APSR Sustainability Issues Discussion Paper

This paper was initially envisaged as a higher level document intended for the steering committee through the executive officer. However, the formation of the expert committee at the December steering committee meeting suggests that a task based document would be more appropriate for that forum, referred to them by the steering committee. The final outcome of the process for which this discussion paper was written is a task based plan that will support the APSR aim of elucidating the critical issues of the access continuity and the sustainability of digital collections. It may be utilised to fulfil the requirement of an issues and strategy paper as outlined in Milestone 1 in the APSR Project Specification 12 February 2004

Digital Sustainability and Digital Repositories

The tasks associated with managing and backing up digital data are well known to IT managers, but the mere presence of the data stream is not the only criterion for preserving and maintaining digital content. Digital sustainability recognises that the continuity of digital information goes well beyond basic storing and managing of data and is integrated into the lifecycle of the information object. It includes technical, social and economic considerations. In 2004 a DEST-funded project, the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) initiated an investigative process to establish a centre of excellence for the management of digital collections. The APSR has an overall focus on the critical issues of the access continuity and the sustainability of digital collections, and this paper draws on the investigation of these issues in the University sector

Critical choices, critical decisions: sound archiving and changing technology

In a relatively short period of time sound archivists have had to come to terms with some fundamental paradigm shifts in the way they approach sound archiving. For example, in December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, the Commonwealth Government announced that the National Library would be funded to develop and manage a new oral history project. At that time the National Library's well developed sound preservation strategy was at an interim stage between digital and analogue. It involved the production of analogue reel, CD and cassette duplicates of the original DAT tape using high end digital audio workstations (DAW) designed for post production of audio materials. By the time the project had reached its completion date in 2002, reel tapes had become more difficult to purchase, CD-R stock was much cheaper and of generally lower quality, DAWs specifically for audio preservation were available, and the Library had refocused its digital preservation strategy so that it relied on the Digital Object Storage System (DOSS), an in-house digital mass storage system (DMSS). The development of DMSSs brings closer the vision of a persistent and replicable archive to which sound archivists have aspired, however it also raises many issues that were not envisaged under the earlier strategies. These include the incorporation and transfer of existing digital and analogue to the storage system, the management of adequate descriptive and preservation metadata, the management of that data, the choice of carrier from which to transfer, (preservation CD or original carrier?) and many other new dilemmas with which to wrestle. These issues, coupled with the disappearance of adequate replay equipment from the market, render critical the timing and planning of what will clearly be the last transfer from a discrete carrier to an integrated system.Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

Missouri weed seeds (2005)

"New 1/05/2.5M.""This publication is part of a series of IPM Manuals prepared by the Plant Protection Programs of the University of Missouri. Topics covered in the series include an introduction to scouting, weed identification and management, plant diseases, and insects of field and horticultural crops.""Integrated pest management.

Survey of Data Collections: A Research Project Undertaken for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories

This report draws together the findings of the Survey of Data Collections conducted in the APSR partner Universities in 2005. The information derived from the process is intended to feed into the next stage of APSR work, providing specific data for the design of software tools, development of repositories, assessment of risk and development of risk management approaches, implementation of preservation metadata and the development of supported formats. The survey of the collections was also developed to help characterise the types of data repositories, to determine if different sorts of data sets needed different facilities, technology or management. The process raised a number of issues which were covered in the survey questions and analysis. This was expected and where appropriate will inform the APSR process and identification of issues. The survey process has also helped to identify datasets with whom APSR will be able to undertake further sustainability investigations with other data sets

Texton finding and lattice creation for near-regular texture

A regular texture is formed from a regular congruent tiling of perceptually meaningful texture elements, also known as textons. If the tiling statistically deviates from regularity, either by texton structure, colour, or size, the texture is called near-regular. If we continue to perturb the tiling, the texture becomes stochastic. The set of possible textures that lie between regular and stochastic make up the texture spectrum: regular, near-regular, regular, near-stochastic, and stochastic. In this thesis we provide a solution to the problem of creating, from a near-regular texture, a lattice which defines the placement of textons. We divide the problem into two distinct sub-areas: finding textons within an image, and lattice creation using both an ad-hoc method and a graph-theoretic method. The problem of finding textons within an image is addressed using correlation. A texton selected by the user is correlated with the image and points of high correlation are extracted using non-maximal suppression. To extend this framework to irregular textures, we present early results on the use of feature space during correlation. We also present a method of correcting for a specific type of error in the texton finding result using frequency-space analysis. Given texton locations, we provide two methods of creating a lattice. The ad-hoc method is able to create a lattice in spite of inconsistencies in the texton locating data. However, as texture becomes irregular the ad-hoc lattice construction method fails to correctly connect textons. To overcome this failure we adapt methods of creating proximity graphs, which join two textons whose neighbourhoods satisfy certain criteria, to our problem. The proximity graphs are parameterized for selection of the most appropriate graph choice for a given texture, solving the general lattice construction problem given correct texton locations. In the output of the algorithm, centres of textons will be connected by edges in the lattice following the structure of texton placement within the input image. More precisely, for a texture T, we create a graph G = (V,E) dependent on T, where V is a set of texton centres, and E ={(v_i, v_j)} is a set of edges, where v_i, v_j are in V. Each edge e in E connects texton centre v in V to its most perceptually sensible neighbours

Missouri weed seeds

Integrated Pest ManagementPlant Protection ProgramsCollege of Agriculture, Food and Natural ResourcesPublished by MU Extension, University of Missouri-ColumbiaFred Fishel, Department of Agronomy, Universiity of Missouri-Columbia; Kevin Bradley, Department of Agronomy, University of Missouri-Columbia"Reviewed November 2018" -- websiteThe purpose of this publication is to assist those who attempt to identify weeds by their seed characteristics. This guide is intended not only for agricultural professionals, but also those who are hobbyists, such as FFA members. A hand or pocket lens with a magnification power of 10x will be especially helpful in using this guide. For an idea of relative seed size, each photograph contains a millimeter ruler. The distance between increments on the sacle is 1 mm. Compare your sample with the color images in this guide to assist in your identifi cation. Seed photographs are grouped by their plant taxonomic family for both broadleaf and grass or grasslike weeds. You may also refer to the indexes of common names -- broadleaf plant families on page 16 and grass and grasslike plant families on page 19

Novel design for noise controlled semiconductor optical amplifier

The use of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) in optical communications networks has so far been limited due to their inherent large noise figure (NF) compared to Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifiers. Therefore improvement of the noise performance of SOAs is critical to their widespread adoption in future networks. We propose to reduce the NF of the SOA by introducing a lasing cavity lateral to the axis of amplification of the device. The carrier density within the cavity is clamped at the lasing threshold. It is thus possible to engineer the carrier density distribution along the active waveguide by controlling the cavity design. According to our simulations, some of the cavity designs lead to a reduction of the noise figure in this novel SOA