Digital Commons Network^™

Assessment Of Dehydration As A Commercial-Scale Food Waste Valorization Strategy, Jon T. Schroeder, Ava L. Labuzetta, Thomas A. Trabold

Articles

Using a commercially available dehydration unit, this study aimed to valorize various food waste streams from different sources in the Rochester, New York area. Dehydration of the food waste collected for the study helped reduce the weight of the feedstock by 70–90%, as the incoming waste streams were relatively wet. The output was materially characterized against end uses such as cattle feed, fish feed, and compost. The results demonstrated that, other than fertilizer, the remaining five end uses (compost, fish feed, cattle feed, pyrolysis, and pelletized fuel) were potentially compatible with varying waste feedstocks based on the parameters analyzed. Fish …

Cell Replacement Strategies For Lithium Ion Battery Packs, Nenad G. Nenadic, Thomas A. Trabold, Michael G. Thurston

Articles

The economic value of high-capacity battery systems, being used in a wide variety of automotive and energy storage applications, is strongly affected by the duration of their service lifetime. Because many battery systems now feature a very large number of individual cells, it is necessary to understand how cell-to-cell interactions can affect durability, and how to best replace poorly performing cells to extend the lifetime of the entire battery pack. This paper first examines the baseline results of aging individual cells, then aging of cells in a representative 3S3P battery pack, and compares them to the results of repaired packs. …

Living With Machines. Ethical Implications And Imaginative Agency As Local Tactics Of Dwelling And Resistance In Everyday Interactions With Artificial Intelligence, Ester Toribio-Roura

Articles

With the widespread of the Internet of things (IoT), algorithms are increasingly managing our everyday life. From navigating our way in cities to keeping track of our health, artificial intelligence has been beneficial to us in many ways. However, its algorithms can also be detrimental as a consequence of biased human programming. The result is that while technological progress delivers more and more human-like artificial intelligence, humans become dehumanised and therefore, disempowered in their everyday interactions with artificial intelligence.The solution(s) is not single-handed and calls for combined interventions at the macro and micro levels. Whilst reviewing recent top-down developments on …

Readiness For Extubation For Pediatric Patients, Ameer Al-Hadidi, Morta Lapkus, Paras Khandar

Articles

Why Should Surgeons Care?

Assessing the readiness for extubation for pediatric patients is not just the decision of the PICU doctors. It must require discussion and agreement of a multi-disciplinary team that includes the operating surgeon and intensivist for the best outcomes. Spontaneous breathing trials are the mainstay of assessing a patient’s readiness for extubation – the entire team must pay close attention to fully understand the readiness for extubation for pediatric patients.

Of course, there are the ‘straight forward’ patients intubated temporarily to obtain imaging, to undergo a necessary procedure, or for protecting an airway during an altered mental …

"I Learned That I Am Loved": Older Adults And Undergraduate Students Mutually Benefit From An Interprofessional Service-Learning Health Promotion Program., Britteny M. Howell, Leslie C. Redmond, Samantha Wanner

Articles

No abstract provided.

Towards Refining Alzheimer's Disease Into Overlapping Subgroups, Erin R. Hascup, Kevin N Hascup

Articles

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive anterograde amnesia, cerebral atrophy, and eventual death. Current treatment has limited efficacy and cannot decelerate the disease progression. Clinical trials targeting the removal of the neuropathological hallmarks of AD, including accu- mulation of amyloid plaques or neurofibrillary tangles, have failed to modify disease progression. Without new or innovative hypotheses, AD is poised to become a public health crisis within this decade. We present an alternative hypothesis—that AD is the result of multiple interrelated causalities. The intention of this manuscript is to initiate a discussion regarding these multiple causalities and …

Post-Op Day 1 Fever Is Never Atelectasis, Elizabeth Boudiab, Paras Khandhar

Articles

Postop day 1 fever is never atelectasis. It has been blamed for decades while even the latest editions of surgical textbooks disseminate this myth1. Whilst both fever and atelectasis are extraordinarily common after surgery – occurring in up to 40% and 90% of patients, respectively2 this is NOT the cause on Day 1. It is time that we exonerate this myth.

Postop day 1 fever is never atelectasis, it is due to inflammation and trauma of surgery. The concept that atelectasis was causing fever was derived principally from a study showing that alveolar macrophages sampled from an atelectatic rat lung …

Coeliac Disease Pathogenesis: The Uncertainties Of A Well-Known Immune Mediated Disorder, Greg Byrne, Margaret Dunne, Con Feighery, Fernando Chirdo

Articles

Coeliac disease is a common small bowel enteropathy arising in genetically predisposed individuals and caused by ingestion of gluten in the diet. Great advances have been made in understanding the role of the adaptive immune system in response to gluten peptides. Despite detailed knowledge of these adaptive immune mechanisms, the complete series of pathogenic events responsible for development of the tissue lesion remains less certain. This review contributes to the field by discussing additional mechanisms which may also contribute to pathogenesis. These include the production of cytokines such as interleukin-15 by intestinal epithelial cells and local antigen presenting cells as …

Covid-19, Single-Sourced Diagnostic Tests, And Innovation Policy, Deb Chaarushena, Osman Moneer, Nicholson W. Price Ii

Articles

At the heart of the United States, disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a failure of diagnostic testing. That something so fundamental to medical care could be so botched evokes incredulity. From primary care offices to critical care settings, every patient encounter begins with a diagnostic workup. Diagnostic testing tools are key parts of the physician’s toolkit, and confirmatory testing is essential. But in the greatest public health challenge of the 21st century, the failures of diagnostic testing have been laid entirely bare.

Audio-Visual Caption Evaluation Metric For People Who Are Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Akhter Al Amin

Articles

While the availability of captioned television programming has increased, the quality of this captioning is not always acceptable to Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) viewers, especially for live or unscripted content, broadcast from local television stations, especially in smaller markets. There is a need for formal metrics to evaluate captioning quality, to enable audits or quality assurance. Although some current caption metrics focus on comparing the textual accuracy (comparing the caption text and accurate transcription of what was spoken), there are other properties of captions that may affect quality or usability judgments. We propose to conduct experiments with DHH …

Seeing Beyond Courts: The Political Context Of The Nationwide Injunction, Charlton C. Copeland

Articles

No abstract provided.

Italian Sociologists: A Community Of Disconnected Groups, Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Vincent Traag, Alberto Caimo, Flaminio Squazzoni

Articles

Examining coauthorship networks is key to study scientific collaboration patterns and structural characteristics of scientific communities. Here, we studied coauthorship networks of sociologists in Italy, using temporal and multi-level quantitative analysis. By looking at publications indexed in Scopus, we detected research communities among Italian sociologists. We found that Italian sociologists are fractured in many disconnected groups. The giant connected component of the Italian sociology could be split into five main groups with a mixture of three main disciplinary topics: sociology of culture and communication (present in two groups), economic sociology (present in three groups) and general sociology (present in three …

May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …

The Power Of A Clean Slate, J.J. Prescott, Sonja B. Starr

Articles

Tens of millions of Americans have criminal records, including about 20 million with felony convictions. Conviction records automatically trigger countless collateral legal consequences, such as occupational restrictions that bar employers from hiring qualified candidates. Moreover, research overwhelmingly shows that bearing a criminal record raises significant barriers to employment, housing, and various other opportunities. These persistent obstacles can overwhelm an individual’s efforts at reintegration and can aggravate poverty, inequality, and racial disparities in our society. And because factors like unemployment and housing instability contribute to crime risk, these effects in turn make society less safe.

Enzymatic In-Situ Transesterification Of Neutral Lipids From Simulated Wastewater Cultured Chlorella Emersonii And Pseudokirchneriella Subcapitata To Sustainably Produce Fatty Acid Methyl Esters, Priyanka Priyanka, Gemma K. Kinsella, Gary Henehan, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

Alternative, more sustainable and environmentally positive, sources of energy are one of the current global challenges. One approach to achieving more sustainable sources of energy is to use waste from one system as a raw material for energy production, following the circular biosystem philosophy. This study successfully adopted this approach whereby microalgae strains Chlorella emersonii and Pseudokirchneriella subcapitata were bioprospected and metabolically engineered in simulated wastewater supplemented with glucose to produce neutral lipids. Using a two-step cultivation approach neutral lipid content was enhanced in Chlorella emersonii and Pseudokirchneriella subcapitata biomass. Via in-situ transesterification, these neutral lipids were subsequently bioconverted to …

What's Left Of The Affordable Care Act?, Helen Levy, Andrew Ying, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

We assess the progress of the Affordable Care Act a decade after it became law. Although most of it remains intact, some parts have been repealed and others have not been implemented as expected. We review how and why the law has aged. Legal challenges have done less damage than is commonly appreciated, with the exception of the Supreme Court case that thwarted full expansion of Medicaid. Most of the important changes have other sources. Some parts were born to fail. Others were dismantled in response to interest-group pressure. Still others have failed to thrive for any number of reasons. …

Aqueous Solution Of Ammonia As Marine Fuel, Alessandro Schönborn

Articles

The ignition of ammonia in aqueous solution was simulated in a two-stroke compression ignition engine model. Zero-dimensional chemical kinetic calculations were used to estimate the ignition timing of fuel air mixtures in homogeneous charge compression ignition and diesel combustion modes. The fuel consisted of a 25% m/m aqueous solution of ammonia and pure ammonia for comparison. Ignition was studied by varying the geometric compression ratio of the engine. To ignite ammonia in aqueous solution a minimum compression ratio of 25 was necessary under homogeneous charge compression ignition combustion conditions, whereas under diesel combustion conditions a minimum compression ratio of 27 …

Prosecutorial Declination Statements, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

This Article examines how prosecutors convey to various audiences their decisions not to charge in discrete cases. Although prosecutors regularly issue public statements about their declinations—and anecdotal evidence suggests that declination statements are on the rise—there is an absence of literature discussing the interests that such statements serve, the risks that they pose, and how such statements are consistent with the prosecutorial function. Prosecutors also operate in this space without clear ground rules set by law, policies, or professional standards. This Article attempts to fill that void. First, it theorizes the interests potentially advanced by such statements—characterized as signaling, accountability, …

What The Post-Coronavirus University Will Look Like, Thomas Power

Articles

The opportunity of a crisis is that it forces an industry to re-examine its policies and practices. Since the coronavirus pandemic university leadership teams have been forced to re-examine its policies and practices on teaching, learning, research and funding.

Transgender Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence From The Us, Klavs Ciprikis, Damien Cassells, Jenny Berrill

Articles

Alternative labour market outcomes for men and women have been studied extensively in past literature. However, existing studies fail to directly compare labour market differences between transgender and non-transgender people. We utilize data from the 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Sys- tem in the United States to examine employment and wage differentials between transgender persons and non- transgender people using the Fairlie decomposition method of 2005. Our findings suggest that transgender people are less likely than non-transgender people to be employed, and are more likely than non-transgender people to receive lower wages. While some of the difference in employment and …

Questions Concerning Attention And Stiegler’S Therapeutics, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for …

Share Buybacks And Income Inequality, Thomas Power

Articles

Should you care what companies do with their profits? Two U.S. democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, in an article in the New York Times, argue that we should all care because what companies do with their profits can damage the economy and jobs.

Fee-Shifting Statutes And Compensation For Risk, Maureen S. Carroll

Articles

A law firm that enters into a contingency arrangement provides the client with more than just its attorneys' labor. It also provides a form of financing, because the firm will be paid (if at all) only after the litigation ends; and insurance, because if the litigation results in a low recovery (or no recovery at all), the firm will absorb the direct and indirect costs of the litigation. Courts and markets routinely pay for these types of risk-bearing services through a range of mechanisms, including state fee shifting statutes, contingent percentage fees, common-fund awards, alternative fee arrangements, and third-party litigation …

Minds Without Spines: Evolutionarily Inclusive Animal Ethics., Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell

Articles

Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity. Some ethical and policy inroads have been made for cephalopod molluscs and crustaceans, but the vast majority of arthropods, including the insects, remain excluded from moral consideration. We argue that this exclusion is unwarranted given the existing evidence. Anachronistic readings of evolution, which view invertebrates as lower in the scala naturae, continue to influence public policy and common morality. The assumption that small brains are unlikely to support cognition or sentience likewise persists, despite growing evidence that arthropods have …

Iron-Focussed Nutritional Status Of Mothers With Children (6–59 Months) In Rural Northern Ghana, Brenda Ariba Zarhari Abu, Jacques Eugene Raubenheimer, Violet Louise Van Den Berg

Articles

Background: Anaemia, especially iron deficiency anemia, is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in African women and children. Aim: To assess the intake of nutrients related to iron and anaemia status among mothers in smallholder agrarian communities in Northern Ghana where anaemia is known to be endemic. Setting: Tolon Kumbumgu district and Tamale Metropolis in Ghana. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 161 mothers with children 6–59 months. Questionnaires on socio-demographics, household food security and production and food frequencies, and three 24-hour recalls were administered during structured interviews, and BMI was assessed. Dietary intakes were analysed with the …

Introduction To The Symposium On Soft And Hard Law On Business And Human Rights, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

This symposium turns to a major debate within a field of international law that has moved from the periphery to center stage in just a few decades—business and human rights, or BHR: Can and should international law's approach to the human rights impacts of business activity shift from today's mostly soft-law framework to a multilateral treaty regime? While advocates for and against such a treaty debate this point at the UN Human Rights Council and other venues, this symposium examines the problem from four theoretical perspectives. Each contribution offers insights for practitioners and scholars alike, but they suggest no easy …

May The State Punish What It May Not Prevent?, Gabriel S. Mendlow

Articles

In Why Is It Wrong To Punish Thought? I defended an overlooked principle of criminalization that I called the Enforceability Constraint. The Enforceability Constraint holds that the state may punish transgressions of a given type only if the state in principle may forcibly disrupt such transgressions on the ground that they are criminal wrongs. As I argued in the essay, the reason why the state is forbidden from punishing thought is that the state is forbidden from forcibly disrupting a person’s mental states on the ground that they are criminally wrongful (as opposed to, say, on the ground that they …

Medical Marijuana, Taxation, And Internal Revenue Code Section 280e, Douglas A. Kahn, Howard J. Bromberg

Articles

Congress enacted § 280E of the Internal Revenue Code in 1982 to punish businesses engaged in illegal drug trafficking, including marijuana. Section 280E denies all credits and deductions, including ordinary business expenses, from gross income of businesses illegally trafficking in a Schedule I or II controlled substance. This provision violates the principle that the tax code should foster a consistent treatment of income, regardless of source; and that the income tax is ill-used for punitive measures. Now that marijuana has been legalized in some form in at least 46 states for therapeutic purposes, this federal tax penalty transgresses principles of …

Modulation Of Medical Condition Likelihood By Patient History Similarity, Jonathan Turner, Dympna O'Sullivan, Jon Bird

Articles

Introduction: We describe an analysis that modulates the simple population prevalence derived likelihood of a particular condition occurring in an individual by matching the individual with other individuals with similar clinical histories and determining the prevalence of the condition within the matched group.

Methods: We have taken clinical event codes and dates from anonymised longitudinal primary care records for 25,979 patients with 749,053 recorded clinical events. Using a nearest neighbour approach, for each patient, the likelihood of a condition occurring was adjusted from the population prevalence to the prevalence of the condition within those patients with the closest matching clinical …

A Proposal Digital Marketing Strategy For Marcheluzzo Srl: Training And Evaluating A Prediction Model For The Number Of Adv. Impressions, Charles Alves De Castro

Articles

This research aims to describe a digital marketing strategy elaborated to be deployed in the MarcheluzzoSrl Company located in Italy. In addition, it intends to give a wide range of information to the company about its customers, target, competitors, market, digital marketing strategy, and potential recommendations. It is also important to highlight that this strategy is focused on the Brazilian market. Most of the information collected for the situational analysis and many other components for this research were gathered through the author`s perception during his internship in the company. The methodology includes secondary data collected through field observation in the …