A decade of user operation on the macromolecular crystallography MAD beamline ID14-4 at the ESRF

The improvement of the X-ray beam quality achieved on ID14-4 by the installation of new X-ray optical elements is described

Experimental procedure for the characterization of radiation damage in macromolecular crystals

A novel automatic procedure to determine the sensitivity of macromolecular crystals to radiation damage is presented. The information extracted from this procedure can be directly used for optimal planning of data collection or/and beamline calibration

MxCuBE: a synchrotron beamline control environment customized for macromolecular crystallography experiments

MxCuBE is a beamline control environment optimized for the needs of macromolecular crystallography. This paper describes the design of the software and the features that MxCuBE currently provides

The MAX IV imaging concept

The MAX IV Laboratory is currently the synchrotron X-ray source with the beam of highest brilliance. Four imaging beamlines are in construction or in the project phase. Their common characteristic will be the high acquisition rates of phase-enhanced images. This high data flow will be managed at the local computing cluster jointly with the Swedish National Computing Infrastructure. A common image reconstruction and analysis platform is being designed to offer reliable quantification of the multidimensional images acquired at all the imaging beamlines at MAX IV

THE INTERNET OF THINGS AND CONTROL SYSTEM

Abstract A recent huge interest in Machine to Machine communication is known as the Internet Of Things (IOT), to allow the possibility for autonomous devices to use Internet for exchanging the data. The Internet and the World Wide Web have caused a revolution in communication between the people. They were born from the need to exchange scientific information between institutes. Several universities have predicted that IOT will have a similar impact and now, industry is gearing up for it. The issues under discussion for IOT , such as protocols, representations and resources are similar to human communication and are currently being tested by different institutes and companies, including start-ups. Already, the term smart city is used to describe uses of IOT, such as smart parking, traffic congestion and waste management.In the domain of Control Systems for big research facilities, a lot of knowledge has already been acquired for building the connections between thousands of devices, more and more of which are provided with a TCP/IP connection. This paper investigates the possible convergence between Control Systems and IOT

LEAPS data strategy

The continuous evolution of photon sources and their instrumentation enables more and new scientific endeavors at ever increasing pace. This technological evolution is accompanied by an exponential growth of data volumes of increasing complexity, which must be addressed by maximizing efficiency of scientific experiments and automation of workflows covering the entire data lifecycle, aiming to reduce data volumes while producing FAIR and open data of highest reliability. This papers briefly outlines the strategy of the league of European accelerator-based photon sources user facilities to achieve these goals collaboratively in an efficient and sustainable way which will ultimately lead to an increase in the number of publications

"The national music plan" and the taming of English music education

In late 2011, the Department for Education in England published ‘The importance of music: A national plan for music education.’ (DfE/DCMS 2011b).. Ostensibly, its purpose is to carry forward in a more coherent and equitable manner the work hitherto carried out by music services-locally-based, publicly funded organisations that provide instrumental lessons to schools within their area. However the plan goes much further, setting out a wide-ranging policy vision for music education in England for the next eight years; a policy vision which is arguably at odds with the values and beliefs that have underpinned music education in England over the last thirty years. In this article I intend to explore the language and rhetoric of the plan and the musical values that it enshrines. I will argue that, whilst drawing superficially on the language of inclusivity, the NMP has the potential to alienate many young people from formal music education and to be used as the means of sustaining social and educational inequalities

Building S.C.A.D.A. Systems in Scientific Installations with Sardana and Taurus

International audienceSardana and Taurus form a python software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) optimized for scientific installations. Sardana and Taurus are open source and deliver a substantial reduction in both time and cost associated to the design, development and support of control and data acquisition systems. The project was initially developed at ALBA and later evolved to an international collaboration driven by a community of users and developers from ALBA, DESY, MAXIV and Solaris as well as other institutes and private companies. The advantages of Sardana for its adoption by other institutes are: free and open source code, comprehensive workflow for enhancement proposals, a powerful environment for building and executing macros, optimized access to the hardware and a generic Graphical User Interface (Taurus) that can be customized for every application. Sardana and Taurus are currently based on the Tango Control System framework but also capable to inter-operate to some extend with other control systems like EPICS. The software suite scales from small laboratories to large scientific institutions, allowing users to use only some parts or employ it as a whole