The role of phase separation and feed cycle length in leach beds coupled to methanogenic reactors for digestion of a solid substrate (Part 1): Optimisation of reactors’ performance

A two-phase system composed by a leach bed and a methanogenic reactor was modified for the first time to improve volumetric substrate degradation and methane yields from a complex substrate (maize; Zea mays). The system, which was operated for consecutive feed cycles of different durations for 120 days, was highly flexible and its performance improved by altering operational conditions. Daily substrate degradation was higher the shorter the feed cycle, reaching 8.5 g TSdestroyed d�1 (7-day feed cycle) but the overall substrate degradation was higher by up to 55% when longer feed cycles (14 and 28 days) were applied. The same occurred with volumetric methane yields, reaching 0.839 m3 (m3)�1 d�1. The system performed better than others on specific methane yields, reaching 0.434 m3 kg�1 TSadded, in the 14-day and 28-day systems. The UASB and AF designs performed similarly as second stage reactors on methane yields, SCOD and VFA removal efficiencies.

‘The Claims of Epic: Overcoming historical distance in the Homeric versions of Derek Walcott and Michael Longley’

This book chapter compares the translation strategies of two contemporay poets, Derek Walcott and Michael Longley, as they attempt versions or rewrites of Homeric epic.

Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite principles: science, nature and knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s 'Fancies at Leisure' and 'Mrs. Holmes Grey'

This article demonstrates how early Pre-Raphaelite poetry worked according to the principle that art should be modelled on science theorised by the Pre-Raphaelites in their early essays. As the main theorists (rather than practitioners) of Pre-Raphaelite art, F. G. Stephens and William Michael Rossetti defined the Pre-Raphaelite project in terms of observation, investigation, experiment, the “adherence to fact” and the “search after truth”. In the hands of the early Pre-Raphaelite poets, and particularly Rossetti himself, poetry too becomes a mode of scientific enquiry into the natural world, the nature of observation, human psychology and medical practice.

Rotational aesthetics: Michael Bay and contemporary cinema’s machine movement

Digital imaging technologies enable a mastery of the visual that in recent mainstream cinema frequently manifests as certain kinds of spatial reach, orientation and motion. In such a context Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise can be framed as a digital re-tooling of a familiar fantasy of vehicular propulsion, US car culture writ large in digitally crafted spectacles of diegetic speed, the vehicular chase film ‘2.0’. Movement is central to these films, calling up Scott Bukatman’s observation that in spectacular visual media ‘movement has become more than a tool of bodily knowledge; it has become an end in itself’ (2003: 125). Not all movements and not all instances of vehicular propulsion are the same however. How might we evaluate what is at stake in a film’s assertion of movement as an end in itself, and the form that assertion takes, its articulations of diegetic velocity, corporeality, and spatial penetration? Deploying an attentiveness towards the specificity of aesthetic detail and affective impact in Bay’s delineation of movement, this essay suggests that the franchise poses questions about the relationship of human movement to machine movement that exceed their narrative basis. Identifying a persistent rotational trope in the franchise that in its audio-visual articulation combines oddly anachronistic elements (evoking the mechanical rather than the digital), the article argues that the films prioritise certain fantasies of transformation and spatial penetration, and certain modes of corporeality, as one response to contemporary debates about digital technologisation, sustainable energy, and cinematic spectacle. In this way the franchise also represents a particular moment in a more widely discernible preoccupation in contemporary cinema with what we might call a ‘rotational aesthetics’ of action, a machine movement made possible by the digital, but which invokes earlier histories and fantasies of animation, propulsion, mechanization and mechanization to particular ends.

Lithium butylchalcogenolate induced Michael-aldol tandem sequence: easy and rapid access to highly functionalized organochalcogenides and unsaturated compounds

Lithium ""butylchalcogenolates are generated in situ by reacting the elements (S, Se, and Te) with (n)butyl-lithium at 0 degrees C. Reaction of the lithium alkylchalcogenolates with activated alkenes and aldehydes gives the corresponding aldol adducts. The selenium-containing products give Morita-Baylis-Hillman adducts after the oxidation/elimination of the selenoxide. The whole sequence can be performed in a one-pot procedure. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Análise estrutural do setor de telefonia celular na cidade de São Paulo à luz do modelo de concorrência ampliada de Michael E. Porter

Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Mestrado em Administração da Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul - USCS

Horror cinematográfico e experimentação de Michael Jackson na música pop e no videoclipe

Dissertação de mestrado apresentado ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Comunicação da USCS - Universidade Municipal de São Caetano do Sul.