All of hardness testing methods now in use were invented about a century ago but it was after the World War II that the international conformity of the test results was required and that the standardization of the testing methods and testing machines was investigated and promoted. In this paper, the historical role of four international organizations, CIPM, IMEKO, OIML and ISO for the progress of the standardization of hardness testing and on the development of the metrological standards of hardness is reviewed together with some remark on the discussions related to the definition of hardness as a quantity. Then a few comments on the feature and metrological meaning of hardness standards are described.

In this paper it is presented the screening method to study the behavior of the human body in different situation: relaxed, before and after an effort in the environmental space. The human subjects have a good health and the recordings are made using a special system for record and analyze the human body stability behavior answer. It is very important to establish in these researches the methodology to record the information’s taking in account the interactions of the human body with environment (with or without open eyes, with or without the sounds in background, temperature, air pollution or external vibrations and noises). The results are presented in the final part of the paper.

Nowadays the Earth Observation sensors provide images containing detailed information relevant for applications related to hazard or security matters. Unfortunately, image information mining, its interpretation and transformation in products useful to the rescue or decision teams is still a laborious task, effectuated many times by visual inspection and manual annotations of the images, thus not appropriate to react in prerequisite time. This paper presents a data analysis processing chain, which by interactive operations, enables analysis and interpretation of large volumes of images with high accuracy, flexibility and much faster than any existing methods.

In our paper we present a laboratory measuring system that students can use to learn different topics related to temperature and humidity sensors. The system consists of three different temperature sensors and a temperature/humidity sensor, all controlled with the aid of a development board based of the PIC18F452 microcontroller. Using this system student can learn: use of integrated temperature sensors, software implementation of different communication interfaces (I²C, 1-wire, CMOSens), distributed measurement systems based on these interfaces, microcontroller based instrumentation, data logging and control of measurement systems.

This paper focuses on a description of the comfort by means of the temperature-humidity comfort index. In the attempt to describe this complex phenomena, those related to the human perception, for temperature and humidity estimation, we propose to use words of natural language. This linguistic description is not so accurate and also subjective than the numeric one obtained through usual sensors, but it is easily understood by human beings even if the concept is abstract due to it geographical context dependence. Finally, an aggregation of temperature and humidity measurements performed by a virtual symbolic sensor is presented for the qualification of the comfort inde