Disclosed are a universal alpha-olefin polymerization industrial catalyst, and an application thereof, specifically an industrial production catalyst which consists of (A) a solid catalyst component, (B) a cocatalyst organoaluminium compound and (C) an external electron donor compound, and is used for various alpha-olefin polymerization or copolymerization processes. The solid catalyst component (A) is prepared from a dibutyl phthalate or diisobutyl phthalate and 9,9-bis(methoxymethyl)fluorene composite internal electron donor. A hydrocarbyl alkoxy silicon, an organic acid ester or a hydrocarbyl alkoxy silicon and organic acid ester composite acts as the external electron donor component (C). The solid catalyst component (A), the cocatalyst organoaluminium compound (B) and the external electron donor compound (C) are used together in industrial devices for various alpha-olefin polymerization or copolymerization processes to produce new grades of poly-alpha-olefins.

Currently, Ziegler-Natta-type (Z-N) catalysts are still main catalysts for industrial olefin polymerization. The Z-N catalysts for polymerization and copolymerization of olefins, especially alpha-olefins comprise (A) a titanium-containing magnesium chloride support catalyst component, (B) a cocatalyst organoaluminium compound and (C) an external electron donor capable of adjusting the structure and properties of poly-alpha-olefins. The titanium-containing magnesium chloride support catalyst component comprises an internal electron donor, and the internal electron donor is a core of the Z-N catalyst. In the present invention, the titanium-containing magnesium chloride support catalyst component is referred to as the catalyst component. The catalyst component may be prepared by three methods: co-precipitation by reaction of a magnesium chloride alcoholate, an internal electron donor and a titanium compound; supporting a titanium compound and an internal electron donor on a spherical magnesium chloride alcoholate support; and reaction of magnesium chloride generated from diethoxymagnesium and a titanium chloride compound with an internal electron donor.
The internal electron donor is a core of the Z-N catalyst, because the internal electron donor plays a key action in adjusting the catalyst activity and the structure of the poly-alpha-olefins, and is a core component of the catalyst component. However, it is not an easy task to develop an industrial production internal electron donor used for various processes. There are a small number of internal electron donors widely used in the industry and the internal electron donors have limited performance, which is difficult to satisfy the demands of the growing polyolefin industry. Recently, it is found that the use of a composite of two or more electron donors as an internal electron donor can produce a synergistic effect so as to obtain the performance different that of a single internal electron donor. The composite internal electron donor combines the advantages of the respective electron donors and even has new properties due to the synergistic effect. The performance of the catalyst component prepared using a composite of two electron donors as an internal electron donor can be adjusted, so as to obtain poly-alpha-olefins meeting various growing grades and special performance and catalyst components meeting the industrial demands. The preparation of a catalyst component using a composite of two electron donors as an internal electron donor is a new idea and a new method for developing new catalyst components having excellent overall performance or some good performance. Although there are many researches on using a composite of two electron donors as an internal electron donor, a universal industrial production catalyst component suitable for various processes has not been reported.
An internal electron donor as a composite internal electron donor for industrial polymerization catalysts must meet basic requirements in industrial production, such as stable source, low price, stable performance, special performance, and adjustable performance, etc.
Dibutyl phthalate and diisobutyl phthalate (collectively di-(n)isobutyl phthalate) are internal electron donors commonly used in current industrial Z-N catalysts, and have good overall performance and moderate price, but suffer from some problems in safety, low activity at a lower polymerization temperature, and absence of special performance for polymers. In contrast, 9,9-bis(methoxymethyl)fluorene has outstanding special performance such as high catalyst activity, low polymerization temperature, high molecular weight of polyolefins, high tacticity of polyolefins, narrow molecular weight distribution, can serve as both internal electron donor and external electron donor, and therefore, is an important electron donor.
The present applicant develops an industrial production method of 9,9-bis(methoxymethyl)fluorene (CN1166608C), and establishes a production device, and its product 9,9-bis(methoxymethyl)fluorene has been supplied to the international market.
Currently, the preparation of catalyst components using a composite of two electron donors as an internal electron donor all stay at the level of combining electron donors empirically through experimentation, and there is a lack of rational methods to guide the study of internal electron donor composite catalyst components. As result, not only a desirable preparation formulation of a composite catalyst component could not be obtained, but also great waste of internal electron donors may be caused, and screening good internal electron donors requires the performance of a large number of experiments and the consumption of a lot of time, man-power, and material resources.

Universal alpha-olefin polymerization catalyst, and application thereof


A heat dissipation apparatus for circuit boards includes a heat transfer plate, at least one heat transfer tube located on the heat transfer plate, a first radiator located on the heat transfer plate, a shell mounted onto the heat transfer plate, an airflow generator located in the shell, at least one latch member latching on the heat transfer plate, and a filter located on the shell. The heat dissipation apparatus is mounted onto a circuit board (such as, but not limited to, interface card, processor circuit board) for discharging heat generated by various elements to ensure stable operations of the elements.

The present invention relates to a heat dissipating apparatus for circuit boards and particularly a heat dissipating apparatus mounted onto a circuit board (processor circuit board or interface card) for dispersing heat generated by the elements on the circuit board.
In computer products, heat dissipation is a problem that often baffles users. The computers often malfunction or not able to operate due to overheating. Thus heat dissipation has become a critical issue most vendors are trying to resolve. Conventional heat dissipation apparatus include radiation sheets, air fans and heat transfer tubes. The radiation sheet usually has a plurality of metal fins located on one side thereof to reduce the temperature of computer devices. The commonly used one is a passive radiation sheet. It can generate convection or does not need additional airflow to disperse heat. The radiation sheet mainly aims at increasing the radiation area. While the radiation sheet can increase the radiation area, heat energy still has to be discharged by airflow in the surroundings. The air fan aims at improving heat discharge. In general, the air fan generates airflow to carry heat energy away from the radiation sheet. The heat transfer tube is an advanced technique adopted on electronic devices. It is made from pure oxygen-free copper tubes and copper meshes filled with pure water or acetone as working fluid. The fluid at the heat receiving end is vaporized to become vapor phase. The vapor flows in the hollow tube to a cooling end to be cooled and condensed to the fluid phase again. The condensate is seeped and returns to the heat receiving end through a capillary structure in the copper mesh to complete the heat absorption and discharge cycle. By means of the phase changes of the working fluid, a great amount of heat energy can be transferred by a small temperature difference. However, all the heat dissipation techniques mentioned above neglect to discharge heat energy outside the machine casing. As a result, the discharged heat energy still remains inside the machine casing, and heat dissipation is not very effective.
Therefore the primary object of the invention is to resolve the aforesaid disadvantages. The invention provides a heat dissipation apparatus mounting onto a circuit board and through an airflow generator to suck in clean and cool air from outside or within the computer casing and to discharge extra heat energy generated by the circuit board through an opening formed on a metal plate located at the rear side of the circuit board outside or in the computer casing so that heat generated by the circuit board won""t be trapped inside the computer casing or the circuit board. As the clean and cool air is drawn from outside or inside the machine casing, operation temperature of the circuit board may be reduced and heat dissipation may be achieved effectively, and operation stability of the circuit board can be ensured and service life can be improved.
In order to achieve the foregoing object, the heat dissipation apparatus of the invention includes a heat transfer plate, at least one heat transfer tube located on the heat transfer plate, a first radiator located on the heat transfer plate, a shell mounted onto the heat transfer plate, an airflow generator located in the shell, at least one latch member latching on the heat transfer plate, and a filter located on the shell. The heat transfer plate absorbs thermal energy and transfers to the heat transfer tube. The heat transfer tube transfers the thermal energy to the first radiator. The airflow generator sucks in air to discharge heat to achieve the heat dissipation object.

Heat dissipating apparatus for circuit boards


A solid-state imaging device includes an imaging element and a logic element. The imaging element includes a first semiconductor substrate, a first wiring layer, and a first metal layer, in which a pixel region which is a light sensing surface is formed. The logic element includes a second semiconductor substrate, a second wiring layer, and a second metal layer, in which a signal processing circuit that processes a pixel signal obtained at the pixel region is formed. The logic element is laminated to the imaging element so that the first metal layer and the second metal layer are bonded to each other, and the first metal layer and the second metal layer are formed on a region excluding a region in which a penetrating electrode layer penetrating a bonding surface of the imaging element and the logic element is formed.

The present disclosure relates to a semiconductor device such as a solid-state imaging device, a manufacturing method thereof, and an electronic apparatus such as a camera including the solid-state imaging device.
In recent years, miniaturization and multilayering of inner wirings due to high integration of LSI (large-scale integrated circuits) have been proceeding. However, the high cost of a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus due to the miniaturization greatly affects the cost of LSI. In addition, a method which mixes and disposes a logic circuit, memory, an imaging device, or the like on single chip is performed. However, in order to perform the mixing and disposing while keeping process characteristics in each device to the maximum, complication and cost increase of the process may not be able to be avoided.
Under such circumstances, the following method is performed. That is, by bonding and laminating the single function LSIs (a logic circuit, memory, and an imaging element) with a wafer level and a chip level, a single chip is achieved without sacrificing the integration of the LSI having high performance. Consideration with respect to a configuration, which obtains electric conduction between laminated wafers or chips in a via in which insulating films are adhered and penetrated, has also been proceeding. However, when the semiconductor elements are close to each other, problems such as influence of electromagnetic waves generated by operation of mutual elements and crosstalk occur. In addition, malfunction due to heat generated by operation of mutual elements is also a problem.
Particularly, when an imaging element and an image processing element are laminated, problems such as an increase of dark current and increase of white noise in the imaging element due to heat generated by the operation of the image processing element occur. In addition, when a logic circuit (a metal wiring) is disposed under the imaging element, incident light is reflected at a wiring metal layer, the reflected light is returned to a photoelectric conversion region, and a problem which affects imaging performance also occurs.
As a method solving the above-described problems, in Japanese Patent No. 4379295, a configuration in which a conductive metal plate having a penetration electrode is interposed between mutual elements is suggested. However, in the configuration, problems such as an increase in the number of manufacturing steps and increase of the cost, a problem such as difficulty corresponding to miniaturization of the element, or a problem such as difficulty for application to bonding of wafer-to-wafer occur.

Solid-state imaging device, semiconductor device, manufacturing methods thereof, and electronic apparatus


A method for conveying a message to a user of a mobile device. The mobile device includes a display and memory. Message content is transferred from a server attached to the mobile device over a mobile network. Metadata is also transferred from the server. The metadata includes instructions for displaying the message content. The message content and the metadata are stored in the memory. The message content is read from the memory and the message is displayed on the display according to the instructions. The reading and displaying is performed by an by an application previously installed on the mobile device. The display events are logged to produce a log stored in the memory and the log is periodically transferred to the server. Preferably, the message content is provided by a customer and the message content stored on the server is targeted for the user. The customer receives the log from the server and preferably the customer subsidizes use of the mobile device based on the log.

The present invention relates to transmitting and display of visual messages, banners, commercial logos, short video messages on connected mobile devices including wireless, e.g. cellular, telephones, and personal digital assistants.
Since the advent of telephone communications and its modern day incarnation cellular communications, telecommunications have always followed the same basic business model. The model has always been characterized by a consumer paying for connectivity and services based on either the amount of time or the amount of bandwidth consumed.
In other fields of communications; namely broadcast communications the model is different in that some communication platforms provide a model through which the consumer does not pay for either connectivity or bandwidth. In these models the connectivity and bandwidth are paid for by advertising revenues. Such is the case with commercial television, commercial radio, newspapers and many popular Internet web sites.
Today's new devices, both wired and wireless, contain a myriad of features once thought impossible or not relevant. Features include multimedia messaging, video and audio support, media management, multi-channel/multi-system communications and more. Today it is quite common to find a phone with a color screen capable of displaying rich media such as animations, video clips and pictures. Such a screen has had limited effect as a commercial medium until now.
There is considerable prior art in the area of advertising using cellular telephones. In US patent application publication 20040259599, a cellular phone is composed of a housing, a keyboard, first and second display devices, a memory, a receiver-transmitter, and a controller computer. The memory stores the advertising information. The controller computer is programmed to receive the advertising information through the receiver-transmitter, to control the first display device in response to instructions received through the keyboard, and to control the second display device to display the advertising information on a screen of the second display device during a phone call established through the receiver-transmitter in response to operation of the keyboard by a user.
In US patent application publication 20040224705, an advertiser transmits advertising contents from a contents server to a portable telephone. A user displays the advertising contents on the display unit in the rear face and the like of the portable telephone in public places and the like so as to advertise the contents to a third party. The advertiser shares a part of the communication fee for compensating the user for displaying the advertisement.
In US patent application publication 20040267615, a method of presenting advertising to a consumer employs use of telephone calls, whether accessed by toll-free number, by use of calling cards or service access cards or other account access mode. When a user makes a call, and attempts to access the service, to access an account, or uses a calling card, an advertisement is presented to the user prior to allowing access to the service, prior to allowing access to the account or prior to connecting the telephone call. The user is encouraged to listen to the ad in exchange for a free telephone call service or for entry into a game of chance such as a wining number drawing.
None of the prior art references disclose unobtrusive advertising in a mobile device using the broadcast media business model.
There is thus a need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have a method of a central server and client software which together form a network through which advertising messages are transmitted from the server to the client according to commercial targeting business rules utilizing the broadcast media business model and in which the advertisements are unobtrusively displayed to the user.
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open international standard for applications that use wireless communication, for example Internet access from a mobile phone. WAP was designed to provide services equivalent to a Web browser with some mobile-specific additions, being specifically designed to address the limitations of very small portable devices.
Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a form of multiplexing and a method of multiple access that does not divide up the channel by time (as in TDMA), or frequency (as in FDMA), but instead encodes data with a certain code associated with a channel to perform the multiplexing. CDMA also refers to digital cellular telephony systems that make use of this multiple access scheme, such as those pioneered by Qualcomm, or W-CDMA.
CDMA2000 is a family of third-generation (3G) mobile telecommunications standards that use CDMA, a multiple access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, data, and signaling data (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile phones and cell sites. It is the second generation of CDMA digital cellular.
W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) is a type of 3G cellular network. W-CDMA is a wideband spread-spectrum 3G mobile telecommunication air interface that utilizes code division multiple access (or CDMA the general multiplexing scheme, not to be confused with CDMA the standard).
The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a popular standard for mobile phones in the world. GSM differs significantly from its predecessors in that both signaling and speech channels are digital, which means that it is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system.
DECT or Digital Enhanced (former European) Cordless Telecommunications is an ETSI standard for digital portable phones, commonly used for domestic or corporate purposes. DECT can also be used for wireless data transfers.
Integrated Digital Enhanced Network, (iDEN), is a mobile communications technology, developed by Motorola, which provides its users the benefits of a trunked radio and a cellular telephone.
Java Micro Edition (Java ME or J2ME), is a runtime and collection of Java APIs for the development of software for resource constrained devices such as PDAs, cell phones and other consumer appliances. Java ME was designed by Sun Microsystems and is a replacement for a similar technology PersonalJava.
Symbian OS is an operating system, designed for mobile devices, with associated libraries, user interface frameworks and reference implementations of common tools, produced by Symbian Ltd. Symbian is currently owned by BenQ, Ericsson, Panasonic, Nokia, Siemens AG and Sony Ericsson
Windows Mobile is a compact operating system for mobile devices based on the Microsoft Win32 API. Devices which run Windows Mobile include Pocket PCs, Smartphones, and Portable Media Centers. The Microsoft .Net Compact Framework is a streamlined version of the .NET Framework that is designed to run on mobile devices with limited memory, resources, and battery power, including smart devices like personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and set-top boxes. The .NET Compact Framework includes the base class libraries from the full .NET Framework and a few libraries designed specifically for mobile devices such as Windows CE InputPanel.
(Reference: Wikipedia)
The term "user" as used herein is the consumer of a mobile device, e.g. cellular telephone.
The term "customer" as used herein is the entity that provides message content, e.g advertisements for displaying on the mobile device.
The term "idle" when referring to a mobile device means that the device is not undergoing active communications intended for the users, i.e. not talking and not receiving a message from another service, e.g SMS.

System and method for transmitting and display of visual messages on screens of connected mobile devices


A liquid lens includes a vessel having an inner wall and configured to contain liquid, an electrolyte liquid and a non-electrolyte liquid forming an interface therebetween and being contained in the vessel, and a voltage applying unit which applies a voltage to the electrolyte liquid. A shape of the interface between the electrolyte liquid and the non-electrolyte liquid is changed by application of the voltage. The inner wall of the vessel has varying affinity with the non-electrolyte liquid depending on a position on the inner wall where an end of the interface contacts the inner wall; and the affinity on the side of the inner wall where the non-electrolyte liquid is situated is lower than the affinity on the side of the inner wall where the electrolyte liquid is situated.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid lens with variable refractive power and an apparatus incorporating the liquid lens.
2. Description of the Related Art
Liquid lenses have been studied and developed as a form of lens with variable refractive power.
Among several types of liquid lenses, a liquid lens which utilizes the principle of electrowetting has been intensively studied. The electrowetting effect has been defined as the change in solid-electrolyte contact angle due to an applied potential difference between the solid (electrode) and the electrolyte. Thus, electrowetting involves modifying the surface tension of liquids on a solid surface using a voltage. By applying a voltage, the wetting properties of a hydrophobic surface can be modified and the surface becomes increasingly hydrophilic (wettable). Applying this principle to a liquid lens, an angle between an interface between an electrolyte liquid and a non-electrolyte liquid and a solid member which the two liquids are in contact with (hereinafter, this angle is referred to as a "contact angle") is varied when a voltage is applied between the electrolyte liquid and an electrode.
Such electrowetting lenses are considered to be beneficial for certain imaging applications due to their rapid operation, sufficient surface accuracy of the interface, and the potential of low manufacturing cost resulting from the reduction in the size of the lens and the reduction in the number of parts.
The electrowetting lens incorporates an electrically conductive electrolyte liquid and a non-conductive non-electrolyte liquid with different refractive indices. The conductive electrolyte liquid and the non-conductive non-electrolyte liquid are immiscible liquids, that is, do not mix with each other but instead form a contact interface therebetween. Since these two liquids are sealed, application of a voltage between the electrolyte liquid and an electrode layer, which is disposed via an insulating layer, changes a contact angle of an end of the interface while the volume of the liquids remains unchanged.
The change in the contact angle causes a change in the sphere radius of curvature of the interface in accordance with the contact angle and a difference between the refractive indices of the two liquids induces a change in the optical refractive power. These two liquids typically are the same in density because a difference in density causes a distorted shape of a spherical surface of the interface due to the influence of gravity which leads to insufficient optical performance.
PCT Japanese Translation Patent Publication No. 2001-519539 (hereinafter "Patent Document 1") discloses an invention to reduce inconvenience of a deviation of the center of a droplet of an insulating liquid from its original central axis due to a deformation which the droplet undergoes when a focal length of a lens is varied by the deformation of the liquid in an electrically conductive liquid as a result of application of a voltage to the electrically conductive liquid.
Patent Document 1 discloses causing a change, on a region basis, in "wettability" of an inner wall of a dielectric chamber which the electrically conductive liquid and droplets of the insulating liquid disposed in the electrically conductive liquid are in contact with. In particular, Patent Document 1 discloses a liquid lens of which an inner wall surface of a chamber is processed to reduce "wettability" to the electrically conductive liquid in a radial direction toward the central axis O.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-293349 (hereinafter "Patent Document 2") discloses a liquid lens of which the shape of a contact surface which a liquid is in contact with is devised such that a change in curvature caused by application of a voltage is made in a more or a less sensitive manner.
In particular, Patent Document 2 implies that a change in the shape of a contact surface in which a liquid constituted by a base surface of an electrical conductive material coated with an insulating layer (i.e., an electrically conductive liquid and a non-electrically conductive liquid) may cause a change in curvature of a lens: a convex contact surface can make the change in a less sensitive manner and a concave contact surface can make the change in a more sensitive manner.
Patent Document 1 attempts to align the center of the droplet constituted by the insulating liquid with the central axis O of the droplet by causing "wettability" of the inner wall surface of the chamber with respect to the electrically conductive liquid to be lowered in a radial direction toward the central axis O. However, no attempt is made to achieve predetermined refractive power when a low voltage is applied.
Patent Document 2 discloses increasing sensitivity to a change in curvature of lens in response to application of a voltage by devising the shape of the contact surface which a liquid is in contact with (specifically, not providing a linearly tapered sectional shape of a common ring electrode but providing a concave-curved surface).
However, in an attempt to obtain a liquid lens with a concave contact surface, regarding a section which includes a cylindrical optical axis and is parallel to the optical axis, it is necessary to provide a concave ring electrode and an insulating layer which constitute the contact surface: such a concave surface is difficult to process and sufficient accuracy is required to process the same. Such a liquid lens is expensive to manufacture and, therefore, is difficult to be used as a liquid lens suited for mass production.

Liquid lens and apparatus incorporating the same


A tablet package conveying apparatus for a tablet automatic packing machine is disclosed. The apparatus can offset a speed difference among conveyed tablet packages while they are conveyed, such that the conveyed tablet packages discharged from the lower side of the tablet automatic packing machine can be more smoothly conveyed to the side wall of the tablet automatic packing machine.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tablet automatic packing machine, and more particularly to a tablet package conveying apparatus for a tablet automatic packing machine which is capable of offsetting speed differences among conveyed tablet packages while they are conveyed, such that the conveyed tablet packages discharged from the lower side of the tablet automatic packing machine can be more smoothly conveyed to the side wall of the tablet automatic packing machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
A prior art tablet automatic packing machine including a main body 100, as shown in FIG. 9, is configured such that: a plurality of tablet cassettes 200 are arranged on a shelf of the main body 100, in which the shelf is located a predetermined height from the bottom of the main body; a hopper 300 is installed under the tablet cassettes 200, a pair of pouch rollers 400 are installed at and under both sides of the hopper 300; a pair of drive rollers 500 are installed under the hopper 300; and a sealing unit 600 is installed between the hopper 300 and the pair of drive rollers 500 to heat and seal pouches.
Such prior art tablet automatic packing machine is operated such that: when tablets are discharged from tablet cassettes 200 to the hopper 300, the tablets in the hopper 300 are contained between pouch papers, which are drawn from the pair of the pouch rollers 400 as the pair of drive rollers 500 are operated; and when the pouch papers containing the tablets are heated to be sealed by the sealing unit 600, while they are downwardly conveyed, thereby achieving tablet packages P that are downwardly discharged from the main body 100.
However, even though the prior art tablet automatic packing machine successively and automatically seals the pouch papers to contain tablets and conveys the tablet packages thereunder, the tablet packages are frequently entangled at the bottom.
Also, since the tablet packages are tangled at the bottom, the tablet automatic packing machine must be installed relatively high, which causes a problem that its installation space is restricted.

Tablet package conveying apparatus for tablet automatic packing machine


The present invention concerns an optical fiber 10 comprising a substantially pure silica glass core 12, a concentric tin-doped core/cladding interface region 14, and a concentric fluorine-doped depressed cladding layer 16. The tin-doped core/cladding interface region 14 comprises a low concentration gradient of tin dioxide, which advantageously results in a de minimis refractive index change, resistance to hydrogen incursion, and thermal stability of any fiber Bragg gratings written into the interface region 14.

Available electronic sensors measure a variety of values, such as, pH, color, temperature, or pressure, to name a few. For systems that require a string of electronic sensors over a long distance, e.g., twenty to thirty kilometers or longer, powering the electronic sensors becomes difficult. Conventionally, the powering of electronic sensors requires running electrical wire from a power source to each of the electronic sensors. Powering electronic sensors electrically has been unreliable in the petroleum and gas industry. For example, electric wires spanning long distances are subject to a significant amount of interference and noise, thereby reducing the accuracy of the electronic sensors.
Optical fibers have become the communication medium of choice for long distance communication due to their excellent light transmission characteristics over long distances and the ease of fabrication of lengths of many kilometers. Further, the light being transmitted can interrogate the sensors, thus obviating the need for lengthy electrical wires. This is particularly important in the petroleum and gas industry, where strings of electronic sensors are used in wells to monitor downhole conditions.
As a result, in the petroleum and gas industry, passive fiber optic sensors are used to obtain various downhole measurements, such as pressure or temperature. A string of optical fibers within a fiber optic system is used to communicate information from wells being drilled, as well as from completed wells. The optical fiber could be deployed with a single point pressure-temperature fiber optic sensor. Also, a series of weakly reflecting fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) may be written into a length of optical fiber or a single point Fabry-Perot sensor may be spliced into a length of optical fiber. An optical signal is transmitted down the fiber, which is reflected and/or scattered back to a receiver and analyzed to characterize external parameters along the length of the optical fiber. Using this information, downhole measurements including but not limited to temperature, pressure, and chemical environment may be obtained.
However, when conventional optical fibers such as germanium-doped silica fibers are exposed to the intense heat, pressure, and hydrogen-rich environment of an oil well attenuation losses increase. This increase in the loss of optical strength of the signal is due, in part, to the diffusion of hydrogen into the glass structure. Hydrogen atoms bond to any open or weak bonds in the glass structure, such as to certain germanium atoms in the vicinity of germanium-oxygen deficient centers or to form SiOH and/or GeOH. For germanium doped fibers, the attenuation increases rapidly with increases in temperature. As temperatures in a typical oil or gas well generally range from slightly less than surface temperature near the surface to between about 90 to 250 degrees Centigrade (C), and possibly 350 degrees C., conventional germanium-doped optical fibers are generally not sufficiently stable for prolonged use at depth in a well. While coating germanium-doped silica fibers with carbon or similar molecularly dense materials is an effective way to reduce hydrogen diffusion into the glass at lower temperatures, such as below 120 degrees C., the effectiveness of the carbon coating diminishes rapidly as the temperature increases.
It is known that fiber cores having alternate glass structures can be more stable when exposed to the type of environment encountered in a well. For example, pure silica glass core fibers are particularly suitable for use in oil wells as the pure silica is resistant to hydrogen incursion at high temperatures. However, at lower temperatures, such as the temperature in the upper portion of a well, attenuation losses from molecular hydrogen can be relatively large.
Therefore, a need exists for optical fiber that is resistant to hydrogen incursion and the correlated induced attenuation losses over a wider range of temperatures.

Optical fiber with tin doped core-cladding interface


Methods and systems describe providing a compilable machine code program from dynamic language code. First, the system receives a computer program consisting of code in a dynamic language. For each dynamic instruction within the code, the system: identifies all function calls within the code which may call the dynamic instruction; generates a super slice callgraph for all identified function calls for the dynamic instruction, including dependency relationships for instance variables and static variables within time constraints; and generates a set of slices for the dynamic instruction. The system then compiles and executes each slice to identify one or more values for each dynamic instruction. Next, the system updates the computer program such that each of at least a subset of the dynamic instructions is replaced with machine code instructions based on the corresponding values.

Within the field of computer science, a major topic of discussion and debate revolves around the merits of dynamic languages and static languages. Many programmers and developers prefer to write computer programs in dynamic languages, such as Python, Ruby, and PHP. Dynamic languages can be altered at runtime, and have flexibility in how a program should be executed at runtime. In contrast to a static or non-dynamic language, these dynamic runtime instructions can be defined by the program itself. While this is powerful and flexible, a major downside is that the usage of dynamic instructions is often very slow.
One example is the use of reflection instructions in Java. Reflection instructions are dynamic instructions defined in an API which is used to examine or modify the behavior of methods, classes, and interfaces at runtime. Reflection gives information about the class to which an object belongs, as well as the methods of that class which can be executed by using the object. Through reflection, methods can be invoked at runtime as long as the name and parameter types of the method are known. This allows the program to be built at runtime.
While reflection is useful for a number of reasons within Java, it has been empirically demonstrated that it can be up to 1,000 times slower than a similar program using direct code. This is due to existing Java interpreters not being able to optimize around the reflection instructions in an adequate way.
Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation optimizations can sometimes work to at least partly mitigate this problem. For example, when used in a program, reflection instructions may be potentially used in hundreds of thousands of different contexts. If one programmatically determines that there are 500 possible contexts on which the usage may turn, and puts the instructions in the program directly, then this "code specialization" can result in benefits. Bounded formal logic can also be used for some optimization. For example, if there is a dynamic instruction which iterates on a list, formal logic may be applied to reason that this list will only have a certain number of elements, and will never jump from 500 elements to 10,000 elements. As a result, optimization can be achieved by building a program around the assumption that the list will have a specific fixed number of elements. This method involves adding constraints to the program based on what can be deduced from the program. While these lead to optimizations, they are not large enough to make a significantly meaningful impact on speed to mitigate the often drastic slowdown caused by invoking dynamic instructions. One problem with this approach is that it is focused on reasoning about the program in the abstract, and attempting to prove formal logic in order to add constraints for optimization, but it fails to actually work directly with the program, including actual execution of the program in order to gain insights and add constraints.
In computer science, partial evaluation is a technique for program optimization by specialization in respect to either static or dynamic inputs. A computer program prog is seen as a mapping of input data into output data:
            prog                    :                                                    I        static            ×              I        dynamic              →    O    ,where Istatic, the static data, is the part of the input data known at compile time. The partial evaluator transforms
      〈          prog      ,              I        static              〉    into                    prog        *                          :                                                    I        dynamic              →    O  by precomputing all static input at compile time.                prog*            is called the "residual program" and should run more efficiently than the original program. The act of partial evaluation results in "residual" code, or code left over after evaluating parts of the expression.
Supercompilation is a program optimization technique that can be approached as a generalization of partial evaluation. The idea behind partial evaluation is that many parts of a program can be evaluated at the time of compiling. Supercompilation extends this, evaluating things that can't be fully done at compile time by deferring some computation while maintaining the evaluation. Partial evaluation and supercompilation are general parts of metacompilation, which involves metasystems.
The versioned dependency graph (VDG), when implemented, enables high compute efficiencies of the program analysis when compared to traditional solutions of system dependency or program dependency graphs. A versioned dependency graph may function to identify code instructions and map the code instructions. The versioned dependency graph may indicate the threadbility of a group or list of instructions by identifying a threading weight, or a threading score associated with a group or list of instructions within the versioned dependency graph. The threading strategy derived from the versioned dependency graph enables parallelization of one or more disparate blocks of code.
In computer programming, program slicing or "slicing" is a method used by programmers for abstracting from programs. The present invention allows for slices to be executable, whereas traditional slices are not. Program slicing is the computation of the set of program statements, the "program slice," that may affect values at some point of interest in the program. A static program slice S consists of all statements in program P that may affect the value of variable v in a statement x. The slice is defined for a seed C=(x,v) where x is a statement in program P and v is variable in x. A static slice includes all the statements that can affect the value of variable vat statement x for any possible input at the point of interest. Static slices are computed by backtracking dependencies between statements. More specifically, to compute the static slice for (x,v), all statements that can directly affect the value of v must be found before statement x is encountered. Recursively, for each statement y which can affect the value of v in statement x, slices are computed for all variables z in y that affect the value of v. The union of all those slices is the slice group for (x,v). All slices disclosed herein are slice groups.
Thus, there is a need in the field of computer science to create a new and useful system and method for generating a compiled, optimized machine code program from dynamic language code to provide the benefits and flexibility of writing dynamic language code with the speed optimizations of static language compiled code. The source of the problem, as discovered by the inventors, is a lack of code optimization and conversion of dynamic instructions to static instructions based on insights gained from executing the program.

Generating compilable machine code programs from dynamic language code


Architecture that maintains the user experience as close as possible to the user experience when dealing with the usual/regular forms and data provided in an office application when dealing with hybrid forms and hybrid data. Synchronization of the hybrid data to single-master and multi-masters systems is accomplished when the associated hybrid client goes offline, changes are made to the hybrid data, and then the client comes back online. For example, where the single-master system is a line-of-business (LOB) server system and the multi-master system is an officer server that employs collaboration capability, the architecture allows office users to access, manipulate, and share LOB entity information using collaborative means, while at the same time, ensuring data and business process consistency for the LOB entity in the LOB system.

Software vendors develop suites of applications for the purpose of providing a common user experience (UX) across a multiple applications and associated software functionality to a large set of users. However, corporations will have many different software requirements to handle human resources, financials, products, line-of-business (LOB) information, and so on.
It can be desirable to extend the common UX into the business realm by allowing LOB information and processes to be surfaced within the familiar UX of the office suite. This introduces other problems, however, particularly when handling data in offline scenarios, which oftentimes can occur when users travel, for example.
In a purely pessimistic offlining model, data about to be modified is locked and then unlocked after modification, which captures how typical on-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems behave. Alternatively, an optimistic offlining (and concurrency) model does not lock the data prior to the user making modifications.
In optimistic offlining in LOB systems, the LOB data and processes can be made available to the end-user in a local datastore while offline. When back online, the offline changes are seamlessly integrated with the LOB system, and any relevant changes in the LOB system are seamlessly integrated into the local datastore.
However, there are many limitations in the optimistic model. For example, there can be conflicting changes made by two different users while offline, which then need to be reconciled when both user systems are back online, the user could be dealing with out-of-date data while offline, the user's operations could be rejected (when back online) long after the operations are fired by the user (when previously offline), etc.
In contrast, there can be advantages of optimistic model. The model is resilient to connectivity issues, and changes coming in from multiple sources can be handled at the same time (referred to as "multiple-masters of data"). Additionally, the optimistic model works well when dealing with personal information (since conflicts in that case will only be with the user's own changes, which is very rare, e.g., user errors, out-of-date clients, data corruptions, etc., all of which are true exceptions), and the model works well when dealing with information that users explicitly collaborate upon (since information exchange is explicitly managed by a small known set of users, so even if conflicts occur, the users can work collaboratively to resolve the conflicts).
Most LOB systems do not employ optimistic offlining and concurrency models. LOB systems are masters (single masters) of the LOB data, and the actions that can be taken on the LOB systems are strictly controlled by business rules, not ad-hoc decisions of end-users. This is necessary since the accuracy and reliability of business data has direct influence on an enterprise's bottom line and can have legal/regulatory implications as well. Thus, the offline data synchronization when surfacing business data in office suite applications can be problematic.

Blending single-master and multi-master data synchronization techniques


A method for generating a magnetic resonance images is provided. A magnetic resonance imaging excitation is applied. A plurality of magnetic resonance image signals is acquired. The plurality of image signals is combined iteratively by using a regularized decomposition algorithm. An image created from combining the plurality of image signals iteratively is displayed.

This invention relates generally to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of an object having different chemical species therein, such as fat and water, and more particularly the invention relates to species imaging in the presence of magnetic field (Bo) heterogeneity.
Reliable and uniform fat suppression is essential for accurate diagnoses in many areas of MRI. This is particularly true for sequences such as fast spin-echo (FSE), steady-state free precession (SSFP) and gradient echo (GRE) imaging, in which fat is bright and may obscure underline pathology. Although conventional fat saturation may be adequate for areas of the body with relative homogeneous Bo field, there may be many applications in which fat saturation routinely fails. This is particularly true for extremity imaging, off-isocenter imaging, large field of view (FOV) imaging, and challenging areas such as the brachial plexus and skull base, as well as many others. Short-TI inversion recovery (STIR) imaging provides uniform fat suppression, but at a cost of reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and mixed contrast that is dependent on T1. This latter disadvantage limits STIR imaging to T2 weighted (T2W) applications, such that current T1 weighted (T1W) applications rely solely on conventional fat-saturation methods. Another fat suppression technique is the use of spectral-spatial or water selective pulses; however, this method is also sensitive to field inhomogeneities.
"In and Out of Phase" Imaging was first described by Dixon in "Simple Proton Spectroscopic Imaging", Radiology (1984) 153:189-194, and was used to exploit the difference in chemical shifts between water and fat and in order to separate water and fat into separate images. Glover et al. further refined this approach, described in Glover G., "Multipoint Dixon Technique for Water and Fat Proton and Susceptibility Imaging", Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (1991) 1:521-530, with a 3-point method that accounts for magnetic field inhomogeneities created by susceptibility differences. This method was applied with FSE imaging by acquiring three images with the readout centered at the spin-echo for one image and symmetrically before and after the spin-echo in the subsequent two images.

The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University


There is provided an information management method used by a computer that manages a system storing key-data pairs, each including a key obtained by application of a predetermined function and data associated with the key, in such a way as to be distributed among a plurality of nodes. The method includes storing, in a management table, information on an identifier common to a plurality of systems, one or more keys commonly assigned to the identifier, and nodes assigned to the identifier; and reflecting, when a node whose assignment to the identifier has been once cancelled is reassigned to the identifier, the reassignment of the node into the management table, and implementing synchronization of one or more key-data pairs corresponding to the keys assigned to the identifier between the reassigned node and remaining nodes assigned to the identifier.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely and increasingly prevalent, which provides communication capabilities to various devices in the world to thereby allow the devices to perform remote measurements and realize the utilization of information collected from them. In the use of the IoT technology, there are needs for the development of technologies enabling more efficient management of vast amounts of information collected by various kinds of devices and faster search for desired information.
In order to manage vast amount of information with great efficiency, there is a technology called autonomous distributed key-value store (KVS), which stores information pieces (values), each associated with a single key used in search operations, in a distributed manner across a plurality of locations (nodes). In such an autonomous distributed KVS system, an algorithm such as a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) or a Skip Graph is used in order to uniquely determine a node responsible for storing key-value pairs to thereby allow a search for the value associated with a given key.
In Chord, a DHT-based implementation, for example, each node is assigned, based on predetermined rules, to one of a plurality of identifiers (ID's) set in advance, and each key is assigned to a node according to the node assignment to the individual identifiers. That is, the node assignment and key assignment made in association with a node entry to or exit from the autonomous distributed KVS system are determined autonomously. Therefore, the autonomous distributed KVS system supports straightforward addition and removal of nodes, thereby providing high scalability.
There is a proposed technique for allowing flexible changes in data assignment by storing, in a node, key information and data in association with each other, managing the node in association with a range to which the hash value of the key information belongs, and making changes in the mapping of ranges to nodes in changing the storage location of the data. In addition, there is a proposed method of identifying the range to which the key of data stored in a node having exited (lost data) belongs by using information for managing the increase or decrease in nodes. Further, there is a proposed method of determining, in storing registration information pieces each including a key and original data of a data item corresponding to the key in DHT nodes, the order of the registration information pieces according to hash values of the keys and determining registration information pieces to be stored in the same node based on the determined order.
See, for example, the following documents:
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2013-61739
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2015-35182
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-20757
David Karger et al., "Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distributed Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web", Proceedings of the twenty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (STOC '97), May 1997.
In an autonomous distributed KVS system, key-value (KV) pairs stored in a node are lost as the node exits. Therefore, the autonomous distributed KVS system replicates key-value pairs and stores the copies in a plurality of nodes, as in the above-mentioned proposed technique of Karger et al., to thereby prevent the loss of the key-value pairs. However, if frequent node entries and exits occur, high communication load between nodes (inter-node communication load) involved in replicating key-value pairs to other nodes is imposed.
In addition, each node entry or exit entails an update of information used for node searching. Therefore, frequent node entries and exits may result in high processing load of nodes. For example, in a system having, as its nodes, mobile terminals likely to enter and exit frequently, their communication environments may change over a short period of time and it may therefore frequently occur that a node having once exited re-enters the system shortly after the exit. Executing, for each re-entry, the same processing as for a new entry (such as replication of key-value pairs) may cause the inter-node communication load and the processing load of nodes to increase, leading to decreased performance of the system.

Method and apparatus for information management


Embodiments of this application relate to a policy determining method and a communications apparatus. The method includes: obtaining, by a policy control network element, policy information from a data analytics network element; and determining, by the policy control network element, an execution policy of a service based on the policy information. In the policy determining method in the embodiments of this application, dynamic adjustment and refined management on the execution policy can be implemented.

In a 5th generation (5G) communications network, a network data analytics function (NWDAF) network element is led. The NWDAF network element uses a big data analytics method to perform model training, and uses a trained model to analyze data. However, in the prior art, how to perform policy determining by using the NWDAF network element in the communications network is not provided.

Determining an execution policy of a service


A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for distribution of digital content such as audio or video uses a method to enhance security of the content from unauthorized access and use, including access by unauthorized players. The method does not necessarily require a token exchange and thereby minimizes storage demands on the server which distributes the digital content. The system generates and distributes keys for decryption of the digital content whereby the keys are unique to a specific player and user account.

The protection of digital content transferred between computers over a network and transferred from a computer or other host device or a server to an associated playback device is important for many organizations. The DRM process often involves encrypting the pieces of content (e.g., encrypting the binary form of the content) to restrict usage to those who have been granted a right to the content, which is for instance pieces of music or video programs.
Cryptography is the traditional protection method, but for many digital file transfer situations, a party that legitimately receives the content might try to break the DRM protection scheme, so as to give illicit access to third parties. Hence, an identified weak link in the DRM security is in the overall process, rather than the encryption scheme. For instance, one of the more successful DRM schemes distributes music and video content via the Internet. The DRM system distributes to a user's computer content that has been encrypted. Typically the content in encrypted form may also be downloaded, via a local connection such as a USB (Universal Serial Bus) connection, to an associated playback-only device such as an audio or video media player.
The present inventors have identified a potential security issue with this approach. There is a need to strengthen the security linking a particular playback device to the associated host device (computer) and also to the central server from which the content and/or DRM information is downloaded.

Security method and system for media playback devices


The optical lens embodiment of the invention refracts and reflects light emitted from the light emitting diode chips on a unique combination of curved surfaces to obtain the desired coupling to a lateral light guide. The system of curved surfaces redirects rays from multiple LED chips laterally by multiple refraction and/or reflection. The optical lens has an optical axis, and comprises a bottom surface and a curved reflecting surface having a concave side. The concave side is oriented to face said bottom surface at an oblique angle. The reflecting surface surrounds the optical axis. The lens comprises a first curved refracting surface having a concave side facing the concave side of the reflecting surface and a second refracting surface extending as a smooth curve from the bottom surface to the first refracting surface. Light entering the lens through the bottom surface and directly incident on the reflecting surface is reflected from the reflecting surface at its concave side to the first refracting surface and refracted by the first refracting surface to exit the lens in a lateral direction with respect to the optical axis of the lens. A first portion of light entering the lens through the bottom surface and directly incident on the second refracting surface is refracted by the second refracting surface to exit the lens in a lateral direction with respect to the optical axis of the lens. A second portion of light entering the lens through the bottom surface and directly incident on the second refracting surface is refracted by the second refracting surface to the first refracting surface, refracted by the first refracting surface to the reflecting surface, reflected by the reflecting surface at its concave side to the first refracting surface and refracted by the first refracting surface to exit the lens in a lateral direction with respect to the optical axis of the lens.

Recent progresses in the field of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have opened the field to new families of applications.
Improvements of internal quantum efficiency and improvement of the extraction efficiency strategies have led to LED chips that deliver high flux. By using high performance packages, LED-based devices at higher driving currents have been developed. Consequently, performance and reliability of LED-based devices have reached new standards, opening ways for high brightness, color-sensitive applications. With this level of performance, LEDs have become a viable alternative to Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp (CCFL) for LCD backlighting.
Compared to CCFL, LEDs offer a new level of flexibility to LCD designers. New generations of LEDs promise to reshape and eventually reduce power consumption. They also offer the possibility of an independent control of various combinations to produce the desired lighting effect.
For example, the response time of LEDs is much faster than the response time of CCFL and obviously much faster than the typical response time of the human eye. It is therefore possible to modulate sequentially the different LED chips to obtain the desired optical properties in terms of light level or color rendering. These factors contribute to the adoption of LEDs for LCD backlighting in place of CCFL. However some issues remain.
The lenses described in prior art for single chip devices are suited for operation with a single on-axis light-emitting chip (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,598,998/6,607,286/6,679,621). The dimensions of the lenses are typically 7 mm in diameter and 4 mm in height. Any variation of the position of the chip leads to a failure of the Total Internal Reflection (TIR) principle and undesired redirection of light outside of the desired angle for both TIR and reflective-coating designs.
Moreover single chip devices present several limitations for backlighting applications. For example each device emits a single color. When multiple single chip LED devices are used, the color mixing elements of the LCD backlighting system must take up the heavy burden of controlling the mixing of the different color light generated by the multiple single chip LED devices to deliver light of the desired color. Moreover, a LCD with multiple single-chip devices requires several layers of lightguide, light diffusers, and light shapers. Each of these elements reduces the overall light transmission of the system.
Multichip and multicolor LED devices perform a localized color mixing within the devices by controlling the light emission of the LED devices. This feature reduces the number of light diffusers and light shapers inside the LCD system. The transmittance of the system is improved as well as the overall brightness on the projection screen.
For multichip designs, the chips are not centered on the optical axis of the lens. Performances as low as 10-20% of light redirected laterally would be obtained with a lens for a single chip system. The major reason for the drop in performance is that light is emitted from a much wider area that can be at least 4 times larger than that of a single chip.
One solution can be to scale-up the dimensions of the optical lens. For example, for a 4-chip design the dimension of the lens can be multiplied by a factor 4 to keep the same level of performance. It means the dimensions of the lens would be typically 28 mm in diameter and 16 mm in height. This would be a barrier for any LCD application. The size, the weight and the cost of the lens would be far beyond the requirements of LCD TV and projectors.
It is therefore desirable to provide a new optical system that redirects and couples an optimal amount of light emitted by multiple light emitting diode chips into a lateral lightguide and therefore provide uniform illumination on the LCD screen.

Solid-state lateral emitting optical system


A server rack seismic restraint includes a rear restraint assembly configured to attach to a support surface that is operable to support a data center server rack. The rear restraint assembly includes at least one lateral member positioned to receive the server rack and restrain the server rack against lateral movement based on a force applied to the server rack; and an angled bracket positioned to receive the server rack and restrain the server rack against vertical movement based on the force applied to the server rack. The server rack seismic restraint also includes a front restraint assembly configured to attach to the support surface and engage the server rack to restrain the server rack against vertical movement based on the force applied to the server rack.

Computer data center equipment often must withstand external forces, such as seismic forces and otherwise. Often, restraining computer data center equipment, such as server racks, against seismic events requires substantial high strength brackets arranged with an optimal geometry. As the equipment rack weight and center of gravity height increases, so must the bracket strength requirement. Conventional restraint systems, therefore, may utilize a structure that is at least as tall as the server rack, thereby increasing costs and decreasing space availability which could otherwise be used for more racks. In addition, data center server racks may be mobile, thereby increasing the challenge of restraining the racks during a seismic event.

Method of installing a server rack in a data center


A number of electrical energy generating assemblies, such as assemblies 10, 240, and 400 which are disposed within a pipeline 12 or in close proximity to the inlet 11 and/or outlet portion 125 of the pipeline 12 and which are adapted to selectively generate electrical energy by use of the material 18 which normally flows through the pipeline 12 according to a certain process.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an energy generating assembly and to a method for generating energy and more particularly, to a number of dissimilar generating assemblies which are each uniquely adapted to be selectively placed within close proximity to flowing material, such as by way of example and without limitation, water, oil, natural gas, or some other medium, and/or immersed in such material, and/or within or in close proximity to a pipeline or another assembly and which are further uniquely adapted to be contacted by and/or receive such dissimilar materials and such contact is effective to produce electrical energy in an efficient and very cost effective manner.
2. Background of the Invention
Great interest exists in the field of renewable or alternate energy and such interest emanates, at least in part, by the perceived and/or very real future scarcity/cost of traditional energy generating fossil type fuels, such as oil and coal. This interest also exists due to the undesirable environmental impact of the use of such fossil fuels. Moreover, this interest also exists, at least in part, due to the undesirable and relatively large and adverse environmental impact due to extracting and utilizing such traditional fossil fuel materials.
Many attempts have been made to explore alternate or renewable energy methodologies and while some methodologies do appear promising (such as the use of solar cells), others have failed. But importantly, it is realized that there exists a wholly unfilled need for new and innovative alternate and renewable energy generation methodologies and assemblies, especially those assemblies and methodologies which do not require the extraction and use of fossil type fuel material, and the present invention(s) provide such a need.
By way of example and without limitation, there exists, within the United States alone, over fifteen thousand municipal wastewater treatment plant facilities (reported in the book entitled Wastewater Treatment Plants: Planning, Design, and Operation (2d Edition) by Syed R. Qasim and which is fully and completely incorporated herein by reference, word for word and paragraph for paragraph). Many thousands additional such treatment facilities are located outside of the United States. Turning each and every one of these facilities into an electrical power generating station, in a cost effective and "green" or renewable manner would be a great achievement and would not only help meet the energy needs of a growing society, but would help reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and reduce the need for diesel type back up generators, currently used at many of these facilities. Diesel fuel is costly and the creation, storage, and use of such diesel fuel is undesirable. Such energy generation also may be "cleanly" stored and used when the primary electrical power source is interrupted, thereby reducing the likelihood of the facilities being "down" or inoperable and "raw" type sewage being directly transmitted into the environment.
The present series of dissimilar inventions achieves these objectives and they do more. As will be seen from the following discussion, the series of dissimilar electrical energy generating assemblies use the very same wastewater treatment process to selectively generate the desired electricity. The treatment process does not change; rather these new and novel assemblies operate in an "in line" manner with very little impact to the treatment process, while allowing for the desired generation and storage of electrical energy to occur.

Energy generating assembly and a method for generating energy


A locking mechanism for locking a first member in any one of an infinite number of positions relative to a second member includes a resilient members for urging the first and second members toward each other to apply a friction force between the first and second members to prevent relative movement between the first and second members. An actuator member for releasing the friction force between the first and second members has a first position in which the first and second members are prevented from moving relative to each other. The actuator member has a second position in which the first and second members are positionable relative to each other. The locking mechanism includes a handle for moving the actuator member from its first position to its second position to release the friction force between the first and second members. The resilient members is operable to move the actuator member from its second position to its first position.

The present invention relates to a locking mechanism, and more specifically to a locking mechanism for locking a first member in any one of an infinite number of positions relative to a second member.
The locking mechanism of the present invention may be used in a steering column to lock a steering input shaft in any one of an infinite number of pivot positions relative to a steering column member, or the locking mechanism may be used to lock a first steering column member in any one of an infinite number of axial positions relative to a second steering column member.
A known locking mechanism is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,041,796. U.S. Pat. No. 4,041,796 discloses a locking mechanism for locking an input shaft of a steering column in any one of an infinite number of pivot positions relative to a steering column member. A spring applies a friction force to urge a supporting bracket connected with the input shaft to frictionally engage a connecting bracket connected with the steering column member to prevent relative movement between the supporting and connecting brackets. A surface of a cam engages a pressure plate to compress the spring. A handle connected to the cam is rotated to release the friction force applied by the spring and permit pivotal movement between the input shaft and the steering column member.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,874,480 discloses a locking mechanism for locking a rod in any one of an infinite number of axial positions relative to a cylindrical housing through which the rod extends. A coil spring having one end fixed relative to the housing is tightly wound around the rod to prevent relative movement between the rod and the housing. The spring is unwound from the rod to permit relative movement between the rod and the housing.


A flight control apparatus includes a detection unit that detects within a predetermined range of an air vehicle another air vehicle. A specifying unit specifies a type of the detected other air vehicle. A determining unit determines a possibility that the air vehicle and the other air vehicle will collide, based on an attribute relating to movement of the other air vehicle. When it is determined that a possibility of collision exists, a flight control unit controls the flight of the air vehicle according to the specified type of the other air vehicle to avoid collision with the other air vehicle.

Techniques for controlling flight of air vehicles are known. For example, Japanese Patent Application No. JP 2009-205652A discloses that an area in which moving objects often encounter each other is specified based on information relating to a position of a moving object and information relating to whether or not another moving object is present, and a movement plan is generated so as to avoid that area.

Flight control apparatus and flight control system


The present invention is related to intermediates useful in the preparation of pharmaceutically acceptable salts of (+)-7-[4-(4-fluorophenyl)-6-isopropyl-2-(methanesulfonyl-methyl-amino)-pyrimidin-5-yl]-(3R,5S)-dihydroxy-hept-6-enoic acid and polymorphs of said intermediates, methods for preparation thereof and use thereof.

(+)-7-[4-(4-fluorophenyl)-6-isopropyl-2-(methansulfonyl-methyl-amino)-pyrimidin-5-yl]-(3R,5S)-dihydroxy-hept-6-enoic acid (rosuvastatin) of the Formula (I) is a known compound which has been disclosed for the first time in European Patent No. 521471 in the form of the free acid and as certain pharmaceutically acceptable salts, e.g. rosuvastatin calcium salt of the Formula (IV)
as well as ammonium salts thereof.
Rosuvastatin zinc (2:1) salt of the Formula (V)
has been disclosed in Published Hungarian Patent Application P0600293 and in Published International Patent Application WO 2007119085.
According to the method of preparation disclosed in European Patent No. 521471, preparation of a rosuvastatin salt is carried out by saponifying a rosuvastatin ester of the general Formula (II) and if desired, the rosuvastatin salt thus obtained is transformed into rosuvastatin acid and either the directly obtained rosuvastatin salt or rosuvastatin free acid of the Formula (I) is transformed into a pharmaceutically acceptable salt, preferably into the calcium salt of the Formula (IV).
Rosuvastatin is an easily decomposing, light-sensitive compound, therefore further methods have been developed with the aim to obtain rosuvastatin in higher purity.
The chemical purity of pharmaceutically active ingredients is regulated by strict official norms issued by health authorities. Thus, according to the ICH Guidelines—even in the case of impurities with known chemical structure—the maximum limit concentration thereof is fixed at 0.1% in a pharmaceutically active ingredient.
Salts of rosuvastatin formed with amines are widely used during the manufacture of rosuvastatin salts used in the production of finished dosage forms. According to the state of the art, such salts of rosuvastatin formed with amines are transformed into a pharmaceutically acceptable alkali metal or alkali earth metal salts of rosuvastatin by setting the amine free from the salt using a stronger base and the thus obtained salt, which is usually an alkali metal salt, is subsequently transformed into the salt form used as active ingredient in the finished dosage form.
Published International Patent Application WO 01060804 is related to crystalline ammonium, methylammonium, ethylammonium, diethanolammonium, tris(hydroxymethyl)-methylammonium, benzylammonium or 4-methoxybenzyl-ammonium salts, which are transformed into amorphous rosuvastatin calcium salt by converting a rosuvastatin ammonium salt mentioned above into rosuvastatin sodium salt using aqueous sodium hydroxide solution, which is converted in the second step into rosuvastatin calcium (2:1) salt of the Formula (IV), and filtering the product from the aqueous solution. The purity of the product has not been disclosed.
Published International Patent Application WO 2008038132 discloses salts of rosuvastatin formed with diamines. Among the salts, only the dibenzylethylenediamine salt is characterized by X-ray diffraction data. The salts are prepared starting from rosuvastatin of the Formula (I) or rosuvastatin sodium salt.
Published International Patent Application WO 2008067440 discloses a method for the preparation of rosuvastatin calcium salt of the Formula (IV) starting from the dehydroabiethylamine salt of rosuvastatin through rosuvastatin sodium salt, in an aqueous solvent. The purity of the rosuvastatin calcium salt disclosed in an example is 99.80% as measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and contains the diastereomer impurity in 0.14% concentration, which is very close to the limit concentration (0.15%).
Direct transformation of several rosuvastatin ammonium salts into rosuvastatin calcium salt (wherein no rosuvastatin sodium salt is produced) has been disclosed in Published International Patent Applications WO 2004014872 and WO 2006136407. The reactions are carried out in an aqueous solvent.
Published International Patent Application WO 2004014872 is related to a method for preparation of rosuvastatin calcium salt with specific operating parameters, which results in the enhancement of the filtering efficiency during the isolation of the salt precipitating from water. In the method, rosuvastatin calcium salt of the Formula (IV) is obtained from certain water-soluble rosuvastatin ammonium salts (ammonium, tris-hydroxymethyl-methylammonium, methylammonium salts).
Published International Patent Application WO 2005077916 is related to crystalline and amorphous rosuvastatin cyclohexyl-, dicyclohexyl-, isopropyl-, diisopropyl- and (S)-1-methylbenzyl-ammonium salts. These salts are prepared by reacting a rosuvastatin ester, rosuvastatin or rosuvastatin lactone with the corresponding amine and purified by recrystallization. However, no method parameters have been disclosed or exemplified for the method using ester or lactone as starting materials, therefore neither the yield of the method nor the quality of the product can not be determined. The salts mentioned above are transformed into rosuvastatin calcium of the Formula (IV) by converting first the rosuvastatin ammonium salt into rosuvastatin lactone of the Formula (VI)
which is subsequently converted into the sodium salt and by reacting with a calcium ion source in aqueous medium and filtering, amorphous rosuvastatin calcium salt having its purity in excess of 99.5% (as determined by HPLC) is obtained. Nevertheless, the concentration of the diastereomeric impurity is high: using the method disclosed in the above-mentioned application, the concentration of the diastereomeric impurity can not be decreased below approx. 0.25%. Such an active ingredient, however, does not comply with internationally accepted ICH Guidelines, since the limit concentration for impurities having known chemical structure is thereby set to 0.1% for each impurity. A further disadvantage of the method is that the ammonium salt is transformed into the final product through further intermediates in multiple steps.
In Published International Patent Application WO 2005051921, a method for purification of rosuvastatin calcium salt through the crystalline isopropyl- or cyclohexylammonium salt has been disclosed. Rosuvastatin calcium salt is first transformed into rosuvastatin of the Formula (I), which is thereafter converted into rosuvastatin isopropyl- or cyclohexylammonium salt using ethylacetate as solvent. Subsequently the ammonium salt is transformed into sodium salt in aqueous medium and the sodium salt is transformed into rosuvastatin calcium salt (2:1) of the Formula (I) in an aqueous solvent. The yield of the reaction is 73.6% without disclosing the purity.
There are several methods in the state of the art relating to the hydrolysis of rosuvastatin esters with bases. In most cases, esters are saponified with aqueous alkali metal hydroxides yielding rosuvastatin alkali metal salts. Ammonium salts are prepared by converting a rosuvastatin alkali metal or alkali earth metal salt into rosuvastatin acid of the Formula (I) which is subsequently reacted with an amine yielding ammonium salt.
Thus, for example, hydrolysis of rosuvastatin methylester of the Formula (IIa) with aqueous sodium hydroxide solution has been disclosed in Published International Patent Applications WO 2003097614, WO 2004052867 and WO 2006017357. According to Published International Patent Application WO 2007000121, hydrolysis of rosuvastatin methylester of the Formula (IIa) is carried out using lithium hydroxide.

Method for the preparation of high-purity pharmaceutical intermediates

EGIS GYOGYSZERGYAR NYILVANOSAN MUKODO RESZVENYTARSASAG


Methods and systems for depositing a film on a substrate are disclosed. In one embodiment, a method includes converting a non-gaseous precursor into vapor phase. Converting the precursor includes: forming a fluidized bed by flowing gas at a sufficiently high flow rate to suspend and stir a plurality of solid particles, and converting the phase of the non-gaseous precursor into vapor phase in the fluidized bed. The method also includes transferring the precursor in vapor phase through a passage; and performing deposition on one or more substrates with the transferred precursor in vapor phase.

In the fabrication of integrated circuits on substrates, such as semiconductor wafers, the vapor deposition of chemicals, such as chemical vapor deposition ("CVD") and atomic layer deposition (ALD), is often desirable. The expansion of suitable source chemicals has increasingly led to use of precursor materials that are naturally liquid or solid at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.
In order to effectively deposit using precursors from a solid or liquid source material, the solid or liquid source material must be vaporized first. In pursuit of this goal, evaporation apparatuses are used to effectuate the vaporization of a solid or liquid source material. In addition, heat sources are often employed in conjunction with such an apparatus in order to increase the vapor pressure above the solid or liquid source material.
Unfortunately, existing semiconductor processing systems, of which an evaporation apparatus is a component, have a number of shortcomings. For example, an evaporation apparatus for subliming a solid source material or vaporizing a liquid source material may offer both an inadequate ratio of solid or liquid source surface area to the desired vapor volume, and poor carrier gas/source material contact time. Often, current processing systems can allow a carrier gas to flow from inlet to outlet without intimately contacting the source material, thus preventing the carrier gas from becoming saturated with precursor vapor.
In certain instances, a large amount of precursor vapor is needed for deposition, such as batch-type deposition. In addition, deposition on a substrate having three-dimensional topology needs a large amount of precursor for a short period of time. Thus, there is a need for an evaporation apparatus that efficiently converts a solid or liquid source material into gas phase.

Method for vaporizing non-gaseous precursor in a fluidized bed


A method sends uplink control information from a user equipment to a serving node of a radio communications system by first encoding uplink control information bits into symbols. The encoded symbols are split into at least two groups of symbols for use to achieve diversity transmission. Each of the at least two groups of symbols are cyclically repeated to generate a repeated group for each of the at least two groups of symbols. Then the repeated groups are mapped each to different transmission ports of the user equipment for diversity transmission as uplink control information through a plurality of uplink transmission slots of an uplink subframe.

Transmit diversity seeks to vary the transmission path for different aspects of a radio signal. The diversity may be created by sending two signals at different times, on different frequencies, or from different locations. More complex forms of transmit diversity send variations of a single packet more than once so that a receiver may combine the two signals to reconstruct the original packet. In some transmit diversity systems, the two signals both contain all of the information while in other systems, the two signals each contain a different part of the information. Even if all of the bits are not received from one signal or the other, the original packet might be reconstructed using error correction, depuncturing, maximum likelihood sequence estimation or other techniques.
In Long Term Evolution (LTE), transmit diversity for some signals is provided by dividing a packet into parts. The parts are each sent in a different time slot and on a different subcarrier. In addition, different antennas may be used for the two slots. This provides time and frequency diversity and options for spatial diversity.
LTE uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in the downlink and discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-spread OFDM in the uplink. The basic LTE downlink physical resource may thus be seen as a time-frequency grid as illustrated in FIG. 1, where each resource element corresponds to one OFDM subcarrier during one OFDM symbol interval. FIG. 1 is a grid diagram of the LTE downlink physical resource (3GPP TS 36.211, Third Generation Partnership Project Technical Specification No. 36.211).
In the time domain, LTE downlink transmissions are organized into radio frames of 10 ms, each radio frame consisting of ten equally-sized subframes of length Tsubframe=1 ms. FIG. 2 is a diagram of the LTE time domain structure where time moves from left to right across the frame.
The resource allocation in LTE is typically described in terms of resource blocks, where a resource block corresponds to one slot (0.5 ms) in the time domain and 12 contiguous subcarriers in the frequency domain. Resource blocks are numbered in the frequency domain, starting with 0 from one end of the system bandwidth. Downlink (DL) transmissions are dynamically scheduled, i.e., in each subframe the base station transmits control information to the remote terminals to indicate the resource blocks assigned to transmit data to each terminal, in the current downlink subframe. The remote terminals are typically referred to in LTE as user equipment or UE. This control signaling is typically transmitted in the first 1, 2, 3 or 4 OFDM symbols in each subframe. A downlink system with 3 OFDM symbols as control is illustrated in FIG. 3. FIG. 3 is a grid diagram of a DL subframe showing control in the first blocks followed by data traffic, with reference symbols dispersed through the grid.
LTE uses hybrid-ARQ (HARQ), where ARQ refers to Automatic Repeat Request or Automatic Repeat Query, where, after receiving downlink data in a subframe, the terminal attempts to decode it and reports to the base station whether the decoding was successful (acknowledgement, ACK) or not (negative acknowledgment, NACK). In case of an unsuccessful decoding attempt, the base station may retransmit the erroneous data.
Uplink control signaling from the terminal to the base station in LTE consists of hybrid-ARQ acknowledgements for received downlink data; terminal reports related to the downlink channel conditions, used as assistance for the downlink scheduling; and scheduling requests, indicating that a mobile terminal needs uplink resources for uplink data transmissions.
If the mobile terminal has not been assigned an uplink resource for data transmission, the L1/L2 (Layer 1/Layer 2) control information (channel-status reports, hybrid-ARQ acknowledgments, and scheduling requests) is transmitted in uplink resources (resource blocks) specifically assigned for uplink L1/L2 control on Release 8 of the Physical Uplink Control Channel (Rel-8 PUCCH).
FIG. 4 is a grid diagram of a PUCCH showing resources assigned for a signal uplink control message. As illustrated in FIG. 4, these resources are located at the edges of the total available cell bandwidth. Each such resource consists of 12 "subcarriers" (one resource block) within each of the two slots of an uplink subframe. In order to provide frequency diversity, these frequency resources frequency hop on the slot boundary, i.e. one "resource" consists of 12 subcarriers at the upper part of the spectrum within the first slot of a subframe and an equally sized resource at the lower part of the spectrum during the second slot of the subframe or vice versa. If more resources are needed for the uplink L1/L2 control signaling, e.g. in case of very large overall transmission bandwidth supporting a large number of users, additional resources blocks may be assigned next to the previously assigned resource blocks.
The PUCCH resource blocks are located at the edges of the overall available spectrum to maximize the frequency diversity experienced by the control signaling. Assigning uplink resources for the PUCCH at other positions within the spectrum, i.e. not at the edges, might fragment the uplink spectrum, making it impossible to assign very wide transmission bandwidths to a single mobile terminal and still retain the single-carrier property of the uplink transmission.
When carrier aggregation is used in LTE, one uplink carrier is designed to carry the HARQ-ACK/NACK bits for all DL carrier Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH) transmissions. To enable the possibility to transmit more than four bits of ACK/NACK, PUCCH format 3 may be used. The basis for Format 3 is DFT-pre-coded OFDM, as diagrammed in FIG. 5 described below.
If the number of ACK/NACK bits is up to 11, then the multiple ACK/NACK bits (which may also include one or more scheduling request (SR) bits) are Reed-Müller (RM) encoded to form 48 coded bits. The coded bits are then scrambled with cell-specific sequences. 24 bits are transmitted within the first slot and the other 24 bits are transmitted within the second slot. The 24 bits per slot are converted into 12 QPSK symbols, spread across five DFTS (DFT Spread)-OFDM symbols using an orthogonal cover code (OCC).
Each of the five sets of QPSK symbols are cyclically shifted with a shift that depends on the cell identity number (Cell ID), the slot number, and the symbol number within the slot. The sets are then DFT pre-coded and transmitted within the one resource block (bandwidth) and five DFTS-OFDM symbols (time) within a slot. The spreading sequence (OCC) is specific to each terminal (UE) and enables multiplexing of up to five users within the same resource blocks.
For the reference signals, cyclic shifted constant amplitude zero autocorrelation (CAZAC) sequences are used. This is shown as a processing diagram in FIG. 5 in which input bits are encoded, scrambled and modulated, then applied to weighting multiplexers and DFTs. The DFTs are applied to inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) blocks as shown. This is the DFTS-OFDM based PUCCH format 3 for a UE supporting more than 4 HARQ bits in normal cyclic prefix (CP) subframes.
The bandwidth of one resource block during one subframe is too large for the control signaling needs of a single terminal. Therefore, to efficiently exploit the resources set aside for control signaling, multiple terminals may share the same resource block, by the use of the OCC on the symbols containing data. In this case the reference signals may also be multiplexed among the terminals. This is done by assigning the different terminals different orthogonal phase rotations of a cell-specific length-12 frequency-domain sequence and/or different orthogonal time-domain covers covering the subframes within a slot or subframe.
In LTE Release 10 specifications, orthogonal time-domain covers are not used on the reference signals, but may be used to accommodate additional orthogonal reference signals for PUCCH Format 3. For example, a transmit diversity scheme may be used if one reference signal resource per antenna port is used.
If the number of ACK/NACK bits exceeds 11, then the bits are split into two parts and two RM encoders are used, one for each part respectively. This is known as the dual-RM code. Up to 20 ACK/NACK bits (plus one SR bit) may therefore be supported by PUCCH Format 3. Each encoder in the dual-RM code outputs 24 bits. The bits from the two encoders are combined and converted to 12 quaternary phase-shift keying (QPSK) symbols per slot. These 12 QPSK symbols are then spread across the five DFTS-OFDM symbols per slot using one out of five orthogonal cover codes, as in the single-RM code case.
The encoding and multiplexing for these cases of transmission without transmit diversity are diagrammed in FIGS. 6A and 6B. FIG. 6A shows encoding and multiplexing up to 11 uplink control information (UCI) bits into slot 0 and slot 1. FIG. 6B shows segmenting 12-21 UCI bits into Segment 1 and Segment 2. The segmentation divides the codewords between the two segments, by, for example, alternating odds to the upper path evens to the lower path. These are combined, encoded and mapped to 24 QPSK symbols and then though a splitter to slot 0 and slot 1.
The Dual Codeword Combiner applies an operation in which {tilde over (b)}0, {tilde over (b)}1, {tilde over (b)}2, . . . , {tilde over (b)}23 is the output sequence from the first encoder and {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}0, {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}1, {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}2, . . . , {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}23 the output sequence from the second encoder and NscRB=12, the number of subcarriers per resource block.
The output bit sequence b0, b1, b2, . . . , bB-1 where B=4·NscRB is obtained by the alternate concatenation of the bit sequences {tilde over (b)}0, {tilde over (b)}1, {tilde over (b)}2, . . . , {tilde over (b)}23 and {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}0, {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}1, {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}2, . . . , {tilde over ({tilde over (b)}23 as follows
            Set                                      i        ,          j      =      0                  while                                      i        <          4      ·              N        sc        RB                                b        i            =                        b          ~                j              ,                  b                  i          +          1                    =                        b          ~                          j          +          1                                        b                  i          +          2                    =                        b                      ~            ~                          j              ,                  b                  i          +          3                    =                        b                      ~            ~                                    j          +          1                          i    =          i      +      4            j    =          j      +      2            end                          while
The "map to . . . " operations apply a cell, slot and symbol specific cyclic shift of the symbols in the time domain to provide inter-cell interference randomization. The DFT processing referred to above is also part of the "map to . . . " operation.
In LTE Release 10, space orthogonal resource transmit diversity (SORTD) is used for PUCCH Format 3 to achieve transmit diversity. Transmission with two antenna ports is supported and the Format 3 encoding and mapping shown in FIG. 5 is repeated for each of the two antennas apart from the cyclic shift of the reference signals and the orthogonal cover codes on the data, which are different to provide orthogonality between signals transmitted on the different antenna ports. The encoding and multiplexing shown in FIGS. 6A and 6B may be adapted to map to two antenna ports and two slots for four paths or to support even more ports and slots.

Transmit diversity for pre-coded radio control signals