Sustainable Ways and Methods of Recycling Epoxy Fiberglass Waste

This article presents two technological ways of recycling the wastes of the production and application of products made of highly oriented fiberglass bound by the epoxy matrix. The first technology is aimed at shredding the epoxy-based products obtained by pultrusion to create fine and ultrafine powders (up to 2-10 microns) used as fillers in various composites. The second technology offers a way to obtain coarse powders with a particle size of up to 100 microns, used in the composition of heat-insulating materials and fire-retardant intumescent coatings. Proposed is the mechanical grinding of fiberglass to a finely dispersed state with subsequent heating to a temperature of 400 °C in the presence of a foaming coke and liquid glass. This technology allows the full utilization of waste from the production and application of epoxy fiberglass, such as windmill blades and parts of molded products, leading to the creation of an environmentally friendly fire-resistant and heat-insulating material in the form of plates, blocks and other products with operation temperature up to 400C, as well as fire retardant coatings for building materials and structures. By varying the content of the foaming agent and soluble glass in the composition of the intumescent mixture, one can regulate the average density, thermal conductivity and strength of the material within significant limits, achieving characteristics that exceed those of traditional heat-insulating materials. The proposed material based on recycled epoxy fiberglass is inflammable and resistant to unfavorable environmental impacts; it has high biostability and provides heat and mass transfer during the operation in buildings and structures.

The Language of Medicine

The words that physicians use with patients have the power to heal or harm. The practice of medicine is shaped by the potent metaphors that are prevalent in clinical care, and military metaphors and the words of war bring with them unfortunate consequences for patients and physicians alike. Physicians who fight disease turn the patient into a passive battlefield. Patients are encouraged to remain stoic, blamed for “failing” chemotherapy and sadly remembered in heroic obituaries of lost battles. The search for disease as enemy shifts the doctor’s gaze to the computer and imaging technologies that render the patient transparent, unseen and unheard. Modern treatments save lives but patients can be the victims of collateral damage and friendly fire. In The Language of Medicine, Abraham Fuks, physician, medical educator and former Dean of Medicine, shows us how words are potent drugs that must be tailored to the individual patient and applied in carefully chosen and measured doses to offer benefits and avoid toxicity. The book shines a light on our culture that deprecates the skill of listening that is, paradoxically, the attribute that patients most desire of their doctors. Societal metronomes beat rapidly and compress clinic visits into stroboscopic encounters that leave patients puzzled, fearful and uncertain. Building on research about physicians in practice, the experiences of patients, stories of medical students as well as the history of medicine, Dr. Fuks promotes an ideal of clinical practice that is achieved by humble physicians who provide time and space for listening, select words with care, and choose metaphors that engender healing.

Szasz Under Friendly Fire: Damned With Faint Praise

This essay is a critical review of recent collections of articles by friends and colleagues of Thomas Szasz. Apart from the usual misunderstandings and wilful misinterpretations of Szasz's social psychology generally and critique of mental illness specifically, his friends and colleagues add a new dimension to Szaszian criticism by damning him with faint praise. Ignoring his indebtedness to social psychologist, George Herbert Mead, they interpret his work as an ideological defence of libertarianism, rather than as a logical critique of mental illness. A defence is, therefore, especially indicated.

The Murder of Jane McCrea

This short chapter discusses one of the most infamous events of the Saratoga campaign, and, indeed, the entire Revolutionary war: the murder of Jane McCrea. As Burgoyne’s army slowly advanced, many Americans sought refuge away from the potential fighting. Jane McCrea, a Loyalist, was captured by some of Burgoyne’s Indian allies and as they conveyed her back to their camp, she was killed, most likely by friendly fire from American soldiers, and scalped. This notorious event led to a crisis in the relationship between Burgoyne and his Indians and it would ultimately inflame American passions against the British. While the tragedy’s impact on the Saratoga campaign was minimal, it did have long-term negative consequences for the British war effort.

The New Guinea Gang

MacArthur struggled to tell the story of his early battles in New Guinea. Accreditation procedures and censorship policies were initially chaotic. Flying from Australia to the New Guinea front was extremely hazardous. Vern Haugland was lucky to survive this journey in August. Byron Darnton became a victim of a friendly-fire incident two months later. Often, no more than two reporters managed to report from the Buna front at any one time, and they faced numerous problems trying to communicate their stories to America. MacArthur tried to step into this vacuum, but his overoptimistic and egocentric communiqués increasingly alienated reporters.

Friendly Fire

IoT platforms enable users to connect various smart devices and online services via reactive apps running on the cloud. These apps, often developed by third-parties, perform simple computations on data triggered by external information sources and actuate the results of computations on external information sinks. Recent research shows that unintended or malicious interactions between the different (even benign) apps of a user can cause severe security and safety risks. These works leverage program analysis techniques to build tools for unveiling unexpected interference across apps for specific use cases. Despite these initial efforts, we are still lacking a semantic framework for understanding interactions between IoT apps. The question of what security policy cross-app interference embodies remains largely unexplored. This article proposes a semantic framework capturing the essence of cross-app interactions in IoT platforms. The framework generalizes and connects syntactic enforcement mechanisms to bisimulation-based notions of security, thus providing a baseline for formulating soundness criteria of these enforcement mechanisms. Specifically, we present a calculus that models the behavioral semantics of a system of apps executing concurrently, and use it to define desirable semantic policies targeting the security and safety of IoT apps. To demonstrate the usefulness of our framework, we define and implement static analyses for enforcing cross-app security and safety, and prove them sound with respect to our semantic conditions. We also leverage real-world apps to validate the practical benefits of our tools based on the proposed enforcement mechanisms.