Analysis of Atmospheric Aerosol Data Sets and Application of Radiative Transfer Models to Compute Aerosol Effects

The Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAER) scientists have worked with the NASA Ames Research Center sunphotometer group led by Dr. Philip Russell for many years researching the climatic effects of aerosol particles in the stratosphere and troposphere. We have continued to work with the NASA Ames sunphotometer group in research activities representing funded, peer-reviewed proposals to NASA, NOAA and DOE. The activities are described in those proposals and also in the documents provided to the Grants Office earlier. This is the final report from January 1,2002 - June 30, 2005. The report consists of a compilation of 41 peer-reviewed publications (published, in press or submitted) produced under this Cooperative Agreement and 43 first-authored conference presentations. To save paper, reprints are not included but will, of course, be provided upon request

Processing of Industrially Relevant Non Metals with Laser Pulses in the Range Between 10Ps and 50Ps

The interest in ps-laser pulses for industrial applications has significantly increased in the last few years. Today, available ps-lasers are industrially applicable turnkey systems, set up in a MOPA arrangement with rod or disk amplifiers and mostly have pulse durations of about 10ps. The change to fiber based amplifier technologies would help to build more compact systems but with pulse durations between 20ps and 50ps. It has been shown, that the ablation efficiency of a material is mainly given by the threshold fluence and the energy penetration depth. For steel and copper both parameters depend on the number of pulses applied and the pulse duration as well. Unfortunately this influence will lead to a significant drop of the ablation efficiency and quality if the pulse duration rises from 10ps to 50ps. This behavior, also expected for other metals, may reduce the attractiveness of the fiber based systems by having to make use of stretcher power amplifier compressor designs to achieve shorter pulses. However, for industrially relevant non-metals like polycrystalline diamond or ceramic materials the situation is unclear. New results of a systematic study about the influence of the pulse duration onto the ablation efficiency and quality will be presented

Cross-Supplier Bundling of Tourist Products with Multi-Vendor Electronic Catalogs

Tourist services are one of the most popular products offered online. This has given rise to all service suppliers to offer their products over the Internet. Currently elementary services as hotels, flights or rental cars and travel packages can be booked online. Despite the high interdependence of tourist products there is no possibility for easy and user friendly online bundling of tourist products. In this paper a solution for online bundling of products will be presented based on multi-vendor Electronic Product Catalogs developed with the Q-Technology

Architecture and Business Potential of Mediating Electronic Product Catalogs

The Internet has the inherent potential of enabling a global marketplace. However, so far electronic shopping systems have had relatively limited success in supplanting or augmenting traditional physical and catalog shopping. The biggest impediment at the stage of product identification is the necessity to manually evaluate and integrate product information. This issue can be alleviated by modeling product information on a semantic level, which enables vocabularies of heterogeneous electronic product catalogs to be integrated. Adopting a mediator architecture for the construction of distributed federated product catalogs preserves each participating vendor\u27s autonomy. Besides creating added value for customers this enables a variety of new business models for emerging intermediarie

Objektive und subjektive Problemlagen:: eine Frage des Einkommens?

"Inwieweit beeinträchtigt ein niedriges Einkommen die Lebensbedingungen und das subjektive Wohlbefinden? Welche Faktoren haben, neben dem Einkommen, den stärksten Einfluss auf die Lebensbedingungen? Lassen sich Problemgruppen ausmachen, die in verschiedenen Lebensbereichen Defizite aufweisen? Dies sind die Fragen, welche in diesem Beitrag näher untersucht werden sollen. Das Referat knüpft an den Ergebnissen des 2002 erschienenen Sozialberichts 'Wohlstand und Wohlbefinden' an und ist in zwei Hauptteile gegliedert. Im ersten Teil werden die Untersuchungsanlage und das methodische Vorgehen erläutert. Anschliessend werden die wichtigsten Analyseergebnisse vorgestellt. Ein besonderes Augenmerk gilt dabei dem Problem der Mehrfachbenachteiligung. Die Daten stammen aus der schweizerischen Einkommens- und Verbrauchserhebung, in deren Rahmen 1998 und 2002 eine 20-minütige, themenübergreifende Zusatzbefragung zu den Lebensbedingungen durchgeführt wurde." (Autorenreferat