ALCOHOL USE IN IRELAND: SOME ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS. General Research Series Paper No. 160, October 1993

Alcohol plays an important role in the economic and social life of Ireland. The control of alcohol consumption, for the purpose of curtailing its abuse, has long been an objective of public policy. Recent international efforts, particularly those by the World Health Organisation, have again refocused attention on achieving reductions in national alcohol consumption levels. A target of a 25 per cent reduction in per capita consumption from 1980 levels has been advanced. The Irish Department of Health, partially in response to the international initiatives, is developing a national policy on alcohol use. The formulation of public policy on alcohol needs to take account of economic, social, medical, cultural and political factors. Some of the economic and social issues are addressed in this paper in the context of the contemporary international developments

Measuring the Magnetic Polarizability Tensor of Non-Symmetrical Metallic Objects

The Magnetic Polarizability Tensor (MPT) is a representative electromagnetic property of a metallic object, which depends on the size, material, shape, and excitation frequency of the object. The MPT can be used to describe the response of metal detector systems and improve target classification performance in applications utilizing electromagnetic induction spectroscopy. However, for target characterization, a library of possible target objects needs to be created which can be used for training machine learning classifiers. To supplement and benchmark our existing library of simulated and measured MPT object characterizations, it is necessary to be able to measure object characterizations accurately and efficiently. This paper describes a novel method utilizing a truncated icosahedron shaped manipulator and procedure to measure MPT characterizations of non-symmetrical, irregular objects. This new method allows the measurement of the MPT of any appropriately sized object. The method also ensures the MPT characterizations are measured quickly and are well posed, without sacrificing accuracy. Performance of the method is validated by comparing experiment results acquired using the new method with experiment results acquired using a slower method for symmetrical objects as well as synthetic results generated using a commercial finite element package and an optimized dedicated open source MPT-Calculator package, which offers high accuracy and considerable computational advantages. Good agreement between the new method and the other three methods is seen. For all objects that have been characterized, MPT loss-peak magnitude and horizontal positions from all described methods are within five percent of each other at worst