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The public’s awareness of noise and vibration forms a significant barrier to further development of railways. This chapter begins with a short introduction to the main fundamental aspects of acoustics, including decibels, frequency analysis, the propagation of sound with distance and common measurement quantities. The main sources of railway noise are discussed, including rolling noise, impact noise, curve squeal and aerodynamic noise. Simple calculation procedures are described that can be used to assess the impact of railway noise and to compare it with legal limits. The final section is devoted to ground vibration, which is a related form of environmental disturbance.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Seismometers continuously record a wide range of ground movements not caused by earthquake activity, but rather generated by human activities such as traffic, industrial machinery functioning and industrial processes. In this Chapter we exploit seismic data to predict variations in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for a set of States in the USA over the period from 2016 to 2021. We measure the noise generated at specific frequencies that are linked to human activity and use it as an indicator of economic activity. We show a remarkable reduction in seismic noise due to a slowdown in traffic and economic activities during the Corona economic crisis. Our results point at seismic data as a valuable source of information that can be used for monitoring regional and national economies.

The impact of mitigating flood occurrence in the rural and urban areas has become crucial as it has affected government policies for countries that are prone to flood disaster. Efforts and funds have been put up to a higher level of capabilities to ensure that coping and managing flood disaster could be resolved. Several initiatives made in managing flood are: effectively monitoring the potential at-risk inundated area, improving the river water irrigation and drainage and undertaking the environmental pollution. This chapter basically focusses more on the improvement of flood monitoring system device at the potential flood area. The approach of ubiquitous mobile SCADA offers a low-cost, portable, and small in size flood monitoring system device with easily accessible data. An easy web monitoring of environment surrounding anywhere and at any time offers a real-time data updated with a very minimum delay of each and every environment data required. There are several sensors like ultrasonic, sound, temperature and humidity, water drop and vibration sensors are equipped together with one small monitoring system platform. The alert of water level condition is notified through a beeping buzzer and light LED notation of various colors of green, yellow and red, which notify any increase of water exceeded. The platform is powered by a rechargeable battery that allows the platform to be mobile and portable. Hence, flood monitoring system platform promotes a low-cost, easy-to-handle and ubiquitous data updated device for a better monitoring system platform.