After Our Bodies Ourselves.

The panel "After Our Bodies Ourselves," organized by Section III (Women, Gender, and Psychoanalysis), focused on the trajectory that feminism took since the publication in the early 1970s of Our Bodies Ourselves. Each of the five panelists had her own approach to the broad topic. Papers covered a historical overview of some of the societal changes affecting women in the past few decades in the United States; the psychodynamic impact of elective body-altering surgeries on adult women and adolescent girls; an introduction to a new construct--object orientation--and its implications in the rethinking of the construct of gender; and a case study about a woman with a snake phobia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Real-time optimization under parametric uncertainty: a probability constrained approach

Uncertainty is an inherent characteristic in most industrial processes, and a variety of approaches including sensitivity analysis, robust optimization and stochastic programming have been proposed to deal with such uncertainty. Uncertainty in a steady state nonlinear real-time optimization (RTO) system and particularly making robust decisions under uncertainty in real-time has received little attention. This paper discusses various sources of uncertainty within such closed loop RTO systems and a method, based on stochastic programming, that explicitly incorporates uncertainty into the RTO problem is presented. The proposed method is limited to situations where uncertain parameters enter the constraints nonlinearly and uncertain economics enter the objective function linearly. Our approach is shown to significantly improve the probability of a feasible solution in comparison to more conventional RTO techniques. A gasoline blending example is used to demonstrate the proposed robust RTO approach.     

An investigation of fuel composition and flow‐rate effects in a H2S fuelled sofc: Experiments and thermodynamic analysis

Hydrogen sulphide (H₂S)‐fuelled solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) can potentially generate useful electrical energy while disposing of H₂S, a toxic by‐product of the fossil fuel industry, on site. Experimental results from H₂S fuelled SOFCs exhibit characteristics, for example, an unusual dependence of cell performance on fuel composition and flow‐rate, which are poorly explained in the literature. In this work we: (a) present results for experiments where the composition and flow‐rates were varied for both the fuel and oxidant streams to analyse their effect on fuel cell performance, and (b) develop and use a thermodynamic analysis to help understand these experimental results. Through this work, we shed further light on two basic questions unanswered so far, (1) Why does the flow‐rate of the fuel affect the open circuit potential of the fuel cell? (2) Which of the chemical species present in the fuel is oxidised on the anode? Our experiments and analysis suggest that H₂S, and not H₂ produced from H₂S dissociation, is preferentially electro‐oxidised on the anode in our experiments. © 2011 Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering     

Oxidation of corticosteroids to steroidal carboxylic acids by an enzyme preparation from hamster liver

Enzyme activity which catalyzes the oxidation of 11-deoxycorticosterone to 21-oic acids accompanies the "detritiating" enzyme (isomerase) of hamster liver recently isolated by Martin, K. O., et al. ((1977) Biochemistry 16 (preceding paper in this issue)). The metabolites isolated were 20alpha- and 20beta-hydroxy-3-oxo-pregn-4-en-21-oic acid and 3,20-dioxo-pregn-4-en-21-oic acid. When 21-hydroxy[4-14C, 21-3H]pregn-4-en-3,20-dione was the substrate, about half of the tritium was retained in position 20 of the hydroxy acids. The system which catalyzes the conversion of the ketol side chain of corticosteroids to acid metabolites appears to be a cluster of closely related enzymes. As a result of these studies, we believe that the hamster liver enzyme preparation provides a useful model system for studies on the biosynthesis of acid metabolites of the corticosteroids in man.     

Gas chromatographic and mass spectrometric analysis of urinary acidic metabolites of cortisol

A method is described suitable for the analysis of the urinary acidic metabolites of cortisol which are amongst the major metabolites of this hormone (5-25% of secretion). Following hydrolysis of the urinary glucuronide conjugates and extraction of the freed steroids, methyl ester-trimethylsilyl ethers were prepared for gas chromatographic analysis. This analysis was carried out on open tubular columns coated with Carbowax stationary phase. The polar phase column permitted the complete resolution of the four acidic metabolites: alpha-cortolonic, beta-cortolonic, alpha-cortolic and beta-cortolic acids.