On the afternoon of Friday April 20, 1883, attorney Kate Kane doused Judge James Mallory with a glass of water in a Milwaukee courtroom. Kane's frustrations were deep. That morning Mallory had reassigned one of her clients to another attorney, despite the fact that this client had specifically requested Kane. This time it was to Peter J. Somers, who had recently worked for Mallory's re-election. After the incident, Kane would announce, “Judge Mallory has been trying to drive me out of this court; he has continuously insulted and misused me, but I bore it.” “Today,” she explained, “I wanted to insult Judge Mallory just where he had insulted me—in open court.” She succeeded; Mallory was furious. Wiping the water from his brow, the irate judge shouted, “Arrest that woman,” and cited Kane for contempt of court. She was immediately apprehended and hauled off to the local jail, where she would stew for days. “I shall stay here for ten years before I pay that fine,” Kane vowed, defiantly. The incident, which imperiled Kane's legal career in Milwaukee, also reveals critical tensions in women's claims on full citizenship that were reflected in battles over professional membership, legal and sexual equality, and political inclusion.

Of 49 long-term care facility residents, 21 (43%) were colonized with 2 or more distinct strains of Escherichia coli. There were no significant risk factors for colonization with multiple strains of E. coli. These results suggest that future efforts to efficiently identify the diversity of colonizing strains will be challenging.

We assessed the rate of recovery of fluoroquinolone-resistant and fluoroquinolone-susceptible Escherichia coli isolates from culture of frozen perirectal swab samples compared with the results for culture of the same specimen before freezing. Recovery rates for these 2 classes of E. coli were 91% and 83%, respectively. The majority of distinct strains recovered from the initial sample were also recovered from the frozen sample. The strains that were not recovered were typically present only in low numbers in the initial sample. These findings emphasize the utility of frozen surveillance samples.

Ceramic joining has become an area of widespread and increasing engineering importance as the aerospace, automotive, chemicals, metals, and utilities industries seek improved performance at higher temperature and in more corrosive service environments. The brittle nature of ceramics, the difficulty of fabricating near net-shape components, the expense of ceramic machining (requiring diamondtipped cutting tools), and the lack of reliable in-process nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods have driven the development of a variety of joining techniques. This article discusses recent advances in ceramic joining using microwave energy as a fast, efficient means to obtain joints indistinguishable from as received material.

Ceramic materials of engineering interest include oxides such as Al2O3 and Al6Si2O13 (mullite), Si3N4, and SiC. Joining applications include attachment of components such as piston liners, combustor cans and turbine rotors in high-efficiency engines; fabrication of tube assemblies for high-temperature, high-pressure heat exchangers and temperature and corrosion resistant radiant burners; and installation of hermetic seals for vacuum system components. The most common joints are mechanical attachments which take advantage of the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) difference between ceramics and metals. Ceramic-ceramic and ceramicmetal joining methods using metallic, glassy, and glass-ceramic interlayers and diffusion bonding have also been successfully demonstrated in recent years.

The ability to provide rapid and volumetric heating of the parts to be joined makes microwave joining attractive. The feasibility and simplicity of this approach was first demonstrated at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1985 by Meek and Blake, who used a home microwave oven to join Al2O3 to itself and to metal with a borosilicate glass interlayer.

Microwave joining of sintered silicon carbide, both to itself and reaction bonded silicon carbide, has been accomplished in a single mode rectangular resonant cavity. Several approaches using different interlayer materials were employed to join sintered silicon carbide. Effective joining of reaction bonded silicon carbide to itself and sintered silicon carbide was accomplished without the use of any interlayer material in the single mode resonant cavity as well as in a multi-mode oven. Specimens cut from 0.95 cm diameter rods were joined in the single mode cavity, whereas a variety of arbitrary shapes and larger specimens (of reaction bonded silicon carbide) were joined in the multi-mode oven.