Repository as a service (RaaS)

In his oft-quoted seminal paper ‘Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age’ Clifford Lynch (2003) described the Institutional Repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” This paper seeks instead to define the repository service at a more primitive level, without the specialism of being an ‘Institutional Repository’, and looks at how it can viewed as providing a service within appropriate boundaries, and what that could mean for the future development of repositories, our expectations of what repositories should be, and how they could fit into the set of services required to deliver an Institutional Repository service as describe by Lynch.<br/

Application of Explosive Detection Systems Steps for Fielding

In this paper we have surveyed some steps regarding application and fielding of explosive detection systems. We discussed the characteristics of the system which must be considered when procuring it, in order to be sure that the system will fit our requirements and can be smoothly fielded. We reviewed some basic methods of risk assessment that can be used for any security field and, in particular, are applicable to the process of fielding an EDS. The risk assessment process must consider the scenario, the known existing threats and any new threats that have arisen or which could occur in the future, such as new explosive targets and new methods of delivery and use. The new threats, and the weaknesses of current systems and methods, need to be reviewed during the process of risk assessment and decision making for future R&D and purchase. In some cases, new threats need to be taken into account in the development process. An astute decision at this stage can provide very important benefits for a small investment. Quality assurance at the production company is based on the specification of the system that defines all the technical parameters. These should be recognized and agreed with the buyer because they are an important part of the implementation of the security system. The end-product quality is measured against them. The key technical characteristics have to be carefully determined and the technical specification very precisely defined to allow it to be a basic document for the purchase and fielding of the system. We mention the main parameters that should be defined by the customer during the process: the explosives that need to detected by system, the required sensitivity, maximum tolerable false alarm rate, throughput rate and cost. Privacy and health and safety issues may also need to be considered. During the purchase process, demonstration and field test and evaluation are conducted to ensure that development and production has met the requirements. At this stage too, the specification document is the key point of reference, defining the parameters and values that are to be checked. Finally, we describe some of the new threats that are emerging and how EDS might be developed to meet them.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

Screen-printed platinum electrodes for measuring crevice corrosion: Nickel aluminium bronze as an example

Screen-printed platinum electrodes were used to monitor crevice corrosion processes. The electrodes, printed on an inert alumina substrate, formed the bottom of an artificial crevice when mechanically clamped to a rectangular block of nickel-aluminium bronze (NAB). Cyclic differential pulse voltammetry was used to detect corrosion products over time whilst the assembly was immersed in a 3.5% by weight aqueous solution of sodium chloride. Cupric (Cu2+), ferric (Fe3+) and ferrous (Fe2+) ions were detected with evolution profiles indicative of selective phase corrosion

Screen-printed platinum electrodes for the detection of cupric and ferric ions in high chloride backgrounds

Screen-printed platinum electrodes developed for use in corrosion monitoring applications have been used to detect cupric and ferric ions both individually and as mixtures in a background of 3.5% by weight sodium chloride and in the presence of dissolved oxygen. In single species detection linear responses for the Fe3+/Fe2+ couple were observed over the concentration range 0.3 to 100mM. By contrast, the small size of the working electrode caused a current limiting response for cupric ions over the same concentration range. In mixtures of these ions, the sensors show good differentiation and are able to separate the individual metal ion responses

Towards a generalized theory of low-frequency sound source localization

Low-frequency sound source localization generates considerable amount of disagreement between audio/acoustics researchers, with some arguing that below a certain frequency humans cannot localize a source with others insisting that in certain cases localization is possible, even down to the lowest audible of frequencies. Nearly all previous work in this area depends on subjective evaluations to formulate theorems for low-frequency localization. This, of course, opens the argument of data reliability, a critical factor that may go some way to explain the reported ambiguities with regard to low-frequency localization. The resulting proposal stipulates that low-frequency source localization is highly dependent on room dimensions, source/listener location and absorptive properties. In some cases, a source can be accurately localized down to the lowest audible of frequencies, while in other situations it cannot. This is relevant as the standard procedure in live sound reinforcement, cinema sound and home-theater surround sound is to have a single mono channel for the low-frequency content, based on the assumption that human’s cannot determine direction in this band. This work takes the first steps towards showing that this may not be a universally valid simplification and that certain sound reproduction systems may actually benefit from directional low-frequency content