The present paper describes the individual analytical methodologies (Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometry, Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry and Alpha Spectrometry) that were developed for uranium age determination and discusses their advantages and drawbacks. With respect to a potential application of the methods (e.g. Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty), the discussion focuses on high...

We report a glass/PDMS-based microfluidic biosensor that integrates contactless conductivity transduction and folic acid, a target for tumor biomarker, as a bioreceptor. The device presents relevant advantages such as direct determination--dismiss the use of redox mediators as in faradaic electrochemical techniques--and the absence of the known drawbacks related to the electrode-solution interf...

In this paper, we exploit some previous theoretical results about decision tree pruning to derive a color segmentation algorithm which avoids some of the common drawbacks of region merging techniques. The algorithm has both statistical and computational advantages over known approaches. It authorizes the processing of 512 512 images in less than a second on conventional PC computers. Experiment...

This paper proposes improvements and revisions to a recent approach in a voting system, and provides an effective approach with a stronger discriminate power. For this purpose, the advantage of a linear transformation is utilized to redene a previously used concept of virtual worst candidate, by incorporating the existing weight restrictions. Then, the best score of this virtual candidate is us...

The success of the Open Source Software movement is beyond doubt one of the most interesting and yet controversial phenomena in software development today. Many contributions stressed the successes and advantages of this new approach but there are alsomajor drawbacks, often (consciously) overlooked by the proponents of Open Source. This paper summarizes and categorizes these drawbacks to broade...