This article summarizes salient points one must know about seismic airgun arrays to discuss seriously how they might affect marine life. It is by no means exhaustive but tries to be thorough enough without being too involved to deter the general reader.

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In the last several years, illicit electronic components have been discovered in the inventories of several distributors and even installed in commercial and military products. Illicit or counterfeit electronic components include a broad category of devices that can range from the correct unit with a more recent date code to lower-specification or non-working systems with altered names, manufacturers and date codes. Current methodologies for identification of counterfeit electronics rely on visual microscopy by expert users and, while effective, are very time-consuming. Here, a plasma-based ambient desorption/ionization source, the flowing atmospheric pressure afterglow (FAPA) is used to generate a mass-spectral fingerprint from the surface of a variety of discrete electronic integrated circuits (ICs). Chemometric methods, specifically principal component analysis (PCA) and the bootstrapped error-adjusted single-sample technique (BEAST), are used successfully to differentiate between genuine and counterfeit ICs. In addition, chemical and physical surface-removal techniques are explored and suggest which surface-altering techniques were utilized by counterfeiters.

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A laboratory test program was undertaken in order to assess the probable effectiveness of electroosmotic treatment in the field in reducing the water content and sensitivity of a deposit of soft sensitive silty clay. The results of treatment on tube samples indicate that substantial reductions in water content and liquidity index would be expected, particularly close to the anode. Static and dynamic triaxial tests on both treated and untreated specimens indicated major improvement in both static strength and the resistance to cyclic loading of the soil. Both of these are necessary if construction of a major embankment on this material is to proceed. Key words: electroosmosis, soil improvement, sensitive soils, cyclic testing.