Societal Safety: Concept,Borders and Dilemmas

In most industrialized countries, the end of the Cold War marked a change in focus from preparedness for war to an increasing focus on civil society's own vulnerability and safety. To meet new threats and changing risks, there is also a need for new analytical concepts. Societal safety is a concept developed in Norway during the last decade. It could be defined as: ‘The society's ability to maintain critical social functions, to protect the life and health of the citizens and to meet the citizens' basic requirements in a variety of stress situations’. It aims to be a systematic approach for understanding, mitigating and responding to social problems such as extraordinary stresses and losses, interferences in complex and mutual dependent systems, or lack of trust in vital social institutions. Future threats to society are not limited to specific sectors or areas, but stem from complex interactions amongst economic, technological, social and cultural factors. Thus, the main challenges to improve societal safety will be the ability to coordinate, organize and assign clear roles to different actors at the international, national and local levels. Societal safety has interfaces with other safety‐related areas such as national security, sustainable development, human security and incident management (handling of isolated accidents, common illness and ordinary criminal acts). Societal safety is, however, a sensitive political issue containing dilemmas and value choices that are hardly possible to perceive or solve as pure scientific problems.     

An Operator-integration-factor splitting method for time-dependent problems: Application to incompressible fluid flow

In this paper we present a simple, general methodology for the generation of high-order operator decomposition (splitting) techniques for the solution of time-dependent problems arising in ordinary and partial differential equations. The new approach exploits operator integration factors to reduce multiple-operator equations to an associated series of single-operator initial-value subproblems. Two illustrations of the procedure are presented: the first, a second-order method in time applied to velocity-pressure decoupling in the incompressible Stokes problem; the second, a third-order method in time applied to convection-Stokes decoupling in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Critical open questions are briefly described.     

Applying a formal analysis technique to the CCITT X.509 strong two-way authentication protocol

In the quest for open systems, standardization of security mechanisms, framework, and protocols are becoming increasingly important. This puts high demands on the correctness of the standards. In this paper we use a formal logic-based approach to protocol analysis introduced by Burrows et al. [1]. We extend this logic to deal with protocols using public key cryptography, and with the notion of duration to capture some time-related aspects. The extended logic is used to analyse an important CCITT standard, the X.509 Authentication Framework. We conclude that protocol analysis can benefit from the use of the notation and that it highlights important aspects of the protocol analysed. Some aspects of the formalism need further study.This research was sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research under Grant IT 0333.22222, and was performed while K. Gaarder was at Alcatel STK Research Centre.     

Feature selection via sensitivity analysis of SVM probabilistic outputs

Feature selection is an important aspect of solving data-mining and machine-learning problems. This paper proposes a feature-selection method for the Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning. Like most feature-selection methods, the proposed method ranks all features in decreasing order of importance so that more relevant features can be identified. It uses a novel criterion based on the probabilistic outputs of SVM. This criterion, termed Feature-based Sensitivity of Posterior Probabilities (FSPP), evaluates the importance of a specific feature by computing the aggregate value, over the feature space, of the absolute difference of the probabilistic outputs of SVM with and without the feature. The exact form of this criterion is not easily computable and approximation is needed. Four approximations, FSPP1-FSPP4, are proposed for this purpose. The first two approximations evaluate the criterion by randomly permuting the values of the feature among samples of the training data. They differ in their choices of the mapping function from standard SVM output to its probabilistic output: FSPP1 uses a simple threshold function while FSPP2 uses a sigmoid function. The second two directly approximate the criterion but differ in the smoothness assumptions of criterion with respect to the features. The performance of these approximations, used in an overall feature-selection scheme, is then evaluated on various artificial problems and real-world problems, including datasets from the recent Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) feature selection competition. FSPP1-3 show good performance consistently with FSPP2 being the best overall by a slight margin. The performance of FSPP2 is competitive with some of the best performing feature-selection methods in the literature on the datasets that we have tested. Its associated computations are modest and hence it is suitable as a feature-selection method for SVM applications. Editor: Risto Miikkulainen.     

A case study comparing defect profiles of a reused framework and of applications reusing it

The benefits of software reuse have been studied for many years. Several previous studies have observed that reused software has a lower defect density than newly built software. However, few studies have investigated empirically the reasons for this phenomenon. To date, we have only the common sense observation that as software is reused over time, the fixed defects will accumulate and will result in high-quality software. This paper reports on an industrial case study in a large Norwegian Oil and Gas company, involving a reused Java class framework and two applications that use that framework. We analyzed all trouble reports from the use of the framework and the applications according to the Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC), followed by a qualitative Root Cause Analysis (RCA). The results reveal that the framework has a much lower defect density in total than one application and a slightly higher defect density than the other. In addition, the defect densities of the most severe defects of the reused framework are similar to those of the applications that are reusing it. The results of the ODC and RCA analyses reveal that systematic reuse (i.e. clearly defined and stable requirements, better design, hesitance to change, and solid testing) lead to lower defect densities of the functional-type defects in the reused framework than in applications that are reusing it. However, the different “nature” of the framework and the applications (e.g. interaction with other software, number and complexity of business logic, and functionality of the software) may confound the causal relationship between systematic reuse and the lower defect density of the reused software. Using the results of the study as a basis, we present an improved overall cause–effect model between systematic reuse and lower defect density that will facilitate further studies and implementations of software reuse.

Integrated micro Pirani gauge based hermetical package monitoring for uncooled VO x bolometer FPAs

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a micro Pirani gauge using VO _x as the sensitive material for monitoring the pressure inside a hermetical package for micro bolometer focal plane arrays (FPAs). The designed Pirani gauge working in heat dissipating mode was intentionally fabricated using standard MEMS processing which is highly compatible with the FPAs fabrication. The functional layer of the micro Pirani gauge is a VO _x thin film designed as a 100 × 200 μm pixel, suspended 2 μm above the substrate. By modeling of rarefied gas heat conduction using the Extended Fourier’s law, finite element analysis is used to investigate the sensitivity of the pressure gauge. Also the thermal interactions between the micro Pirani gauge and bolometer FPAs are verified. From the fabricated prototype, the measured device TCR is about −0.8% K⁻¹ and the sensitivity about 1.84 × 10⁻³ W K⁻¹ mbar⁻¹.     

Assessment of a Cylindrical and a Rectangular Plate Differential Mobility Analyzer for Size Fractionation of Nanoparticles at High-Aerosol Flow Rates

An existing differential mobility analyzer (DMA) of cylindrical electrodes and a novel DMA of rectangular plate electrodes are demonstrated for size fractionation of nanoparticles at high-aerosol flow rates in this work. The two DMAs are capable of delivering monodisperse size selected nanoparticles (SMPS σ_g < 1.1) at gas flow rates ranging from 200 slm to 500 slm. At an aerosol flow rate of 200 slm, the maximum attainable particle mean size is of about 20 nm for the cylindrical DMA and of nearly 50 nm for the rectangular plate DMA. The number concentration of the monodisperse nanoparticles delivered by the high-flow DMAs spans from 10⁴ cm^?3 to 10⁶ cm^?3 depending upon the particle mean size and particle size dispersion.

Copyright 2014 American Association for Aerosol Research     

Computer Analysis of Impedance Effects in Large Grounding Systems

In large plants with high primary fault levels, the whole plant must be considered as forming the ground grid for the return of primary fault current. The internal impedance of the equivalent ground grid must be taken into account in grid potential rise calculations, as grid potentials transferred from one area of the plant may cause hazardous touch potentials at other locations. Field measurements and computer analyses to calculate the distribution of grid potential rise in a large grounding system are presented.     

Kinematics of the heart: strain-rate imaging from time-resolved three-dimensional phase contrast MRI

A four-dimensional mapping (three spatial dimensions + time) of myocardial strain-rate would help to describe the mechanical properties of the myocardium, which affect important physiological factors such as the pumping performance of the ventricles. Strain-rate represents the local instantaneous deformation of the myocardium and can be calculated from the spatial gradients of the velocity field. Strain-rate has previously been calculated using one-dimensional (ultrasound) or two-dimensional (2-D) magnetic resonance imaging) techniques. However, this assumes that myocardial motion only occurs in one direction or in one plane, respectively. This paper presents a method for calculation of the time-resolved three-dimensional (3-D) strain-rate tensor using velocity vector information in a 3-D spatial grid during the whole cardiac cycle. The strain-rate tensor provides full information of both magnitude and direction of the instantaneous deformation of the myocardium. A method for visualization of the full 3-D tensor is also suggested. The tensors are visualized using ellipsoids, which display the principal directions of strain-rate and the ratio between strain-rate magnitude in each direction. The presented method reveals the principal strain-rate directions without a priori knowledge of myocardial motion directions.     

Melting behavior of polypropylene fibers studied by differential scanning calorimetry

Polypropylene fibers produced in a compact-spinning process were studied by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). With unrestrained fibers, the onset of melting increases with decreasing draw ratio, increasing M_w/M_n, decreasing extrusion temperature, increasing annealing ratio, and increasing draw-down ratio. These trends are discussed in terms of restraints and reorganization. The onset of melting is shifted to lower temperatures as the heating rate increases for all combinations of material and processing parameters, indicating suppressed reorganization. At low draw ratios, the height and width of the endotherm are affected by the spinline stress, and a secondary peak or shoulder is observed on the high temperature side of the main peak. The magnitude of the secondary peak increases with decreasing M_w/M_n, increasing draw ratio, decreasing draw-down ratio, and decreasing heating rate, but its position mainly depends on the heating rate. This indicates that the secondary peak may be due to the melting of structures that have been reorganized during the heating scan. As the draw ratio increases, the melting regime broadens, especially towards lower temperatures, and several maxima emerge on the DSC curve. Reorganization and shrinkage during heating may explain these observations. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.