An improved piggyback dispensing feature for extended dispensing devices of tile type having a housing with a downwardly extending handle, a trigger pivoted to the handle, an extension bracket attached forwardly of the housing, a barrel assembly attached to the extension bracket opposite the housing, and a piston rod slidably supported in the housing and extension bracket and protruding into the barrel assembly. The improvement comprises an interchangeable push-disk piston mounted on the distal end of the piston rod, and a smaller barrel assembly adapted to be seated inside the other larger barrel assembly to accommodate a smaller-sized cartridge. The smaller barrel assembly piggybacks in the larger, and the push-disk piston swaps out, thereby making it possible to use one extended gun for at least two different-sized cartridges, such as the typical 1/4 gallon cartridges and 1/10th gallon cartridges. A variety of interchangeable/adjustable quick-change guide assemblies are also shown for guiding the application of a bead of caulk or adhesive along trusses, joists and other structural components.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to dispensing devices and, more particularly, to an extended dispensing device for application of a bead of caulk or adhesive along hard to reach structural components. The extended dispensing device employs a repairable design with easy to replace components, interchangeable barrels to accept different caulk cartridges, and interchangeable application guides for guiding the application of a bead of caulk or adhesive along trusses, joists and other structural components.
2. Description of the Background
There are many types of conventional caulk guns all used to dispense a variety of fluid compounds including urethane, vinyl, polyester, epoxy and other plastics or resins. Some of these caulk guns are specially adapted for a particular purpose. One example of a specialty caulk gun is the extended gun that is commonly used in the roofing and flooring context. Extended caulk guns have a barrel, nozzle and cartridge that are separated from the trigger and driving mechanism by an elongated extension, thereby enabling operation of the gun at a distance from where the bead of caulk is applied. This allows an extended reach when compound must be applied to remote areas, such as overhead joists or trusses. Extended caulk guns provide great utility to the flooring and roofing industry. However, different flooring or roofing jobs present different requirements, and extended guns offer very little flexibility. For instance, a larger quart-size cartridge should be used for a longer run job to save costs and avoid frequent cartridge replacement. On the other hand, a smaller 1/10th gallon cartridge should be used for short run jobs. Otherwise, the unused portion of the cartridge goes to waste. Conventional extended guns are made to accommodate either the typical 1/4 gallon cartridges or 1/10th gallon cartridges, but not both. Since the extended caulk guns are specialty items, they are relatively expensive to purchase and it is impractical to buy two (one for the 1/4 gallon cartridge and one for the 1/10th gallon cartridge). The expense of extended guns also promotes a market for replacement and repair parts, but existing extended guns are generally not repairable. They typically use a welded and/or riveted design and make no provision for swapping out worn parts. Accordingly, there remains a demand for a more flexible extended dispensing gun in which parts are interchangeable to facilitate repair, and which is capable of accommodating at least two different-sized cartridges such as the typical 1/4 gallon cartridges and 1/10th gallon cartridges.
In addition to the above-described expense of extended guns, their length makes them difficult to maneuver because the weight of the caulk cartridge must be supported at the end of the elongate extension. It is known to mount a caulk application guide at the distal end of the barrel underneath the nozzle to support the cartridge and ensure that a bead of caulk is properly applied. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,932,565 to Paradiso shows an extended reach caulking gun with an application guide 24 mounted at the distal end (Paradiso FIG. 1). The guide takes the form of a U-shaped member which is screwed or riveted to the underside of the gun at the barrel end. The U-shaped guide is adapted to straddle and ride along a joist or truss thereby helping to apply the compound in a straight line and with improved accuracy. The U-shaped guide assists in applying compound along studs, rafters and other building components that call for the application of compound along a defined path. Unfortunately, the fixed span of the U-shaped guide 24 is only capable of accommodating studs of a particular size. The guide 24 cannot straddle double studs or many other types of components such as window sills or roof seams. While Paradiso '565 goes on to suggests other guide configurations (see FIGS. 5-7) to accommodate other components, these are not interchangeable and the gun cannot be easily adapted for a particular job.
Accordingly, there is also a demand for an extended gun having interchangeable guide members, inclusive of an adjustable guide member, to facilitate quick and easy adaptation for different types of jobs and for applying compound along different types of building components.

Extended piggyback dispensing device with interchangeable application guides


A first filter input is received from a first recipient of an email including a plurality of recipients. The first filter input is associated with the email. Further, the first filter input is propagated to at least another of the plurality of recipients of the email.

Often many people within a defined group or organization may each receive a common email. For example, the email may be spam or other junk email that may be generally directed at a specific domain. Similarly, every individual may be copied on a group-wide or department wide email. Frequently, such mass-emails may be of little value, being addressed to a large number of recipients, rather than targeted to a few specific individuals to whom the email may actually pertain. However, each individual recipient must open the email and at least quickly scan the email to determine if the email is of any value to the individual recipient. Once an individual recipient has read or scanned the email, he/she may take a desired action, such as deleting the email, responding to the email, etc. Any such action must be carried out with little or no initial information regarding the email, such as a relative importance, likelihood that the email is junk-mail, etc.

International Business Machines Corporation


Embodiments described herein relate to testing the integrity of a storage system's metadata while corresponding structured data remains online. Embodiments also relate to enabling corrupt storage system metadata to be repaired while the metadata remains in use and while its structured data remains online. Corruption detection and repair is described with respect to allocation metadata and reference count metadata. The embodiments are applicable to many types of storage systems, including file systems and databases, for example.

Computers are used to store and organize data. Stored data may be structured and managed with many objectives, some conflicting. For example, data may be structured and managed for reliability and integrity, efficient reading and writing, efficient searching, minimal waste of the underlying storage, ease of management, minimal computational overhead, and so forth. The particular algorithms and strategies that may be used to structure and manage any particular data often depend on which of these objectives are most important for the use of that data. As discussed below, algorithms and techniques that can improve any of these objectives without significantly undermining other objectives are desirable. Before discussing some shortcomings and improvements in the field of structured data storage, some terminology will be established.
A common data storage scenario involves a storage system layering structured data on an underlying block-based storage unit. There are many kinds of block-based storage units. For instance, disk drives, logical and physical file system volumes, memory, virtualized storage devices, database page files, block-based cloud storage systems, and so forth. Block-based storage units are referred to herein as "storage units", with the understanding that the term refers to any type of discrete unit of storage, physical or virtual, that is able to store structured data within its discrete blocks, pages, clusters, or other generally segmented into uniform sub-units of storage, which will be referred to herein as "blocks". Usually, the blocks of a storage unit are contiguous, their size is aligned with the size of their storage unit, and they are discretely written to and read from their storage unit. Note that a block can also be a byte of a byte-addressable storage (DAX).
The term "storage system" is used herein to refer to any computer-executable system that organizes and manages structured data ("data") within the blocks of a storage unit, where the data is structured for retrieval, updating, deletion, etc., by the storage system. "Structured data" will refer to the data abstraction provided by a storage system and layered on top of a storage unit. Typically, structured data is stored in objects (data types, items, sub-structures, etc.) defined and implemented by the storage system. Objects typically store data that is passed into the storage system (e.g., "user data" or "client data") as well as management metadata generated and used by the storage system. A storage system usually maintains "storage metadata" on a storage unit to logically arrange the storage unit's objects and perhaps track properties of the objects (i.e., object metadata). Storage systems also store and manage global metadata for a storage unit. A storage unit's global metadata may include data about the storage unit itself, for instance its size (or location and extent), layout, block size, properties, access credentials or keys, global information about the structured data per se, and so forth. For efficiency, global and storage metadata (collectively, "metadata") are often stored in trees. Often, a root piece of global metadata points to other units of global metadata.
File systems are one type of structured data. In terms of file systems, a file system manager is an example of a storage manager. A volume, whether physical or logical, is an example of a storage unit consisting of blocks (i.e., nodes, clusters, etc.). A file system is an example of structured data managed by a file system manager, which is usually included as part of the storage stack of an operating system. Objects of a file system typically include files, directories, links, access control lists, and others. Storage metadata provides the hierarchical structure of a file system. Global metadata of a file system or volume may include information about which blocks are allocated, counts of references to objects in the file system, the number of blocks and their size, properties of the volume, etc. All of this file system information is overlaid on the blocks of the volume and is managed by the file system manager.
Databases are another type of structured data. In terms of databases, a database engine is an example of storage system. A page file consisting of pages (i.e., blocks) is an example of a storage unit managed by a database engine. A database is an example of structured data overlaid on the pages of the page file, and the objects of a database typically consist of tables, records, indexes, schemas, security information. Global metadata may include information about which pages are allocated, which objects are stored at which locations of which pages, and so forth.
With this terminology in mind, consider that most storage systems allow updating of their structured data; they enable objects to be added, removed, and modified. Therefore, most storage systems have some mechanism for, for a given storage unit, tracking which blocks of the storage unit are currently allocated, i.e., which blocks are in use to store global metadata, storage metadata, objects, object metadata, or any other information. Because allocating blocks, deallocating blocks, and querying for block allocation states are frequent operations of storage systems, a storage system's performance may be limited by how quickly these allocation operations can be performed. For speed, storage systems generally use some form of index (a type of global metadata) to track block allocation states. Recently, trees such as B− trees and B+ trees have been favored due in part to their fast search times and other advantages. In any case, often, the more efficient an index, the more vulnerable the index may be to corruption. For some types of indexes, one erroneous bit might cause a storage system to consider an entire corresponding storage unit to be corrupt and unusable. Described below are techniques for detecting corruption in allocation indexes and repairing corrupt allocation indexes while the related structured data and storage unit remain online and continues to be made available by the corresponding storage system.
Many storage systems also track how many references are currently active for the objects in a storage unit. For instance, a file system may have a tree of reference counts maintained by a file system manager to track how many references are active for objects in the file system. Described below are techniques for monitoring the integrity of global reference counts while corresponding structured data remains online, and, while the structured data remains online, repairing the reference counts in a way that allows the structured data to remain online.
Other techniques for improving the availability and robustness of structured data, in particular storage metadata and global metadata are also described below.

Online repair of metadata for structured data including file systems


The invention provides a sheet stacking apparatus including a stacking tray whose stacking surface is inclined, a sheet presence/absence detecting sensor that detects presence and absence of a sheet on the stacking surface, an abutting member to which an end of the sheet on the stacking surface abuts, an alignment mechanism that aligns the sheet on the stacking surface widthwise by a pair of aligning members, and a control portion that controls the aligning mechanism. Determining presence of the sheet on the stacking tray from a detected result of the sheet presence/absence detecting sensor, the control portion aligns the sheet by setting a distance between aligning faces of the pair of aligning members as a first distance, and determining absence of the sheet, the control portion sets the distance between the aligning faces of the pair of aligning members as a second distance which is wider than the first distance.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sheet stacking apparatus configured to be able to align a sheet stacked on a stacking tray, an image forming apparatus, and a sheet processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, there is known a sheet stacking apparatus adapted to be able to align sheets discharged out to a stacking tray for stacking sheets in a sheet widthwise direction (referred to simply as a "width direction" or "widthwise" hereinafter) orthogonal to a direction in which the sheet is discharged (referred to simply as a "discharge direction" hereinafter) as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-211829 for example.
The sheet stacking apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-211829 includes a pair of aligning members capable of moving in the width direction above a stacking tray. When a sheet is discharged out to the stacking tray, the sheet stacking apparatus aligns the sheet widthwise by moving the pair of aligning members in the width direction so that the aligning members come in contact with both widthwise ends of the sheet.
By the way, the sheet stacking apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-211829 aligns a sheet by sandwiching the sheet widthwise between the pair of aligning members, i.e., by making the pair of aligning members come into contact with the both widthwise ends of the sheet, by moving the aligning members widthwise after the elapse of a predetermined time since when the sheet has been discharged out of a sheet discharging portion. The predetermined time until when the pair of aligning members starts to move is set based on a time until when the sheet discharged on an inclined stacking surface of the stacking tray abuts an abutting member against which an end in the discharge direction of the sheet is to be abutted by its own weight or the like. That is, the sheet stacking apparatus is configured so that normally the sheet stacking apparatus aligns the sheet in the width direction by the pair of aligning members after the elapse of the predetermined time since when the sheet has been aligned in the discharge direction by abutting against the abutting member.
However, if such move of the sheet is delayed by some reason, there is a possibility that the predetermined time elapses before the sheet reaches the abutting member and the sheet moving on the inclined stacking tray is held by the pair of aligning members before reaching the abutting member. If the sheet is held and aligned by the pair of aligning members here, there is also a possibility that the sheet in the move is stopped. When there is no sheet on the stacking tray in particular, the sheet is less movable on the stacking surface than a case in which another sheet is already stacked on the stacking tray, because level of kinetic friction force between the stacking surface and the sheet is higher than that between sheets. Due to that, if the sheet is held in this condition from the both ends in the width direction by the pair of aligning members, there is such a possibility that the sheet is stopped before abutting the abutting member. If the sheet is stopped during its move, it becomes even more difficult to move the sheet again because of a static friction force which is caused between a halted sheet and the stacking surface of the stacking tray and which is greater than the kinetic friction force between the stacking surface and a sheet. Due to that, it is unable to align the sheet in the discharge direction by the abutting member, possibly causing stacking misalignment in the discharge direction among the sheets discharged first and discharged afterward. In short, the sheet stacking apparatus has the possibility of causing the stacking misalignment in the discharge direction among sheets discharged first and thereafter if the sheet moving on the inclined stacking surface is stopped on its way by being held by the pair of aligning members.

Sheet stacking apparatus, sheet processing apparatus and image forming apparatus


A holder for a telecommunications device includes a container including a side wall connected to a base. Together the side wall and base define a cavity. Side wall defines an opening of the container at an end of the side wall distal to the base. A resilient insert is disposed inside the cavity. The insert includes a bottom portion that abuts the base and a feature for releasably retaining the device inside the container. A lid is in selective locking engagement with the side wall's distal end. When in locking engagement, the lid encloses the opening of the container to retain the device inside the holder, and to muffle a sound and/or a vibration produced by the device. A locking mechanism is operatively attached to the container and/or the lid, and holds the lid and the container together when the lid is in locking engagement with the distal end.

Cellular phones, smart phones, and other telecommunications devices may be used as a way of establishing communications between two or more parties. These mobile devices are often carried by the owner and/or the possessor of the device, even when he/she is inside a mobile vehicle, such as a car. It may, in some instances, be desirable to have a place to stow the mobile device inside the vehicle so that the device interface(s) are not immediately accessible to the owner and/or possessor while he/she is operating the vehicle.


An article support for a surface, the support including a base having a first end portion and a second end portion, the base first end portion is adjacent to the surface. A reservoir is disposed within the second end portion, the reservoir having a terminating margin periphery forming an aperture. An omni-directional substantially planar extension originating at the margin periphery and outwardly terminating in an outer perimeter, the planar extension has a segmented primary surface and a secondary surface wherein the secondary surface faces the first end portion. A portion of the primary surface is formed from an inverted equilateral square pyramid wherein an apex of the pyramid is disposed within the aperture. Operationally, the article is placed upon the primary surface, the article having a plurality of point contacts upon the primary surface causing the article to clear the margin periphery for drainage from the article into the reservoir.

As is well known the deterioration or wasting away of an article in the form of a bar of soap in a soap holder is a common occurrence due to the soap resting in a partial reservoir of residual water (being drainage from the soap or environmental water spray) that causes a portion of the bar of soap to become very soft, pasty, and to waste or erode away easily at the bar of soap's next use. Thus, not only does the soap bar need to be initially elevated above the residual water to help prevent partial wasting away of the soap bar, there needs to be an accommodation for the reduction in soap bar size such that as the bar of soap reduces in size due to usage it still retains a four point peripheral support elevated above the residual water to continue to prevent wasting away of the bar of soap via residual water. Another challenge is that there is no standardization of soap bar shapes, some are round, some are oval, some are arcuate in shape, some are rectangular, and some are square, basically resulting in a number of derivations from a basic parallelepiped shape, i.e. such as in IVORY soap bars being square edged and rectangular in shape. Another issue is in the residual water that needs to be contained in a reservoir so as not to run all over the countertop, shelf, or whatever surface that the support for the soap is placed on.
In the prior art, most bar of soap holders are of a dish type shape having a relatively flat support surface with some sort of drainage channels within the support surface for residual water removal, wherein a typical problem is that the drainage channels clog up with soap paste (as the channels tend to be quite small) thus significantly reducing the ability of the residual water to drain, causing the portion of the soap bar to be immersed in the residual water that facilitates the wasting of a portion of the bar of soap.
In looking at the prior art in this area, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,910,661 to Geary, disclosed is a soap holder that has a "V" shaped one-way inclined soap bar support surface, with a gate type edge to keep the soap bar from sliding down the incline. However, in Geary the residual water merely runs off of the incline surface onto the surface that the soap holder is placed upon (having no reservoir), thus only making the Geary soap holder suitable for the side of a bathtub, such that the residual water runoff drains back into the bathtub itself.
Next, in the prior art in U.S. Pat. No. 1,479,361 to Blevens, disclosed is a soap dish that has a flat support surface with multiple shallow drainage channels within the support surface for residual water removal wherein the channels drain to a central channel that drains to a reservoir on one side of the soap dish. In Blevens, the weight of the bar of soap will cause it to literally melt into the shallow channels causing the channels to plug up with soft pasty soap material thus resulting in the lower portion of the soap bar to waste away from being submerged in the residual water.
Further, in the prior art in U.S. Pat. No. 2,319,104 to Andrews disclosed is a soap holder that being somewhat similar to Blevens wherein Andrews has narrow transverse support beams 14 that are positioned flat as against the bottom of the soap bar that are perpendicular to a somewhat larger main residual water drain channel, however, the beams 14 having a small support area on the bottom of the bar of soap that would tend to "cut" into the soap bar due to the weight of the soap bar and the soft nature of the soap bar material, as being an effect of the narrow beams 14 supporting the bar of soap, see FIGS. 1 to 4.
Continuing, in the prior art in U.S. Pat. No. 4,277,042 to Ash, Sr., disclosed is a bar soap receptacle that is essentially like Andrews, with Ash having the narrow beam support, however, being on a steep incline with one end of the narrow beams having a perpendicular extension to hold the bar of soap in place, thus having the same problems as Andrews with the narrow beams cutting into the soft soap bar material allowing the bar of soap to rest directly on the flat surface, thus facilitating the bottom of the soap bar being wet with residual water causing soap bar material to waste away. Further, for the residual water drainage like Geary, Ash has the residual water draining into the bathtub directly (having no reservoir), thus only making the Ash soap holder suitable for the side of a bathtub, such that the residual water runoff drains back into the bathtub itself.
Further, in the prior art in U.S. Pat. No. 2,026,288 to Swift disclosed is a soap dish that has a slightly inclined flat surface with several narrow protruding ridges to slightly elevate the bar of soap for drainage as between the ridges, however, the ridges could easily cut into the bar of soap that is soft and pasty thus allowing the bottom of the bar of soap to rest on the flat surface and again meaning that the bottom of the soap bar is trapped in residual water on the flat surface thus causing more wasting away of the soap bar, being similar to Ash and Andrews for having small area soap bar support which tends to allow the soft pasty soap material to sink downward into the residual water.
Further, in the prior art in U.S. Pat. No. 349,890 to Laxton, disclosed is a soap dish that is similar to Swift in that Laxton has a series of narrow ridges that support the bar of soap wherein the ridges are to slightly elevate the bar of soap for drainage as between the ridges, however, the ridges could easily cut into the bar of soap that is soft and pasty thus allowing the bottom of the bar of soap to rest directly on the drain opening, effectively plugging the drain openings again meaning that the bottom of the soap bar is trapped in residual water thus causing more wasting away of the soap bar. Further, Laxton only drains the residual water onto the surface that the soap dish is placed on like Geary, thus only making the Laxton soap holder suitable for the side of a bathtub, such that the residual water runoff drains back into the bathtub itself (i.e. Laxton having no residual water reservoir).
What is needed is a single piece soap bar support which supports the soap on a portion of the soap bar outer periphery consistently utilizing a larger surface area of support as against the bar of soap, further reducing the effect of the bar of soap "sinking" due to a small surface area of support that embeds into the soft soap material from the residual water dampened soap material, as from a typical soap bar holder. Also, as the bar of soap reduces in size with use, keeping the bar of soap elevated over the residual water as the bar of soap reduces in size, thus keeping the residual water drainage away from the soap bar freely flowing whether the bar of soap is large or small. Further a reservoir would be needed to hold the residual water such that the countertop, shelf, or other surface is isolated from the residual water that drains from the bar of soap.


A summarization system generates summaries from documents. Text structure tags, in conformance with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), are inserted into the documents to generate encoded documents. The text structure tags, when associated with portions of the document, identify text types. A text type, such as an argumentative text type, provides meta-information about the associated portion of text. The documents are also encoded, via document type declaration (“DTD”) in the eXtensible mark-up language (“XML”), to generate a tree structure that depicts the text types and hierarchical relationships among the text types in the tree structure. The summarization system generates a summary of the documents by extracting portions of the document, associated with the text type tags, using the tree structure in accordance with user input. The summarization system may be used to generate summaries from multiple documents.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed toward the field of text summarization, and more particularly toward generating summaries of documents from structured text in those documents.
2. Art Background
In general, text summarization is the ability to provide an overview of synopsis of information from one or more sources. For purposes of nomenclature, a document is broadly defined herein as a source of information. A document may consist of a periodical, an article, a book, etc. One goal of systems that manage documents is to automate the generation of summaries for one or more documents.
Intelligent text summarization is among the largest problems facing the information management community. In the prior art, summarization of information typically deals almost exclusively with corpora from the news domain to provide summaries of a single news story. However, these techniques do not attempt to compare and contrast the news reported by more than one bureau. New summarization techniques are needed because the overwhelming amount of textual information on the Internet threatens to render the medium useless. The average request for a "match" on a single word using a search engine results in over 2,000 "hits". Most of these "hits" are unrelated, outdated, or irrelevant to the match query. This problem of query precision is exacerbated when the user attempts to combine related textual information from multiple documents. For example, a user of an information management system may desire to compare analyst statements from multiple documents relating to a potential stock investment. Currently, the solution for processing this query results in a sequential scan of each of the analysts statements and a subsequent manual compilation of the opinions identified. As another example, if the user wishes to monitor the change in issue position statements for a political candidate, then the user sequentially scans the full text of this temporal textual information, so as to render a decision regarding the changing position. Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a system that permits a user to compare summarized information from multiple document sources.
Text structure contributes to the identification of classes of documents (e.g., business letters vs. journal articles vs. user manuals), parts of documents (e.g., the sports page vs. the classified advertisements in the newspapers) and the types of information contained in a document (e.g., subsidiary information in footnotes vs. primary information in titles, paragraph breaks at topic breaks). Text structure clearly plays a role in text comprehension. The use of text structure is largely ignored in fields of computational linguistics and information retrieval. In the prior art, no information retrieval system or information extraction system uses more than a cursory use of text structure. There is also no attempt to utilize the structure of text to add intelligence to the summarization process.
In general, text structure involves identifying, with a standardized language, various attributes of a document. For example, HTML documents, pervasive on the Internet, provide some information about text structure including headings and paragraph breaks. However, the minimal amount of structural information provided in HTML documents does not provide the underlying structure for use to generate documents summaries. The eXtensible mark-up language ("XML") embeds structural information into a textual document. It is desirable to develop a text summarization system that utilizes structural information to generate summaries of documents. As is described fully below, the present invention utilizes text structure (i.e., structural information embedded into a document), to create hierarchical relationships using text type understanding so as to provide enhanced text summarization of documents.

Automatic generation of document summaries through use of structured text


A solid-state imaging device includes a plurality of pixels, a reference signal supply unit configured to output a reference signal, and a comparison unit configured to output a signal depending on the reference signal and a signal from the pixel. The comparison unit includes a comparator circuit including an input terminal and an output terminal, a first switch configured to connect the input terminal and the output terminal of the comparator circuit, a clamp capacitor including a first terminal connected to the input terminal of the comparator circuit, a second switch connected to a second terminal of the clamp capacitor, and configured to select one of the signal from the pixel and the reference signal and to input the selected signal to the second terminal, and a clipping circuit arranged in an electrical path through which the reference signal is input to the comparator circuit.

Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a solid-state imaging device including an AD converter.
Description of the Related Art
There is a technology in the field of solid-state imaging devices, in which an analog-to-digital converter (hereinafter referred to as AD converter) is arranged in each column of pixels in an array-like arrangement and a signal from each pixel is converted into digital data. In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-286706, there is disclosed a technology in which an inverter is used for a comparator circuit included in each AD converter.
In the technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-286706, a signal from a pixel is input to a sampling capacitor during sampling, and a reference signal is input to an inverter via the sampling capacitor during AD conversion. Digital data is acquired through storing a time at which an output potential of the inverter is inverted to perform the AD conversion.
However, in the technology described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-286706, the conversion range of the AD conversion is limited by a range of voltage that can be input to the inverter. In other words, the upper and lower limits of the potential of the reference signal are limited by the range of voltage that can be input to the inverter, and thus, it is difficult to realize a high S/N ratio. Further, in order to increase the range of voltage that can be input to the inverter, it is necessary to increase a power supply voltage, which increases power consumption.


A wrecking tool has a head and a pole; the head including a sleeve for receiving the pole, a crescent shaped head member and a shank generally rectangular in cross section and having an outwardly bowed sharpened edge primarily for ripping into ceilings, the shank flaring laterally outward as it approaches the sleeve to provide additional strength in this region and the interior of the sleeve having an inward taper to its opening partially adjacent the flared region of the shank with the pole held in the sleeve by a cementing material, such as an epoxy resin and a rivet passing only through one surface of the sleeve and into the pole. A D-shaped handle has a sleeve into which the pole is cemented and riveted if the pole is less than eight feet long; the cross member of the D-shaped handle being an I-beam in cross-section.

The present invention relates to improvements in my prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,921,288. That which is common in said patent to the present invention is incorporated herein by reference. Since the issuance of that patent certain changes that have been made and in use for some time. Specifically the wooden pole has been replaced with a fiberglass pole having luminescent material embedded in the pole and the previously sharp end designated in the patent by the reference numeral 30 has been blunted. The luminescent pole is employed to permit ready location of the tool in dark areas when the user has had to put the tool down, as well as assist in identifying the area where the tool is chopping. The blunted end or the head has been found to be more effective in making holes in walls and ceilings.
The wrecking tool of the patent sold under the name "Clemens Hook", although in wide use, has been found not to be ideal in certain situations particularly in tearing down ceilings and in some situations requiring maximum torque to produce the desired result. Specifically, the use of the tool as previously constituted would on some occasions cause portions of a ceiling to fall on the individual using the tool. Also in cases involving use of maximum leverage force, the pole also on rare occasions would break.


There are provided measures for cellular radio path measurement and reporting. Such measures may exemplarily include, by a terminal, initiating transmission of a beacon signal of the terminal towards base stations in a coverage area of which the terminal resides, and, by a base station, monitoring transmission of the beacon signal from the terminal, measuring characteristics of a radio path towards the terminal based on a received beacon signal from the terminal, determining a timing value of the received beacon signal from the terminal, and initiating storage of the measured characteristics and the determined timing value as data with respect to the terminal in a network-based database being common for base stations in a coverage area of which the terminal resides.

In the field of mobile communication systems, particularly cellular communication systems, one issue relates to radio path measurement and reporting, specifically neighbor measurement and reporting.
Conventionally, a terminal, such as a UE, performs measurements with respect to its serving base station and neighbor base stations thereof, i.e. all base station in the coverage area or cell of which the terminal resides, and reports the results to the network, i.e. a network entity such as a RNC or the like. The network can give the terminal information about what to measure, or the terminal may blindly (i.e. without any directives from the network) search and measure the neighbor base stations.
Such measurements typically relate to characteristics of the radio path (air interface) between the terminal and the respective base station, including e.g. quality and propagation measures.
The network can use the measurement reports from the terminal for decision making relating to mobility, for example in handover decisions. Also, the network can use the measurement reports to monitor and optimize transmission quality between the terminal and the respective base station. The terminal can use the measured results for similar decision making, for example in selecting the most suitable base station for an autonomous cell reselection or the like.
Such conventional measurement and reporting consumes network capacity from the radio path (air interface) for transmitting measurement reports from the terminal to the network, and increases terminal power usage for performing measurements and transmitting measurement reports. Further, the transmission of measurement reports can utilize certain signaling channels that are not always available or may be degraded in terms of transmission capacity. This may cause that the terminal has to wait until the signaling channel is available again before being able to transmit measurement reports, or that the amount of measurement results being capable of being transmitted in one measurement report, thereby resulting in latency or delay in transmission and in potential usage of the measurement results.
In case of cell change (i.e. handover), the terminal needs to obtain synchronization before the terminal can receive or transmit data. In particular, the terminal needs to obtain uplink synchronization (which can be done for example via random access procedure execution) before the terminal can transmit measurement reports to the network. However, obtaining uplink synchronization takes some time after cell change (i.e. handover), thereby resulting in latency or delay in transmission and in potential usage of the measurement results, and consumes terminal power, thereby resulting in a reduced battery lifetime of the terminal.
In view thereof, there exist problems in terms of resource and power consumption as well as latency or delay in the context of cellular radio path measurement and reporting.
Thus, there is a need to further improve cellular radio path measurement and reporting.

Cellular radio path measurement and reporting


A rotary microtome (1) is disclosed, having a base part (2) on which a microtome housing (4) and a knife holder (6) are arranged. Also provided is a collection element (8) that surrounds the knife holder on three sides, the collection element having a U-shaped base outline. Also provided are several clamping levers that are associated with the knife holder, at least one clamping lever for the knife holder being arranged operably on a first or a second outer side wall (18a, 18b). In addition, the bottom (12) of the collection element (8) has shaped on it an elevation (22) under which a mechanical coupling is guided from the clamping lever (10c) to the knife holder.

The series HM 340 I and series HM 355 and HM 360 rotary microtome of the Mikrom company encompasses a large-volume section collection pan. The section collection pan possesses a base outline which is substantially wider than the base outline of the rotary microtome. The section collection pan has beveled outer surfaces that serve as armrests for a user. The knife holder comprises a plurality of clamping levers for clamping and adjusting the knife. The plurality of clamping levers arranged on the knife holder is on the one hand disadvantageous because they can become contaminated by excess thin sections during cutting. The section collection pan having the beveled armrests furthermore requires a great deal of installation space on a laboratory bench, which is detrimental to the compact installation necessary in a routine-analysis laboratory.
A further rotary microtome is disclosed in Patent No. DE 42 05 257 C2. The rotary microtome is equipped with a base part on which a microtome housing and a knife holder are arranged. A pan for the reception of thin sections of a thin-section sample is provided, the pan comprising two side parts spaced apart from one another, and a front part joining the side parts, which together form a pan having a U-shaped base area. The pan having the U-shaped base area is adapted to surround the knife holder on three sides, and the side parts terminate externally at least approximately flush with the microtome housing. Although the space necessary for installation of the rotary microtome is thereby reduced to a minimum, the knife holder nevertheless encompasses a plurality of clamping parts that can be contaminated by thin sections upon utilization of the rotary microtome. This entails an increased cleaning outlay for the rotary microtome and for the section collection pan provided on the rotary microtome.

Rotary microtome and collection element for a rotary microtome


In general, this disclosure describes methods and devices for analyzing source code to detect potential bugs in the code. Specifically, a device retrieves source code of an application. For each distinct execution of a plurality of executions of the application, the device initiates the respective execution at a particular starting point of the source code and inputs, into the source code, a unique set of inputs relative to any other execution. The device stores, into a path log, an indication of each line of source code and stores, into an output log, an indication of each output object encountered during the respective execution. Each output object includes a local variable dependent on the inputs. The device analyzes, using a machine learning model, the path and output logs to identify an abnormality indicative of a potential bug in the source code. The device outputs a graphical representation of the abnormality.

Software bugs are a significant risk to mission success and human safety. Increasingly, the public relies on computers and cyber-physical systems in mission-critical and safety-critical applications. Even in less-critical systems, software bugs are a major source of errors, system failure, and downtime. Decades of software engineering have demonstrated that making bug-free software may not be possible. Even "provably correct" software, which is too time-consuming and expensive for most real-world systems, can have bugs resulting from humans' inability to correctly provide specifications.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.

Automated software bug discovery and assessment


A system for receiving bid requests and bid proposals sent thereto over a data-packet-network (DPN) and for matching the bid proposals to the bid requests includes at least one input/output port for receiving the bid requests and the bid proposals, at least one memory utility for storing the bid requests and bid proposals, and a set of machine readable instructions for enabling matching of the stored bid proposals to the stored bid requests.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of electronic server-based interaction systems and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for matching electronic bids to electronic requests based on standardized protocols.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Session Initiation Protocol SIP is a well-known communication protocol created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). SIP is used over data networks to initiate and define multi party multimedia telephony and IP sessions including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video streamed over the network using one of several known transport protocols such as Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP). In terms of the layers of the suite of Internet protocols, SIP sits in the application layer. In typical use, SIP is somewhat limited in scope to a dedicated purpose of building or initiating multimedia sessions, defining them using session description language (SDP), and then for tearing down those sessions when completed. It has occurred to the inventors that while SIP is not used to transmit documents, it is capable of handling multipart message bodies using MIME or S/MIME headers. Much information about SIP in particular is available at the following Web resource http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3261.txt.
In certain communications environments, large companies routinely compose and then post or send out proposals for other companies or entities that wish to submit formal bids that might be accepted for fulfilling those requests. Such activity involves identification of certain standards of quality, procedure, and like attributes imposed by the project requester on to those entities that might be accepted to fulfill all or a portion of a project. In certain business environments, those standards are somewhat universally understood by all of those who would submit bids for consideration. However, navigating through all of those requirements can be a challenge for some bidders. Moreover, the process of selecting which submitted bids fit all of those criteria is also a very challenging, complex, and time-consuming task.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for communicating those requirements to bidders electronically enabling the bidders system to interpret those requirements and for facilitating automated screening of submitted bids according to the level of conformity of those bids relative to those requirements. A system such as this could reduce much work associated with qualifying bids submitted from multiple bidders.

System and method for matching electronic proposals to electronic requests

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.


Performing distributed contention-free communication channel reservation for wireless communication, is disclosed. One implementation involves providing access to a shared communication channel in a wireless network including multiple wireless stations, by performing distributed channel time reservation for contention-free access to a shared wireless channel by each wireless station, based on a prior successful contention by the wireless station for access to the channel in a wireless network.

In a typical wireless network utilizing a coordination function for coordinating transmissions among wireless stations, such a function may be implemented in one of the wireless stations or a coordinator device such as an access point (AP). The wireless stations may be consumer electronics (CE) devices which communicate via directional transmissions using sector antennas and beam forming antenna arrays. The coordinator device may use omnidirectional transmissions for broadcasts to all wireless stations in all directions (e.g., 360 degrees range). Alternatively, the coordinator may use quasi-omnidirectional transmissions for broadcasts to a wide range, but not necessarily in all directions.
In many wireless area networks (WLAN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN) standards, a coordinator station in infrastructure mode is used for providing contention free access to a wireless communication medium to support Quality of Service (QoS) for certain applications such as audio/video (A/V) applications (e.g., multimedia audio and video applications). Many WLAN/WPAN standards such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.3, WirelessHD and WiGig, support or fully operate in infrastructure mode, in which a centralized coordinator or access point (AP) is used to control and manage the wireless network.
In the absence of a coordinator, to provide contention-free channel time reservation, existing techniques use announcement or information exchange among wireless stations in a network to negotiate/reserve the use of the communication medium. Specifically, QoS support for A/V applications is achieved using announcement or information exchange according to the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), and the ECMA 368 specifications. EDCA defines four Access Categories (ACs) and introduces service differentiation such that A/V data traffic uses higher priority parameters to contend for the communication medium. However, EDCA does not provide collision free QoS services and bandwidth suffers under high contention. Further, ECMA 368 specification utilizes a multi-band OFDM alliance (MBOA) media access control (MAC) layer with a distributed scheduling protocol to provide communication medium reservation for contention free access. However, MBOA MAC uses a complex multi-beacon mechanism that is inefficient and difficult to manage, especially for 60 GHz wireless networks where most transmissions are not omnidirectional.
Further, in many WLAN and WPAN communication standards that utilize channel time reservation either in a centralized or a distributed manner, legacy wireless stations use contention-based wireless medium access and are unaware of channel time reservation schemes. These legacy wireless stations may contend and occupy channel time which jeopardizes the channel time reservation operations of non-legacy wireless stations.

Method and system for shared communication medium in wireless communication systems


Provided are a porous organosilicate polymer composite prepared by heating an organic/inorganic hybrid polymer in which an organosilicate polymer is chemically bonded to a radial pore-forming polymer ended with a hydrolyzable alkoxysilyl group and used as a core molecule, and a semiconductor device using an organosilicate polymer composite film including the porous organosilicate polymer composite. The organosilicate polymer composite film has a very low dielectric constant, and thus, is useful as a dielectric film of the semiconductor device.

To provide improved performance and cost-effectiveness of multilayer integrated circuits in the electronic field, a recent trend is to increase the density of the multilayer integrated circuits, for example increase the number of memories and logic chips. For this, a chip size has decreased. At the same time, a significant effort has been made in developing a new dielectric material that can decrease the dielectric constant of a dielectric film. A low dielectric film material recently used is silicon dioxide with a dielectric constant of about 3.5 to 4.0. The silicon dioxide has a physical strength and thermal stability sufficient to withstand various chemical or thermal processes related to a semiconductor fabrication method.
However, recent high performance multilayer integrated circuits require a relatively inexpensive copper conductor with excellent conductivity and a new low dielectric material that can satisfy a dielectric constant of 2.5 or less. Signal retardation and cross-talk phenomena accompanied by a decrease in the size of an integrated circuit act as serious blocking factors against device performance improvement. To solve such signal retardation and cross-talk problems, studies about a low dielectric material have been actively done. Development of an ultra-low dielectric material requires introduction of nanoscale pores into a dielectric material or film. For this, a thermal decomposition of an organic polymer that can form nanoscale pores is mainly used. However, a recent technology is difficult to control the size and distribution of nanoscale pores to an ideal level. This is because there arise a phase separation phenomenon between a dielectric material and a pore-forming polymer, and thus, the problem of lack of uniformity of the size and distribution of pores.
Recently, there have been done many studies to develop low dielectric materials based on silicate- and nanoporous silicate- polymers, aromatic polymers, fluorinated aromatic polymers, organic/inorganic composite materials, and the like. In addition to a dielectric constant of 2.5 or less, development of ultra-low dielectric materials also requires improvements of characteristics necessary for a semiconductor device fabrication process and the durability of semiconductor devices, such as thermal stability, mechanical properties, chem.-mech polishing compatibility, etching property, interface compatibility, and electrical properties.

Low dielectric organosilicate polymer composite


A method for deploying application components to Information Technology (IT) resources using an application platform controller includes requesting a network slice for the application components from a network controller. Priority values are assigned to the application components defining an order in which the application components are planned to be deployed. The application components are deployed sequentially, using the priority values, to host sites of the IT resources using information from the network controller including existing registrations of users of the application to an access network of the host sites such that replicas of the application components are provided at the host sites which provide a minimum latency with respect to a location of the users.

Typically, large distributed applications are executed and managed by an application platform, which handles multiple applications. The application platform provides for the control of deployment options and placement decisions of application components on the IT infrastructure. For example, it receives packaged customer applications for deployment and can apply techniques such as:
1. Application component replication and placement,
2. Application component migration,
3. Prioritization of applications or application requirements, and
4. Application data quality/quantity level configuration (if configurable)
An IoT platform is an application platform which performs the aforementioned tasks on an IT infrastructure which includes edge as well as loud hosts in order to integrate and handle data and users that potentially do not only come from (or use) computers, but also mobile or embedded units with limited processing and communication capabilities. An IoT platform typically involves various further functionalities, which are not the subject of the present invention. Edge hosts refer to hosts that are co-located with either gateway devices (in fixed/broadband networks) or base stations (in mobile/3GPP networks) to which the end users connect directly ("one hop"), typically leading to user-to-edge latencies that are much lower than user-to-Cloud latencies.
Various approaches have appeared for optimizing (individually or jointly) the control parameters managed by the application (or IoT) platform, typically focusing around application component placement or virtual machine placement and being based on diverse optimization goals.
Kangasharju, Jussi, et al., "Object replication strategies in content distribution networks," Computer Communications 25, no. 4, pp. 376-383 (2002) describe the problem of optimally replicating objects and deploying them in content distribution networks (across a network model that is based on the actual internet architecture). The problem is formulated as a decision problem and the optimization goal is set to finding the nodes to store the objects such that the average number of inter-node hops that a request must traverse from a client to an object is minimized. The average number of hops is chosen as an indicator of user latency. Along with the problem formulation, heuristics which are based on random, popularity and greedy algorithms are proposed to approximate the optimal solution.
Similarly, Alicherry, Mansoor, et al., "Network aware resource allocation in distributed clouds," In Infocom, 2012 proceedings IEEE, pp. 963-971 (2012) study the problem of resource allocation in distributed clouds. The problem is formulated as selecting the data centers for virtual machine placement such that the maximum latency between any two of the chosen data centers is minimized. The infrastructure of data centers is considered as a graph with vertices that represent data centers and edges that represent the physical links among the nodes. The aim is set to finding the sub-graph of the initial network graph that achieves the optimization goal. Along with the problem formulation, a heuristic that is based on the clique problem of the graph theory is also proposed.

System and method for deploying application components on distributed IT resources


Metal particles that can be alloyed with rhenium are dispersed as a main component in a gas phase, a rhenium oxide vapor is made to be present around these particles, the rhenium oxide is reduced, and the rhenium precipitated on the surface of the main component metal particles as a result of this reduction is diffused under a high temperature into the main component metal particles, which gives a rhenium-containing alloy powder including the main component metal and rhenium. The powder thus obtained preferably contains 0.01 to 50 wt % rhenium, has an average particle size of 0.01 to 10 μm, and is made into a conductor paste by being uniformly mixed and dispersed in an organic vehicle along with other additives as needed.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing a rhenium-containing alloy powder whose main component is nickel or a metal that can be alloyed with rhenium, such as platinum, palladium, iron, cobalt, ruthenium, or rhodium, and more particularly relates to a method for manufacturing a rhenium-containing alloy powder that can be used suitably in a conductor paste used to form internal conductors in laminated ceramic electronic parts.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the field of electronics, conductor pastes, resistor pastes, and other such thick film pastes are used to manufacture parts such as IC packages, capacitors, resistors, electronic circuits, etc. These pastes are produced by uniformly mixing and dispersing conductive particles of a metal, an alloy, a metal oxide, or the like in an organic vehicle along with a vitreous binder or any other additives that are needed, and the resulting pastes are applied to substrates, and then firing at a high temperature to form conductors or resistors.
Laminated ceramic electronic components, such as laminated capacitors and laminated inductors, or ceramic multilayer substrates are generally manufactured by alternately laminating an unfired (green) ceramic sheet of a dielectric, a magnetic material, or the like, and an internal conductor paste layer, in a plurality of layers of each, and firing all the layers at the same time at a high temperature. It used to be that palladium, silver-palladium, platinum, and other such noble metals were most often used as the internal conductor, but more recently the use of nickel and other such base metal materials has become increasingly popular because of the need to conserve resources and to reduce the delamination and cracking caused by oxidation expansion during the firing of palladium or silver-palladium, and so forth.
There is a trend toward increasing the number of laminations with these laminated parts and multilayer substrates, to the point that laminated capacitors, for instance, are beginning to be manufactured with hundreds of layers of lamination. This has made it necessary to reduce the film thickness of the ceramic layers, and in turn to further reduce the film thickness of the internal conductor layer. For example, if the thickness of a ceramic layer is about 3 μm, unless the internal conductor film thickness is 1 μm or less, and preferably about 0.5 μm, the middle part of the laminate will end up being too thick, and this can lead to structural defects and diminished reliability.
However, when ordinary nickel particles are used for an internal conductor paste, excessive sintering of the nickel particles during firing can cause them to clump together or cause abnormal particle growth, so not only does the internal conductor become a discontinuous film, which can lead to higher resistance, or to circuit disconnection, but another problem is that the conductor becomes thicker, so there has been a limit to how thin a film could be made. Specifically, when nickel particles are fired in a non-oxidizing atmosphere, such as an inert atmosphere or a reducing atmosphere, in order to prevent oxidation, their sintering begins early, and even single crystal particles with relatively low activity begin to sinter and shrink at a low temperature of 400° C. or lower.
Meanwhile, the temperature at which a ceramic layer starts to sinter is generally much higher than this. For example, the temperature is approximately 1200° C. with barium titanate, and when a ceramic green sheet of this and a nickel internal conductor paste layer are alternately laminated in a plurality of layers of each, and all these layers are fired at the same time at a high temperature, the ceramic layers do not shrink together with the nickel films, so the nickel films are pulled in the planar direction. Consequently, it is presumed that small voids produced in the nickel films by sintering at a relatively low temperature expand into large holes as the sintering proceeds at higher temperatures, or that this is accompanied by growth of the film in the thickness direction.
Therefore, to reduce the thickness of the nickel internal conductor layers, it seems to be necessary to make the nickel particles finer and give them better dispersibility, so that as few voids as possible are created during firing, and to match the sintering shrinkage behavior with that of the ceramic layers. Also, even when the films are formed thicker, this mismatching of the sintering shrinkage behavior between the conductor layers and the ceramic layers causes delamination or cracking and other such structural defects, and is therefore a problem in that it lowers the yield and the reliability of the product.
Various attempts have been made in the past to suppress the sintering of conductor layers up to the sintering commencement temperature of the ceramic layers. For example, the sintering commencement of conductor layers can be apparently delayed to about 800° C. by adding ceramic particles with the same composition as that used in the ceramic layer to the conductor paste. However, since the sintering of the metal particles themselves in the conductor layer is not being suppressed, when the material is fired at a high temperature of about 1300° C., the conductor layer still loses its continuity and conductivity. Also, there is no effect unless these additives are used in a large quantity, so other problems such as higher resistance, etc., arise.
Patent Document 1, listed below, states that the sintering commencement temperature of a conductor paste can be raised by using an alloy powder composed of nickel and at least one element selected from among vanadium, chromium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, tantalum, and tungsten as the metal powder used for the conductor paste used in forming the internal conductor of a laminated ceramic capacitor. Nevertheless, the elements disclosed in Patent Document 1 are all baser metals than nickel, so even when the firing is performed under conditions under which nickel will not be oxidized, these other metals often ended up being selectively oxidized. As a result, there is the danger that they will react with the surrounding ceramic and adversely affect the electric characteristics of the laminated ceramic electronic part.
In view of this, various studies have been conducted to find the ideal metal elements for alloying with nickel, and attention has recently been directed to rhenium. Rhenium is one of high-melting point metals, and it is expected to be very effective at suppressing sintering when used for the formation of an internal conductor used in laminated ceramic electronic parts. For instance, Patent Document 2, listed below, discloses a composite powder in which nickel is coated with rhenium.
However, while rhenium is more noble than nickel, it cannot really be considered to have low chemical reactivity, and rhenium oxide in particular sublimates at a low temperature of just a few hundred degrees centigrade. This means that when a rhenium powder or a rhenium-coated metal powder is used to form conductors for electronic parts, the material must be handled with the greatest of care to avoid the oxidation of the rhenium during firing and so on. Alloying nickel and rhenium is thought to be advantageous in terms of suppressing this reactivity of rhenium.
Still, with the alloy powder manufacturing methods known up to now, it was difficult to stably produce alloy powders that were homogeneous and had a small particle size, and alloy powders of nickel and rhenium were particularly difficult to manufacture.
For instance, Patent Document 1 discusses the manufacture of an alloy powder by heating together chlorides of metal elements contained in the alloy powder, evaporating them and mixing these vapors, and then subjecting them to hydrogen reduction, but with a CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) method such as this, the particles of the various metal elements typically are not alloyed, and instead are produced individually.
Also, it is possible that PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) could also be utilized if the vapor pressures of the metals constituting the alloy were close enough to each other, but when the vapor pressures are greatly different, as is the case with nickel and rhenium, it is exceedingly difficult to control the alloying ratio, so a homogeneous nickel-rhenium alloy power cannot be obtained consistently. Because of this, with a powder obtained by a conventional vapor deposition method, the particles of the various metal elements typically are not alloyed, and instead are produced individually, so the product ends up being either a mixed powder in which particles of the various metal elements are both present, or, even if the elements can be successfully alloyed, the powder ends up being one with considerable variance, in which the particle form and average size, the alloying ratio, and so forth are not uniform. When a powder such as this is used to form a conductor for a laminated ceramic electronic part, this lack of uniformity precludes obtaining good electric characteristics.
There is also known a wet reduction method (co-precipitation method) in which aqueous solutions of the metal ions constituting the alloy particles are mixed, and this mixture is then reduced to precipitate a powder, but most of the powder that is precipitated ends up as an agglomeration of fine particles of the various metal elements, and a separate heat treatment is necessary to alloy these agglomerated fine particles. Since the agglomeration further proceeds during this heat treatment, it becomes even more difficult to obtain a fine powder with a uniform particle size. Furthermore, if the surface of the unalloyed agglomerated powder is oxidized into rhenium oxide during heating, since rhenium oxide sublimates even at relatively low temperatures, this process is unsuited to the production of an alloy containing rhenium.
Other known methods include atomization and pulverization, but there is a limit to the size of the powder obtained with either of these, and it has been extremely difficult to obtain a powder with an average particle size on the order of 0.05 to 1.0 μm, which is needed nowadays to form internal conductors for laminated ceramic electronic parts.
Spray pyrolysis is another known method for manufacturing an alloy powder. As discussed in Patent Documents 3, 4, and 5, listed below, and elsewhere, spray pyrolysis is a process in which a solution containing one or more kinds of metal oxide, or a suspension in which these have been dispersed, is sprayed to form fine droplets, these droplets are heated to a temperature higher than the pyrolysis temperature of the metal compounds, and preferably a high temperature that is close to or above the melting point of these metals, and the metal compounds are pyrolyzed, thereby precipitating a metal or alloy powder. This method yields a high-density, highly dispersible, truly spherical metal powder or alloy powder that is either highly crystalline or in the form of single crystals. Unlike a wet reduction process, this method does not require any solid-liquid separation, so manufacture is easier, and since the method involves no additives or solvents that would effect purity, it has the advantage of yielding a high-purity powder containing no impurities. Furthermore, the particle size is easy to control, and the composition of the produced particles basically matches well the composition of the starting metal compounds in the solution, so another advantage is that the composition is easy to control.
However, when a nickel-rhenium alloy powder is manufactured with this method, a solution containing nickel and rhenium is sprayed and pyrolyzed, but because of the above-mentioned characteristics of rhenium, heating causes just the rhenium component to vaporize and separate, so a powder of nickel alone is all that is actually obtained by pyrolysis. This means that a nickel-rhenium alloy powder cannot be obtained by a conventional spray pyrolysis process.
The manufacturing methods discussed in Patent Documents 6 and 7 listed below, are also known. With the methods described in these publications, at least one kind of thermally decomposable metal compound powder is supplied by carrier gas to a reaction vessel, the metal compound powder is dispersed in the gas phase at a concentration of 10 g/L or less, and in this state the powder is heated at a temperature higher than the decomposition temperature and not lower than (Tm−200)° C., where Tm° C. is the melting point of the metal, in order to produce metal powder. This method makes it easy to obtain a metal powder that has spherical particles, good crystallinity, and high dispersibility. It is also possible to obtain a single crystal metal powder by heating the raw material compound powder at a temperature of not lower than the melting point of the metal. Since no additives or solvents that would effect purity are used, a high-purity powder containing no impurities is obtained. Furthermore, a metal powder of uniform particle size can be obtained by controlling the particle size of the raw material powder, so the adjustment of particle size is also easy. There is therefore no need for a classification step, and an extremely fine powder with a narrow particle size distribution that is suited to a thick film paste can be obtained. Also, since the raw material are not put in the form of a solution or suspension, energy loss through evaporation of the solvent is lower than with an ordinary spray pyrolysis method, and the powder can be manufactured more simply and less expensively. Moreover, there is no problem with agglomeration of droplets, and the powder can be dispersed in the gas phase at a relatively high concentration, so efficiency is higher.
Nevertheless, when a nickel-rhenium alloy powder is manufactured with this method, a thermally decomposable metal compound powder containing nickel and rhenium must be prepared as the raw material powder. Chlorides, nitrates, carbonyls and other such compounds with a relatively simple structure, and so forth can be used as thermally decomposable raw material powders, but because these compounds have a low pyrolysis temperature, it is difficult to control their alloying quantitatively. An organic acid salt with a relatively high decomposition temperature, such as a formate, acetate, or oxalate, is thought to be good for improving this control, but when it comes to rhenium, synthesis is extremely difficult, and this complicates manufacture.
As discussed above, with the methods known in the past for manufacturing an alloy powder, if an attempt was made to manufacture an alloy powder containing rhenium, it was difficult to obtain an alloy powder that had a small average particle size, excellent dispersibility, and a uniform alloying ratio.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication 2002-60877A    Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Publication 2004-319435A    Patent Document 3: Japanese Patent Publication 62-1807A    Patent Document 4: Japanese Patent Publication 6-172802A    Patent Document 5: Japanese Patent Publication 7-216417A    Patent Document 6: Japanese Patent Publication 2002-20809A    Patent Document 7: Japanese Patent Publication 2004-99992A

Method for manufacturing rhenium-containing alloy powder, rhenium-containing alloy powder, and conductor paste


The invention provides an apparatus and method for the preparation of a pharmaceutical composition comprising a complex of an antigen component and the corresponding antibody component in a pharmacologically acceptable carrier. The apparatus comprises a housing chamber for containing paramagnetic particles and a platform against which the housing chamber is releasably retained. The platform contains one or more magnets located adjacent to the housing chamber when the housing chamber is positioned on the platform. The platform is secured to a support which allows the platform, and thus the housing chamber, to be rotated between a vertical and a horizontal position. The method involves supplying a quantity of paramagnetic particles bearing the antigen component to the housing chamber, introducing into the housing chamber a physiological fluid which contains the antibody component, mixing the paramagnetic particles and the physiological fluid to form an antigen component and antibody component complex on the paramagnetic beads, removing the physiological fluid from the housing chamber, and eluting the antigen component and antibody component complex from the paramagnetic beads in a pharmaceutically acceptable eluting solution.

The present invention is related to devices and methods of using the same, to prepare pharmaceutical compositions comprising a complex of an antigen component and the corresponding antibody or inhibitor component in a pharmacologically acceptable carrier. Specifically, the invention concerns a device and method of using the same, of preparing a pharmaceutical composition by selectively isolating an antibody type component from a physiological fluid, such as blood, plasma or other bodily fluid in a pharmacologically acceptable carrier to which the antigen type compound may be added.
Pharmaceutical compositions containing antibody/antigen complexes have been suggested for numerous medical applications. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,740,371, issued to St. Remy et al on Apr. 26, 1988, disclosed a complex useful for treating allergies. This complex includes the specific allergen that causes the allergic reaction, and the corresponding antibody for that allergen. While the antibodies may be derived from either the patient's or a donor's physiological fluids, the preferred antibody is usually derived from the patient's own physiological fluids. The injection of this complex reduces, and even eliminates, a patient's allergic reaction to the specific allergen, while not possessing the side effects accompanying conventional allergy treatments.
Another antibody/antigen complex is taught in EP 426913, published May 15, 1991. This application discloses a complex composed of factor VIII and an antibody termed factor VIII inhibitor. This complex is used to treat hemophiliacs who have become refractory to the injection of factor VIII. These individuals produce a factor VIII inhibitor antibody which binds with, and renders factor VIII inactive. Thus factor VIII functions as the antigen, while the anti-factor VIII functions as the antibody. It was demonstrated that the injection of the factor VIII antigen/inhibitor complex reduces some patient's refractortness to factor VIII injections.
The antigen/antibody complexes taught in St. Remy et al and the pending application preferably use the antibody from the patient's own physiological fluids. This is significant not only because it eliminates any potential reaction to an antibody prepared from a non-identical donor, but more importantly, autologous antibodies are most effective for induction of the therapy itself. The presently available methods, as taught by St. Remy et al and the referenced application, of extracting the antibodies requires painstaking chemical isolation of the antibody from the patient's bodily fluid, such as blood. For example, St. Remy et al discloses isolating the desired antibodies IgG, IgM, IgA, IgE, and IgD by a complex series of steps involving precipitation, dialysis, concentration, chromatography and immunoadsorption.
Thus while pharmaceutical compositions containing antigen/antibody complexes may be beneficial in the treatment of certain diseases and conditions, the methods of isolating the desired antibody are complex and time consuming. It is thus desirable to provide a mechanism to readily prepare pharmaceutical antibody/antigen complexes.
Recent advances in separation technology have presented the opportunity of isolating a specific target population, e.g. cells, proteins, or antibodies without the need of tedious and extensive chemical separation techniques. For example, various workers have suggested capturing specific target populations by using filters bearing immunoreactive groups. Immunoreactive groups are those to which the desired antibody will selectively bind, typically the antigen. These techniques include filters prepared from fibers bearing immunoreactive groups, U.S. Pat. No. 3,843,324, issued on Oct. 22, 1974; columns bearing immunoreactive group, U.S. Pat. No. 4,252,653, issued on Feb. 24, 1981; and filter candles bearing immunoreactive groups, U.S. Pat. No. 4,648,974, issued Mar. 10, 1987.
Another recently developed technique for isolating target populations, i.e. antibodies, selected proteins and cells, from a physiological fluid utilizes paramagnetic beads or particles coated with an immunoreactive compound or agent selective for the desired target population. Examples of such particles or beads are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,230,685, issued Oct. 28, 1980; 4,554,088, issued Nov. 19, 1985; and 4,628,037, issued Dec. 9, 1986. The use of such particles in the separation of taught in publications, "Removal of Neuroblastoma Cells From Bone Marrow with Monoclonal Antibodies Conjugated to Magnetic Microspheres", by J. G. Treleaven, J. Ugelstad, T. Philips, F. M. Gibson, A. Rembaum, G. D. Caines and J. T. Kemshead, The Lancet, Jan. 14, 1984, pages 70-73, and "Immunomagnetic removal of B-lymphoma cells from human bone marrow: a procedure for clinical use", by G. Kvalheim, O. Sorensen, O. Fodstad, S. Funderud, S. Kiesel, B. Dorken, K. Nustad, E. Jakobsen, O. Ugelstad and A, Pihl, Bone Marrow Transplantation, (1988), volume 3, pages 31-41.
Other references which disclose devices and methods of isolating specific target populations are U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,970,518, and 4,018,886 both issued to Giaever on Jul. 20, 1976 and Apr. 19, 1977, respectively, 4,219,411, issued to Yen et al on Aug. 26, 1980 and 4,710,472, issued to Saur et al on Dec. 1, 1987. Both Yen et al and Saur et al disclose intricate devices for mixing a physiological fluid with Immunoreactive paramagnetic particles. These immunoreactive paramagnetic particles are coated with an agent specific for the target population, that is, will selectively bind to the target population cellular members or chemical species. These paramagnetic particles are subsequently captured by a magnetic field while removing the fluid.
The Giaever patents disclose devices and methods of isolating the select population of cells from a physiological fluid using the immunoreactive paramagnetic particles. The immunoreactive paramagnetic particles and the physiological fluid are mixed in a vessel. Once the immunoreactive agents, i.e. antibody layer, has bonded with the target population cells or chemical species, the particles are separated from the fluid by activating a magnetic coil to capture and immobilize the particles and opening a valve to release the fluid from the vessel. The immunoreactive paramagnetic particles are then transferred to another vessel containing a cleaving agent. This cleaving agent promotes the release of the selected target population from the coated paramagnetic particles.
The above discussed procedures and apparatus allow for the separation of a target population, whether cells, proteins or antibodies, from a physiological fluid. The procedures for which these methods are used are typically those in which it is desired to remove this target population from the physiological fluid prior to returning the fluid to the patient. For example, the above procedure is useful for removing infected or tumor cells from a specific tissue, e.g. bone marrow. The major drawback to the described procedures and apparatus is the complexity of the procedure or apparatus used, or the inability of thoroughly separating the target population from the remainder of the physiological fluid. That is, the disclosed procedures and apparatus were not as concerned with the complete removal of most of the physiological fluid since the primary focus is the removal of the target population. Thus there remains the risk of some contamination of the target population with extraneous cells or compounds from the fluid.
Further, such procedures and apparatus have the drawback of requiring multiple containers for performing the isolation, as described in Giaever et al, or require specific knowledge of procedures to insure prevention of contamination of the final product. It thus remains desirable to provide for a method and apparatus which would simplify the handling and isolation of a target population, and specifically an antibody, for the purpose of easily, and safely preparing a pharmaceutical composition.

Method and useful apparatus for preparing pharmaceutical compositions


An apparatus for moving a toilet seat from a closed position adjacent a toilet bowl to a raised position includes an actuator attached to a foot pedal. Pressing the foot pedal moves the actuator in a forward stroke such that nearing the end of the forward stroke an end of the actuator is pivoted and elements connected to the actuator bear against an underside of the toilet seat, raising the seat away from the bowl.

Various apparatus for the assisted lifting of a toilet seat are known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 2,251,770 to Warner describes a pair of actuators, each actuating either a toilet lid or a toilet seat. U.S. Pat. No. 2,776,440 to Miller describes a toilet seat lifter that is foot actuated. U.S. Pat. No. 3,303,517 to Wood et al., describes a toilet seat lifter that is also foot actuated. Yet another foot actuated lifter is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,803,741. More recently, US Pub. No. 2009/0113611 by Jarjour et al., describes a toilet seat lifter that is counterweight driven. Other seat lifting apparatus have been described in the past and all suffer from mechanical complexity and multiple hard to clean surfaces. Difficult to clean surfaces, especially in restrooms, are particularly troublesome owing to the increase in hospital or nursing home acquired infections.
It would be desirable to provide a toilet seat lifter having minimal moving parts and employing curved surfaces that easy to clean.
It would be even more desirable of larger sections of the foregoing seat lifter were easily removable when needed from the toilet assembly enabling a thorough cleaning.
It would be further desirable for such a seat lifter to be hand or foot actuated.


A technique for directly sharing physical memory between processes executing on processor cores is described. The technique includes loading a plurality of processes into the physical memory for execution on a corresponding plurality of processor cores sharing the physical memory. An address space is mapped to each of the processes by populating a first entry in a top level virtual address table for each of the processes. The address space of each of the processes is cross-mapped into each of the processes by populating one or more subsequent entries of the top level virtual address table with the first entry in the top level virtual address table from other processes.

As the core count on processors used for high-performance computing continues to increase, the performance of the underlying memory subsystem becomes more important. In order to make effective use of the available compute power, applications will likely have to become more sensitive to the way in which they access memory. Applications that are memory bandwidth bound should avoid extraneous memory-to-memory copies. For many applications, the memory bandwidth limitation is compounded by the fact that the most popular and effective parallel programming model, Message Passing Interface ("MPI"), mandates copying of data between processes. MPI implementers have worked to make use of shared memory for communication between processes on the same node. Unfortunately, the current schemes for using shared memory for MN can require either excessive memory-to-memory copies or potentially large overheads inflicted by the operating system ("OS").
In order to avoid the memory copy overhead of MPI altogether, more and more applications are exploring mixed-mode programming models where threads and/or compiler directives are used on-node and MPI is used off-node. The complexity of shared memory programming using threads has hindered both the development of applications as well as the development of thread-safe and thread-aware MN implementations. The initial attractiveness of mixed-mode programming was tempered by the additional complexity induced by finding multi-level parallelism and by initial disappointing performance results.
Portable Operating System Interface ("POSIX") based operating systems generally support shared memory capability through two fundamental mechanisms: threads and memory mapping. Unlike processes, which allow for a single execution context inside an address space, threads allow for multiple execution contexts inside a single address space (note, a "process" is defined here as the combination of an execution context plus an address space). When one thread updates a memory location, all of the threads sharing the same address space also see the update. A major drawback of threads is that great care must be taken to ensure that common library routines are reentrant, meaning that multiple threads could be executing the same library routine simultaneously. For non-reentrant functions, some form of locking is used to ensure atomic execution. The same is true for data accessed by multiple threads—updates are atomic with respect to one another or else difficult to debug race conditions may occur. Race conditions and fundamentally non-deterministic behavior make threads difficult to use correctly.
In memory mapping, cooperating processes request a shared region of memory from the OS and then map it into their private address space, possibly at a different virtual address in each process. Once initialized, a process may access the shared memory region in exactly the same way as any other memory in its private address space. As with threads, updates to shared data structures in this region are atomic.
Explicit message passing is an alternative to shared memory for intra-node data sharing. In message passing, processes pass messages carrying data between one another. No data is shared directly, but rather is copied between processes on an as necessary basis. This eliminates the need for re-entrant coding practices and careful updates of shared data, since no data is shared. The main downside to this approach is the extra overhead involved in copying data between processes.
In order to accelerate message passing, memory mapping is often used as a high-performance mechanism for moving messages between processes. Unfortunately, such approaches to using page remapping are not sufficient to support MPI semantics, and general-purpose operating systems lack the appropriate mechanisms. The sender must copy the message into a shared memory region and the receiver must copy it out—a minimum of two copies must occur.
As of MPI 2.0, MPI applications may make use of both threads and memory mapping, although few MPI implementations provide full support for threads. More commonly, MPI implementations utilize memory mapping internally to provide efficient intra-node communication. During MPI initialization, the processes on a node elect one process to create the shared memory region and then the elected process broadcasts the information about the region to the other processes on the node (e.g., via a file or the sockets API). The other processes on the node then "attach" to the shared memory region, by requesting that the OS map it into their respective address spaces.
Note that the approach of using shared memory for intra-node MPI messages only works for the point-to-point operations, collective communication operations, and a subset of the MPI-2 remote memory access operations. Copying mandates active participation of the two processes involved in the transfer. Single-sided put/get operations, such as those in the Cray Shared Memory ("SHMEM") programming interface, cannot be implemented using POSIX shared memory.
There are several limitations in using regions of shared memory to support intra-node MPI. First, the MPI model doesn't allow applications to allocate memory out of this special shared region, so messages must first be copied into shared memory by the sender and then copied out of the shared region by the receiver. This copy overhead can be a significant performance issue. Typically there is a limitation on the amount of shared memory that a process can allocate, so the MPI implementation must make decisions about how to most effectively use this memory in terms of how many per process messages to support relative to the size of the contents of each message. The overhead of copying messages using shared memory has led researchers to explore alternative single-copy strategies for intra-node MPI message passing.
One such strategy is to use the OS to perform the copy between separate address spaces. In this method, the kernel maps the user buffer into kernel space and does a single memory copy between user space and kernel space. The drawback of this approach is that the overhead of trapping to the kernel and manipulating memory maps can be expensive. Another limitation is that all transfers are serialized through the operating system. As the number of cores on a node increases, serialization and management of shared kernel data structures for mapping is likely to be a significant performance limitation. Another important drawback of this approach is that there are two MPI receive queues—one in the MPI library and one in the kernel. When the application posts a non-specific receive using MPI_ANY_SOURCE, great care is taken to insure that the atomicity and ordering semantics of MPI are preserved. There is a potential race for a non-specific receive request to be satisfied by both the MPI library and the operating system. Managing atomicity between events in kernel space and user space is non-trivial.
Another strategy for optimizing intra-node transfers is to use hardware assistance beyond the host processors. The most common approach is to use an intelligent, programmable, network interface to perform, the transfer. Rather than sending a local message out to the network and back, the network interface can simply use its direct memory access ("DMA") engines to do a single copy between the communicating processes. The major drawback of this approach is serialization through the network interface, which is typically much slower than the host processor(s). Also, large coherent shared memory machines typically have hardware support for creating a global shared memory environment. This hardware can also be used when running distributed memory programs to map arbitrary regions of memory to provide direct shared memory access between processes. The obvious drawback of this approach is the additional cost of this hardware.
More recently, a two-level protocol approach for intra-node communication uses shared memory regions for small messages and OS support for page remapping individual buffers for large messages has been proposed. There has also been some recent work on optimizing MPI collective operations using shared memory for multi-core systems.
All communication between processes on the Cray XT use the Portals data movement layer. Two implementations of Portals are available. The default implementation is interrupt driven and all Portals data structures are contained inside the operating system. When a message arrives at the network interface of the Cray XT, the network interface interrupts the host processor, which then inspects the message header, traverses the Portals data structures and programs the DMA engines on the network interface to deliver the message to the appropriate location in the application process' memory. This implementation is referred to as Generic Portals ("GP") because it works for both Catamount on compute nodes and in Linux on service and I/O nodes. The other implementation supports a complete offload of Portals processes and uses no interrupts. When a message arrives at the network interface, all of the Portals processing occurs on the network interface itself. This implementation is known as Accelerated Portals ("AP") and is available only on Catamount, largely due to the simplified address translation that Catamount offers.
For intra-node transfers, the Generic Portals implementation takes advantage of the fact that Portals structures for both the source and destination are in kernel space. The kernel is able to traverse the structures and perform a single memory copy to move data between processes, since all of user space is also mapped into kernel space. At large message sizes, it becomes more efficient for the kernel to use the DMA engines on the network interface to perform the copy, so there is a crossover point where it switches to using this approach. For the Accelerated Portals implementation, all Portals data structures are in network interface memory, so it must traverse these structures in the same way it does for incoming network messages, so there is little advantage to intra-node transfers. In fact, intra-node transfers are slower going through the network interface rather than the operating system, due to the higher speed of the host processor relative to the network processor.

Direct access inter-process shared memory