A system and a method for converting markings made on media with a marking agent into a digital form representing the markings. The system of the present invention includes a marking device and an illumination digital scanning device. The marking device can be a manual or machine marking device, each containing the marking agent. The marking agent is dispensed by the marking device onto the media. The marking agent is a chemical that emits a certain radiation frequency set when illuminated by an illumination frequency set. The illumination digital scanning device converts the markings of the marking agent into a digital form. The method of the present invention includes marking the media with the marking agent, illuminating the markings to cause the marking agent to radiate at the radiation frequency set and converting the radiation into a digital form representing the markings.

The present invention relates in general to marking and reading media and more particularly to a system and a method for converting subsequent marks made on media with a marking agent into a digital form.
Documents containing various types of data and printed on a variety of media are widely used to convey information. Frequently these documents are created and then distributed to others for receiving their comments, edits and review. For example, a document created in a word processing application and printed on an inkjet printer may be distributed to and reviewed by others for receiving their edits and comments. Typically, edits and comments are conveyed by placing edit and comment markings directly on the original document. These additional markings can include interlineations, annotations and other additions. These additional markings, which can be alphanumeric characters or other types of symbols, are usually created by a manual marking device (handwriting), such as a pencil, or a machine marking device, such as a typewriter or printer. Whichever type of marking device is used to add the markings to the original document, the marking process results in a new document.
Since the new document contains non-digital information, namely the additional markings, it is difficult to manipulate and distribute the new document to others. One way to distribute the new document is to photocopy it and physically deliver a copy to others. However, because the markings are not in digital form, they are difficult to incorporate into the original document using existing digital applications. Although a digital scanning device can be used to convert the markings into digital form, this method has several disadvantages.
The primary disadvantage of using a digital scanning device is that the results are usually unreliable and unacceptable. This is because the placement of the markings is often between or over original material of the document. This can obscure or mingle the markings with the original material and cause the contrast between the markings and original material to be very low or nonexistent. Consequently, scanning devices usually cannot distinguish between the markings and the original material. This typically creates misinterpreted or ambiguous digital conversions of the markings. Thus, there exists a need for a system and method for accurately and efficiently separating and converting subsequent markings that are made on media into a digital form.
To overcome the limitations in the prior art as described above, and to overcome other limitations that will become apparent upon reading and understanding the present specification, the present invention is embodied in a system and method for creating markings on media and separating and converting the markings into a digital form. The system of the present invention includes a marking device and an illumination digital scanning device.
The marking device for creating additional markings and subsequent marks can be any suitable marking device, such as a manual marking device or a machine marking device. The marking device preferably contains a marking agent, such as a high-contrast marking agent. The marking device dispenses the marking agent onto the media. The manual marking device can be a manual marking implement, such as a pen for creating handwritten markings. A pen manual marking device preferably contains ink that can be comprised of a high-contrast marking agent or a mixture of the agent with suitable ink. Alternatively, the manual marking device can be a pencil for creating handwritten markings and having suitable pencil writing material, which is typically some type of graphite containing a binder. The pencil writing material can be comprised of the high-contrast marking agent or a mixture of the agent with suitable pencil graphite.
The machine marking device can be a machine capable of printing markings, such as a printer or a typewriter. The machine marking device preferably contains the high-contrast marking agent. For example, for printer marking devices, such as an inkjet printer, the high-contrast marking agent or a mixture of the agent with suitable ink can be used to create the markings. For a typewriter machine marking device, the high-contrast marking agent can be embedded within a typewriter ribbon. For a photovoltaic laser printer operating with laser toner, the high contrast marking agent can be embedded in the laser toner.
The high-contrast marking agent can be any suitable chemical that emits a certain radiation frequency, such as the strongest radiation frequency, when illuminated by an illumination set of wavelengths or frequencies. The illumination and radiation frequencies can be the same or different frequencies depending on the chemical. An illumination digital scanning device can be used to separate and convert the markings created with the high-contrast marking agent into a digital form. In particular, the scanning device emits a set of illumination frequencies which causes the marking agent to radiate at a set of radiation frequencies. If an emitive marking agent is used, the marking agent preferably radiates at a different set of radiation frequencies than the set of frequencies emitted by the scanning device. If a reflective marking agent is used, the marking agent preferably radiates at the same set of radiation frequencies as the set of frequencies emitted by the scanning device. In both cases, high contrast is provided between the markings created with the marking agent and the original material, thereby allowing the scanning device to easily distinguish between the two.
A digital converter, such as a CCD (charge-coupled-device), can be used to convert the detected radiation into digital electronic form, thereby converting the markings into computer readable digital information representing the markings. After conversion, the digital information representing the markings can be easily manipulated by computer software applications, such as optical character recognition (OCR) applications, and widely distributed using electronic messaging. Other aspects and advantages of the present invention as well as a more complete understanding thereof will become apparent from the following detailed description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, illustrating by way of example the principles of the invention. Moreover, it is intended that the scope of the invention be limited by the claims and not the preceding summary or the following detailed description.

System and method for high-contrast marking and reading


A host computer system contains a software module that monitors and records network communications that flow through the legitimate network channels provided by the operating system and reports this information to a central processing server. A computer system acting as a central processing server compares network communications data received from the host computer system with the overall network traffic. Network traffic that is not reported from the host computer system is likely the result of stealth network traffic produced by advanced malware that has hidden its communications by circumventing the legitimate network channels provided by the OS. Detection of this stealth network traffic can be accomplished by using just the packet header information so the data payload does not need to be recorded, thereby reducing the memory requirements and reducing the need to save any potentially sensitive information.

As host based network defenses get stronger, malware writers are adapting by becoming stealthier. Stealth techniques can hide many aspects of a malware infection on a system from the user, from the operating system, and from host based security software. Malware can run in environments outside of the operating system, including the BIOS or on devices such as a graphic or network card. Hardware implants, such as the type used for espionage, also allow attackers to circumvent any host based security. These types of infections cannot be detected with any tool running on the compromised machine. Therefore, in order to identify advanced infections one must look at the activity outside of the machine itself. One of the best places to look for advanced infections is network communications because almost all malware requires network access to perform functions such as receiving additional instructions, transferring stolen information or infecting additional machines.
While stealth is an effective method, it produces an identifiable anomaly if the malware has to communicate on the network, i.e. network traffic that the host system is not aware of. In a normal computer environment, the only network traffic that is generated should come from within the operating system itself and flow through the legitimate network channels the operating system provides. Because malware can circumvent these legitimate network channels, it is able to send and receive network traffic without higher level software recognizing that communications are occurring. However, this stealth network traffic is still visible to the network hardware that handles it. Because it looks like legitimate network traffic, many network security devices are not able to determine that the traffic came from a malicious source without looking into the packet payload to find signatures of known malware behavior. This method of detection is unable to find unknown malware, and is computationally intensive because it requires comparing data snippets from both legitimate and malicious sources with a large database of known malware signatures. With the proposed method, the mere existence of a packet that has not been seen by the accepted data pathways is indication enough of a possible malicious compromise.
A similar method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,079,030 to Satish et al. which claimed a method of identifying stealth network traffic using a hypervisor to monitor a virtual machine wherein the hypervisor monitors data flowing out of the virtual guest machine and determines if the hypervisor data matches the virtual guest machine data. If they do not match, then a stealth technique was used to communicate over the network. There are at least two problems with this implementation; First, a hypervisor is a piece of software that runs on the hardware of a single machine, and provides a layer of abstraction and virtual hardware to Operating Systems (OSs) that run on it. This means that the scope of the hypervisor's ability to monitor network communications is limited to a single physical machine. A hypervisor cannot monitor an entire network of independent physical machines. Second, a hypervisor runs on the same physical machine that may be infected with malware. This makes the hypervisor susceptible to the same type of tactics the malware uses against the OS. There is no guarantee that the malware 202 is not fooling the hypervisor or simply running outside what is able to be monitored, so the network traffic captured by the hypervisor may not actually represent all network traffic to and from the physical machine. The method proposed in the present invention is scalable to practically any size network and practically guarantees that stealth network traffic will be detected on the network. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.

Identifying stealth packets in network communications through use of packet headers


A surgical system includes a handle having a controller and a motor, an adapter releasably coupled to the handle, and a loading unit releasably coupled to the adapter. The motor is coupled to a drive shaft of the handle. The adapter including an adapter identification device in communication with the controller, configured to store adapter data, and to communicate the adapter data to the controller. The loading unit configured to affect tissue in response to a force transmitted by the adapter from the drive shaft. The loading unit including a loading unit identification device in communication with the controller, configured to store loading unit data, and to communicate the loading unit data to the controller. The controller is configured to adjust output of a motor based on at least one of the adapter data or the loading unit data.

1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to surgical stapling systems and, more particularly, to multi-fire surgical stapling systems including an electronic counter, a lockout, and a visual indicator mechanism for indicating the condition or state of the system.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Surgical staplers that first grasp or clamp tissue between opposing structures and then join the tissue with surgical fasteners are well known in the art. In some devices, a knife cuts the tissue that has been joined by the fasteners. The fasteners are typically in the form of surgical staples but other devices, such as two-part polymeric fasteners have also been utilized.
Surgical staplers may be linear surgical staplers that include two jaw structures which capture or clamp tissue therebetween. Typically, one of the jaw structures carries a staple cartridge which houses a plurality of staples arranged in at least two lateral rows, while the other member has an anvil that defines a surface for forming the staple legs as the staples are driven from the staple cartridge. Generally, the stapling operation is effected by a cam bar, a drive sled, or other similar mechanism, that travels longitudinally through the staple cartridge to sequentially eject the staples from the staple cartridge. A knife may also travel between the staple rows to longitudinally cut the stapled tissue between the rows of staples.
Surgical staplers may also be circular surgical staplers that include two structures which capture or clamp tissue therebetween. Typically, one of the structures carries a staple cartridge which houses a plurality of staples arranged in at least two circular rows, while the other member has an anvil that defines a surface for forming the staple legs as the staples are driven from the staple cartridge. Generally, the stapling operation is effected by a longitudinally driven drive bar, or other similar mechanism, that travels through the staple cartridge to simultaneously eject the staples from the staple cartridge. A knife may also travel between the staple rows to circularly cut the stapled tissue within the inner row of staples.
In endoscopic or laparoscopic procedures, surgery is performed through a small incision or through a narrow cannula inserted through small entrance openings in the skin. In order to address the specific needs of endoscopic and/or laparoscopic surgical procedures, endoscopic surgical stapling devices have also been developed.
It would be beneficial, particularly with respect to laparoscopic and/or endoscopic surgical procedures, to provide a surgical stapler that can provide a predetermined number of firings without requiring removal of the stapler from the surgical site and that also includes a lockout mechanism for preventing "empty firing," e.g., firing beyond the expiration of a pre-determined number of firings, and/or firing after a partial firing has occurred. In addition, it would be beneficial to provide a visual indicator that indicates the condition or state of the stapler, e.g., the number of times the stapler has been fired, the number of firings remaining, or whether the stapler is locked out. Further, it would be beneficial to gather data about the firings of the stapler for use by the medical facility or the manufacturer of the stapler.

Multi-fire stapler with electronic counter, lockout, and visual indicator


A turbine seal member for use in a gas turbine engine includes a turbine seal substrate having a gas-path side and a ceramic layer disposed on the gas-path side that includes a plurality of mechanical indentations.

This disclosure relates to protective layers and methods of manufacturing protective layers having mechanical indentations for facilitating stress relief.
Components that are exposed to high temperatures, such as a component within a gas turbine engine, typically include protective coatings. For example, components such as turbine blades, turbine vanes, and blade outer air seals typically include one or more coating layers that function to protect the component from erosion, oxidation, corrosion or the like to thereby enhance component durability and maintain efficient operation of the engine. In particular, conventional outer air seals include an abradable ceramic coating that contacts tips of the turbine blades such that the blades abrade the coating upon operation of the engine. The abrasion between the outer air seal and the blade tips provides a minimum clearance between these components such that gas flow around the tips of the blades is reduced to thereby maintain engine efficiency.
One drawback of the abradable type of coating is its vulnerability to erosion and spalling. For example, spalling may occur as a loss of portions of the coating that detach from the outer air seal. Loss of the coating increases clearance between the outer air seal and the blade tips, and is detrimental to turbine efficiency. One cause of spalling is the elevated temperature within the turbine section, which causes sintering of a surface layer of the coating. The sintering causes the coating to shrink, which produces stresses between the coating and a substrate of the outer air seal. If the stresses are great enough, the coating may delaminate and detach from the substrate.

Segmented ceramic layer for member of gas turbine engine


A multimodal and real-time method for filtering sensitive content, receiving as input a digital video stream, the method including segmenting digital video into video fragments along the video timeline; extracting features containing significant information from the digital video input on sensitive media; reducing the semantic difference between each of the low-level video features, and the high-level sensitive concept; classifying the video fragments, generating a high-level label (positive or negative), with a confidence score for each fragment representation; performing high-level fusion to properly match the possible high-level labels and confidence scores for each fragment; and predicting the sensitive time by combining the labels of the fragments along the video timeline, indicating the moments when the content becomes sensitive.

With the growth of video data generated by many devices, such as cameras, smartphones and closed-circuit televisions—CCTVs, allied with the Internet as a fast spreading venue, smart and continuous content filtering becomes paramount. In this context, classification of sensitive media content (e.g., pornography, violence, crowd) retains a considerable amount of attention because of its applications: it can be used for detecting, via surveillance cameras, inappropriate behavior; blocking undesired content from being uploaded to (or downloaded from) general purpose websites (e.g., social networks, online learning platforms, content providers, forums), or from being viewed on some places (e.g., schools, workplaces); preventing children from accessing adult content on personal computers, smartphones, smart glasses, tablets, cameras, Virtual Reality devices or smart TVs; and avoiding that improper content is distributed over phones by sexting, for instance.
Sensitive media content may be defined as any material that represents threats to its audience. Regarding digital video, the typical sensitive representatives include pornography and violence, but they may also cover disgusting scenes and other types of abstract concepts. Therefore, automatically filtering sensitive content is a hard and challenging task, because of its high-level conceptual nature.
Most of the recent approaches on classification of sensitive content are typically composed of three steps: (i) low-level visual feature extraction, (ii) mid-level feature extraction, and (iii) high-level supervised classification. The low-level features are extracted from the image pixels. They are still purely perceptual, but aim at being invariant to viewpoint and illumination changes, partial occlusion, and affine geometrical transformations. Mid-level features aim at combining the set of low-level features into a global and richer image representation of intermediate complexity. The mid-level features may be purely perceptual or they may incorporate semantic information from the classes, the former case being much more usual in the literature. Finally, the goal of supervised classification is to learn a function which assigns (discrete) labels to arbitrary images. That step is intrinsically semantic, since the class labels must be known during the training/learning phase.
Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) is the most popular mid-level image representation and the most widely used for sensitive content classification problem. Inspired by the Bag-of-Words model from textual Information Retrieval, where a document is represented by a set of words, the BoVW representation describes an image as a histogram of the occurrence rate of "visual words" in a "visual vocabulary" induced by quantizing the space of a local feature (e.g., SIFT—Scale Invariant Feature Transform, SURF—Speeded Up Robust Features, HOG—Histogram of Oriented Gradients)). The visual vocabulary of k visual words, also known as visual codebook or visual dictionary, is usually obtained by unsupervised learning (e.g., k-means clustering algorithm) over a sample of local descriptors from the training/learning data.
The BoVW representation has important limitations (such as quantization error, spatial information loss), and several alternatives have been developed. One of the best mid-level aggregate representations currently reported in the literature, the Fisher Vector is based upon the use of the Fisher kernel framework with Gaussian mixture models (GMM) estimated over the training/learning data. For sensitive media content classification, no commercial solutions took advantage from that tip-top mid-level aggregate representation.
Other approaches have employed audio features (e.g., MFCC—Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients, loudness, pitch) to improve the classification of sensitive videos. The addition of audio analysis to the context of sensitive media detection can be critical to detect challenging cases, which can be a lot harder using visual features only (e.g., breastfeeding, hentai movies, gun shots). In addition, most of the visual local descriptors are static (i.e., it does not take into account temporal information). Audio features, in the other hand, are purely temporal, since no spatial information is available to be analyzed. Therefore, audio features can overcome static visual descriptors when the nature of the sensitive content is fundamentally temporal (e.g., blows in a fight). However, in the context of sensitive media analysis, the audio information should only be used along with the visual information. The audio features alone can be misleading and unreliable since it often does not correspond to what is being visually displayed. It is very common, for example, in movies, where there is plenty of background music which sometimes overlaps the action that is going on visually. Despite its importance and faster processing time, no commercial solutions took advantage from the audio information.
In addition, some approaches are based on multimodal fusion, exploiting both auditory and visual features. Usually, the fusion of different modalities is performed at two levels: (i) feature level or early fusion, which combines the features before classification and (ii) decision level or late fusion, which combines the scores from individual classifier models.
The feature level fusion is advantageous in that it requires only one learning phase on the combined feature vector. However, in this approach it is hard to represent the time synchronization between the multimodal features. In addition, the increase in the number of modalities makes it difficult to learn the cross-correlation among the heterogeneous features.
The strategy of the decision level fusion has many advantages over feature fusion. For instance, unlike feature level fusion, where the features from different modalities (e.g., audio and visual) may have different representations, the decisions (at the semantic level) usually have the same representation. Therefore, the fusion of decisions becomes easier. Moreover, the strategy of the decision level fusion offers scalability in terms of the modalities used in the fusion process, which is difficult to achieve in the feature level fusion. Another advantage of late fusion strategy is that it allows us to use the most suitable methods for analyzing each single modality, such as hidden Markov model (HMM) for audio and support vector machine (SVM) for image. This provides much more flexibility than the early fusion.
The method of the present invention relies on multimodal fusion of visual, auditory, and textual features for a fine-grained classification of sensitive media content in video snippets (short temporal series of video frames).
Patent document US 2013/0283388 A1, titled "Method and system for information content validation in electronic devices", published on Oct. 24, 2013 by SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD, proposes a method and system for content filtering in mobile communication devices. An eventual similarity with the method of the present invention is the fact that the method of document US 2013/0283388 analyzes the information content—including image, video and audio information in real-time. However, this approach does not go into details. For example, for analyzing image/video content, the authors only mentioned that an image analysis engine comprises an "Image and Video Filtering module from IMAGEVISION located at Anna, Tex., 75409, U.S.A". Nothing is specified in document US 2013/0283388 for analyzing audio information. Moreover, in contrast with the present invention, US 20130283388 does not fuse information for classification and it does not classify sensitive content within a video timeline.
Patent document US 2012/0246732 A1, titled "Apparatus, Systems and Methods for Control of Inappropriate Media Content Events", published on Sep. 27, 2012, by BURTON DAVID ROBERT, proposes systems and methods to prevent presentation of inappropriate media content. The media content analysis logic of document US 2012/0246732 A1 may comprise the audio recognition logic, the object recognition logic, the text recognition logic, and/or the character recognition logic. However, it is not clear how sensitive content is analyzed. The method of the present invention exploits and evaluates a plurality of different characteristics (i.e., fuse information), and also classifies sensitive content within a video timeline, in contrast to the method proposed in document US 2012/0246732.
Patent document US 2009/0274364 A1 titled "Apparatus and Methods for Detecting Adult Videos" proposes apparatus and methods for analyzing video content to determine whether a video is adult or non-adult. Using a key frame detection system, the method of document US 2009/0274364 generates one or more models for adult video detection. According to the inventors, any suitable key frame features may be extracted from each key frame—17 image/video analysis techniques are described (including spatial and/or color distribution features and texture features). One drawback related to the present invention is that such techniques are typically not robust to the changes in video resolution, frame rate, cropping, orientation, or lighting. Differently, the method in the present invention proposes an end-to-end BoVW-based framework, which preserves more information while keeping the robustness to different changes in video. Moreover, in contrast with the present invention, document US 2009/0274364 does not use audio and/or textual content, does not fuse information and it does not classify sensitive content within a video timeline.
Patent document U.S. Pat. No. 8,285,118 B2 titled "Methods and Systems for Media Content Control", published on Jan. 14, 2010, by NOVAFORA, INC, proposes methods and systems to control the display of media content on media player. The video media content is analyzed by extracting only visual information—local feature descriptors, such as SIFT, spatio-temporal SIFT, or SURF descriptors. An eventual similarity with the method of the present invention is the fact that U.S. Pat. No. 8,285,118 method computes the video signature using a BoVW-based mid-level representation. However, while U.S. Pat. No. 8,285,118 proposes to match the BoVW signatures to a database of signatures (it is time consuming and it is not generalizable), the present invention proposes to classify video signatures according a mathematical model learned from the training/learning dataset (it is very fast processing and it is generalizable). Furthermore, in contrast with the present invention, document U.S. Pat. No. 8,285,118 does not use audio and/or textual content and does not fuse information.
Patent document US 2014/0372876 A1 titled "Selective Content Presentation Engine", published on Dec. 18, 2014, by AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC, proposes a method for suppressing content portion (e.g., audio portions that include profane language, video portions that include lewd or violent behavior, etc.) at an electronic device. In document US 2014/0372876 A1, the selective content presentation engine may determine whether the content portion is to be presented by the electronic device based on the user preferences using visual or audio recognition. However document US 2014/0372876 A1 only mentioned the different types of classifiers that recognize images or audio segments and, it is not mentioned how the visual or audio content may be analyzed. In contrast with the present invention, US 20140372876 does not fuse information and it does not use mid-level aggregate representation.
Patent document US 2014/0207450 A1 titled "Real-time Customizable Media Content Filter", published on Jul. 24, 2014, by INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION, proposes a method for content filtering (e.g., violence, profanity) in real-time, with customizable preferences. Textual information, extracted from subtitles, closed caption and audio stream, is analyzed by matching textual content with one or more blacklist table entries. Differently, the proposed method in the present invention analyzes textual content using a robust BoW-based framework. Additionally, the present invention uses visual information, fuse information, and classifies sensitive content within a video timeline.
Patent document US 2003/0126267 A1 titled "Method and Apparatus for Preventing Access to Inappropriate Content Over a Network Based on Audio or Visual Content", published on Jul. 3, 2003, by KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS ELECTRONICS N.V, proposes a method and apparatus for restricting access to electronic media objects having objectionable content (such as nudity, sexually explicit material, violent content or bad language), based on an analysis of the audio or visual information. For example, image processing, speech recognition or face recognition techniques may be employed to the identified inappropriate content. In contrast with the present invention, document US 2003/0126267 does not fuse information, does not use mid-level aggregate representation, and it does not classify sensitive content within a video timeline.
Finally, patent document CN 104268284 A titled: "Web Browse Filtering Soft dog Device Special for Juveniles", published on Jan. 4, 2015, by HEFEI XINGFU INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD, provides a web browser filtering softdog (USB dongle) device which comprises a pornographic content analysis module. As defined in document CN 104268284, pornographic content analysis unit includes a text analysis module, image analysis module and video analysis module. However, it is not clear how pornographic content is analyzed. Furthermore, in contrast with the present invention, CN 104268284 does not use audio content, it does not fuse information, it does not use mid-level aggregate representation and it does not classify sensitive content within a video timeline.
In the following, it is summarized the scientific papers for the two most important types of sensitive content considered in this invention, pornography and violence.
Pornography Classification
The first efforts to detect pornography conservatively associated pornography with nudity, whereby the solutions tried to identify nude or scantily-clad people (Paper "Automatic detection of human nudes", D. Forsyth and M. Fleck, International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 63-77, 1999; Paper "Statistical color models with application to skin detection", M. Jones and J. Rehg, International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 81-96, 2002; Paper, "Naked image detection based on adaptive and extensible skin color model", J.-S. Lee, Y.-M. Kuo, P.-C. Chung, and E.-L. Chen, Pattern Recognition (PR), vol. 40, no. 8, pp. 2261-2270, 2007.). In such works, the detection of human skin played a major role, followed by the identification of body parts.
The presence of nudity is not a good conceptual model of pornography. There are non-pornographic situations with plenty of body exposure. Conversely, there are pornographic scenes that involve very little exposed skin. Nevertheless, nudity detection is related to pornography detection, with a vast literature of its own.
The clear drawback of using skin detectors to identify pornography is the high false-positive rate, especially in situations of non-pornographic body exposure (e.g., swimming, sunbathing, boxing). Therefore, Deselaers et al. (Paper "Bag-of-visual-words models for adult image classification and filtering", T. Deselaers, L. Pimenidis, and H. Ney, in International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 1-4, 2008) proposed, for the first time, to pose pornography detection as a Computer Vision classification problem (similar to object classification), rather than a skin-detection or segmentation problem. They extracted patches around difference-of-Gaussian interest points, and created a visual codebook using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), to classify images into different pornographic categories. Their Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model greatly improved the effectiveness of the pornography classification.
More recently, Lopes et al. developed a Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) approach, which employed the HueSIFT color descriptor, to classify images (Paper "A bag-of-features approach based on hue-SIFT descriptor for nude detection", A. Lopes, S. Avila, A. Peixoto, R. Oliveira, and A. Araujo, in European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), pp. 1152-1156, 2009) and videos (Paper "Nude detection in video using bag-of-visual-features", A. Lopes, S. Avila, A. Peixoto, R. Oliveira, M. Coelho, and A. Araujo, in Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images (SIBGRAPI), pp. 224-231, 2009) of nudity. For video classification, they proposed a majority-voting scheme over the video frames. Similar to Dewantono and Supriana (Paper "Development of a real-time nudity censorship system on images", S. Dewantono and I. Supriana, in International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (IcoICT), pp. 30-35, 2014) proposed aBoVW-based image/video nudity detection by using a skin filtering method and SVM classifiers.
By moving from nudity detection towards pornography classification, it arises the challenge in defining the notion of pornography. Many scientific papers have adopted the definition of pornography proposed by Short et al. (Paper "A review of internet pornography use research: methodology and content from the past 10 years", M. Short, L. Black, A. Smith, C. Wetterneck, and D. Wells, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 13-23, 2012): "any explicit sexual matter with the purpose of eliciting arousal", which while still subjective, establishes a set of criteria that allow deciding the nature of the material (sexual content, explicitness, goal to elicit arousal, purposefulness).
Avila et al. proposed an extension to BoVW formalism, BossaNova (Paper "Pooling in image representation: the visual codeword point of view", S. Avila, N. Thome, M. Cord, E. Valle, and A. Araujo, Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU), vol. 117, pp. 453-465, 2013), with HueSIFT descriptors to classify pornographic videos using majority voting. Recently, Caetano et al. (Paper "Representing local binary descriptors with BossaNova for visual recognition", C. Caetano, S. Avila, S. Guimarães, and A. Araujo, in Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), pp. 49-54, 2014) achieved similar results by using BossaNova, binary descriptors, and majority voting. In (Paper "Pornography detection using BossaNova video descriptor", in European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), pp. 1681-1685, 2014), Caetano et al. improved their previous results by establishing a single bag for the entire target video, instead of a bag for each extracted video frame. A possible similarity to the method of the present invention is the fact that the method of Gaetano et al. calculates the signature using a mid-level video representation based on BoVW. However, while Gaetano et al. proposes the use of BossaNova representation of mid-level video—which extends BoVW method offering more pooling operation of information maintenance based on a distribution of the distance to the keyword, the present invention proposes applying the representation of the Fisher vector—one of the best mid-level aggregated representations currently described in the literature, which extends the BoVW method to encode the first and second order mean differences among the local descriptors and codebook elements. It is important to mention that to the best of our knowledge, for sensitive media content rating, there are no commercial solutions that use this best mid-level representation. Additionally, this article "Pornography Detection Using BossaNova Video Descriptor" does not have most of the advantages offered by the proposed solution of the present invention: while the method of Caetano et al. detects pornographic content only, the present invention proposes a unified and easy structure for extending to handle any kind of sensitive content; while the method of Gaetano et al focuses only on the visual signal, the present invention provides a method of high level multimodal fusion exploring auditory, visual and/or textual features; while the method of Gaetano et al. classifies pornographic content in the video as a whole, the present invention proposes a fine-tuning method of classifying sensitive media content in video fragments (small parts or series short time of video frames). Furthermore, in contrast to the present invention, the method of Caetano et al. cannot be performed in real-time nor on mobile platforms.
Some prior art works rely on bags of static features. Few works have applied space-temporal features or other motion information for the classification of pornography. Valle et al. (Paper "Content-based filtering for video sharing social networks", E. Valle, S. Avila, F. Souza, M. Coelho, and A. Araujo, in Brazilian Symposium on Information and Computational Systems Security (SBSeg), pp. 625-638, 2012) proposed the use of space-temporal local descriptors (such as STIP descriptor), in a BoVW-based approach for pornography classification. In the same direction, Souza et al. (Paper "An evaluation on color invariant based local spatiotemporal features for action recognition", F. Souza, E. Valle, G. Camara-Chavez, and A. Araujo, in Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images (SIBGRAPI), pp. 31-36, 2011) improved Valle et al.'s results by applying ColorSTIP and HueSTIP, color-aware versions of the STIP detector and descriptor, respectively. Both works established a single bag for the entire target video, instead of keeping a bag for each video frame, prior to voting schemes.
Very recently, M. Moustafa (Paper "Applying deep learning to classify pornographic images and videos", M. Moustafa, in Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology (PSIVT), 2015) proposed a deep learning system that analyzes video frames to classify pornographic content. This work focused on the visual cue only and applied a majority-voting scheme.
In addition, other approaches have employed audio analysis as an additional feature for the identification of pornographic videos. Rea et al. (Paper "Multimodal periodicity analysis for illicit content detection in videos", N. Rea, G. Lacey, C. Lambe, and R. Dahyot, in European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP), pp. 106-114, 2006) combined skin color estimation with the detection of periodic patterns in a video's audio signal. Liu et al. (Paper "Fusing audio-words with visual features for pornographic video detection", Y. Liu, X. Wang, Y. Zhang, and S. Tang, in IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), pp. 1488-1493, 2011) demonstrated improvements by fusion visual features (color moments and edge histograms) with "audio words". In a similar fashion, Ulges et al. (Paper "Pornography detection in video benefits (a lot) from a multi-modal approach", A. Ulges, C. Schulze, D. Borth, and A. Stahl, in ACM International Workshop on Audio and Multimedia Methods for Large-scale Video Analysis, pp. 21-26, 2012) proposed an approach of late fusion motion histograms with audio words.
In addition to those scientific results, there are commercial software packages that block web sites with pornographic content (e.g., K9 Web Protection, CyberPatrol, NetNanny). Additionally, there are products that scan a computer for pornographic content (e.g., MediaDetective, Snitch Plus, NuDetective). MediaDetective and Snitch Plus are off-the-shelf products that rely on the detection of human skin to find pictures or movies containing nude people. The work of Polastro and Eleuterio (a.k.a., NuDetective, Paper "NuDetective: A forensic tool to help combat child pornography through automatic nudity detection", M. Polastro and P. Eleuterio, in Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), pp. 349-353, 2010) also adopts skin detection, and it is intended for the Federal Police of Brazil, in forensic activities.
Violence Classification
Over the last few years, progress in violence detection has been quantifiable thanks to the MediaEval Violent Scenes Detection (VSD) task, which provides a common ground truth and standard evaluation protocols. MediaEval is a benchmarking initiative dedicated to evaluate new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. Organized annually from 2011 to present, the MediaEval VSD task poses the challenge of an automated detection of violent scenes in Hollywood movies and web videos. The targeted violent scenes are those "one would not let an 8 years old child see in a video because they contain physical violence".
The violence detection pipeline is typically composed of three steps: (i) low-level feature extraction from audio, visual or textual modalities, (ii) mid-level feature extraction using bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) representation or extensions, and (iii) supervised classification by employing support vector machines (SVM), neural networks, or hidden Markov models (HMM).
In the 2014 edition of the VSD task, for instance, all proposed techniques employed this three-step pipeline, except for one team, which used the provided violence-related concept annotations as mid-level features. In the low-level step, most of the approaches explored both auditory (e.g., MFCC features) and visual information (e.g., dense trajectories). Avila et al. (Paper "RECOD at MediaEval 2014: Violent scenes detection task", S. Avila, D. Moreira, M. Perez, D. Moraes, I. Cota, V. Testoni, E. Valle, S. Goldenstein, and A. Rocha, in Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2014 Workshop, 2014) additionally incorporated textual features extracted from the Hollywood movie subtitles. In the mid-level step, the low-level features were frequently encoded using a Fisher Vector representation. Finally, in the last step, SVM classifiers were the most used for classification.
Before the MediaEval campaign, several methods were proposed to detect violent scenes in video. However, due to the lack of a common definition of violence, allied with the absence of standard datasets, the methods were developed for a very specific type of violence (e.g., gunshot injury, war violence, car chases) and, consequently, the results were not directly comparable. In the following, we overview some of those works for the sake of completeness.
One of the first proposals for violence detection in video was introduced by Nam et al. (Paper "Audio-visual content-based violent scene characterization", J. Nam, M. Alghoniemy, and A. Tewk, in International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), pp. 353-357, 1998). They combined multiple audio-visual features to identify violent scenes in movies, in which flames and blood are detected using a predefined color tables, and sound effects (e.g., beatings, gunshots, explosions) are detected by computing the energy entropy. This approach of combined low-level features with specialized detectors for high-level events (such as flames, explosions and blood) is also applied by paper "A multimodal approach to violence detection in video sharing sites", T. Giannakopoulos, A. Pikrakis, and S. Theodoridis, in International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 3244-3247, 2010; Paper "Violence detection in movies with auditory and visual cues", J. Lin, Y. Sun, and W. Wang, in International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security (ICCIS), pp. 561-565, 2010.
Although most of the approaches on violence detection is multimodal, previous works (before MediaEval) have mainly focused on single modalities. For instance, using motion trajectory information and orientation information of a person's limbs, Datta et al. (Paper "Person-on-person violence detection in video data", A. Datta, M. Shah, and N. Lobo, in International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), pp. 433-438, 2002) addressed the problem of detecting human violence such as first fighting and kicking. Nievas et al. (Paper "Violence detection in video using computer vision techniques", E. B. Nievas, O. D. Suarez, G. B. Garca, and R. Sukthankar, in International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP), pp. 332-339, 2011) employed a BoVW framework with MoSIFT features to classify ice hockey clips. By exploiting audio features, Cheng et al. (Paper "Semantic context detection based on hierarchical audio models", W.-H. Cheng, W.-T. Chu, and J.-L. Wu, in International Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR), 190-115, 2003) recognized gunshots, explosions and car-braking using a hierarchical approach based on GMM and HMM. Pikrakis et al. (Paper "Gunshot detection in audio streams from movies by means of dynamic programming and bayesian networks", A. Pikrakis, T. Giannakopoulos, and S. Theodoridis, in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 21-24, 2008) proposed a gunshot detection method based on statistics of audio features and Bayesian networks.

Multimodal and real-time method for filtering sensitive media


An antigen composition for stimulating an immune response in an inoculated avian species to at least one intestinal pathogenic organism includes seven field strains of E. coli, Pseudomona aeruginosa, Aerobacter aerogenes, Salmonella enteritidis, Salmonella typhimurium, Salmonella agona, and Salmonella Kentucky. The antigen composition can be used alone or in combination with a Marek's Disease vaccine to reduce shedding of E. coli and/or Salmonella bacteria.

Consumption of poultry products contaminated with Salmonella bacteria is a significant source of gastrointestinal infections in humans. For example, Salmonella enteritidis, especially phage type 4, has become more common in both poultry and humans since the early 1980's. The prevalence of Salmonella typhimurium, on the other hand, has remained relatively stable. However, the spread of the antibiotic-resistant strain DT104 in domestic flocks gives some reason for concern. Accordingly, the presence of Salmonella in commercial meat and food products is a major public health concern given that such infections can lead to serious illness or, in severe cases, death. Further, Salmonella infections in chickens, turkeys and ducks raise concerns for poultry producers due to increasing rates of morbidity and mortality as well as losses attributable culling and/or rejection of infected birds.
Salmonella infections can be spread via intraspecies or horizontal transmission, i.e., from animal to animal, and/or via interspecies or vertical transmission, i.e., from animal to humans. Generally, horizontal transmission of Salmonella bacteria is typically via exposure to environmental factors such as, for example, contaminated feces, bedding, nesting materials and/or other fomites. In contrast, vertical transmission of Salmonella bacteria is typically via oral exposure to the bacteria such by handling contaminated raw meats. Vertical transmission can also occur via shell contamination and/or internal transovarian contamination of the yolk of eggs produced by infected birds.
The basis for good control of Salmonella infections in farm environments, in particular, in poultry farms, is good farming and hygiene practices. Such practices include, for example, managing and preventing contamination of feeds, monitoring of animal health, cleaning and disinfection of coops and pens, and control of pest species such as, for examples, rodents. Testing and removal of infected or pathogen-positive animals from production and/or contact with uninfected animals are also vital to controlling horizontal and/or vertical transmission of such infections.
Poultry infected with Salmonella bacteria generally develop a strong immune response to the pathogen which is typically manifested by progressive reduction in excretion of the organism and reduced disease and excretion upon subsequent challenge. Accordingly, there is a need for an effective means for inducing an immune response to Salmonella bacteria in poultry which results in reduced disease and excretion or shedding of the bacteria while reducing productivity losses attributable to culling and/or rejection of infected birds.
Recently, vaccination of commercial poultry flocks to increase resistance against pathogenic exposure to Salmonella has become more prevalent particularly in view of increasing public awareness. However, such vaccination programs are generally difficult, time consuming and/or prohibitively expensive to administer on a commercial production scale. Accordingly, there is a need for an effective means for vaccinating domestic poultry and fowl against Salmonella infections.
Additionally, it is generally believed that vaccination is not a control option for serovars other than Salmonella enteritidis and Salmonella typhimurium which can be present on poultry farms. It is also generally believed that vaccination has limited effect on improving animal health and welfare and such vaccines are primarily used for public health reasons. Accordingly, there is a need for an antigen composition or vaccine effective to result in improved avian health and welfare such as can be manifested by increased weight gain and reduced mortality.
Further, some antigens may interfere with efficacy of other vaccines or medications administered simultaneously with and/or subsequent to vaccination. Additionally or alternatively, particular antigens may interfere with or affect the accuracy of traditional test or screening tools used to detect active or prior infection. Accordingly, there is a demand for a Salmonella antigen which can be administered to domestic poultry and fowl which does not reduce the effectiveness of other vaccines such as, for example, Marek's disease vaccines.

Composition and method for controlling intestinal pathogenic organisms

Nutrional Health Institute Laboratories, LLC


In an inspection jig (1) for electrical inspection of printed circuit boards, an electrode section (40) has an electrode (41) disposed on a surface of an electrode plate (42), and a contact (10) includes a conductive contact needle (11), a compression coil spring (12), and an intermediate member (13) that are arranged coaxially for use. The contact needle (11) has a distal end (111), a projection (112), a larger diameter portion (113), and an intermediate portion (114), and the intermediate member (13) has a cylindrical intermediate end (131), a guide portion (132), and an electrode end (133). The electrode end (133) has a cut section at an oblique angle, is bent to have a proximal end (133a) in the vicinity of a central portion, and is held by a contact holder (30) to have an initial load. The electrode (41) is smaller in diameter than the contact (10).

Description is given with reference to FIG. 1 of a general configuration of an inspection to be conducted on a printed circuit board. An inspection jig 1 is disposed between a printed circuit board to be inspected and an inspection device, so as to ensure conduction and allow inspection to be conducted regarding electrical properties such as a resistance value. A contact holder 30 and an electrode section 40 are connected with the inspection device by means of a connector 45. The contact holder 30 is configured to hold a plurality of contacts 10 that are adapted to conductively contact inspection terminals of the printed circuit board to be inspected. The electrode section 40 has electrodes and is configured to detachably support the contact holder 30 to establish conductive contact of the electrodes with the contacts 10. The configuration allowing separation of the contact holder 30 and the electrode section 40 is effective for fabrication and maintenance.
Background art includes a perpendicular coil spring probe of Patent Document 1 wherein an attempt is made to improve direct current resistance and inductance (an alternate current resistance property) of the internal resistance of the probe, and a first embodiment thereof is depicted in FIG. 5. The probe includes an upper probe pin 100, a compression coil spring 400, a guide tube 300, and a lower probe pin 200, and the upper probe pin is contained in the guide tube, such that an attempt is made to improve the internal resistance. The number of component is however four and thus there is still room for cost reduction.
FIGS. 2, 3, and 4 of Patent Document 2 include a longitudinal cross-sectional view and an enlarged view of a contact pin portion of a test head that includes a contact pin (reference numeral 1 of Document 2), a coil spring (reference numeral S of Document 2), and a receiver pin (reference numeral 3 of Document 2). The number of components is three and, as in Patent Document 1, an attempt is made to improve the internal resistance by housing the contact pin in the receiver pin; however, with smaller dimensions of the components, processing an insertion hole (reference numeral 34 of Document 2) in the receiver pin is not easy.
FIG. 1 of Patent Document 3 depicts a perpendicular spring probe with two components, i.e., a contact pin (reference numeral 100A of Document 3) and a tubular body (reference numeral 200A of the document). A spring (reference numeral 230A of Document 3) is provided in a middle portion of the tubular body and a contact pin is contained in the tubular body, such that an attempt is made to improve the internal resistance. This configuration however involves higher cost because of additional provision of a conical connection cap (reference numeral 240B of the document) to the tubular body for reducing contact resistance. Non-use of a connection cap may increase the area of contact and hence invite connection failure due to insufficient contact pressure under a lower load condition.
FIG. 2 of Patent Document 4 depicts a contact including a bar-shaped member (reference numeral 21 of Document 4), a coil spring (reference numeral 23 of Document 4), and a connection terminal (reference numeral 24 of Document 4). The number of components is three, and the connection terminal has a tapered second end, such that even a small electrode is contacted therewith. The tapered shape is however not conical, and the contact condition is thus not certain, which may involve a higher level of skill in design to define the electrode area, load, and specifications for processing.
As described above, elaboration is made in various manners on conductive contact between the electrode of the electrode section 40 and the contact 10 of the inspection jig 1 and on the internal electrical properties of the contact 10, but there is still room for improvement.


This invention pertains to a method for operating a radiotelephone for receiving digitally encoded broadcast messages from a radio channel, and also to a radiotelephone that operates in accordance with the method. The method includes a first step of operating a user interface (19, 20, 22) for inputting information to a controller (20) of the radiotelephone, the information specifying at least one category of broadcast message to be received. In response to the inputted information, a second step receives a broadcast message that belongs to the at least one category. A third step stores all or a portion of the received message in a memory (21) of the radiotelephone. A fourth step selectively displays (19) all or a portion of the stored message. In a presently preferred embodiment of this invention the message is received from a short message service broadcast channel.

A Short Message Service Broadcast Channel (S-BCCH), in the IS-136 rev. 0 specification, is specified for use in sending short point-to-multipoint messages to mobile stations, such as radiotelephones. A maximum number of 15 slots per superframe may be assigned to the S-BCCH logical channel. The S-BCCH is considered as a continuous channel even if more than one slot is allocated to the S-BCCH. The IS-136 rev. 0 specification does not specify particulars of this mode of operation, except for the level 2 reservation of slots within a superframe.
One possible implementation for such a system is as follows. This implementation is similar to that originally set forth in the preliminary IS-136 rev. 0 specification.
The SMS frame can be defined as a sequence of 24 Superframes which are aligned with a Hyperframe (HF) counter. Thus, the number of slots assigned to the SMS frame are 0, 24, 48, 72, depending on how many slots per superframe are assigned to BCCH.
The Hyperframe (HF) counter and a Primary Superframe (SF) indicator can be provided in the DCCH. These two counters together (2*HF Counter+Primary SF indicator) constitute a Superframe counter. A SMS frame is defined to be a single complete cycle (0-23) of the SF counter. The SMS frame is aligned to start at a HF counter value of 0, and also when the Primary Superframe indicator equals 0. The SF counter provides SMS frame synchronization information to the mobile station.
SMS subchannels are defined to allow different repetition cycles for different messages. Each subchannel has its own repetition cycle defined in terms of units of SMS frames. SMS frames are grouped into the SMS subchannels. Within each subchannel, a repetition cycle is defined (in units of SMS frames) with which the SMS broadcast message sequences contained in the SMS sub-channel are repeated. The SMS broadcast subchannel cycle may range from 1 to 64 SMS frames in length. Within each subchannel, the first S-BCCH slot within each SMS frame contains a header that describes the structure of the subchannel. Up to four subchannels may be defined. If more than one subchannel exists, the subchannels are time-multiplexed onto the S-BCCH channel on a SMS frame basis. If a SMS subchannel block is defined to consist of one SMS frame from each subchannel, placed in ascending order of subchannel number, then the multiplexed subchannels can be defined as the repetition of these subchannel blocks. The number of subchannels and the identity of the subchannel to which an SMS frame belongs are specified in the SMS frame header.
According to SMS header information found in the first slot in any SMS frame, the set of messages in SMS(i) may span M(i) number of SMS frames before a cycle is completed. M(i) is the length of the sub-channel cycle. The SMS frame number within the subchannel cycle is referred to as the phase of the subchannel cycle.
A number of different BCCH message categories can be defined. These include Emergency Information messages, Time and Date messages, Overload Class messages, System Identity messages, and Broadcast messages. Each BCCH message typically includes a number of fields of information. These fields can include: a Protocol Discriminator field (2 bits), a Message Type field (6 bits), a SMS Message ID field (8 bits), and a Text Message Data field (8 to 2024 bits).
The Broadcast Message category field is coded to provide a number of different types of message category identifiers. These include, by example, emergency numbers and road-side information, toll gate information, airline departure/arrival information, weather-related information, news, and financial information.
As may be appreciated, it is important to provide a user of a radiotelephone an ability to specify what types of SMS Broadcast messages that the user is interested in receiving. It is also important to provide the user with other SMS Broadcast-related capabilities, such as an ability to selectively enable and disable the reception of these messages, an ability to generate with the radiotelephone different indications of message-related conditions, and an ability to control the storage and display of messages.

Radiotelephone user interface for broadcast short message service


Pantoic acid ester neopentyl sulfonyl ester prodrugs of acamprosate, pharmaceutical compositions comprising such prodrugs, and methods of using such prodrugs and compositions thereof for treating diseases are disclosed. In particular, acamprosate prodrugs exhibiting enhanced oral bioavailability and methods of using acamprosate prodrugs to treat neurodegenerative disorders, psychotic disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, movement disorders, substance abuse disorders, binge eating disorder, cortical spreading depression related disorders, tinnitus, sleeping disorders, multiple sclerosis, and pain are disclosed.

Prodrugs are derivatized forms of drugs that following administration are converted or metabolized to an active form of the drug in vivo. Prodrugs are used to modify one or more aspects of the pharmacokinetics of a drug in a manner that enhances the therapeutic efficacy of a drug. For example, prodrugs are often used to enhance the oral bioavailability of a drug. To be therapeutically effective, drugs exhibiting poor oral bioavailability may require frequent dosing, large administered doses, or may need to be administered by other than oral routes, such as intravenously. In particular, many drugs with sulfonic acid groups exhibit poor oral bioavailability.
Intramolecular cyclization prodrug strategies have been used to modify the pharmacokinetics of drugs (Bundgaard in "A Textbook of Drug Design and Development," Krogsgaard-Larsen and Bundgaard Eds., Harwood Academic, Philadelphia, 1991, pp. 113-192; Bungaard and Nielsen, U.S. Pat. No. 5,073,641; Santos et al., Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, 2005, 15, 1595-1598; Papot et al., Curr Med Chem—Anti-Cancer Agents, 2002, 2, 155-185; and Shan et al., J Pharm Sciences 1997, 86(7), 765-767). Intramolecular cyclization release prodrug strategies have been applied to drugs containing sulfonic acid functional groups. Prodrugs comprising a substituted neopentyl sulfonate ester derivative in which the neopentyl group is removed in vivo by unmasking a nucleophilic heteroatom bonded to a substituted neopentyl moiety followed by intramolecular cyclization to generate the parent drug in the sulfonic acid or sulfonic acid salt form have been described (Roberts and Patch, U.S. Pat. No. 5,596,095; and Roberts et al., Tetrahedron Lett 1997, 38(3), 355-358). In such prodrugs the nucleophilic heteroatom can be nitrogen or oxygen and the nitrogen or oxygen nucleophile can be masked with any amine or alcohol protecting group, respectively, capable of being deprotected in vivo. Roberts and Patch also disclose that the masked nucleophilic group can be a carboxylic ester, e.g., —OCOR where R can be aryl, substituted aryl, heteroaryl, C1-8 alkyl, arylalkyl, or heteroarylalkyl. However, Roberts and Patch do not provide biological or pharmacological data to indicate which if any of the substituted neopentyl sulfonate esters release the prodrug in vivo and would therefore be useful for enhancing the oral bioavailability of the corresponding drug.
3-(Acetylamino)propylsulfonic acid (also named as N-acetylhomotaurine), acamprosate,
is a derivative of homotaurine, a naturally occurring structural analog of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) that appears to affect multiple receptors in the central nervous system (CNS). As an antiglutamatergic agent, acamprosate is believed to exert a neuropharmacological effect as an antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. The mechanism of action is believed to include blocking of the Ca2+ channel to slow Ca2+ influx and reduce the expression of c-fos, leading to changes in messenger RNA transcription and the concomitant modification to the subunit composition of NMDA receptors in selected brain regions (Zomoza et al., CNS Drug Reviews, 2003, 9(4), 359-374; and Rammes et al., Neuropharmacology 2001, 40, 749-760). In addition, acamprosate may block GABAB receptors (Daost, et al., Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 1992, 41, 669-74; and Johnson et al., Psychopharmacology 2000, 149, 327-344). Similar mechanisms are believed to be associated with the activity of other glutamate modulators such as riluzole, N-acetylcysteine, β-lactams, amantadine, lamictal, memantine, neramexane, remacemide, ifenprodil, and dextromethorphan.
Other diseases or disorders known to be associated with modulation of NMDA activity and for which modulators of NMDA receptor activity are clinically useful include psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder; mood disorders such as anxiety disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, mania, bipolar disorder; and somatoform disorders such as somatization disorder, conversion disorder, hypochondriasis, and body dysmorphic disorder; movement disorders such as Tourette's syndrome, focal dystonia, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, Syndeham's chorea, systemic lupus erythematosus, drug-induced movement disorders, tardive dyskinesia, blepharospasm, tic disorder, and spasticity; substance abuse disorders such as alcohol abuse disorders, narcotic abuse disorders, and nicotine abuse disorders; cortical spreading depression related disorders such as migraine, cerebral damage, epilepsy, and cardiovascular; sleeping disorders such as sleep apnea; multiple sclerosis; and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Recently, acamprosate has been found to be effective in treating tinnitus, or noise originating in the ear, a common disorder (de Azevedo et al., 109th Meeting and OTO EXPO of the Am. Acad. Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Foundation, Los Angeles, Calif., Sep. 25-28, 2005; Azevedo et al, Rev. Bras. Otorrinolaringol. Engl. Ed., 2005, 71, 618-623; and Azevedo et al., WO 2007/082561 A2). Acamprosate analogs (Berthelon et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,265,437) and salt forms of acamprosate analogs (Durlach, U.S. Pat. No. 4,355,043) are also reported to have therapeutic potential.
There is also evidence that acamprosate may interact with excitatory glutamatergic neurotransmission in general and as an antagonist of the metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 5 (mGluR5) in particular (De Witte et al., CNS Drugs 2005, 19(6), 517-37). The glutamatergic mechanism of action of acamprosate may explain the effects of acamprosate on alcohol dependence and suggests other activities such as in neuroprotection. Dysregulation of the mGluR5 receptor has been implicated in a number of diseases and mGluR5 antagonists have been shown to be effective in treating depression, pain, anxiety disorders, alcohol abuse disorders, drug abuse disorders, nicotine abuse disorders, neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, schizophrenia, and gastrointestinal reflux disease.
Acamprosate is a polar molecule that lacks the requisite physicochemical characteristics for effective passive permeability across cellular membranes. Intestinal absorption of acamprosate is mainly by passive diffusion and to a lesser extent by an active transport mechanism such as via an amino acid transporter (Más-Serrano et al., Alcohol 2000, 4(3); and 324-330; Saivin et al., Clin Pharmacokinet 1998, 35, 331-345). As a consequence, the oral bioavailability of acamprosate in humans is only about 11%. The mean elimination half-life of acamprosate following intravenous infusion (15 min) is 3.2±0.2 h. Efforts to enhance the gastrointestinal absorption and oral bioavailability of acamprosate include co-administrating the drug with polyglycolysed glycerides (Saslawski et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,514,524). Acamprosate prodrugs exhibiting enhanced absorption from the lower gastrointestinal tract have the potential to increase the oral bioavailability of the drug and to facilitate administration of acamprosate using sustained release oral dosage forms.

Simple pantoic acid ester neopentyl sulfonyl ester cyclization release prodrugs of acamprosate, compositions thereof, and methods of use


Tunable receivers and techniques for receiving an electrical oscillator signal in the RF, microwave or millimeter spectral range based on photonics technology to use both (1) photonic or optical components and (2) electronic circuit components.

This application relates to electronic devices and photonic devices for handling oscillation signals in a radio frequency (RF), microwave or millimeter wave spectral range.
A baseband signal can be carried by a radio frequency (RF) carrier signal to transmit either (1) wirelessly via air or (2) through a cable or waveguide from an RF signal transmitter or generator to an RF signal receiver. In many RF systems, the RF signal receiver can be designed to filter the received RF signal and to mix the filtered RF signal with an RF local oscillator (LO) signal generated by an RF local oscillator to convert the RF signal at the RF carrier frequency to an intermediate frequency (IF) at a lower frequency. The down-converted IF signal is then processed to extract the baseband signal for various signal processing operations.
In various RF applications, the RF receiver can be a tunable wideband RF receiver to tune to a range of RF frequencies. Such a wideband RF receiver can be realized using a bank of tunable RF filters to filter the received RF signal to select an RF frequency of interest from the detected input signal of an RF input port or circuit which can be, for example, a wideband RF antenna. A tunable synthesizer can be provided to mix the filtered RF signal output by the bank of tunable RF filters with the RF LO signal to down-convert the RF signal to IF. This approach requires many RF circuit elements, including the bank of filters, synthesizers, mixers, and various stages of signal amplification and thus the wideband receiver can have complex receiver circuitry and suffer losses at various stages in the circuitry. In addition, the frequency tuning range of such RF wideband receivers can be limited and narrow bandwidths can be difficult to achieve in the RF range using RF electronic filter designs.

Wideband receiver based on photonics technology


A tachometer system is provided for a motor vehicle having an engine selected from a plurality of engines having unique maximum rated engine RPMs. The system has an RPM data signal and scale correction data. A microcontroller receives the RPM data signal and said scale correction data and generates a scaled tachometer signal therefrom in accordance with a computer program stored in a memory. A gauge drive circuit receives the scaled tachometer signal from the microcontroller. A tachometer gauge has a pointer driven by the gauge driver circuit. The computer program calculates the scaled tachometer signal according to a first scaling constant while the RPM data signal represents less than a predetermined RPM, and calculates the scaled tachometer signal according to a second scaling constant while the RPM data signal represents greater than the predetermined RPM. The second scaling constant is selected from a set of predetermined scaling constants according to the scale correction data.

It is common for motor vehicles with internal combustion engines to have a tachometer for indicating the revolutions per minute, or RPM, of the engine crankshaft. It is also common for the dial face of the tachometer to include a red-colored strip that coincides with an RPM range that is at and above the maximum rated RPM for the engine. The lowest RPM represented by the red-colored strip is commonly called the engine redline.
It is also common for a particular model of motor vehicle to be offered with several different engines, with each engine having a different redline RPM. For example, a V8 engine may be offered in vehicle and have a 5500 RPM redline; while a V6 engine offered in the same vehicle may have a 6000 RPM redline. Since the engine redline must coincide with the redline region printed on the tachometer face, the vehicle manufacturer must design and assemble two different tachometers to coincide with the two engine redlines offered in the vehicle. In addition to the effort of designing the tachometers, the vehicle manufacturer is faced with the expense of maintaining inventories of different tachometers, and is also faced with the possibility of undesirably building a vehicle with a mismatched engine redline RPM/tachometer combination.


A system and method for manipulating waveforms, including transaction cancellation, in parallel time-warp simulation of circuits, such as those modeled in VHDL. Events waveforms for each output of a processor are organized by the simulation time (ST) of the events which created them and by the simulation time (RT) at which they are to be effective. A phantom buffer provides a linked list of events and associated transactions cancelled as a result of insertion of a new event in said chain of events. Rollback of a cancelled event waveform is done by restoring to the linked lists selected events and transactions from the phantom buffer.

1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention provides a system and method for circuit simulation. More particularly, it relates to a system and method for correct manipulation of waveforms in parallel time-warp simulations.
2. Background Art
The VHDL language is described in IEEE Standard VHDL Language Reference Manual, IEEE 1987. (VHDL refers to the VHSIC Hardware Description Language of IEEE standard 1076, where VHSIC means "very high speed integrated circuit.") The concept of time warp has been described by Jefferson. See, D. R. Jefferson, "Virtual time," in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, pp. 404-425, July 1985.
During time-warp simulation of VHDL models it is possible that a simulation of an event on any processor (sometimes referred to as dispatcher) will schedule one or more transactions with simulation time less than the simulation time of already scheduled transactions (due to a simulation of previous events on processor's inputs) on an output of the processor. Such transactions will cancel one or more of the already scheduled transactions. This may happen because (i) of non-uniform propagation delays from the inputs of a logical process (also referred to simply as process) to its outputs and (ii) of the inertial delay model for the output. However, in time-warp simulation, the event generating new transactions, which canceled already scheduled transactions on the output, can get rolled back at some later time. In such a case we need to restore all the transactions which were canceled by the simulation of the rolled back event. Briner has proposed a solution for such event cancellation due to non-uniform propagation delay in switch-level time warp simulation of digital circuits which are not modeled in VHDL. See J. V. Briner, "Parallel Mixed-Level Simulation of Digital Circuits Using Virtual Time," Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1990. However, Briner's solution does not deal with the complexities of multiple waveform elements for an output and/or transaction cancellation due to inertial delay model.
Consequently, it is an object of the invention to provide a system and method for handling transaction cancellation, particularly for waveform elements.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for handling transaction cancellation due to the inertial delay model in time-warp simulation of circuits modeled in VHDL or any other such HDL, e.g., Verilog.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a parallel VHDL simulation method which will run on any number of parallel platforms, including a cluster of workstations such as a cluster of IBM RS/6000 systems interconnected with a switch, such as the Allnode switch described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,404,461, the teachings of which are incorporated herein by reference.

Waveform manipulation in time warp simulation

International Business Machines Corporation


In a pre-filled Foley catheter for urine drainage, the conventional clip for releasing sterile water from a bulb (21) at the proximal end of the catheter, to fill the anchor bulb (20) at the distal end of the device, is replaced by a plug (25) which has an annular portion connected to a thin stem (27) by a circle of weakness. Snapping the stem (27) from the annulus provides a tactile signal through the opaque latex lumen that the catheter has been actuated. There is no separate clip to be disposed of. The interface between the latex and the plug remains undisturbed. Further improvement in the shelf-life and convenience of use of the catheter is delivered by the use of a sleeve, which can be of shrink-wrap material, around the bulb (21) and optionally also around the drain coupling (15) of the catheter. Apparatus for placing the plug and the sleeve is also described.

The Foley catheter is a catheter device usually made out of elastomeric material, which is for urine drainage and which is installed with its distal end in the bladder of the patient. When the distal end of the catheter has been advanced into the bladder, sterile water is caused to flow along a lumen from the proximal to the distal end of the catheter, there to fill a balloon at the distal end of the catheter. This balloon retains the distal end of the catheter in the bladder and allows a second lumen in the catheter shaft, open to the bladder at the distal end of the shaft, to drain urine from the bladder to the proximal end of the catheter.
In a pre-filled Foley catheter, such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,602,226 the device includes a reservoir of sterile water in the proximal end of the device, and a clip over the shaft of the catheter at its proximal end, which clip prevents the sterile water from flowing from the distended reservoir bulb along the lumen to the distal end of the catheter. The person placing the catheter is required to hold the catheter in the desired disposition relative to the body of the patient, and then remove the clip and squeeze the reservoir bulb, in order to inflate the balloon. It would be desirable to provide an improved device for preventing fluid flow from the reservoir to the balloon until it is desired to do so. U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,275,001 and 3,675,658 disclosed the use of internal plugs instead of clip.
Achievement of satisfactory shelf-life for pre-filled Foley catheters has proved to be a challenge. Common elastomeric material, such as latex, is not entirely impermeable to the passage of water. Accordingly, the water in the distended bulb reservoir of elastomeric material can escape through the wall, given enough time. In order to achieve a satisfactory shelf-life (18 to 24 months) it has been proposed to cover the outside of the reservoir bulb with a coating of material more resistant to passage of water than latex. Nevertheless, residual problems remain some of which are discussed in the U.S. Pat. No. 3,602,226.
One such problem is that the coating tends to crack. This reduces the resistance to escape of water and can adversely affect appearance. Another problem is to achieve satisfactory continuity of the coating around the clip at the distal end of the bulb, and the customary filler valve at the proximal end of the bulb. Even then, there is potential for water to escape from the bulb by flowing lengthways along the elastomeric material of the wall of the bulb, until it has passed the distal and proximal ends of the waterproof coating material.
The thickness of latex catheters made by a conventional dipping process is always liable to vary, and this variation can prejudice the goal of reliable sealing with an external moulded clip. With a conventional U-shaped one-piece clip, and latex walls of uncertain thickness, there is some potential for the clip to damage the latex lumen wall.


Paper coating or binding formulations are provided that comprise aqueous copolymer emulsions including copolymers derived from one or more copolymerizable surfactants of formula I and one or more monomers. The paper coating or binding formulations can include one or more mineral fillers, coating pigments, or mixtures thereof, wherein the total weight concentration of the one or more mineral fillers, coating pigments, or mixtures thereof is 65% or higher, based on the total weight of the composition. Paper products coated with the paper coating or binding formulations, methods of making the paper coating or binding formulations, and methods of making the coated paper products are also disclosed.

Paper typically includes binders and/or coatings to improve its optical and printing properties. For example, synthetic latexes can be used as components of pigmented coatings to increase the strength and the printability of the paper. For pigmented paper coating formulations, the solids content can influence the runnability of the coatings in the paper coating machine by affecting the viscosity of the coatings and their flow behavior at varying stresses in the coating machine. High solids content may be desired to save drying energy and to improve coating holdout for better printing quality. High water retention capacity may also be desired so as to prevent significant dewatering between the application and metering process steps.
When a paper coating formulation having a synthetic latex is subjected to high shear, such as, for example, in a blade coater, the formulation can exhibit a shear thinning or shear thickening behavior. Decreasing the solids content in the coating formulation may reduce shear thickening thereby improving the runnability of the formulation, but the quality of the resulting coating can be adversely affected by lower solids content and may also lead to excess absorption of water into the paper substrate, resulting in higher instances of web breaks.
Paper coating formulations that can be run at increasingly higher solids content can facilitate the production of high quality paper, increase production rates, and reduce energy costs. Conventional synthetic latexes may be limited in their use as paper coatings with high solids content due to the resulting high viscosity of the coating formulations at high shear rates.

Paper coating or binding formulations and methods of making and using same


A method of data communication includes: determining, by a first terminal, an idle channel, and transmitting a data handshake request carrying interruption information on the idle channel, wherein the interruption information at least includes an indication for interrupting a call of a traffic channel; receiving a data handshake response transmitted by a repeater; when the data handshake response is of a type allowing interruption, jumping to the traffic channel designated by the repeater according to a channel jumping indication included in the data handshake response; and when determining that a second terminal occupying the traffic channel making the call interrupts the call and releases a resource of the traffic channel, initiating a call on the traffic channel. The embodiments of the present invention can interrupt the call of the transmitting terminal and release the channel resource, and have strong flexibility and high efficiency.

An Extended Pseudo Trunk (abbreviated as XPT in English) system is a distributed trunking system without a control center. One XPT system may be composed of a plurality of stations, each station has a plurality of repeaters providing a shared channel, and the plurality of repeaters include a fixed master repeater and a plurality of slave repeaters. The XPT system can maximize the system capacity without increasing additional cost, effectively utilize the existing channel resources, and can fully meet the demands of mid-and-low-end trunking customers. The XPT system does not need a designated control channel. This solution can meet US FB6 frequency specifications, and its frequency allocation can be shared with other systems, for example, the same frequency can be allocated to different users. Therefore, the XPT system is widely applied due to low cost and high channel resource utilization thereof.
In the related art, there is a situation that people in the same call always occupy the channel, resulting in a receiving terminal being unable to interrupt a call of a transmitting terminal to initiate a callback. Moreover, in the case that all the channel resources are occupied, users with high priority cannot interrupt the channel resources to initiate a call if they want to initiate a general call or an emergency call. Therefore, there is a need for a method that can interrupt the call of the transmitting terminal to meet the demands of the users.
In the existing centralized trunking system, each terminal is managed by a designated control channel and a specialized control center. At ordinary times, the control channel remains in a long transmission state, and all the terminals are waiting on the control channel. When all the channels in the system are occupied, the control center can release the channel resources by issuing a Reverse Channel (RC) instruction to a designated terminal. However, this method requires the designated control center and the designated control channel to manage the terminals. The issuing the RC instruction to release the channel resources by the control center when the channel resources are fully occupied is not suitable for a receiving terminal of a distributed trunking system without a control center to interrupt a call of a transmitting terminal. Therefore, in the distributed trunking system without a control center, how to use the current system resources to interrupt the call of the transmitting terminal so as to reduce the waste of the channel resources becomes a matter of concern.

Data communication method, apparatus and system

Hytera Communications Corporation Limited


A camera for use with a flash device capable of performing a test light emitting action and a lens device having a diaphragm includes a lens diaphragm control instructing part for giving an instruction for an aperture controlling action of the diaphragm of the lens device, and a test light emission control part for causing, in response to a predetermined operation (for example, an operation on a stop-down switch provided on the camera), both the aperture controlling action by the lens diaphragm control instructing part and the test light emitting action of the flash device to be performed, so that, in response to the predetermined operation, the test light emission can be performed in a state of having the aperture of the lens diaphragm stopped down. Accordingly, shades and shadows of the object of shooting to be obtained under flash light emission can be simply recognized through the test light emission prior to execution of flash photography without recourse to any complex operation.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a camera and a camera system for use with a flash device.
2. Description of Related Art
Some of known camera systems provided with flash light emitting means are capable of making test light emission from the flash light emitting means, as disclosed, for example, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. HEI 7-120812, etc. In such camera systems, when a light emission start switch is pushed by the photographer, the flash light emitting means emits a predetermined quantity of flash light for testing toward an object, so that the photographer can recognize shades and shadows brought about at the object and the background thereof by the flash light. Thus, the photographer can recognize, prior to photo-taking, an influence to be brought about by the illumination with the flash light.
In the case of the camera system disclosed in the above Japanese laid-open patent application No. HEI 7-120812, however, the test flash light emission is made with a lens diaphragm left in its initial full-aperture state. Therefore, in recognizing the object, etc., through a viewfinder after a light flux passing through the lens diaphragm arrives at the viewfinder, the shades and shadows of the object, etc., observable through the viewfinder at the time of the test flash light emission are only ones which are obtained with the lens diaphragm left in its full-aperture state and which differ from shades and shadows to be obtained by exposing a film to the light coming through the photo-taking lens with the lens diaphragm in a stopped-down state. Accordingly, the prior camera system has such a drawback that the photographer cannot recognize, prior to photo-taking, the shades and shadows of the object and the background to be obtained under flash light emission for a photo-taking operation which is to be performed with the lens diaphragm stopped down as desired to deepen the depth of field.


An output buffer including a first input stage circuit, a first output stage circuit, a second output stage circuit, a first switching module, and a second switching module is disclosed. The first output stage circuit is coupled to a first data line. The second output stage circuit is coupled to a second data line. The first switching module is coupled between the first input stage circuit and the first output stage circuit. The second switching module is coupled between the first input stage circuit and the second output stage circuit.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an output buffer, and more particularly to an output buffer applied in a source driver.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a conventional output buffer. The output buffer 100 comprises input stage circuits 111 and 113, output stage circuits 131 and 133, and an output multiplex unit 150. The output buffer 100 increases the driving capability of the input signals IN1 and IN2 to successfully drive the load units L1 and L2. However, the transistor sizes of the output stage circuit 131 and 133 and the output multiplex unit 150 are increased as a result. Thus, the size of the output buffer is increased.
In addition, when the output signals of the output stage circuit 131 and 133 approach a target, the voltage difference between the drain and the source of the transistor of the output multiplex unit 150 approaches 0V. If the load units L1 and L2 become heavier, when the output signals of the output stage circuits 131 and 133 approach the target, the driving speed of the output is reduced.

Output buffer and source driver utilizing the same