The exposure history of Jilin and production rates of cosmogenic nuclides

Jilin, the largest known story meteorite, is a very suitable object for studying the systematics of cosmic ray produced nuclides in stony meteorites. Its well established two stage exposure history even permits to gain information about two different irradiation geometries (2pi and 4pi). All stable and long-lived cosmogenic nuclides measured in Jilin so far correlate well with each other. An example is shown where the Al-26 activities are plotted vs. the spallogenic Ne-21 concentration. These records of cosmic-ray interaction in Jilin can be used both to determine the history of the target and to study the nature of production rate profiles. This is unavoidably a bootstrap process, involving studying one with assumption about the other. Production rate equations are presented and discussed

Wikileaks: how web technologies are changing the game for freedom of information.

A true information and political earthquake resulted from the collision of the two great plates of internet freedom and US diplomacy. The epicenter? Wikileaks, a well known website led by Julian Assange since 2006 that encourages online whistle-blowing with the guarantee to keep the source a secret. Coming from Chile, it is difficult for me not to think about earthquakes when describing such a big political crash. However, being fair with Wikileaks, earthquakes have a doubtless destructive power that the website arguably does not have: at least the picture of Wikileaks is one of a rich variety of grey, rather than plain black or white

Automating quantitative information flow

PhDUnprecedented quantities of personal and business data are collected, stored, shared, and processed by countless institutions all over the world. Prominent examples include sharing personal data on social networking sites, storing credit card details in every store, tracking customer preferences of supermarket chains, and storing key personal data on biometric passports. Confidentiality issues naturally arise from this global data growth. There are continously reports about how private data is leaked from confidential sources where the implications of the leaks range from embarrassment to serious personal privacy and business damages. This dissertation addresses the problem of automatically quantifying the amount of leaked information in programs. It presents multiple program analysis techniques of different degrees of automation and scalability. The contributions of this thesis are two fold: a theoretical result and two different methods for inferring and checking quantitative information flows are presented. The theoretical result relates the amount of possible leakage under any probability distribution back to the order relation in Landauer and Redmond’s lattice of partitions [35]. The practical results are split in two analyses: a first analysis precisely infers the information leakage using SAT solving and model counting; a second analysis defines quantitative policies which are reduced to checking a k-safety problem. A novel feature allows reasoning independent of the secret space. The presented tools are applied to real, existing leakage vulnerabilities in operating system code. This has to be understood and weighted within the context of the information flow literature which suffers under an apparent lack of practical examples and applications. This thesis studies such “real leaks” which could influence future strategies for finding information leaks

A quake to Chile’s social reallity

Indeed what happened in Chile is terrible, and continuously shocking. Every day that passes we are more able to realize what really occurred, as communications are improving and water returns to the sea. Like always, those who had little are the ones who lost all

Variations of Blue, Hoh, and White Glaciers During Recent Centuries

Glaciers in the Olympic Mountains of western Washington, as elsewhere in North America, enlarged in late-postglacial time and attained positions from which they have receded conspicuously. Former locations of the ice are marked by moraines and overridden surfaces which the regional vegetation is slowly invading. An examination of aerial photographs of glaciers on Mt. Olympus taken in 1939 and 1952 clearly reveals the progress of recession. In 1952 Blue and Hoh glaciers appear rather inactive whereas a photograph of Blue Glacier taken about the turn of the century shows an actively discharging tongue, well in advance of its position in the early 1950's. About 1900 glacier termini were nevertheless well behind positions reached when the ice stood farther down the valleys in past centuries. No written accounts or measurements are available from this pre-1900 period, although the ages of trees growing on moraines and outwash offer the means for fixing positions of the glaciers during the time before the earliest observations. The minimum periods elapsed since glaciers may have been even farther advanced are established by the ages of the oldest trees in the forests beyond the recent outermost limits of the ice. A reconnaissance of Blue and Hoh glaciers and the vicinity of White Glacier was made during the 1955 summer, and the former limits of the ice were determined and dated. The purpose was to record the variations of Mt. Olympus glaciers so that the climate of this region during the last several centuries might be interpreted from these changes and compared with other localities where similar studies have been made. ..

Quality assurance of medical education: a case study from Switzerland

In the light of ongoing changes and challenges in the European health systems which also have significant implications for undergraduate medical education, the present paper describes the accreditation of medical education programmes in Switzerland focussing on undergraduate medical education. A summary of the methodology used is provided and first experiences as well as future perspectives are discussed in the light of the aim to achieve continuous quality assurance and improvement in medical education

Laker Mobile 2.0: Rewriting GVSU’s official mobile app for iOS Project

This project seeks to renovate the Laker Mobile iOS app by following the most recent standards of the mobile application development industry. The original Laker Mobile app was released back in 2010 with some updates until 2014. This first version of the app relied mostly on default user interface components, which are provided by the operating system, and it was developed fully in Objective-C. Since the introduction of Swift 1.0 by Apple in 2014 the language gained wide acceptance. With this project Laker Mobile follows this trend by making Swift its main language. The app has been entirely rewritten from ground up and besides the exception of a few frameworks that are still in Objective-C it only uses Swift 2.x. Additional to this, Laker Mobile features a complete redesign of the user interface and user experience in order to be more appealing to its target audience. As a result, the application should have an increased usability and retention of users than the previous version

GENIUS-TF: a test facility for the GENIUS project

GENIUS is a proposal for a large scale detector of rare events. As a first step of the experiment, a small test version, the GENIUS test facility, will be build up at the Laboratorio Nazionale del Gran Sasso (LNGS). With about 40 kg of natural Ge detectors operated in liquid nitrogen, GENIUS-TF could exclude (or directly confirm) the DAMA annual modulation signature within about two years of measurement.Comment: 14 pages, latex, 5 figures, 3 tables; submitted to Astroparticle Physic