Study of magnetic helicity injection via plasma imaging using a high-speed digital camera

The evolution of a plasma generated by a novel planar coaxial gun is photographed using a state-of-the-art digital camera, which captures eight time-resolved images per discharge. This experiment is designed to study the fundamental physics of magnetic helicity injection, which is an important issue in fusion plasma confinement, as well as solar and astrophysical phenomena such as coronal mass ejections and accretion disk dynamics. The images presented in this paper are not only beautiful but provide a powerful way to understand the global dynamics of the plasma

Irish Script on Screen: the Growth and Development of a Manuscript Digitisation Project

Irish Script on Screen (ISOS), a project of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, was initiated in 1998, with the stated aim of the high-resolution digitisation of entire Gaelic manuscripts and of making the digital images freely available on the World Wide Web (www.isos.dias.ie). The growth and development of ISOS has therefore paralleled, and in some cases informed, the evolution of awareness of digital matters in Ireland over the last ten years. This paper describes the history and structure of ISOS, its public reception, its impact on research, and the varying uses that are made of the site. The questions of further potential and future direction are also addressed

Contextualising Mobile Presence with Digital Images

A series of Swarm mobile phone prototypes have been developed in response to the user needs identified in a three-year empirical study of young people’s use of mobile phones. The prototypes take cues from user led innovation and provide multiple avatars that allow individuals to define and manage their own virtual identity. This paper briefly maps the evolution of the prototypes and then describes how the pre-defined, color coded avatars in the latest version of the Swarm are being given greater context and personalization through the use of digital images

Implementation of ECC and ECDSA for Image Security

the use of digital data has been increase over the past decade which has led to the evolution of digital world. With this evolution the use of data such as text, images and other multimedia for communication purpose over network needs to be secured during transmission. Images been the most extensively used digital data throughout the world, there is a need for the security of images, so that the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data is maintained. There is various cryptography techniques used for image security of which the asymmetric cryptography is most extensively used for securing data transmission. This paper discusses about Elliptic Curve Cryptography an asymmetric public key cryptography method for image transmission. With security it is also crucial to address the computational aspects of the cryptography methods used for securing images. The paper proposes an Image encryption and decryption method using ECC. Integrity of image transmission is achieved by using Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and also considering computational aspects at each stage

Galactic Plane Hα\alpha Surveys: IPHAS & VPHAS+

The optical Galactic Plane H$\alpha$ surveys IPHAS and VPHAS+ are dramatically improving our understanding of Galactic stellar populations and stellar evolution by providing large samples of stars in short lived, but important, evolutionary phases, and high quality homogeneous photometry and images over the entire Galactic Plane. Here I summarise some of the contributions these surveys have already made to our understanding of a number of key areas of stellar and Galactic astronomy.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, refereed proceeding of the "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys" conference, November 2014, to be published in the Astrophysics and Space Science Proceeding

Recollecting landscapes: new media for urban research

Recollecting Landscapes is a rephotograpic survey project which documents a century of landscape transformation in Belgium. It is based on the successive photography of 60 sites at three moments in time between 1904 and 2004. This paper takes the project as a starting point to investigate the use of new technologies for the communication of urban research. The project is marked by two ambitions: first, to analyze the transformation of urban and rural landscapes and second, to communicate this research to other scholars and to the general public. Recollecint Landscapes constructs a specific kind of knowledge in the form of a digital archive that is set up both as an interpretative instrument and as a didactic tool. An important evolution in the course of this project is the transition from print to pixel. The most recent rephotographic series resulted in a proliferation of media: a sourcebook, a multimedia exhibition, a documentary film and an interactive website with an on-line archive (www.recollectinglandscapes.be). Digital technology seems to expose the oscillation between document and discourse inherent to this kind of archival material. On the one hand, web-applications enhance the accuracy of information storage. Web-related databases are an aid to adding unambiguous metadata about the original context of images: year, place and date of production, photographer, institutional context, and so on. On the other hand, the availability of information on the web allows us to recontextualise images with an unprecedented ease. In the age of the internet, search engines such as Google Images have become an important source of information for students as well as scholars. Anyone can now produce an instant powerpoint presentation on any subject from behind their own desk. It goes without saying that in the limitless image archive of the internet, easy access prevails over accurate metadata. This evolution leads to one of the main questions behind this paper: how do we understand the impact of the new technologies on the perception and reproduction of the urban landscape? How do we prevent new technologies such as the web and powerpoint presentations from resulting in a mere rhetorical parade of images without context? More generally speaking: how do we deal with the issue of information control when images migrate from one discursive context to another? We argue that, because of the rise of new technologies such as the internet, the role of the researcher becomes comparable with that of an exhibition curator. Instead of offering one narrative that determines how the public looks at the photos, the researcher offers many layers of information: the researcher becomes a ‘curator of knowledge’. However, we also argue that, even when the web blurs the boundaries of traditional didactical spaces (such as the classroom, the archive and the exhibition space), these spaces can survive in new forms in the digital era