In recent years, the range of sensing technologies has expanded rapidly, whereas sensor devices have become cheaper. This has led to a rapid expansion in condition monitoring of systems, structures, vehicles, and machinery using sensors. Key factors are the recent advances in networking technologies such as wireless communication and mobile ad hoc networking coupled with the technology to integrate devices. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used for monitoring the railway infrastructure such as bridges, rail tracks, track beds, and track equipment along with vehicle health monitoring such as chassis, bogies, wheels, and wagons. Condition monitoring reduces human inspection requirements through automated monitoring, reduces maintenance through detecting faults before they escalate, and improves safety and reliability. This is vital for the development, upgrading, and expansion of railway networks. This paper surveys these wireless sensors network technology for monitoring in the railway industry for analyzing systems, structures, vehicles, and machinery. This paper focuses on practical engineering solutions, principally, which sensor devices are used and what they are used for; and the identification of sensor configurations and network topologies. It identifies their respective motivations and distinguishes their advantages and disadvantages in a comparative review.

The need for reproducible and comparable results is of increasing importance in non-targeted metabolomic studies, especially when differences between experimental groups are small. Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry spectra are often acquired batch-wise so that necessary calibrations and cleaning of the instrument can take place. However this may introduce further sources of variation, such as differences in the conditions under which the acquisition of individual batches is performed. Quality control (QC) samples are frequently employed as a means of both judging and correcting this variation. Here we show that the use of QC samples can lead to problems. The non-linearity of the response can result in substantial differences between the recorded intensities of the QCs and experimental samples, making the required adjustment difficult to predict. Furthermore, changes in the response profile between one QC interspersion and the next cannot be accounted for and QC based correction can actually exacerbate the problems by introducing artificial differences. “Background correction” methods utilise all experimental samples to estimate the variation over time rather than relying on the QC samples alone. We compare non-QC correction methods with standard QC correction and demonstrate their success in reducing differences between replicate samples and their potential to highlight differences between experimental groups previously hidden by instrumental variation.

Motivation: The identification of suitable conditions for crystallization is a rate-limiting step in protein structure determination. The pH of an experiment is an important parameter and has the potential to be used in data-mining studies to help reduce the number of crystallization trials required. However, the pH is usually recorded as that of the buffer solution, which can be highly inaccurate.Results: Here, we show that a better estimate of the true pH can be predicted by considering not only the buffer pH but also any other chemicals in the crystallization solution. We use these more accurate pH values to investigate the disputed relationship between the pI of a protein and the pH at which it crystallizes.Availability and implementation: Data used to generate models are available as Supplementary Material.Contact: julie.wilson@york.ac.ukSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The detection of tracks in spectrograms is an important step in remote sensing applications such as the analysis of marine mammal calls and remote sensing data in underwater environments. Recent advances in technology and the abundance of data requires the development of more sensitive detection methods. This problem has attracted researchers' interest from a variety of backgrounds ranging between image processing, signal processing, simulated annealing and Bayesian filtering. Most of the literature is concentrated in three areas: image processing, neural networks, and statistical models such as the Hidden Markov Model. There has not been a review paper which describes and critically analyses the application of these key algorithms. This paper presents an extensive survey and an algorithm taxonomy, additionally each algorithm is reviewed according to a set of criteria relating to their success in application. These criteria are defined to be their ability to cope with noise variation over time, track association, high variability in track shape, closely separated tracks, multiple tracks, the birth/death of tracks, low signal-to-noise ratios, that they have no a priori assumption of track shape and that they are computationally cheap. Our analysis concludes that none of these algorithms fully meets these criteria.