destruction in both conventional and enhanced mesophilic anaerobic digesters can be reasonably predicted by the concentration of cations in the sludge being treated. It was found that depending on the disintegration device used to enhance digestion performance was influenced by different cation associated fractions of the sludge floc. Along with the improvement of digester performance, overall biosolids stability was investigated through of volatile organic sulfur emissions from dewatered biosolids. In doing so, a method to mimic high solids centrifugation in the laboratory was developed. The centrifugation method identified three major factors that contribute to the generation of odors from biosolids: shear, polymer dose, and cake dryness. The inclusion of shearings suggest that one means of reducing odors from biosolids generated by centrifugation is to use a shear enhanced digestion technology to degrade odor precursors, such as amino acids, within the digester prior to dewatering. Furthermore, the mechanical shearing within a digester is thought to be similar to that of mechanical shear enhanced digestion; therefore, the floc properties that control the digestion process would control observed odor generation. Ph. D.

By shearing activated sludge using a high shear rotor stator device, bioavailable proteinaceous material can be produced. Operation at elevated temperatures, serves to increase the amount of material that is rendered soluble (

This report makes the case that New Orleans' system of public defense is broken. The city's provision of counsel to its criminally accused poor has been condemned by entities ranging from the Louisiana Supreme Court to the Louisiana State Bar Association; the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance. In the words of Calvin Johnson, former chief judge of the New Orleans criminal court, "[t]he public defender situation was bad before [Hurricane] Katrina. Now it's a full-blown disaster." The city's predicament, then, is less one of identifying the problem than of deciding what to do about it. New Orleans, and in particular the Board of the Orleans Public Defender (BOPD), has two clear options before it: (1) focus strictly on the structural issues of funding, vertical representation, caseload limits, and the like, or (2) work from the outset to establish a model community defender office that will address clients' needs inside and outside the courtroom. Though there are many strong arguments to support the former course of action, this report concludes that the latter is the best option if the city hopes to stanch the excessive flow of cases running through its criminal justice system, cut costs, and address the most exigent problems experienced by its former clients