Communication and Social Representation (guest paper)

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CHEMISTRY

Editorial

The selected contributions to this year's Chemistry Panel reflect high quality work in two different fields: Green Chemistry and Nanoscale Materials.

In "Uses of Ionic Liquids in Analytical Chemistry", A. Berthod and S. Carda-Broch discuss several applications of Room Temperature Ionic Liquids. RTILs are liquids in which ions are present, a fact that confers very interesting solvent properties to these compounds. Examples of usage in extractions, capillary electrophoresis, MALDI matrixes or GC stationary phases are presented.

R. Przeniosło in "Unusual magnetic and structural properties of nanocrystalline Chromium", presents a review about the crystalline and magnetic microstructure of nanocrystalline and amorphous chromium. Nanocrystalline chromium is an important material used by the electroplating industry. The author demonstrated that the small crystallite size as well as the preparation method considerably influences the electronic and magnetic properties of chromium.

I hope you enjoy the reading of the present volume and would like to encourage you to submit the results of your own research to the forthcoming fourth edition.

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Uses of Ionic Liquids in Analytical Chemistry

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Unusual Magnetic and Structural Properties of Nanocrystalline Chromium

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EARTH SCIENCES

Editorial

I ended the editorial in the previous MCFA Annals with a statement expressing my desire to maintain high quality paper submissions. You, the reader, should be the ultimate judge of quality, but if the opinion of the reviewers is representative - and why shouldn't it be - the two Earth Sciences papers in the present MCFA Annals are near the top of the quality ladder.

In the first paper, José Manuel Astilleros García-Monge discusses the growth behaviour of calcite surfaces in contact with multicomponent carbonate aqueous solutions containing divalent cations. Various growth mechanisms are illustrated with beautiful nanometre-scale images recorded using Atomic Force Microscopy (see also Carlos Pina's paper in Volume 2 of the MCFA Annals). Astilleros' work is of broad interest to many different research areas, reaching far beyond the realms of the Earth Sciences, thus truly interdisciplinary.

In the second paper, Angélique Prick and co-authors compare rock weathering processes in remote periglacial environments of Antarctica and Spitsbergen. The authors provide strong evidence that conditions suitable for rock weathering by freezing of pore water (so-called 'frost action') are met only rarely at both field locations. Seasonal trends in rock temperature and moisture content as well as rock stiffness data are used to make a case for preferred weathering by wedging of macrofractures at the Spitsbergen site and for increased weathering due to high salt content within the rocks at the Antarctic site.

On behalf of the authors, I would like to express my gratitude to the reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscripts.

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Molecular-scale formation of carbonate solid solutions from multicomponent aqueous solutions and other related phenomena

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Rock Weathering in Central Spitsbergen and in Northern Victoria Land (Antarctica)

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ECONOMICS

Information Content of Earnings Forecast Disclosures

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ELECTRONICS

Editorial

In the world of Electronic products, there is overwhelming pressure for companies to produce complex integrated circuit devices with first-time success, in order to accommodate shortening product life cycles that are typical of consumer products. Competitiveness is dependent upon supplying the market with devices that provide the right functions at the right price, as consumers continue to demand increasingly sophisticated and smaller electronic products with greater functionality and power.

In order to achieve this, electronics companies are looking to re-use elements of existing designs (known as Intellectual Property (IP) blocks) and then integrating them together with novel design elements onto single silicon chips known as System-on-Chip (SoC). Such chips may contain elements for computing, memory, graphics processing or wireless communications. Designing systems at this very low level of integration produces chips with millions and millions of transistors. The SoC industry's efforts to satisfy the consumers' insatiable demand for sophisticated products powered by SoCs is also driving the emergence of a new generation of design technologies and methodologies. These include the 'fast track' development of circuits as 'soft', re-usable IP cores using high level description languages as opposed to low level, manual design of transistor layouts and schematics. These novel design technologies also permit the integration of analogue and mixed signal elements into a largely digital platform, as well as the verification of the design to prove that it will carry out its intended functions through the use of rapid prototyping of circuits on programmable logic devices.

These novel design methodologies provide ample room for collaborative work and research partnerships and hence ties in quite well with European research programmes such as those supported by Marie Curie mobility schemes. For example, each partner in the research network may focus on a particular aspect of the SoC under development, and hence the end result is a collection of IP cores that can be integrated on the same silicon chip.

The contribution of the Electronics panel demonstrates the benefits of putting these novel techniques into practice. Titled "On the Feasibility of Miniaturised Vision Systems", the paper reports on two case studies of SoC architectures that integrate processing, memory and light sensing elements. The first vision SoC, VISoc, illustrates the state-of-the-art in SoC design using current mixed-signal technology and re-usable IP cores. The second vision SoC, SmartPupilla, extends these design paradigms to account for emerging technologies that will help develop the next generation SoCs, such as the use of nanotechnology, multi-chip modules and embedded high speed memory cores. The paper highlights the challenges and trade-offs associated with the design of vision SoCs, and concludes with a very optimistic view on the future direction of SoC development which is tending towards the convergence with the consumer demand for "increasingly sophisticated and smaller electronic products with greater functionality and power".

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On the Feasibility of Miniaturised Vision Systems

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ENGINEERING

Editorial

This year's contributions to the Engineering Panel reflect the breadth and width of this field. Our Panel received several papers of high technical standard and good readability; but due to volume limitations we could accept, as in previous years, only two of them. Nonetheless we would like to encourage all people who have not seen their paper published in the Annals during this year, to try again in the future.

The first paper outlines a new experimental method of non-destructive testing for the investigation of the internal structure of materials that are used in engineering applications. As it well known, materials with no structural defects at micro level and yet suitable for use in a demanding environment cannot be found at present. Stringent requirements for reliability and safety of engineering systems necessitate the availability of effective techniques for determining the distribution of local variations of material density with micrometric accuracy and furthermore, for predicting crack growth and instability. In the current paper, whose lead author and Marie-Curie Fellowship recipient is Dr. Daniel Vavrik from the Czech Republic, a method is proposed that contributes to the understanding of the mechanics at micro level and possibly could lead to safer engineering structures.

The second paper is authored by Dr Zimeras of the University of the Aegean who is also a MCFA Fellow. Dr. Zimeras puts forward a method that is useful for supporting the medical treatment of patients based on the so-called technique of "virtual simulation". According to this, rather than using the data of the physical patient for simulating e.g. a beam radiotherapy treatment in an oncology clinic, he suggests to perform the simulation on the basis of the computed tomography data set of the patient. The latter is much less expensive in terms of infrastructure and personnel. According to the author, the current level of technology allows use of this method for many treatment cases, replacing completely the conventional simulator that relies on physical patient data.

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Non-destructive Observation of Damage Processes
by X-Ray Dynamic Defectoscopy

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Virtual Simulation for Radiatiotherapy Treatment using CT Medical Data

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INFORMATION SCIENCES

Editorial

We wish you a nice reading of the third version of the annals, and welcome you to submit papers on the last results and advancement of your research in Computer Science and Technology to the fourth edition.

We are pleased to include in this year's annals, the paper ``AC motor closed loop performances with different rotor flux observers'' by M. Alexandru, R. Bojoi, S. M. Tenconi, G. Ghelardi and F. Profumo. The work discusses robust flux observation of an induction motor using both an analytical observer and an artificial intelligence based one. At the present time, the direct field oriented control (FOC) technique is widespread used in high performance induction motor (IM) drives. It allows, by means a co-ordinate transformation, to separate the electromagnetic torque control from the rotor flux one, and, hence to manage the induction motor as a dc motor. Such control method needs the knowledge of the rotor flux which is not directly measurable. In order to avoid expensive sensors, rotor flux observers are commonly used. The characteristics of the observer, in terms of stability, accuracy and robustness, critically influence those of the drive. The authors focus in this paper on the developed observers based on rotor vector equation.

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An AC motor closed loop performances with different rotor flux observers

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LIFE SCIENCES

Editorial

Sensing sense and making decisions

The closing of the 3rd volume of the Annals gives us a chance to reflect on what we have accomplished so far and where we want to go next. From the beginning, the editorial view has been to understand the Annals in general, and the "Life Sciences" in particular, as a heterogeneous mixture of areas that often reach across their conventional borders as defined by their subdisciplines. With this view in mind, we select contributions that cover aspects ranging from molecular to behavioural and from clinical to applied sciences, and we try to make these papers understandable to the widest possible range of scientists. As the Annals enter their forth year, we intend to maintain the momentum achieved and to continue along this path.

In the first contribution of this year's Life science section, J. P. Lowry discusses the development of a biosensor that, implanted into specific regions of the brain, can detect biochemical signals and their changes in real time. To obtain a "window" into ongoing brain activities is of major interest in the neurosciences, thus this work offers a great potential to understand the biological basis on how the brain makes sense.

The decision on what to do or which paper to read is a process that requires the evaluation of the respective benefits. Often however, such decisions are biased. Therefore, in the second contribution, J. Mysiak presents the development of decision making tools for complex tasks that are aimed to establish objective guidelines. His approach, which compares the benefits of cost effective analyses with multi criteria decision approaches in the context of environmntal studies, has been tested in two EU-projects demonstrating the value of the methodology developed.

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Monitoring Real-time Metabolite Trafficking in the Brain using Microelectrochemical Biosensors

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Development of Transferable Multicriteria Decision Tools for Water Resource Management

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MATHEMATICS

Advances in Digital Image Compression by Adaptive Thinning

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PHYSICS

Editorial

In this third volume of the MCFA Annals the papers of the physics section address topics situated at two different extremes of our world.

Two of our contributions are focused on the magnetic and structural properties of crystalline materials and their fundamental impact on the development of devices we use in everyday life. The scales over which theoretical models attempt to reproduce the physical world are just over a few billionths of a meter. Over those tiny scales physics is dominated by the electromagnetic forces in a highly complex manner and statistical mechanics describes the global properties and disorder of the materials.

A leap of 20 orders of magnitude from the microscopic scales of the atoms to the orbits of near earth asteroids in our solar system brings Newton's law and gravity into the forefront. Even though gravity is nearly 40 orders of magnitude "weaker" than the electromagnetic forces the fact that it is much easier to accumulate large quantities of matter rather than large electric charges makes gravity the ultimated force that shapes the future of our Universe.

Unfortunately though lack of determinism, complexity, and chaos do enter this regime as well. New numerical techniques and theoretical approaches need to be developed in order to be able to see into the distant future whether a near earth asteroid will actually cross the orbit of the earth around the sun at the time the earth occupies the same location...

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Modelling of nanostructured magnetic network media

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Unusual magnetic and structural properties of nanocrystalline chromium

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Chaotic diffusion of small bodies in the Solar System

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SOCIAL SCIENCES

Editorial

Social sciences include disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, social anthropology and political sciences. The articles selected for this issue of the MCFA Annals show that despite the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, what unites such disciplines is a focus on a common theme: the ways humans in different social, cultural, economic and geographic contexts react (and adapt) to the transformations that the turn of the millennium is witnessing.

The article by Alexandra Steinberg analyses, from a social psychological perspective, the effects, in the Greater London business area, of a change that shook the global markets in 1999/2000: the dotcom stockmarket collapse. Starting from the realization that very little is known about the entrepreneurs' perspectives on technological and socio-economic transformations, the author discusses the changing meanings of success and decision-making in light of the dotcom crash. In her analysis, Steinberg describes entrepreneurship as a collective sense-making process (something antithetical to the individualistic ethos that is believed to be central to entrepreneurship), and illustrates how values as well as practices are renegotiated through communication and interaction among businesspeople. In exploring how a system of thinking that engenders a sense of 'business community' comes to the fore in the aftermath of the dotcom crash, the author points to the valuable contribution social psychology can make to understanding entrepreneurship.

Isabella Crespi's article explores, from a sociological perspective, different dimensions of gender socialisation. It sets out to shed light on the pattern of association between socio-economic conditions and parents' gender attitudes. In addressing this issue, Crespi avails herself of mainly quantitative information from Britain drawn from British survey data sources. Central to her article is the role of 'tradition', and particularly the transmission of 'traditional' gender roles (in the division of labour, for example) from one generation to another. The author shows how status may play a decisive role in hindering the transmission of 'traditional' gender roles, and argues that family life and relationship still determine, to a significant extent, the ways gender roles are conceptualised and enacted in everyday life.

Both case studies represent instances of different approaches to different themes. However, they also point to the significance of interdisciplinarity, and especially to the practical uses that can be made of the knowledge generated by such studies. Furthermore, these works reveal the extent to which approaches that seem the exclusive domain of one discipline can illuminate questions asked in other disciplinary fields.

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Socialization and Gender Roles within the Family: a Study on Adolescents and their Parents in Great Britain

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Entrepreneurship and success in e-business: on changing meanings of expertise and community in e-entrepreneurship

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