in re q2:
I asked a friend of mine who is knowledgable in these matters, and he said that it depends on what you're trying to convert from. If you have swirl measured over the whole lift event, then a Ricardo swirl number can be calculated from that. If you have an AVL swirl number, it cannot be directly converted because the AVL number is based on a fraction of the lift event, while the Ricardo number is based on the entire lift event.
He said he'd try to find out if anyone had a nifty conversion table (or similar) to get you close.