RV Knorr Cruise KN200-4, 13 Apr-03 May 2011. RAPID Mooring Cruise

This report describes the mooring operations conducted during RV Knorr cruise KN200-4 between 13 April and 3 May 2011. These mooring operations were completed as part of the United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded RAPID-WATCH Programme to monitor the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) at 26.5°N. The primary purpose on this cruise for the UK team was to service the RAPID Western Boundary moorings while the US teams worked on the Western Boundary Time Series project and the RAPID-MOCHA Western Boundary moorings. Cruise KN200-4 was from Port Everglades, Florida to Port Everglades, Florida and covered the Western Boundary moorings deployed on RB0901 and OC459. This cruise was the ninth annual refurbishment of the Western Boundary section of an array of moorings deployed across the Atlantic in order to continuously observe the MOC. This array will be further refined and refurbished during subsequent years. The instruments deployed on the array consist of a variety of current meters, bottom pressure recorders, and CTD loggers, which, combined with time series measurements of the Florida Straits Current and wind stress estimates, will be used to determine the strength and structure of the MOC at 26.5°N. (http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/rapid

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

Steam reforming of biomass tar over tyre char for hydrogen production

Carbonaceous materials have been proven to have a high activity for tar removal. The simultaneous gasification of pyrolysis gases and char has a significant role in increasing the gas yield and decreasing the tar in the product syngas. This study investigates the use of tyre char as a catalyst for hydrogen production and tar reduction during the pyrolysis/reforming of biomass using a two stage fixed bed reactor. The biomass sample was pyrolysed under nitrogen at a pyrolysis temperature of 500 deg;C. The evolved pyrolysis volatiles were passed to a second stage with steam and the gases were reformed at a temperature of 900 deg;C with the presence of tyre char as catalyst. The influence of catalyst bed temperature, steam flow rate, reaction time and addition of metals were investigated. Char was characterized using BET surface analysis and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Raising the steam injection rate and reforming temperature resulted in an increase in hydrogen production as steam reforming and gasification of char increased. Over the ranges of operating conditions examined, the maximum hydrogen content reached 52% and the ratio of H 2 /CO varied between 1.3 to 2. The presence of steam promotes the char conversion, however, increasing the amount of steam from 6.64 g/h to 8.64 g/h doesn't contribute to decrease the char yield and the obtained hydrogen yield was almost the same at about 51 vol. %. The results indicate that the char bed exhibited a higher tar reduction than the thermal cracking conditions

RV Walton Smith Cruise WS16336, 01 - 07 Dec 2016, Miami to Miami, USA. MerMEED microstructure cruise report

The MerMEED (Mechanisms responsible for Mesoscale Eddy Energy Dissipation) project is a NERC funded project (NE/N001745/1, 2015-2018) to investigate the levels of dissipation associated with eddies at a western boundary, in order to identify the mechanisms responsible. Mesoscale eddies are ubiquitous in the worlds oceans, and can be found in the subtropical Atlantic travelling slowly westward (at 4-5 cm/s), with a radius of about 100 km. These eddies are formed through baroclinic instability or wind forcing across the Atlantic, but when they reach the western boundary (east coast of the USA), they disappear from the satellite altimetry record. This disappearance of eddies occurs throughout the worldsí oceans at western boundaries, but from altimetry alone, it is not known whether they disappear because energy is transferred to other wave modes or the mean flow, or whether it is locally dissipated through eddy-topography interactions. The purpose of this cruise was to make microstructure temperature and shear measurements in order to measure dissipation at the intersection of an anticyclonic eddy and the steep topography to the east of Abaco, Bahamas. During the 7 day cruise, 70 profiles of microstructure data were collected using a tethered microstructure profiler, and a shipboard 75 kHz ADCP collected concurrent measurements of ocean currents. This cruise is the first of several planned cruises for the MerMEED project, and the data collected are intended to complement additional field operations, including moored instruments added to the RAPID array (thermistors and ADCPs on the WB1 mooring) and glider deployments planned for the 2017/18 year

The effectiveness of investigative tools for Secure Digital (SD) Memory Card forensics

There are many freeware based tools that can be downloadedfrom the World Wide Web. This paper reports the retrieval results of using these tools on digital images which have been deletedfrom Secure Digital (SD) carde. Since SD carde and USE flash drives are considered solid state technology, the tools selected are specifically for solid state drives. This research helps classify the selection of the most eifoctivefreeware tools that could be used to recover lost or deleted images, Further, it includes some of the issues that wouldfaceforensic examiners undertaking such investigations. The tools were tested using the Windows environment and did not require any specific forensics background in order to retrieve the images. The testing procedures included retrieval time and the state of the deleted image, viewable or damaged (corrupt). A review of tool functionality is given together with the most effective tools useful in retrieving images from deleted Secure Digital cards

Exploiting the potential of large databases of electronic health records for research using rapid search algorithms and an intuitive query interface.

Objective: UK primary care databases, which contain diagnostic, demographic and prescribing information for millions of patients geographically representative of the UK, represent a significant resource for health services and clinical research. They can be used to identify patients with a specified disease or condition (phenotyping) and to investigate patterns of diagnosis and symptoms. Currently, extracting such information manually is time-consuming and requires considerable expertise. In order to exploit more fully the potential of these large and complex databases, our interdisciplinary team developed generic methods allowing access to different types of user. Materials and methods: Using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink database, we have developed an online user-focused system (TrialViz), which enables users interactively to select suitable medical general practices based on two criteria: suitability of the patient base for the intended study (phenotyping) and measures of data quality. Results: An end-to-end system, underpinned by an innovative search algorithm, allows the user to extract information in near real-time via an intuitive query interface and to explore this information using interactive visualization tools. A usability evaluation of this system produced positive results. Discussion: We present the challenges and results in the development of TrialViz and our plans for its extension for wider applications of clinical research. Conclusions: Our fast search algorithms and simple query algorithms represent a significant advance for users of clinical research databases

Vacuum phototriodes for the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter endcap

The measurement of scintillation light from the lead tungstate crystals of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) poses a substantial technical challenge, particularly in the endcap regions, where the radiation levels are highest. The photodetectors must be fast, sensitive, radiationhard, and operate with significant internal gain in a magnetic field of 4 Tesla. The measured performance characteristics of the first batches of series production vacuum phototriodes (VPT), developed to satisfy the needs of CMS, will be described

Credibility-based social network recommendation: Follow the leader

In Web-based social networks (WBSN), social trust relationships between users indicate the similarity of their needs and opinions. Trust can be used to make recommendations on the web because trust information enables the clustering of users based on their credibility which is an aggregation of expertise and trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose a new approach to making recommendations based on leaders' credibility in the "Follow the Leader" model as Top-N recommenders by incorporating social network information into user-based collaborative filtering. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of "Follow the Leader" as a new approach to making recommendations, first we develop a new analytical tool, Social Network Analysis Studio (SNAS), that captures real data and used it to verify the proposed model using the Epinions dataset. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach is a significantly innovative approach to making effective collaborative filtering based recommendations especially for cold start users. © 2010 Al-Sharawneh & Williams

An evaluation on the effectiveness of Web 2.0 Startpages (Netvibes & Pageflakes) within NHS libraries.

Carol McCormick was Learning Resources Advisor in the library at James Cook University Hospital, South Teesside when she completed her BSc (Hons) Librarianship (Work Based Learning) degree at Northumbria University. She gained a 1st Class Honours and is now Learning Resources Librarian. Carol’s dissertation formed part of a wider action research project into the provision of current awareness services at James Cook University Hospital. This article reports on the evaluation which was conducted after a Web 2.0 Startpage, or portal, had been introduced to improve access to current awareness information for all staff within the Trust. It is the second article in the Dissertations into practice series to examine the use of web-based tools to improve access to information for NHS staff