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We have implemented a cost-effective design for the readout electronics of both the anode wires and the cathode pads of large area proportional wire chambers for the HERA-B muon system based on the ASD-08 integrated circuit. To control and monitor the large number of readout channels, we have built a distributed control system based on Philips Semiconductors' I2C bus and microcontrollers. To date we have installed about 10800 channels of muon chambers and electronics. The average single channel noise occupancy is less than 10**-5, and the detectors have been operated with target interaction rates as high as 70 MHz., Comment: 9 pages, 13 figures; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science; to appear in Conference Record of 1998 IEEE NSS in Toronto

The tritium beta spectrum in the valine molecule has been studied with the improved ITEP spectrometer. Emphasis has been put on the determination of the apparatus functions. An estimate resulting from the analysis is that the neutrino mass is larger than 20 eV. The mass difference of neutral 3 H and 3 He atoms calculated from the end-point energy is in good agreement with recent direct measurements of this value with an ion-cyclotron resonance spectrometer.