An elongated construction workpiece having a viewable surface and adapted to be cut to a measured length or width at a work site, wherein the workpiece is provided on a viewable surface adjacent one or more of its edges with linear measure markings whereby a desired length or width of the workpiece can be cut utilizing only the markings thereon with no need for a tape measure or the like.

1. Field
This invention provides a novel and unique measurement system for application to a large variety of workpieces such as vinyl siding and components thereof including corner post, J-channel, F-channel, fascia, undersill and the like, soffit-panels, or manufactured wood or sheet metal or plastic products such as plywood sheets, plastic or metal guttering and roofing and the like.
2. Prior Art
Heretofore, cutting workpieces such as those mentioned above to size on the job has involved the time consuming steps of placing the workpiece, which typically is several, e.g., 10 to 20 feet in length, on a table or other flat support, taking up a tape measure and hooking the end thereof to an end of the workpiece, extending the tape measure out along the workpiece without dislodging the hook end thereof from the workpiece, marking on the workpiece the desired cut point, removing the tape measure from the workpiece, retracting the tape measuring, replacing the tape measure at its storage place, placing the workpiece in a position on the support to be cut on the mark, and cutting the workpiece.
The time involved in carrying out these steps does not, at first glance, appear as a significant time expenditure, however, for example, for a typical days vinyl siding work on a large home, the cutter operator will use a tape measure hundreds of times and easily expend an hour or so each day in just measuring and marking.


A method for manufacturing wireless communication devices for use in tracking or identifying other items comprises a number of cutting techniques that allow the size of the antenna for the wireless communication device. Further, the chip for the wireless communication device is nested so as to be flush with the surface of the substrate of the wireless communication device. Rollers cut the tabs that form the antenna elements. In a first embodiment, a plurality of rollers are used, each one effecting a different cut whose position may be phased so as to shorten or lengthen the antenna element. In a second embodiment, the rollers are independently positionable to shorten or lengthen the antenna element.

It is often desired to track and identify items, such as packages, containers, and the like, and to communicate information concerning such items wirelessly. One method of tracking and providing information concerning packages is to attach a wireless communication device, such as a radio frequency identification (RFID) transponder or other identification device, to packages or items. The information communicated concerning the packages or items may include an expiration date, "born on" date or date of manufacture, lot number, tracking information, or other manufacturing information, and the like. A wireless communication device may be attached to an individual package, to a container containing multiple packages, or other item as the situation merits.
Recent advances in the miniaturization of wireless communication electronics have enabled the creation of small chips, containing integrated circuits, that are well suited for use in these wireless communication devices. However, these chips still need antennas to communicate to a remotely positioned interrogator. Numerous potential antennas exist that may be coupled to the chip for this purpose.
It is expected that the demand for such devices will rapidly increase as industries realize the versatility and utility of the wireless communication devices. To meet this demand, automated manufacturing processes are needed. Further, the process contemplated should provide a wireless communication device well suited for integration with the item to be tracked and one that may have the ability to communicate at multiple frequencies if desired.

Manufacturing method for a wireless communication device and manufacturing apparatus


A method of searching for full charge capacity of stacked battery cells in a rechargeable battery pack and a battery management system based on the method are disclosed. The method includes the steps of: predefining an end-of-discharge condition as a ratio of change of open-circuit cell voltage to change of state of charge; providing a full charge capacity for a rechargeable battery pack assembled of several stacked battery cells; charging the rechargeable battery pack until it is fully; discharging the rechargeable battery pack; measuring current values and open-circuit cell voltages periodically; processing coulomb counting based on the measured current values and zeroing a sum of coulomb counting values when a new discharging cycle begins; estimating state of charge during discharging periodically; calculating a running ratio; and updating the full charge capacity by the current sum of the coulomb counting values when the running ratio is equal to or greater than the end-of-discharge condition.

Rechargeable batteries are widely used in many products, such as laptop computers, tablets, mobile phones, and even large electric vehicles and robots. Since durability of those products depends on the performance of the rechargeable batteries, use of suitable rechargeable batteries and careful maintenance for them are very important during the lifespan of those products.
Recently, among all rechargeable batteries, nickel-cadmium batteries, nickel-hydrogen batteries, nickel-zinc batteries and lithium batteries are more and more popular because they have stable physical characteristics and smaller size for stacking. They can also be charged or discharged with no or limited memory effects. Besides, these rechargeable batteries have very low self-discharge rate and high energy density. However, since they often use with sub-battery sets (or cells) connected in series/parallel, poor performance may be caused by unbalance of the sub-battery sets during charge or discharge. In order to avoid battery unbalance and utilize the best performance of these rechargeable batteries, monitor of power capacity of these rechargeable batteries is very commonly executed in battery management systems (BMS). Full charge capacity (FCC) is an index of power capacity. The FCC of a rechargeable battery is set to be a certain value when the rechargeable battery is produced in a factory. However, it will gradually decrease as the rechargeable battery is repeatedly charged and discharged. Thus, the FCC needs to be updated often for each rechargeable battery to check current status.
A prior art to determine the FCC of a rechargeable battery is disclosed in US Patent Application No. 20130057290. Please refer to FIG. 1. It is a flowchart of the mentioned application. A battery performs charging and discharging operations according to the control of a battery protection circuit (S1). When a charger is electrically connected to a battery pack, the charging operation is performed. When an electronic device is connected to the battery pack, the discharging operation is performed. A monitoring unit monitors each cell of the battery in series during the charging and discharging operations of the battery to measure at least one of voltage, current, and temperature of the battery (S2). A control unit receives monitoring results from the monitoring unit, and determines whether the monitoring results satisfy FCC updating conditions of the battery (S3). For example, the control unit determines whether the measured values of the voltage, the current, and the temperature of the battery matches the corresponding values stored in a preset table. If it is determined that the updating conditions are not satisfied in operation (S3), the process returns to operation (S1). In addition, the battery repeatedly performs the charging and discharging operations, and the monitoring unit performs the monitoring substantially continuously. On the other hand, if it is determined that the updating conditions are satisfied in operation (S3), it is determined whether the time point where the conditions are satisfied is included during a rising period of the voltage of the battery (S4). For example, it is determined whether the discharging operation of the battery is discontinued. When it is determined that the voltage of the battery rises in operation (S4), the process returns to operation (S1). On the other hand, when it is determined that the voltage of the battery does not rise, the FCC of the battery is updated and the updated FCC is stored in a recording unit (S5).
Although the prior doesn't point out a specified means to calculate the FCC, it indicates updating conditions that a calculated FCC for each cell in the battery is acceptable under the conditions. Meanwhile, since there are many rechargeable battery cells assembled inside the battery in series, the FCC of the battery is set to be the smallest FCC among the FCCs of the all rechargeable battery cells. As there will be slightly battery unbalance among the rechargeable battery cells during measurement, the FCC should reflect a real situation so that people know if the battery needs to repair or not. Once after repairing, some rechargeable battery cells are replaced, the updating conditions need to re-check again. It is too complex while operating.
Hence, a more simplified and effective method to search for FCC of stacked rechargeable battery cells during operation is desired.

Method of searching for full charge capacity of stacked rechargeable battery cells in rechargeable battery pack and battery management system made of the same


In one embodiment, a collector current driver is provided that controls the collector current for a bipolar transistor temperature transducer. The collector current driver is configured to use negative feedback to generate an emitter current for the bipolar transistor responsive to target current.

PNP bipolar transistors are readily produced in CMOS integrated circuits as parasitic substrate devices. This is quite advantageous as bipolar transistors have an emitter-to-base voltage (Veb) that varies predictably with regard to temperature. The temperature of integrated circuits may thus be monitored using a bipolar transistor as a temperature transducer. Because a bipolar transistor is readily and inexpensively embedded with the circuits to be monitored, bipolar transistor temperature transducers are attractive options to an integrated circuit designer.
Although bipolar transistor temperature transducers are inexpensive, they suffer from a number of problems. For example, it is known that if the collector current for a bipolar transistor is changed from a first collector current value IC1 to a second collector current value IC2, a resulting change in emitter-to-base voltage (ΔVeb) is directly proportional to a product of the absolute temperature T and the logarithm of a ratio of the collector currents (IC2/IC1). If IC2 equals N*IC1, then the temperature is proportional to ΔVeb divided by the logarithm of N. This logarithm of N may be stored in a memory such that the temperature measurement merely requires mapping ΔVeb by some proportionality factor retrieved from the memory. The accuracy of the temperature measurement thus is a function of the accuracy for the collector current ratio. But the collector current IC for a PNP bipolar transistor temperature transducer is commonly determined from the emitter current IE. In particular, IC equals IE*(β/β+1), where β is a current gain factor that depends upon the collector current amplitude. A ratio of emitter currents will thus vary from the desired ratio of collector currents as a function of this variation in β. For high values of β, this dependence of the emitter current ratio on the variation in β leads to relatively little error. For example, a PNP bipolar transistor temperature transducer having a 10% variation for a β of 100 leads to just a 0.1° C. error as the collector current is increased tenfold. Such a relatively high value of β is readily achieved in discrete PNP transistors. But integrated PNP transistors typically have much lower values of β such as one or even less than one. In contrast to the high-β example, a PNP bipolar transistor temperature transducer having a 10% variation for a β of 1 leads to a 6° C. error as the collector current is increased tenfold.
To mitigate temperature measurement errors from β variation as a function of collector current, a lead may be used to monitor the collector current of the PNP device directly. While such a solution is feasible for discrete PNP devices, an integrated PNP device does not have a discrete collector terminal since its substrate serves as the collector terminal. Direct monitoring of the collector current for integrated PNP devices would thus be expensive and cumbersome because of the need for an additional pin on the transducer package and a corresponding trace on the package's printed circuit board.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an integrated bipolar transistor temperature transducer that compensates for the variation in β.
Embodiments of the present invention and their advantages are best understood by referring to the detailed description that follows. It should be appreciated that like reference numerals are used to identify like elements illustrated in one or more of the figures.

Collector current driver for a bipolar junction transistor temperature transducer


A computing system in which permanent state changes to portions of the system are effected using transactions, including an exception handier and a method of handling exceptions in such a system is disclosed. Specifically, the computing system comprises a processor for executing at least one process; and scratchpad memory. A transactional subsystem is interconnected with the processor and has a plurality of states. State changes to the transactional subsystem are made irreversible only upon successful completion of a transaction. Program memory interconnected with the processor contains an exception handler for handling an exception dependent on one of a transaction. The handler adapts the processor to buffer data resulting from the exception in the scratchpad memory; and upon successful completion of the transaction, transfer the buffered data to an exception buffer accessible by a software process executing on the processor. Upon unsuccessful completion of the transaction, the buffered data in the scratchpad memory is discarded. Preferably, the transactional subsystem is a shared memory system.

Existing computing systems, as for example a multi-processor, shared memory system as disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/774,548 entitled "Shared Memory Control Algorithm for Mutual Exclusion and Rollback" filed Dec. 30, 1996 naming Brian Baker and Terry Newell as inventors, and incorporated herein by reference, effect certain permanent system changes in "transactions". In this system, multiple processors execute processes that may modify shared memory. Memory changes made by a process executing on a processor do not permanently affect the shared memory until the process successfully completes. During process execution, memory used by a process is "owned" by that process; read and write access by other processes is locked out. If a process does not successfully complete or attempts to access memory owned by another process, the process is aborted and memory affected by the process is "rolled back" to its previous state. Memory changes are only made permanent (or "committed") upon successful process completion. In this context, "transactions" may be considered those intervals between initial system accesses that may ultimately permanently affect the system state, and the "committal" of the state changes to the system. This shared memory system is referred to as a transactional system.
By contrast, conventional computing systems effect permanent state changes at any time. These systems may be considered "non-transactional systems".
Notwithstanding the use of transactions to permanently cause changes to shared memory in the above described computing system, irreversible events continue to affect the state of the system. These events are said to be "non-transactional" and are unique and non-repeatable. Examples of such events include hardware state changes; communications with non-transactional systems; and processor interrupts or exceptions. Ideally, state changes caused by non-transactional events should coincide with permanent state changes effected in any transactional system.
In order to avoid the effect of exceptions, these could simply be blocked from occurring. Data normally provided by the exceptions would be provided and collected by the base (ie. non-exception) processes. However, blocking all exceptions would severely impact overall system performance. This impact on overall performance would be exacerbated in a multi-processor system. Moreover, by its very nature, the locking out of transactions in a real time system would be impossible. A real time system must be able to immediately react to events, including exceptions.
Another approach might utilize a simple buffer formed in memory to transfer data between exception and base levels. Critical sections of data are preserved by software system exclusion primitives. However, unlike in the above described transactional shared memory system, the rollback of memory altered as a result of a process would not be possible.
As should be apparent, a method of handling exceptions within a transactional system that allows for memory rollback and minimal blocking is desirable.

Computing system with exception handler and method of handling exceptions in a computing system


A headlight is turned on if an external illuminance value outside of the vehicle is equal to or lower than a first threshold value if the non-rainfall state is judged from windshield wiper activation, and is permitted to be turned on if the external illuminance value is equal to or lower than a second threshold value higher than the first predetermined illuminance value if the rainfall state is judged. When the vehicle is capable of being driven and the headlight is turned on, if an average illuminance value of the external illuminance value is equal to or higher than a predetermined value, then the second threshold value switches to the first threshold value. When the headlight is turned off, if the activation of the wiper has not been confirmed for a first predetermined period, then the second threshold value switches to the first threshold value.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicular automatic light control apparatus for automatically turning on and off vehicular headlights, and more particularly to a vehicular automatic light control apparatus for determining a shift from a rainfall state to a non-rainfall state and automatically controlling a headlight from a turned-on state to a turned-off state.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, there has been known a method of and an apparatus for automatically operating vehicular headlights by measuring a period of time in which a windshield wiper has operated and the number of cycles in which the windshield wiper has wiped the windshield in each of intermittent, low-speed, and high-speed modes of operation of the windshield wiper, and judging a rainfall when the period of time and the number of cycles have reached respective values. See, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-168435.
The applicant has proposed a rainfall determining device for judging a rainfall based on information as to the wiping operation of a windshield wiper. According to the proposed rainfall determining device, a wiping operation detecting means detects each wiping operation of the windshield wiper, and a timer starts measuring a predetermined period of time in each detected wiping operation. A counter counts the number of cycles in the predetermined period of time in which the windshield wiper has wiped the windshield, and if the count is detected successively a predetermined number of times, then a judging means judges a rainfall. For details, reference should be made to Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-103519.
The conventional arrangement disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-168435 requires a dedicated timer and a dedicated counter for each of the operation modes of the windshield wiper, the timer and the counter being controlled under different conditions in the respective modes. The disclosed apparatus for judging a rainfall is complex in structure. The disclosed method and apparatus turn on the headlights when a rainfall is judged depending on the operation mode of the windshield wiper, and do not judge a non-rainfall state.
The proposal according to Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-103519 also judges a rainfall and does not judge a non-rainfall state.
As described above, there has not been any conventional non-rainfall judging apparatus for determining a shift from a rainfall state to a non-rainfall state.

Vehicular automatic light control apparatus


The present invention is a method of synchronizing a digital receiver to a digital transmitter in both frequency and time using a novel ambiguity transformation. The ambiguity transform combines time correlation and spectrum synchronization into an integrated two-dimensional transform process. The ambiguity transform includes the steps of multiplying a reference sequence with a received signal to create a product signal, calculating the magnitude of the spectrum of the product signal, and determining the peak product signal. Through multiple iterations of the ambiguity transform, and time and frequency shifts, a digital receiver may be synchronized to a digital transmitter. The method of the present invention may be implemented using a digital signal processor (DSP).

(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to digital communications and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for rapidly synchronizing a digital receiver to a digital transmitter in both time and frequency.
(b) Description of Related Art
The reception of a digitally modulated signal requires that a receiver be synchronized with a transmitter. Two common modes of synchronization are by frequency and time. When a receiver attempts to obtain information sent by a transmitter, the receiver must be tuned to the frequency being transmitted. That is, the transmitter and the receiver must be synchronized in frequency. For a digital receiver to accurately demodulate the received signal, the receiver must know the starting time of the individual symbols that are received. This is referred to as time (or symbol) synchronization. Digitally transmitted information can only be interpreted when a transmitter and a receiver are synchronized in both time and frequency.
The importance of time and frequency synchronization in a digital transmission system can be readily appreciated. Although most academic discussion regarding the interaction of digital transmitters and receivers assume synchronization, actual implementation of a digital system requires the consideration of various methods of time and frequency synchronization. Many known synchronization methods employ the transmission of a known bit pattern or reference sequence from the transmitter to the receiver. In many cases a receiver also locally generates the same reference sequence that is transmitted by the transmitter. The comparison of the received reference sequence and the locally generated reference sequence provides the information necessary to synchronize the receiver to the transmitter in time. Synchronization may be done at the beginning of a transmission, or may be used periodically to ensure or re-establish synchronization.
A technique which is generally used for time synchronization is that of signal delay and correlation processing. A received signal, which contains a reference sequence, is fed to a tapped delay line, which is then correlated with a locally generated reference sequence via a summing bus. The received reference sequence is shifted relative to the locally generated bit sequence until, by way of correlation measurements, it is determined that the transmitted and locally generated sequences are time synchronized. This method is acceptable in applications where the frequency offset between the transmitter and the receiver is relatively small. However, in situations where frequency offsets between the transmitter and the receiver are large, the correlation of long sequences is subject to significant loss.
In situations where there exists a significant frequency offset between the transmitter and the receiver, another known synchronizing approach is to scan the receiver frequency in small steps through a frequency range suspected to contain a signal that is to be received. At each step in 25 frequency a correlation operation is repeated. The process of changing receiver frequency and executing the correlation procedure is repeated until the transmitted signal is found. When the proper correlation is found both time and frequency are synchronized. This synchronization method is computationally inefficient and may be very time consuming if the frequency range to be stepped through is large. However, this method may be implemented in a hardware device such as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) dedicated to the function of synchronizing the receiver to the transmitter. Although the ASIC approach provides rapid synchronization, due to the fact that software calculations are avoided, it is not generally a cost effective solution.
Therefore, there exists a need for a rapid, scalable and computationally efficient method for synchronizing a digital receiver to a digital transmitter.

Rapid time and frequency acquistion of spread spectrum waveforms via ambiguity transform


A method for classifying electronically posted documents includes receiving two posted documents and generating corresponding metadata summaries for each, wherein each of the metadata summaries includes at least one sub-tree structure. The structures of the two summary sub-trees within the respective metadata summaries are subsequently compared. If the two summary sub-trees are different, the two documents are deemed distinct. If the two summary sub-trees are the same, attribute values and text content of the metadata summaries are compared over a portion of the metadata summaries. If the compared attribute values and text content are determined to be the same, the documents are deemed duplicative.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to systems and methods for comparing and classifying documents, and in particular to systems and methods for classifying electronically posted documents used in conjunction with search engines.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet, a global network connecting millions of computers, is increasingly becoming the preferred way to disseminate information. An estimated 150 million people worldwide use the Internet to access and exchange information.
Both commercial and non-commercial entities have recognized the growing use of the Internet and have thus accelerated the posting of "electronic documents" to provide access to their information. As known, "electronically posted documents" ("documents," herein) may contain any type of information which can be electronically communicated. These documents, typically web pages, are posted on the world wide web, a system of internet-accessible web servers. Individual companies set up one or more web sites using a web server to support web page publication and communication. Some examples of information which can be included in an electronic document such as a web page includes data, text, facsimile, audio, video, graphics, as well as other types of information.
In many instances, the user may not know the web site location (URL address) which contains the desired information. Alternatively, the user may prefer to browse similar information obtained from a variety of different web sites. In these cases, the user may employ a search engine to locate one or more web pages containing information about the desired topic.
Conventional search engines, such as Yahoo®, Alta Vista® and Excite® use several programs to retrieve web pages containing the requested information. Typically, a "spider" or "webcrawler" program is used to locate and download posted documents. Once downloaded, an "indexer" program reads the documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Upon entry of one or more of the indexed keywords, the search engine provides to the requester a listing of the search results, typically in the form of HTML links, each listing corresponding to one of the indexed documents. The user may then click on one of the displayed HTML links to access information on a particular web page. Each provider's search engine typically uses proprietary webcrawler and indexing programs which locate and return the most comprehensive set of documents in the shortest amount of time.
A problem associated with the aforementioned process is the listing of duplicate documents in the search results. Duplications inconvenience the user by directing him/her to seemingly distinct documents which, in fact, contain identical content.
To minimize the occurrence of duplicate listings, a textual comparison process was developed by which the text content of two downloaded or listed documents is compared. If the text of the two documents match, the documents are deemed duplicative and one could then be discarded without loss of information.
One disadvantage of the conventional textual comparison process is that it performs a pair-wise document comparison process on a non-selective basis. For example, the conventional textual comparison process will compare documents of different mime-types which are inherently dissimilar. Performing these unnecessary document comparisons lengthen the system's response time. Another disadvantage of the conventional process is that it does not ensure elimination of content-duplicate listings. Documents which contain identical content but which include different attributes (such as metadata "href" elements), are typically identified as different documents using the conventional textual comparison process. These documents in fact are content-identical and provide no additional information to the searcher.
In view of the disadvantages suffered by the conventional system and process, a new system and method for classifying posted documents is needed.

System and method for classifying electronically posted documents

International Business Machines Corporation


A thermal transfer image receiving sheet comprising a support having an image receiving layer on one surface of the support and a backing layer on the other surface of the support, wherein, (a) a first electrical resistance of the thermal transfer image receiving sheet is in a range of 1×108–1×1012 ohms per square before the transferable protection layer is transferred; and (b) a second electrical resistance of the thermal transfer image receiving sheet is in a range of 1×108–1×1012 ohms per square after the transferable protection layer is transferred and after the backing layer is removed, the first and second electrical resistances being measured by a salt bridge method.

A method of forming a color or monochrome image according to a known prior art is such that an ink sheet containing thermal diffusive dye, which has the property of being diffused and transferred by heat, is placed opposite to an image receiving layer of an image receiving sheet and the thermal diffusive dye is transferred onto the image receiving layer to form an image, using a thermal printing means such as thermal head or laser. The above thermal transfer method has been acknowledged as a method that enables to form an image from digital data and also to form a high quality image comparable with a silver salt picture without using any processing solution such as a developer.
Concerning the storage stability and permanence, however, the quality of an image formed by this method has not yet reached those of a silver salt picture.
In order to improve the stability of a formed image, particularly to improve the fixing stability and light resistance, there have been disclosed thermal transfer materials using a chelatable thermal diffusive dye (hereinafter also called as a post-chelate dye) and methods of forming images (post-chelate technique) in the Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as JP-A) Nos. 59-78893, 59-109349 and 60-2398 for example.
As a technology of improving the mechanical permanence (e.g., abrasion resistance, grease resistance) of the image formed by a dye thermal transfer method, there has been proposed a technology for forming a transparent protection layer on an image by the thermal transfer method after the image is formed; and a process of using this technology for the image formed by the post-chelate technique has also been disclosed (refer to the Patent Document 1 for example).
When forming an image by a thermal sublimation transfer method, since the thermal transfer sheet and the thermal transfer image receiving sheet are put together and heated while conveyed through a printer, there may arise a problem that static electricity is generated resulting in a trouble in the conveyance or that dust is collected on the dye receiving layer surface of the thermal transfer image receiving sheet resulting in imperfect coloring. In addition, as a method for forming a protection layer described above, there is available a method of forming a protection layer on the formed image using a thermal transfer sheet on which a transferable protection layer has been provided beforehand. While the protection layer described above is transferred by a thermal printer, there has often been a problem that a considerable amount of static electricity is generated when the protection layer is separated from the thermal transfer sheet, resulting in a trouble in the conveyance of a thermal transfer image receiving sheet and thermal transfer sheet in the thermal printer.
In addition, when multiple image prints are piled one over another after printing, the image receiving sheets adhere to each other due to static electricity, and therefore there sometimes arises a problem that multiple image prints cannot be piled up compactly, resulting in inconvenience in handling the prints.
In order to solve the above problems, there have been proposed ideas of eliminating static electricity by providing an antistatic layer on a thermal transfer sheet (ribbon) or impregnating the thermal transfer sheet with antistatic agent in JP-A 9-52454, 7-179071, 7-179072, 6-55868, 6-99670, 10-81078, 10-118565, 10-119444, 8-300842, 9-156244, and 9-295465 for example. Recently, there have also been proposed antistatic techniques (refer to the Patent Documents 2–5 for example). With the above proposed methods, however, electrostatic charge of the thermal transfer image receiving sheet cannot be prevented fully satisfactorily.
There have also been disclosed methods of eliminating static electricity by providing an antistatic layer on the back surface of the thermal transfer image receiving sheet or impregnating the back surface with an antistatic agent in JP-A Nos. 4-366688, 5-58064, 7-1845, 8-175035, 9-207462, 10-35116, 10-44624, 10-58846, 11-157226 and 11-165469 for example. However, these proposed methods of providing a conductive layer on the back surface are not fully enough to prevent generation of static electricity on the image receiving surface.
There have also been disclosed methods of providing a conductive layer on the image receiving surface in JP-A 5-64979, 6-155949, 7-32754, 7-290845, 8-52945, 10-324072, 10-329432, 11-78255, and 11-321125. Even with these technology in which a formed image print contains a transferable protection layer, however, static electricity prevention has not been fully effective enough. With a method in which a protection layer is separated and transferred, compared to a method in which no protection layer is separated and transferred, it is supposed that the intended effect of the technique has not yet been fully produced because a lot of electric charge is generated and also because the conductive layer is destructed by the heat caused in transferring the protection layer.
There have also been disclosed methods of providing a protection layer with an antistatic agent so as to prevent electrostatic charge of the formed image print containing the transferable protection layer described above (refer to the Patent Documents 6 and 7 for example). These proposed methods are effective for electrostatic prevention of the formed image print containing a transferable protection layer, however, involve a problem that the intrinsically intended properties of the protection layer, namely permanence and storage stability of the formed image are not fully attained.
There have been proposed processes of using cellulose resin as a backing layer provided on the image receiving sheet in the thermal transfer method (refer to the Patent Documents 8 and 9). In these patent documents, however, almost no information have been disclosed on the relationship between the antistatic property and the use of cellulose resin nor on the trial to improve the antistatic property by considering the conductivity measured by the salt bridge method.
[Patent Document 1]
JP-A 2001-168244
[Patent Document 2]
JP-A 2000-103175
[Patent Document 3]
JP-A 2000-103178
[Patent Document 4]
JP-A 2000-272254
[Patent Document 5]
JP-A 2001-1653
[Patent Document 6]
JP-A 11-105437
[Patent Document 7]
JP-A 2003-145946
[Patent Document 8]
JP-A 10-297113
[Patent Document 9]
JP-A 11-181226

Thermal transfer image receiving sheet and image forming method using the same


A display member, particularly a plasma display member, can be produced by a process including applying a paste which includes a urethane compound and inorganic fine particles onto a substrate and then firing the paste. The display member has a post-firing pattern without any defect.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a paste and a process for the production of a display member using the paste. The paste and the process of the present invention can be used for the production of various types of displays, including a plasma display, a plasma address liquid crystal display and a field emission display, and for the pattern processing in circuit materials and so on.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the fields of displays and circuit materials, increasingly small and high-definition products have been recently developed and pattern processing techniques adaptable to such development have been demanded. In particular, for the production of a barrier rib for a plasma display, methods have been demanded which enable the pattern processing of inorganic materials, such as glass, with high accuracy and high aspect ratio.
Heretofore, for the pattern processing of inorganic materials, methods have been proposed in which pattern formation is performed using a photosensitive paste by photolithography technique, as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 9-310030 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,197,480.
However, the methods have such a problem that a firing shrinking force caused by the crosslinking of an organic component is generated at the time of removing the organic component by firing, leading to the occurrence of defects such as peeling and line breaking of the pattern. The present inventors have made intensive and extensive studies for the purpose of providing a paste which causes no defect such as peeling and line breaking during firing. As a result, the present invention has been accomplished.

Paste, display member, and process for production of display member


The invention provides an optical module that enables to increase the optical coupling efficiency without being dependent on the thickness of a substrate. The optical module, detachably coupled to a connector provided at one end side of an optical fiber, can include a substrate having a first hole, a translucent layer arranged so as to cover, at least, the first hole on one surface side of the substrate, and an optical element that is arranged inside the first hole and on the translucent layer and carries out transmission or reception of light signal to/from the optical fiber through the translucent layer.

1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an optical module suitably used for an optical transmission system and a manufacturing method of the same.
2. Description of Related Art
In an optical transmission system, the basic configuration is the one coupling a light emitting element, which converts electrical signal into light signal, and a light receiving element, which converts light signal into electrical signal, through an optical fiber. In order to make an optical element, such as the above light emitting element and light receiving element, and an optical fiber detachable, an optical module is used for optically coupling an optical element and an optical fiber. Such an optical module is described, for example, in reference documents including the following document (Japanese laid-open patent publication No. 14-250846).

Optical module and manufacturing method of the same, optical-communication apparatus, and electronic apparatus


In a system for processing signals responsive to the position of an object, a pair of position sensors are mounted to produce sinusoidal wave signals corresponding to positioning scale markings on the object. The output of the sensors are pulse-width modulated with high-frequency sinusoidal waves. The pulse-width modulation is carried out in a selected section of the sinusoidal waves that does not include regions proximate the peak values of the sinusoidal output of the sensors.

For example, for the detection of the stroke position of a piston rod of a hydraulic cylinder, it is customary to do a computation by converting into pulses the output signals from a magnetic sensor mounted on the cylinder side with a number of magnetic scales equally spaced embedded in the piston rod.
The magnetic sensor is intended to produce sinusoidal waves having one cycle per the minimum distance (one scale span) of the magnetic scale by the stroke of the piston rod, the output sinusoidal waves being set in a pair so as to be 90.degree. out of phase with respect to one another.
Detection of the stroke position of the piston rod is achieved by converting these outputs e.sub.A, e.sub.B from the sensor by the use of a comparator into square waves e.sub.A0, e.sub.B0, then inputting them into a phase discrimination or directional discrimination/multiply circuit, producing forward and backward pulses based on the following formulas, and counting these pulses by means of an up-and-down counter. ##EQU1## Where e.sub.A0 (.uparw.); pulses generated upon rise of e.sub.A0,
e.sub.B0 (.uparw.); pulses generated upon rise of e.sub.B0, PA1 e.sub.A0 (.uparw.); pulses generated upon rise of e.sub.A0, PA1 e.sub.B0 (.uparw.); pulses generated upon rise of e.sub.B0, PA1 e.sub.A0 ; inversion signals of e.sub.A0, PA1 e.sub.B0 ; inversion signals of e.sub.B0, PA1 .multidot.; logic product.
Thus, as for the resolution power of position detection, it is possible to detect a quarter of a cycle of the sensor output, i.e. up to the position of a quarter of a stroke of one scale span of the magnetic scale.
With such a system, however, one cycle only of the sensor output can be divided into four, and so improvement of the detection precision of stroke position requires an arrangement of the respective scale markings of the magnetic scale at short intervals. But, there is a processing limit in making fine magnetic scale marks on the surface of the piston rod, and this does not allow detection of very small strokes, accordingly.
The object of the present invention is to provide a system for processing position signals wherein a highly accurate detection of very small strokes can be made with the magnetic scale having marks at small intervals or pitches.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a system for processing position signals wherein the detection of position can be performed accurately and safely in any area of the output of the sensors.

System for processing position signals that are reponsive to displacement of an object


An optical apparatus according to the present invention includes a moving lens frame guided movably in an optical axis direction by guide shafts, a drive source for driving the lens frame along the optical axis direction, a lead screw attached to the drive source, a nut member which is fitted on the lead screw and whose rotation is controlled by a rotation control section, the nut member moving only in the optical axis direction by rotation of the lead screw, and an urging spring for pressing part of the lens frame on the nut member such that the lens frame follows movement of the nut member. The lead screw has a top end portion and a bottom end portion each of which is a non-screw portion having a diameter smaller than that of a root of a screw portion of the lead screw, and a spring is fitted near the bottom end portion of the lead screw to urge the nut member, which is fitted in the bottom end portion, in such a manner that the nut member is pushed in a direction of the top end portion of the screw.

The present invention relates to an optical apparatus such as a camera, which is so constituted as to perform a predetermined optical adjustment by guiding a lens, which is supported by a lens frame, by means of guide shafts and moving it along an optical axis by a propulsive mechanism constituted of a lead screw and a driven member (e.g., a nut) fitted on the lead screw.
In an optical apparatus such as a camera, generally, a specific optical element such as a focusing lens supported by a lens frame, is guided by a guide member such as a guide shaft and moved in an optical axis direction. The optical element is then driven in the optical axis direction by a propulsive mechanism constituted of a lead screw and a driven member (e.g., a nut) fitted on the lead screw, thereby performing a predetermined optical adjustment such as a focus adjustment.
The propulsive mechanism moves the lens frame using the lead screw as a drive source, and the driven member thereof is constituted of a nut or a half nut in order to convert a turning force of the lead screw to a moving force thereof in the optical axis direction. In the propulsive mechanism having such a constitution, if a nut member is over-driven beyond a normal range for some reason, the following trouble will be caused.
If the nut member is over-driven in a direction of the top end of the lead screw, it is likely to fall from the lead screw. On the other hand, if the nut member is over-driven in a direction of the bottom end of the lead screw, it often bites a motor shaft.
To prevent the bite of the nut member, Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 7-43591 discloses a means for cutting a power supply to a motor to stop a nut before the nut reaches a set physical stopping position, using an electrical position sensor.
However, even though the above position sensor is used, the bite of the nut member cannot be prevented completely but there remains a possibility that a bite will occur. It is therefore likely that a great trouble will be caused without any measures against the bite.


The invention concerns a detection of duplicate tuples in a database. Previous domain independent detection of duplicated tuples relied on standard similarity functions (e.g., edit distance, cosine metric) between multi-attribute tuples. However, such prior art approaches result in large numbers of false positives if they are used to identify domain-specific abbreviations and conventions. In accordance with the invention a process for duplicate detection is implemented based on interpreting records from multiple dimensional tables in a data warehouse, which are associated with hierarchies specified through key—foreign key relationships in a snowflake schema. The invention exploits the extra knowledge available from the table hierarchy to develop a high quality, scalable duplicate detection process.

Decision support analysis on data warehouses influences important business decisions so that accuracy of data in the warehouses is very important. A significant amount of time and money are spent on data cleaning, the task of detecting and correcting errors in data.
The problem of detecting and elimination duplicated is one of the major problems in the broad area of data cleaning and data quality. It is often the case that the same logical real world entity may have multiple representations in the data warehouse. For example, when a customer named Lisa buys purchases products from Circuit City twice, her name might appear as two different records: [Lisa Simpson, Seattle, Wash., USA, 98025] and [Lisa Simson, Seattle, Wash., United States, 98025]. The discrepancy is due to data entry errors and/or preferences of the salesperson who enters the data. Such duplicated information can significantly increase direct mailing costs because several customers like Lisa may receive multiple catalogs. In direct mailing campaigns with tight budget constraints such errors can be the difference between success and failure of the campaign. Moreover, such errors can cause incorrect results in analysis queries (How many Circuit City customers are there in Seattle?) as well as erroneous analysis models to be built.
The process of detecting and eliminating multiple distinct records representing the same real world entity is a fuzzy duplicate elimination problem. The modifier fuzzy is used since the records are not exact matches. This is in contrast to several other terms—merge/purge, dedup, record linkage. This problem is different from the standard duplicate elimination problem for answering "select distinct" queries, in relational database systems which consider two tuples to be duplicates if they match exactly on all attributes. In the following discussion the term fuzzy is dropped for clarity in expression.
Duplicate elimination is a difficult problem because it is caused by several types of errors. These errors include typographical errors, and equivalence errors—different (non-unique and non-standard) representations of the same logical value. For instance, a user's preferences may dictate whether he or she enters "WA, United States" or "Wash., USA" or "WA, United States of America." Equivalence errors in product tables ("winxp" for "windows XP Professional") are different from those in bibliographic tables ("VLDB" for "very large databases"), etc. The number of duplicate tuples due to equivalence errors can be high because an equivalence error may result in several duplicate tuples.
The prior art has addressed the class of equivalence errors by building sets of rules. For instance, there are commercially available cleaning software packages that use such rules to detect errors. Previous domain-independent methods for duplicate elimination rely on threshold-based textual similarity functions (e.g., edit distance or cosine metric), which predict that two tuples whose similarity is greater than a pre-specified threshold are duplicates. However, using these functions to detect duplicates due to equivalence errors (say, "US" and "United States") requires that the threshold be dropped low enough, resulting in a large number of false positives—pairs of tuples incorrectly detected to be duplicates. For instance, tuple pairs with values "USSR" and "United States" in the country attribute are also likely to be declared duplicates if the software detects "US" and "United States" as duplicates using textual similarity.
Several earlier proposals exist for the problem of duplicate elimination. See I. P. Felligi and A. B. Sunter. A theory for record linkage. Journal of the American Statistical Society, 64:1183-1210, 1969. B. Kilss and W. Alvey. Record linkage techniques—1985. Statistics of income division. Internal revenue service publication, 1985. M. Hernandez and S. Stolfo. The merge/purge problem for large databases. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD, pages 127-138, San Jose, Calif., May 1995. Alvaro Monge and Charles Elkan. The field matching problem: Algorithms and applications. In Proceedings of the second international conference on knowledge discovery and databases (KDD), 1996. A. Monge and C. Elkan. An efficient domain independent algorithm for detecting approximately duplicate database records. In Proceedings of the SIGMOD Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Tucson, Ariz., May 1997. W. Cohen. Integration of heterogeneous databases without common domains using queries based in textual similarity. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD, pages 201-212, Seattle, Wash., June 1998.
As mentioned above, these methods rely on threshold-based textual similarity functions to detect duplicates, and hence do not detect equivalence errors unless the thresholds are sufficiently lowered; lower thresholds result in an explosion of the number of false positives. The record linkage literature also focuses on automatically determining appropriate thresholds, but still suffers from the false positive explosion. Gravano et al. proposed an algorithm for approximate string joins between relations, which in principle can be adapted to detect duplicate records. Since they use edit distance function to measure closeness between tuples, their technique suffers from the drawbacks of strategies relying only on textual similarity functions.
Most work on data cleaning can be classified into three categories. The first category views the process of cleaning a database as a transformational operation using a set of rules and related domain specific information. The second category consists of domain specific standardization and auditing techniques mostly driven by immediate requirements in the industry. A survey of all available commercial tools is available from Helena Galhardas. Data cleaning commercial tools. http://caravel.inria.fr/˜galharda/cleaning.html. The third category of work focuses on preventing errors from entering the database. Borkar et al. address the problem of minimizing errors in databases due to formatting mistakes and inconsistencies (e.g., the country name appears in the zip code attribute). The important issue of designing and deploying "good" business practices and process flows to prevent problems of deteriorating data quality has been receiving attention as well. Automatic detection of integrity constraints (functional dependencies and key—foreign key relationships) so that they can be enforced in future also has a similar goal. Cleaning operations on existing erroneous databases complement these approaches, which prevent data quality from deteriorating.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.

Detecting duplicate records in databases


A circuit for selecting a base memory to be accessed by a microcontroller in response to a command from the microcontroller. An input receives the command from the microcontroller. The command selectively instructs the circuit to reset the microcontroller and signal the microcontroller to access an internal memory as the base memory. Also, the command selectively instructs the circuit to reset the microcontroller and signal the microcontroller to access an external memory as the base memory. A reset output is used to send the reset signal to the microcontroller, and a memory select output is used to send a memory select signal to the microcontroller. A logic circuit processes the command received from the microcontroller, and selectively sends an internal base memory select signal on the memory select output in response to the command received from the microcontroller, while the reset signal is being processed by the microcontroller, and selectively sends an external base memory select signal on the memory select output in response to the command received from the microcontroller while the reset signal is being processed by the microcontroller.

Microcontrollers provide a good balance between cost and performance for those applications which do not require extensive computing power, and which cannot bear expensive components. A microcontroller is typically a monolithic device, including a central processing unit (CPU), a read only memory (ROM), and a random access memory (RAM). The ROM contains instruction code for the CPU, and the RAM can hold current variable information required by the CPU as it completes the instructions read from the ROM.
Often, a microcontroller is able to access the internal ROM provided as a part of the microcontroller, and an external ROM. Typically, the external ROM can be of a larger capacity than the internal ROM. For example, the internal ROM may have a capacity of 32K bytes, and yet the microcontroller may be able to access an external ROM having a capacity of 64K bytes.
The microcontroller usually accesses either the internal or external ROM as the base memory, according to the level of the input on one of the microcontroller input pins. This input pin is typically referred to as the external access pin, or EA pin. For example, if the level of the signal on the EA is low, then the microcontroller may understand to access the external memory as the base memory, and if the level on the EA is high, then the microcontroller may understand to access the internal memory as the base memory.
If the internal memory is designated as the base memory, then all values at an address within the range of the internal memory are accessed by fetches from the internal memory. However, when an address above the range of the internal memory is requested, the value is accessed by a fetch from the external memory. Thus, with the internal memory designated as the base memory, all memory addresses of the internal memory are accessible, and the memory addresses of the external memory above the highest address of the internal memory are also accessible. Therefore, in this mode, the lower addresses of the external memory, which correspond to the addresses of the internal memory, are not accessible. If the external memory is designated as the base memory, then all values at an address within the range of the external memory are accessed by fetches from the external memory. In this mode the addresses of the internal memory are not accessible at all.
While it may appear to be a simple matter to access all of the memory available in the internal memory and external memory, placing this access within the control of the microcontroller is a difficult matter. One possible method for doing this is to connect an output of the microcontroller to the EA. Thus, the microcontroller could alter the level of the signal on the EA at any time that it desired to access the other memory as the base memory. Unfortunately, operating the microcontroller in this mode typically produces an unstable operation. Therefore, most microcontroller manufacturers recommend that the level on the EA remain stable after a reset, and will not guarantee the operation of the microcontroller under other circumstances.
The effect of this restriction is that an amount of memory space equal to the capacity of the internal memory is wasted when the external memory is the base memory, as the internal memory cannot be accessed in this mode. Alternatively, an amount of memory space equal to the capacity of the external memory below the highest address of the internal memory is wasted when the internal memory is the base memory, as this portion of the external memory cannot be accessed in this mode. Of course, it is possible to purchase microcontrollers which can access a larger memory address space if more memory is required. However, such microcontrollers cost more, and offset the cost-savings benefit of using an inexpensive microcontroller.
What is needed, therefore, is a method of inexpensively and reliably allowing a microcontroller to select and access all of the internal memory and external memory available to it.

Microcontroller utilizing a circuit to select during reset process an internal or external memory as base memory


A production well apparatus for underground coal gasification and an underground coal gasification method using same. The production well apparatus comprises a well head apparatus, a sleeve (8), a product pipe (1), a coolant pipe (3), and a monitoring meter system (7). Coolant is injected, during underground coal gasification, to be in contact and mixed with product gas, and the product gas is discharged after cooled, such that the operation is safer and more controllable. Moreover, most of the components of the production well apparatus can be completely or partially recycled and reused after the gasification is completed.

Underground coal gasification (UCG or ISC) is a process by which a coal seam is converted into a product gas (also called raw syngas), by combusting and gasifying the in-situ coal seams in the presence of an oxidant. The product gas can be used for various applications, including fuels production, chemical production and power generation. Given the increasingly stringent environmental requirements for the mining industry and the associated labor and capital costs, this UCG technology, which is suitable for most coal reserves, is undoubtedly attractive.
Whether the coal gasification process is conducted underground or on the surface, coal is converted through a series of chemical reactions, wherein H2O and CO2 are the main gasification agents and O2 as the main oxidant:
C+O2→CO2 (Complete oxidation reaction)
C+½O2→CO (Partial oxidation reaction)
C+H2O→H2+CO (Steam gasification reaction)
C+2H2→CH4 (Hydrogen gasification reaction)
C+CO2→2CO (Carbon dioxide gasification reaction)
CO+H2O↔H2+CO2 (Water gas shift reaction)
CO+3H2↔CH4+H2O (Methanation reaction)
During the UCG process, a sub-surface completed UCG well system is generally set up in the coal seam. The above-mentioned completed well system includes an injection well for injecting a variety of agents such as oxidant, gasification agent and coolant etc.; a production well for extracting product gas; and other auxiliary support wells, wherein the injection well, production well and support wells are usually fitted with a casing and/or well liner and are connected as required, wherein the support wells generally include an ignition well, coolant delivery well, monitoring well and a guard well. The injection well is usually a horizontal directional well. The production well and support wells are usually horizontal directional wells or vertical wells.
Therefore, during the UCG process, the most basic well completion system consists of an injection well, a production well and a substantial horizontal wellbore linking each other and to be completed with casing and/or well liner, which is typically referred to as an underground coal gasification unit or a well pair.
During the UCG process, the relevant sub-surface zones includes a combustion zone, a gasification zone and a pyrolysis zone, wherein: the combustion zone generally extends from the point of oxidant and gasification agent injection where coal is combusted and gasified in the presence of the oxidant and gasification agent; the gasification zone where coal is gasified and partially oxidized to produce product gas is located downstream of combustion zone or radically around combustion zone; the pyrolysis zone where coal is pyrolyzed is located downstream of the gasification zone. For an ideal UCG process, it is generally desirable to have as little pyrolysis as possible. As coal is consumed or gasified, an UCG cavity within the coal seam develops and gradually grows in size. Finally, the sub-surface coal reserve is completely consumed, leaving only coal ash.
During the UCG process, the produced product gas usually includes CO, CO2, H2, CH4 and solid particles, water, coal tar and hydrocarbon, and small amount of H2S, NH4 and COS etc. The specific composition of the above-mentioned product gas is dependent on multiple factors, including the oxidant (e.g. air, oxygen-enriched air, or pure oxygen), presence of water (coal inherent moisture or ingress water from surrounding strata), coal quality, and process parameters (temperature and pressure, etc.).
During the UCG process, due to the strong exothermic nature of the gasification process, the product gas produced usually has extremely high temperatures, typically 700-800° C. and sometimes even up to 1000° C. As the production well directly contacts the high-temperature product gas, it encounters a variety of challenges caused by such high temperature and heat duty, including thermal damage, wet and hot corrosion damage to relevant components of the production well. For example, when the absolute high temperature, such as 700° C., exceeds the yield stress failure temperature of the production casing material, causing damage to the production well; thermal expansion and/or thermal elongation causing damage to the casing and/or cement layer; thermal elongation causes bending of the production casing for the production well; and wet corrosive product gas causes deterioration and damage to the production well integrity, such as particles and high velocity gas erosion, hydrogen embrittlement or hydrogen induced cracking, chloride ion pitting corrosion, sulfide (H2S) stress corrosion cracking, CO2 corrosion and dissimilar metal galvanic corrosion.
Therefore, for the production well equipment used in the UCG process, if it can better cope with the high temperature wet corrosive product gas, it can prevent and reduce various problems that may occur and/or can recycle and reuse some of the components after sealing or abandonment which is undoubtedly very beneficial.
AU2014100615 provides a UCG product gas-cooling method and apparatus in which the product gas temperature is lowered to change the physical and/or chemical properties of the product gas before it reaches the production well. The coolant flow is injected into the product gas stream primarily through a support well located downstream of the operating gasification zone and upstream of the production well to reduce the product gas temperature from about 500-1200° C. to about 200-400° C. It can be seen that the patent uses a support well to inject coolant flow to cool the product gas, and due to the existence of a separate support well, this design is undoubtedly costly and relatively complicated in structure.
Therefore, for the prior art in the UCG process, the production well equipment used therein still needs improvement, especially how to deal with the high temperature wet corrosive product gas generated by gasification.

Production well apparatus for underground coal gasification and use thereof

ZHONGWEI (SHANGHAI) ENERGY TECHNOLOGY CO. LTD


Methods and systems that use the time-wise stability of RF location systems and the short time accuracy and spatial stability of inertial tracking system to increase the accuracy of tracking method.

These teachings relate to locating objects by use of combined methods.
The precise tracking of persons and/or objects is desirable in many applications. One way to achieve precision indoor location with electronic tracking systems is by ranging (estimating the distance) between one or more base stations and a mobile locator device. Known examples of electronic locating systems that perform ranging are GPS technology, in which satellite transmissions are used by mobile receivers to determine the position of the mobile receivers, and cell phone location systems, where tower-located base station receivers estimate the location of mobile hand-held cell phone transmitters.
However, in the past, several factors have hindered the use of known electronic locating systems in indoor environments. One major impediment to the use of known locator systems is multi-path signal contamination, referring to the signal scattering effect caused by the local environment between the transmitter and the receiver, such as walls, support beams and furnishings. Other impediments include insufficient signal strength, lack of precision, the FCC spectrum non-compliance of ultra wide band systems, the need for pre-existing infrastructure, and failure of simple pulse distortion models in actual through-building and multi-path propagation conditions.
RF (radio frequency) systems for electronic locating have been developed. In general, radio based tracking systems attempt to extract time of-flight information from radio signals that have propagated through a building, from the object being tracked to externally located reference units, or vice versa. However, radiofrequency electromagnetic waves are refracted, reflected and diffracted by structural members and objects within the building. These phenomena result in a received signal that can be defined as the sum of the direct-path component and the "multi-path" components. Methods for mitigating the impact of "multi-path" components have been disclosed but may be insufficient in the face of severe multi-path conditions. Additionally, the reference node antenna constellation is often limited by practical considerations, which can often result in a severe geometric dilution of precision.
Inertial tracking is possible in some situations, in which linear accelerations and rotational velocities of an inertial measurement unit are computationally integrated to obtain a relative position track. However, inertial position estimates are the outcome of a double time integral, which causes their error (due to measurement unit errors such as bias and scale error and timewise drift of these errors) to grow with time as t2, while rotational error, similarly due to a single integration, grows as t. These problems can be mitigated to some extent by use of very low bias error devices but at typically hugely increased monetary cost, increased size and increased power consumption. Furthermore, as inertial tracking solutions are relative in nature (both in position and rotation), accurate initialization of orientation and position are necessary to track absolute position. This kind of initialization can be difficult to impossible to conduct in some situations or in a sufficiently timely fashion to be practicable, such as in applications involving first responders at an emergency.
There is a need for a system and method that overcomes or ameliorates the effects of both the problem of limited direct path availability as well as geometric dilution of precision for RF systems and the short time accuracy and relative outcome nature and initialization dependence of inertial tracking systems.

Enhanced RF location methods and systems


An exhaust header having a recessed sealing surface that receives an annular graphite gasket for affecting a fluid tight seal. The exhaust header further includes one or more exhaust head pipe flanges and one or more exhaust head pipes. Each exhaust head pipe flange is fixedly attached to one of the exhaust head pipes to form a passageway through the exhaust header. During installation, each exhaust head pipe flange is aligned with a passageway from an exhaust port of an internal combustion engine. A one to one registration between the exhaust head pipe flanges and the exhaust ports is achieved. The gasket circumscribes the exhaust port when the exhaust header is aligned with the surface of the internal combustion engine. Torquing of one or more fasteners compresses the gasket against the surface of the internal combustion engine to form the fluid tight seal between the passageways of the exhaust port and the exhaust header.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to exhaust systems. More particularly, the invention relates to an exhaust header for an internal combustion engine.
2. Description of the Related Art
Within the exhaust system of an engine, gaskets are used to seal the interfaces between the connecting flanges of exhaust pipes, or between an exhaust header flange or other exhaust manifold and the cylinder head. In basic construction, these gaskets are conventionally formed from a sheet consisting of one or more layers of material. A plurality of apertures are formed in the sheet for registration with the passageways of the exhaust pipes or cylinder head and manifold. Bolts or other fasteners typically are employed to develop compressive forces within the interface for securing the assembly into an air tight joint.
Gaskets located between the header flange and the cylinder head may further include metallic material such as copper, steel, aluminum, or the like. Such a combination of a soft material along with a metallic material provides additional rigidity to the gasket. However, such conventional gaskets over time and under repeated thermal cyclings, may have a tendency to develop a compression set which, in turn, may result in a loss of torque within the fasteners and a loosening of the joint. Moreover, as no positive means typically is provided to limit or otherwise control the compression of the gasket, the gaskets may be overcompressed during an installation or maintenance which again leads to the development of a compression set within the gasket.


A state determination device determines a state of a paint device including an air motor that rotates by a supply of a gas, a rotational shaft that serves as a rotational center of the air motor, and a rotary atomizer head that is connected to the rotational shaft and sprays paint. The paint device further includes a vibration detection unit that detects a vibration of the paint device, and the state determination device includes a frequency component acquisition unit and an abnormality determination unit. The frequency component acquisition unit acquires a frequency component caused by a contact between the rotational shaft and the air motor from a detection result by the vibration detection unit. The abnormality determination unit determines whether an abnormality of the air motor exists or not based on an acquisition result by the frequency component acquisition unit.

Hitherto, there is known a paint device that uses an air motor to rotate a rotary atomizer head (for example, refer to Patent Document 1). The rotary atomizer head is connected to a rotational shaft of the air motor. In this configuration, if the rotary atomizer head is eccentric with respect to the rotational shaft, centrifugal whirling is generated, and the rotational shaft, a bearing of the air motor, or the like may be consequently damaged.

State determination device, method, program, storage medium


A system and method for estimating motion between images performs correlation of candidate image blocks of a target digital image with potential image blocks of a reference digital image, in which pixel values of the images have been quantized, to estimate displacements of the candidate image blocks between the reference and target digital images. The correlation process may include a technique for counting the number of particular type bits in binary words. The counting technique involves performing bit-wise AND operations using a pair of masking binary words to derive first and second resulting binary words, shifting the second resulting binary word by a predefined number of bits and summing the first resulting binary word and the shifted binary word.

Motion estimation is a useful tool in various image-processing operations such as video compression and mosaic image generation. In video compression, motion estimation is used to minimize redundancy between successive video frames to render pictures of higher quality without increasing the data amount for each video frame. In mosaic image generation, motion estimation is used to map video frames to create mosaic images. A mosaic image is a composite image that is created by stitching together successively captured video frames.
For mosaic image generation, the desired characteristics of the motion estimation include real-time output and accuracy. Since mosaic image generation typically involves extremely high video data rates, real-time output of the motion estimation is desired to discard frames with no new useful information. In addition, the motion estimation should be accurate as possible so that new information from subsequent frames can be placed appropriately within the context of the acquired information from the previous frames to prevent misalignment of pixel intensities in the resulting mosaic image, which will degrade the quality of the mosaic image.
Conventional motion estimation techniques commonly utilize block matching to estimate motion between two successive video frames, a reference video frame and a target video frame. The target video frame is typically the later captured video frame with respect to the reference video frame. In a block-matching motion estimation technique, a number of candidate blocks of the target video image are selected for motion estimation. Each candidate block is then correlated with all the blocks within a search window of a reference image to determine the position of a block within the search window that best "match" that candidate block. The positions of these matched blocks of the reference video frame are then used to generate motion vectors that represent the displacements of the candidate blocks to estimate the motion between the target and the reference video frames.
A concern with the conventional motion estimation techniques is that the process of correlating the candidate blocks of a target video frame with the blocks of a reference image within the respective search windows is computationally intensive, and consequently, requires significant amount of processing time. As a result, a number of modifications have been proposed to decrease the computational requirement of the conventional motion estimation techniques, such as hierarchical block matching and heuristic search block matching. However, these modifications typically come at a cost with respect to the accuracy of the motion estimation.
In view of the above-described concern, there is a need for a system and method for estimating motion between video frames in a less computationally intensive manner without significantly reducing the accuracy of the motion estimation.

System and method for estimating motion between images

Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.


The disclosed computer-implemented method for enforcing age-based application constraints may include (1) receiving a selection of age-based use constraints to be associated with one or more applications installed on the computing device, (2) associating the age-based use constraints with the applications, (3) determining that a user attempting to access the applications does not meet the age-based use constraints, and (4) performing a security action that restricts user access to the applications when the user does not meet the age-based use constraints. Various other methods, systems, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.

Privacy and security features on enterprise and consumer computing devices are often enforced through various content policies defining user access to certain applications based on various hierarchical categories. For example, mobile device security features may include user driven content policies enabling a device owner to manually select and lock applications typically associated with a high degree of privacy, such as financial and dating applications, while allowing utility, music, and gaming applications (typically associated with a low degree of privacy) to be safely shared with other users.
However, these traditional computing device content policies may often fail to address application access based on user age. For example, some applications typically associated with a low degree of privacy (e.g., music and gaming applications) may contain mature content that is appropriate for certain age groups, thereby potentially being problematic when a computing device is shared with a minor child. Moreover, even when a computing device owner locks a high privacy application on a computing device, this action may often include a viewable lock notification associated with the application which may not be protected with a passcode (thereby allowing any user to "unlock" the application by responding to the notification) or alternatively, for locks that are passcode protected, allow an underage user to acquire private information associated with the device owner without accessing the application itself (e.g., a child may identify a well-known dating application on their parent's mobile device).

Systems and methods for enforcing age-based application constraints


Important aims in nearly all tree-breeding programs around the world are to produce plants with increased growth rates and stem volumes, and shorter rotation times. Such trees would yield more biomass per area unit. Here the present inventors have shown that when over-expressing a key regulatory gene in the biosynthesis of the plant hormone gibberellin (GA) in hybrid aspen (Populus tremula×P. tremuloides), improvements in valuable traits such as growth rate and biomass are obtained. In addition, these trees also have longer xylem fibers than unmodified wild type plants. Long fibres are very desirable in the production of strong paper, but it has not (as yet) proved possible to influence this trait by traditional breeding techniques. A further advantage of the present invention is that it may reduce or eliminate the use of growth influencing chemicals in forestry.

A major disadvantage with traditional tree breeding, especially for forest tree species, is the slow progress due to their long generation periods. However, by taking advantage of recent developments in gene technology the time required to produce a new variety could be reduced significantly. In addition, a biotechnological approach would allow closer targeting of traits considered desirable by the forest and pulp industries, in specific tree species.
To date, most applications of genetic engineering of trees have focused on modifying lignin biosynthesis, resulting in trees with less lignin or a modified lignin composition, earlier flowering, pest or herbicide resistance. In order to change growth and development processes in trees, the manipulation of plant hormone levels, or the hormone sensitivity, would also be of interest. However, as yet there has only been few examples of the modification of plant hormone levels in trees. These have mainly been accomplished by directly altering endogenous IAA biosynthesis or cytokinin biosynthesis or indirectly by modifying various hormone pools using the Agrobacterium rolC gene. Although such modifications in all cases lead to trees with altered growth characteristics and wood properties, so far no improvements with a clear practical application have been obtained.
Gibberellins (GAs) are a group of more than 100 tetracyclic diterpenes, some of which are essential endogenous regulators that influence growth and development processes throughout the plant life cycle, e.g. shoot elongation, the expansion and shape of leaves, flowering and seed germination. The best examples illustrating the importance of GAs in control of shoot elongation are GA-deficient mutants of Arabidopsis, maize and pea. These have reduced levels of active GA(s) compared to wild type plants, resulting in a dwarfed phenotype due to a reduction in internode length. The phenotype of such GA-deficient mutants can be completely restored by the application of an active GA. At the cellular level, GAs have been found to promote both cell division and cell elongation.
Biosynthesis of GAs in planta occurs through the isoprenoid pathway from mevalonic acid. Gibberellin levels are mainly regulated by transcriptional control of gibberellin biosynthesis genes. In particular, the multifunctional enzyme gibberellin 20-oxidase (GA 20-ox) is a key-enzyme in controlling GA biosynthesis (FIG. 1). It catalyses the stepwise conversion of the C-20 gibberellins, GA12/GA53, by three successive oxidations to GA9/GA20, which are the immediate precursors of the active gibberellins, GA4 and GA1, respectively. The expression of the GA 20-oxidase gene is down regulated by the action of GA14, suggesting that direct end-product repression is involved in regulation of the gene. In addition, some authors have suggested that GA 20-oxidase is photoperiodically regulated at the transcription level.
Application of chemicals that alter GA levels in the plant is a common practise in traditional agriculture and horticulture. Inhibitors of GA biosynthesis are especially commonly used as growth retardants in cereals and ornamental plants. In order to reduce the use of these chemicals, a biological approach like genetic modification of endogenous GA biosynthesis would have clear advantages. Using Arabidopsis as a model organism it has been shown that it is possible to change GA levels by modifying GA 20-oxidase enzyme levels and that this results in plants with altered growth and development patterns. Transgenic Arabidopsis expressing the GA 20-oxidase in a sense orientation shows earlier flowering and taller stems than wild type plants, whereas antisense plants have the reverse properties [Coles, J. P. et al. Modification of gibberellin production and plant development in Arabidopsis by sense and antisense expression of gibberellin 20-oxidase genes, Plant J. 17, 547–556 (1999)].
Modification of GA biosynthesis in a higher species, such as trees would be of additional interest since this would open up ways to modify wood. Previous hormone application studies have shown that GAs are required for the differentiation of xylem fibres, and that they have pronounced effects on the length of secondary xylem fibres and on both longitudinal and radial growth in hard wood species and conifers.
Obviously there remains a need for improved methods for modification of the growth properties of trees, in particular properties of technical and economical interest, such as growth rate, biomass increase and fibre length. Likewise, there remains a need of transgenic trees, exhibiting improved properties, such as increased growth rate, stem volume and xylem fibre length. Consequently, the objective of the present invention is to provide such improved methods and transgenic trees. Another objective is to reduce or eliminate the use of growth influencing chemicals in forestry.

Transgenic trees exhibiting increased growth, biomass production and xylem fibre length, and methods for their production


A molded optical filter is provided having effective filtering of energy emissions at an optical density (OD) of greater than 4 in three energy emission bands corresponding to the wavelengths of laser emissions while preserving the wearer's ability to differentiate and recognize colors and having a pleasing overall color. The selective optical filter is a moldable polymer filter that has three dyes therein to produce sharp notch filtering ranges at about 530 nm, 700 nm and 1060 nm and a fourth color balance dye therein to adjust the overall color of the filter making it more pleasing and desirable to the wearer.

The present invention relates generally to optical safety filters. More specifically, the present invention relates to optical safety filters that provide laser protection across a plurality of narrowly selected wavelength ranges corresponding to laser emissions, while also including a color-balancing component that enhances the color rendering performance of the filter.
In a number of commercial and military fields there is a growing awareness that certain wavelengths of energy emissions are harmful to the eye. Generally, such energy emissions, in the form of a laser emission, are grouped at or around three wavelengths corresponding to approximately 400-1400 nm. For example, energy emitted from a laser operating in one of these wavelength ranges can cause both temporary and permanent blindness and can be disorienting to those people that have been exposed. The adverse effects of energy emissions having wavelengths within these wavelength regions are only recently beginning to be fully recognized as applications that utilize such energy emissions are more frequently employed. For example, there are a number of optical communication protocols that utilize lasers tuned to these wavelengths for the transmission of data as well as a number of military applications that employ infra-red and near infra-red laser energy emissions at these wavelengths in connection with the sighting of weapons and target acquisition. As the environments in which the use of such energy emissions increases, the potential for accidental exposure to such emissions also greatly increases.
In the past, to avoid accidental exposure to infra-red and visible laser emissions, people have attempted to protect their eyes through the use of nonselective filters that simply include a broad wavelength dark filter that screens out the potential for exposure to harmful emission levels. In this regard, however, the broadband filters reduce the magnitude of the exposure over a wider range than screening out the harmful wavelengths of energy. As a result, with only a few exceptions, such filters have generally been directed toward the reduction in intensity of the light transmitted, rather than to the filtering of any particular wavelength or group of wavelengths.
The problem with such a prior art approach is that the nonselective reduction in overall light transitivity generally impacts the visual acuity of the wearer making the use of such filtering difficult if not impossible to implement due to the severe limitations imposed on the visibility of the wearer. One key area that further limits the wearability of such generalized filters is traffic signal recognition. To meet the standards required for use as sunglasses, the wearer must be able to differentiate between red and green traffic signals. Often broad filters directed at screening the above laser energy emissions also result in severely limiting the wearer's ability to differentiate between red and green objects making traffic identification difficult if not impossible.
Another prior art approach involved in laser filtering related to the use of specialty lenses. The difficulty with such lenses is that they typically have a limited range of properties, because they are made of glass or high impact polymers such as polycarbonate, thereby requiring that the additives used to modify the transmissivity must be compatible with the high temperatures required in making the glass or molding of the polymer material. The range of substances that are available that are both compatible with the high molding temperatures and capable of imparting the desired filtering properties is very narrow and generally does not provide the versatility typically encountered with organic dyestuffs that are normally utilized for narrow wavelength filtering. An example of such a prior art filter is illustrated in the performance graph at FIG. 1. The curve illustrates a prior art optical filter tailored for filtering energy in the range of approximately 755 nm-1064 nm. As can be seen, the filter provides a filtering performance curve that exhibits filtering characteristics on the order of 5 optical density (OD) between the wavelengths of about 755 nm to about 1064 nm. In addition, however, the filter still exhibits filtering on the order of 2-3 OD for wavelengths as low as 700 nm and as high as 1080 nm. Since transmissivity is the inverse of OD to the base 10, this translates to a transmissivity of almost zero in the target filtering range of 755 nm-1064 nm with a visible light transmission (VLT) across the remaining spectrum of only around 30-35%. As can be seen, the results indicate a relatively low performance filter with a limited VLT value.
Should the above approach be taken to create a filter to cover all three of the identified energy emission ranges, a lens is produced that exhibits a very undesirable color. Not only is this undesirable from a commercial standpoint, it further encounters the problem that the filter does not allow the wearer to differentiate well between reds and greens. Finally, such a lens has a low light transmissivity because the overlap of the three broad filtering ranges needed to cover the target energy covers almost the entire visible spectrum.
As a result there is a need for an optical filter that blocks narrow bands of energy emissions corresponding laser energy emission while preserving the wearer's ability to differentiate between reds and greens. There is a further need for an optical filter that is molded from a polymer and includes dyes that filter laser energy emissions while having a pleasing overall color and while also preserving the wear's ability to differentiate between colors.

Laser protective eyewear having improved glare protection