Topics in Preservation Science
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The Lost 18 1/2 Minutes of the Nixon Presidency
April 11, 2006,
3:00 - 4:00 pm
West Dining Room, 6th floor James Madison Building
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
In 1996, NIST initiated a five-year program to develop competence in
advanced techniques for imaging information stored on damaged magnetic
media. Since then, applications have included recovery of forensic evidence
for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and recovery of data for the
National Transportation Safety Board. The nanoscale recording system
(NRS) that was developed is a general-purpose instrument that uses read/write
heads similar to those in computer hard-disk or tape drives to read from
and write data to magnetic media. The NRS can image by rastering either
the head at a resolution of 50 nanometers (nm) or the storage medium
at a resolution of 1 nm. The NRS is being used for forensic analysis
of audio tapes, high-speed imaging of tape samples, identification of
signatures of erase and write heads, and reconstruction of analog and
digital data. This talk will describe the development of large linear
scanning arrays and associated electronics, discuss the efficacy of the
system for recovering data from damaged magnetic recording media, give
examples of when data can be recovered (and when it can not), and show
applications for magnetic data storage media such as audio, video, and
digital tapes.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. David P. Pappas earned a BA in Physics in 1986 from the University
of Colorado, Boulder, and PhD in Physics form the University of California,
Irvine, in 1991. After postdoctoral work at Almaden Research Laboratory
(San Jose, CA) and at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC),
he served as an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University
from 1993-1997 where he was awarded a National Science Foundation Young
Investigator Award and a Research Corporation Cottrell College Science
Award. He left academia in 1997 to become the Project Leader for the
Magnetic Sensors Quantum Devices Group, National Institute of Standards & Technology,
Boulder, CO. He has published over 75 papers and given numerous invited
presentations in the science. His current research interests are advanced
materials for quantum computing applications, developing state of the
art magnetic field sensors, and building real-time magnetic field imaging
systems.