Distributed communication systems have gained a substantial importance over the past years with a large set of examples of systems that are present in our everyday life. The heterogeneity of applications and application domains speaks for the complexity of such systems and the challenges that developers are faced with. The focus of this dissertation is on the development of applications for dis...

Earthquake Alarm Systems, or ElarmS, is a network-based earthquake early warning (EEW) system developed in California. This dissertation concerns the transition of ElarmS from research prototype to production-grade code. We test ElarmS' performance for large earthquakes with an extensive dataset of large events from Japan. Using the Japanese dataset and results, we develop a statistical error m...

[1] The accumulation of strong earthquakes with resembling source mechanisms in the Romanian Vrancea zone, SE Carpathians, allows for designing a simple, cheep and robust earthquake early warning (EEW) system for Bucharest with leading times of about 25 s. A previously established scaling relation for EEW predicts in the range from 1–2 s a ten times higher ground motion amplitude in Bucharest t...

Ostracods are small bivalved crustaceans widely distributed in aquatic environments and in total 99 species have been recorded in genus Euphilomedes Kornicker, 1967. In this study, we further describe two new species of benthic ostracods in this genus, Euphilomedes liuruiyii sp. nov. and Euphilomedes pentacanthos sp. nov., collected from the Taiwan Strait in China. These two species can be easi...

This article compares the provision of long-term care (LTC) in Japan and Spain, two countries with similar demographic structures but which address the provision of LTCs in very different ways. Both countries provide universal LTC. However, Japan has developed a generous benefit package of formal services for dependents to alleviate the care burden on the family, but provides no cash benefits. ...

A real-time seismic monitoring infrastructure has been recently installed and it is actually operating in southern Italy, whose main purposes are to rapidly issue an earthquake alert, to provide near-real-time maps of the peak ground motion and intensity shaking and to test the feasibility of earthquake early warning following moderate to large earthquakes occurring along the southern Apenninic...

The latest improvements in geo-informatics offer new opportunities in a wide range of territorial and environmental applications. In this general framework, a relevant issue is represented by earthquake early warning and emergency management. This research work presents the investigation and development of a simple and innovative geospatial methodology and related collaborative open source geos...

We at DDBJ (http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp) process and publicise the massive amounts of data submitted mainly by Japanese genome projects and sequencing teams. It is emphasised that the collaboration between data producing teams and the data bank is crucial in carrying out these processes smoothly. The amount of data submitted in 1999 is so large that it alone exceeds the total amount submitted in ...

We demonstrate a flexible strategy for local tsunami warning that relies on regional geodetic and seismic stations. Through retrospective analysis of four recent tsunamigenic events in Japan and Chile, we show that rapid earthquake source information, provided by methodologies developed for earthquake early warning, can be used to generate timely estimates of maximum expected tsunami amplitude ...

Recent results suggest that measurements of the average “predominant period,” sp, of an earthquake using the first few seconds of P waves provide a rapid approximate estimate of magnitude that can be used for earthquake early warning systems. Although these prior studies demonstrate the empirical value of such an approach, we here examine the theoretical properties of the predominant period est...