The One Hundred Year Web Pemberton, Steven
Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023,
04/2023
Conference Proceeding
Open access
The year 2023 marks the thirty-second anniversary of the World Wide Web being announced.
In the intervening years, the web has become an essential part of the fabric of society. Part of that is that ...huge amounts of information that used to be available (only) on paper is now available (only) electronically. One of the dangers of this is that owners of information often treat the data as ephemeral, and delete old information once it becomes out of date. As a result society is at risk of losing large parts of its history.
So it is time to assess how we use the web, how it has been designed, and what we should do to ensure that in one hundred years time (and beyond) we will still be able to access, and read, what we are now producing. We can still read 100 year-old books; that should not be any different for the web.
This paper takes a historical view of the web, and discusses the web from its early days: why it was successful compared with other similar systems emerging at the time, the things it did right, the mistakes that were made, and how it has developed to the web we know today, to what extent it meets the requirements needed for such an essential part of society's infrastructure, and what still needs to be done.
Far-field acoustical characterization of blast wave propagation from explosives is often carried out using relatively small shot sizes (less than 1 kg). This paper describes a series of eleven ...Composition C4 detonations, with shot charge mass varying from 13.6 kg to 54.4 kg (30 to 120 lbs.) that were recently measured at the Big Explosives Experimental Facility (BEEF) at the Nevada National Security Site. Pressure waveform data were recorded at up to nine different stations, ranging from 23 m to 2.7 km from the blast origin, with some angular variation. As part of examining blast overpressure decay with distance and comparing with literature, the data were analyzed from the context of human safety regulations. To provide improved guidance for BEEF personnel working distances, an empirical model equation was developed for the distance, as a function of shot size, at which the peak pressure level drops below 140 dB. A preliminary investigation into peak level variability due to wind was also conducted.
In order to improve understanding of how aluminum contributes in non‐ideal explosive mixtures, cast‐cured formulations have been analyzed in a series of cylinder tests and plate‐pushing experiments. ...This study describes the contribution of 15 % aluminum (median size of 3.2 μm) vs. lithium fluoride (an inert substitute for aluminum; <5 μm) in cast‐cured HMX formulations in different temporal regimes. Small cylinder tests were performed to analyze the detonation and wall velocities (1–20 μs) for these formulations. Near‐field blast effects of 58 mm diameter spherical charges were measured at 152 mm and 254 mm using steel plate acceleration. Pressure measurements at 1.52 m gave information about free‐field pressure at several milliseconds. While the observed detonation velocities for all formulations were within uncertainty, significantly higher cylinder wall velocities, plate velocities, and pressures were observed for the aluminum formulations at ≥2 μs. Additionally, hydrocode calculations were performed to determine how non‐ideal behavior affected the plate test results. Collectively, this work gives a clearer picture of how aluminum contributes to detonation on timescales from 1 μs to about 2 ms, and how the post‐detonation energy release contributes to wall velocities and blast effects. The experiments indicate that significant aluminum reactions occur after the CJ plane, and continue to contribute to expansion at late times.
With the growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), devices in households and offices are becoming information sharing “smart” devices controlled via network connections. The growth of ...collection, handling and distribution of data generated by IoT devices presents ethical and privacy issues. Users have no control over what information is kept or revealed, the interpretation of data collected, data ownership and who can access specific information generated by their IoT devices. This paper describes an approach to data ethical/privacy issues related to IoT using a fine-grained access-control framework on Igor, a centralized home and office automation solution. We designed a capability-based access control framework on top of Igor that allows agents, either human or machine, to access and change only the data to which they are authorised. The applicability of this to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be obvious. The implementation, expert evaluation and performance measurement results demonstrate that this is a promising solution for securing access to data generated by IoT devices.
The dispersion and control of liquid kinetic energy and momentum are a major issue after the explosion of targets in an inertial fusion energy (IFE) thick-liquid chamber. For HYLIFE-type IFE chambers ...the desired repetition rate for shots varies from 5 to 10 Hz—a rate much too fast for natural gravity clearing of liquid debris. The impulse load delivered by a single shot generates enough kinetic energy in disrupted liquid material to do significant damage to surrounding solid structures. However, carefully designed jet arrays with regular void spacing can diffuse and dissipate kinetic energy that could damage adjacent structures, and rapidly moving, oscillating jets can dynamically clear the chamber center. A brief theoretical and mathematical background is given for this method of shock abatement, using the current Berkeley jet array experiment as a representative geometry.
About Ergonomics of Computer Interfaces Designing a System Jouis, Christophe; Orus-Lacord, Mercedes; Pemberton, Steven
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Management of Digital EcoSystems,
10/2022
Conference Proceeding
Open access
This document discusses the ergonomic problems with currently available software products, and what in general is necessary to make an application pleasant to work with. The application of these ...principles to a new open-architecture user interface system, Views, is then described.
The Web took the world by storm, and as a result developed rapidly in many directions. However it still exhibits many aspects of its early development, such as its visual and computer-screen ...orientation. But the Web is still developing rapidly: there are now more browsers on mobile telephones than on desktops, and there is a vast diversity in types of devices, types and orientations of screens, and sizes (in number of pixels), and resolutions (in dpi) of screens.
Dealing with this diversity is impossible to address just by keeping a list of all the possible devices, or even a list of the most-used ones, and producing different sites for them, since the complexity would be unmanageable, and because once sites started turning away browsers and devices they didn’t know, the browser makers responded by disguising themselves to such sites as other browsers.
On top of this diversity there is also the diversity required for accessibility. Although providing access for the visually impaired is an important reason for accessibility, we are all more or less visually impaired at one time or another. When displaying an application on a projector screen at a conference or meeting, the whole audience will typically be visually impaired in comparison to someone sitting behind a computer screen. The existence of separate socalled ”Ten-foot Interfaces” (for people controlling their computers by remote control from an armchair ten feet away) demonstrates that the original applications are not designed for accessibility. Furthermore, Google (and all other search engines) is blind, and sees only what a blind user sees of a page; as the webmaster of a large bank has remarked, ”we have noticed that improving accessibility increases our Google rating”.
The success of the Web has turned the browser into a central application area for the user, and you can spend most of your day working with applications in the browser, reading mail, shopping, searching your own diskdrive. The advent of applications such as Google Maps and GMail has focussed minds on delivering applications via the web, not least because it eliminates the problems involved with versioning: everyone always has the most recent version of your application. Since Web-based applications have benefits for both user and provider, we can only expect to see more of them in the future.
But this approach comes at a cost. Google Maps is of the order of 200K of Javascript code. Such applications are only writable by programming experts, and producing an application is not possible by the sort of people who often produce web pages for their own use.
The Web Interfaces landscape is in turmoil at the moment. Microsoft has announced a new markup language and vector graphics language for the next version of Windows; probably as a response Adobe has acquired Macromedia and therefore Flash; W3C have standards for applications in the form of XForms, XHTML and SVG and are working on ’compound documents’; and other browser manufacturers are calling for their own version of HTML.
What are we to make of these different approaches? Are they conflicting? Have any addressed authorability, device-independence, usability or accessibility? Is it even possible to make accessible applications? HTML made creating hypertext documents just about as easy as it could be; do any of the new approaches address this need for simplicity, or has power been irretrievably returned to the programmers?
This talk discusses the requirements for Web Applications, and the underpinnings necessary to make Web Applications follow in the same spirit that engendered the Web in the first place.
The use of swirling annular vortex flow inside beam entrance tubes can protect beam-line structural materials in chambers for heavy-ion inertial fusion energy (IFE) applications. An annular wall jet, ...or vortex tube, is generated by injecting liquid tangent to the inner surface of a tube wall with both axially and azimuthally directed velocity components. A layer of liquid then lines the beam tube wall, which may improve the effectiveness of neutron shielding, and condenses and removes vaporized coolant that may enter the beam tubes. Vortex tubes have been constructed and tested with a thickness of three-tenths the pipe radius. Analysis of the flow is given, along with experimental examples of vortex tube fluid mechanics and an estimate of the layer thickness, based on simple mass conservation considerations.
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