LaTeX, metadata, and publishing workflows

The field of scientific publishing that is served by LaTeX is increasingly dependent on the availability of metadata about publications. We discuss how to use LaTeX classes and BibTeX styles to curate metadata throughout the life cycle of a published article. Our focus is on streamlining and automating much of publishing workflow. We survey the various options and drawbacks of the existing approaches and outline our approach as applied in a new LaTeX style file where we have as main goal to make it easier for authors to specify their metadata only once and use this throughout the entire publishing pipeline. We believe this can help to reduce the cost of publishing, by reducing the amount of human effort required for editing and providing of publication metadata

Air flow sensor and data logger

The problem of heating and cooling buildings efficiently continues to present a significant concern for facility managers throughout the world. Factors contributing to air leakage, such as opening a door or general escape through a building's crevices, greatly decrease the system's efficiency, which in turn, translates to higher operating costs. By measuring the temperature and flow of air into a room and comparing it to the rate of return, the air conditioning system's efficiency can be determined and areas of inefficiency can be resolved. Accordingly, there is a need for monitoring equipment which can record airflow characteristics in an isolated section of ventilation duct for extended periods of time. The objective for this research project was to design and implement a prototype for a low-power, low-restriction airflow and temperature logger which is capable of autonomous operation for at least one month. This report, which serves as a methodological description for the design and implementation of our chosen sensor system, demonstrates a proof of concept for a device which is capable of autonomously measuring the temperature and rate of airflow through a ventilation duct for a period of over two months. Our system, which utilizes a low-profile 3.3V battery to supply an ultra-low power processor, employs custom-fabricated PCB boards containing analog temperature and IR distance sensors to take measurements from a vane flapper. Our prototyped design surpasses specifications in the areas of power regulation, temperature reading, response time, and flow allowance. However, it falls short in the operations of data logging and reliable airflow reading accuracy. With further development, our sensor system has the potential to prove a viable option for efficiency monitoring in large-scale deployments

A fast portable implementation of the Secure Hash Algorithm, III.

In 1992, NIST announced a proposed standard for a collision-free hash function. The algorithm for producing the hash value is known as the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and the standard using the algorithm in known as the Secure Hash Standard (SHS). Later, an announcement was made that a scientist at NSA had discovered a weakness in the original algorithm. A revision to this standard was then announced as FIPS 180-1, and includes a slight change to the algorithm that eliminates the weakness. This new algorithm is called SHA-1. In this report we describe a portable and efficient implementation of SHA-1 in the C language. Performance information is given, as well as tips for porting the code to other architectures. We conclude with some observations on the efficiency of the algorithm, and a discussion of how the efficiency of SHA might be improved

Geospatial Mapping and Navigation of the Web

Web pages may be organized, indexed, searched, and navigated along several different feature dimensions. We investigate different approaches to discovering geographic context for web pages, and describe a navigational tool for browsing web resources by geographic proximity

Language Modeling and Encryption on Packet Switched Networks ⋆

Abstract. The holy grail of a mathematical model of secure encryption is to devise a model that is both faithful in its description of the real world, and yet admits a construction for an encryption system that fulfills a meaningful definition of security against a realistic adversary. While enormous progress has been made during the last 60 years toward this goal, existing models of security still overlook features that are closely related to the fundamental nature of communication. As a result there is substantial doubt in this author’s mind as to whether there is any reasonable definition of “secure encryption ” on the Internet.