A 3D image display device includes: a liquid crystal (LC) display panel including, a first array substrate (AS) including a gate line (GL) extending in a first direction (FD), a data line (DL) extending in a second direction (SD) substantially perpendicular to the FD, and a pixel electrode (PE) connected to the GL and the DL and having first branch electrode portions (FBEPs) having a first width, each of the FBEPs being spaced from each other by a first interval substantially ≧the first width, and a LC lens panel including a second AS including lens electrodes (LEs) extending in a third direction (TD) tilted with respect to the SD by a first angle having an absolute value ≧about 5° and ≦about 15°. Each of the FBEPs extends in a fourth direction having a first tilting angle with respect to the TD by about 45° or about 135°.

1. Field
Exemplary embodiments of the invention relate to a display device. More particularly, exemplary embodiments of the invention relate to a three-dimensional image display device capable of improving display quality.
2. Discussion of the Background
As demand for three-dimensional ("3D") stereoscopic images increases in consumer markets including the game market, the movie market, and so on, display devices configured to display 3D stereoscopic images have been developed. For example, conventional 3D display devices are configured to present two-dimensional ("2D") images different from each other to respective eyes of an observer, such that the 3D stereoscopic image can be autonomically perceived by the observer. For example, the observer may view a pair of 2D images through respective left and right eyes, and then the 2D images may be mixed in the observer's brain to be recognized as a 3D stereoscopic image.
Typically, 3D stereoscopic display devices are classified into a glasses type display device and a no-glasses type display device. The glasses type display device utilizes polarized light to respectively radiate 2D images to respective left and right eyes of viewers, whereas the no-glasses type display device utilizes a lenticular lens to separate and, thereby, direct the presentation of left-eye images and right-eye images to corresponding eyes of an observer. For instance, display devices of the glasses type include an active polarizing panel in which a left-eye image and a right-eye image are displayed, such that the display panel changes the polarization of light associated with each image so that the observer, via polarized light glasses, is able to perceive the left-eye image via their left-eye and the right-eye image via their right-eye. Display devices of the no-glasses type include a lenticular lens in which a left-eye image and a right-eye image displayed on sub-pixels of a display panel are diffracted into a plurality of views, so that an observer may view the left-eye image via their left-eye and the right-eye image via their right-eye. For example, a liquid crystal lens panel may be used as the lenticular lens. The liquid crystal lens panel may include a liquid crystal layer interposed between an upper electrode and a lower electrode.
The liquid crystal lens panel may be disposed on a 2D image display panel, thereby refracting 2D images from the 2D image display panel toward a plurality of viewpoint. If the 2D image display panel includes a black matrix, then the black matrix may be enlarged due to the liquid crystal lens panel in a certain situation, thereby generating moiré phenomenon which may be perceived by the observer as undesired stripes.
A polarizing axis of the 2D image display panel may be tilted by an angle with respect to a transmitting axis of the liquid crystal lens panel in order to reduce the moiré phenomenon. However, an overall luminance of 3D image emitted from the liquid crystal lens panel may be reduced due to the tilting of the transmitting axis of the liquid crystal lens panel.
Also, an alignment direction of an upper alignment layer of the liquid crystal lens panel may be tilted by an angle with respect to an alignment direction of a lower alignment layer of the liquid crystal lens panel in order to reduce the moiré phenomenon. However, a theoretically perfect condition such as, e.g., Moguin condition or Gooch-Tarry condition may be hardly achieved in a practical liquid crystal lens panel, and the theoretically perfect condition may be inadequate to a large liquid crystal lens panel.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form any part of the prior art nor what the prior art may suggest to a person of ordinary skill in the art.


A solution for increasing the switching speed of a bus driver circuit includes a pair of transistors controlled by a pair of control circuits. Pumping circuits are placed between the control electrodes of the transistors to speed up the conduction of one of the transistors immediately after the other is in an off state. An output interface for a differential bus is produced using two bus driver circuits, the control signals of one of the circuits being inverted relative to the other of the circuits.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the output interfaces of integrated circuits for driving data buses. More particularly, the invention relates, in a nonlimiting manner, to a universal serial bus (USB) driver circuit.
2. Description of the Related Art
The trend in the development of communication buses is towards incessantly increasing the data transmission speeds in electronic systems. Moreover, the integration of the electronic circuits entails miniaturizing and implementing in integrated circuit form the circuits directly driving the communication buses. A typical example of communication bus operating at high speed is known by the name of Universal Serial Bus (defined by the USB standard). USBs are commonly used to enable personal computers, typically of PC type, to communicate with external peripheral devices. The external peripheral devices are, for example, portable music players, removable storage drives, digital photographic devices, modems, and even peripheral devices incorporating a number of functions such as mobile telephones. In the current version of the standard, USB 2.0, the nominal data rate is equal to 12 Megabits per second but a maximum transmission speed of up to 480 Megabits per second is allowed. To achieve such data rates, there are a relatively large number of constraints on the circuits.
An exemplary output interface, designed to drive a USB bus, is represented in FIG. 1. The USB bus comprises a differential data bus comprising two conductor wires 1 and 2 each driven by a driver circuit 100A and 200A. The bus is a differential bus, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio. The input signals of the two driver circuits 100A and 200A are mutually inverted so that the outputs of said circuits 100A and 200A are complementary. The driver circuits 100A and 200A are often currently made of CMOS technology, but can also use bipolar transistors.
Each driver circuit 100A comprises a pair of transistors 101 and 102 of opposing types, that is, one PMOS and one NMOS, the conduction channels of which are linked in series between two power supply conductors respectively supporting a high power supply voltage V+ and a low power supply voltage V−. To limit the consumption of this pair of transistors 101 and 102 when they switch, these transistors are driven separately so that one begins to conduct only when the other stops conducting. To stagger the switching of the two transistors in time, two control circuits 103 and 104, respectively linked to the gates of the transistors 101 and 102, supply said gates with voltages, the increasing or the decreasing of which is controlled to obtain different slopes on a transition of a control signal CS intended to be sent over the differential bus comprising wires 1 and 2.
Each control circuit 103, or 104, comprises a controlled current source 105, or 106, and a capacitor 107, or 108, to supply a voltage ramp in response to a transition of the signal CS. Thus, on a transition of the signal CS, each current source 105, or 106, is switched to supply a constant current to charge or discharge the capacitor 107, or 108, as well as the equivalent capacitance of the gate of the transistor 101, or 102, controlled by said source 105, or 106. The slope is controlled by assigning a current value that is higher in absolute terms to discharge the gate of the transistor for which conduction is to be stopped. The capacitors 107 and 108 are, furthermore, linked to the output of the driver circuit 100A in order also to control the transition slope of the output of the driver circuit 100A. The gate-source voltage of the transistor 101 or 102 is held constant when the latter reaches a balance voltage while the conductor wire 1 is charging or discharging. This balance is created automatically when the gate-source voltage of the transistor 101 or 102, switched to become conducting, enables said transistor 101 or 102 to supply a current equal to IC+IS such that |IC/C1|=|IS/CL|, with IC being the current supplied by the source 105 or 106, to switch on the transistor 101 or 102, C1 being the capacitance of the capacitor 107 or 108, Is being the output current supplied by the driver circuit and CL being the capacitance of the conductor wire 1. The capacitor 107 or 108 and the current IC are dimensioned according to the switching slope required on the bus, taking into account the specifications of the USB standard.
A problem with this known interface is that, because of the spread of component characteristics, it presents switching synchronization defects between the driver circuits 100A and 200A. These synchronization defects become more problematic as the frequency increases. One solution for making the operation of the two circuits uniform is disclosed in EP-A-1 291 780. The outputs of each driver circuit are linked to the gates of the other driver circuit by capacitive coupling. The solution developed in this patent application gives good results but has the effect of delaying the fastest circuit to the detriment of the overall speed of the interface comprising the two circuits.


A computer-implemented method for providing a vehicle recommendation to a user may include: obtaining one or more vehicle images via a device associated with the user; identifying one or more user-selected images of the one or more vehicle images based on user interaction with the one or more vehicle images performed by the user via a user interface; identifying one or more first-level attributes from the one or more user-selected images; obtaining one or more vehicle identifications from the one or more user-selected images; determining one or more second-level attributes based on the one or more vehicle identifications; determining a value of each of the one or more first-level attributes and the one or more second-level attributes; determining the vehicle recommendation based on the value; and transmitting, to the device associated with the user, a notification indicating the vehicle recommendation.

Purchasers of relatively expensive items, such as vehicles, real estate, mattresses, boats, computers, etc. may conduct part or all of their shopping for such items online, via the Internet (e.g., via one or more online search user-interfaces). Such expensive items often have numerous optional features or attributes which may impact an overall cost of the item. In the context of a vehicle purchase, for example, a purchaser (e.g., a buyer or user) may weigh the cost of the vehicle against the various features or attributes of that vehicle. In so doing, some of the features or attributes may be determined more favorable to the purchaser than other features or attributes (e.g., some features may be categorized as "must have features," while other features may be categorized as "like to have features" or "unneeded features"). Because each purchaser may have his/her own unique preference of available features or attributes, it can be difficult for the purchaser to convey such preference information with traditional, often rigid, online search user interfaces. Consequently, the buyer/user may spend a significant amount of time researching vehicles before making a purchasing decision, which may lead to purchaser dissatisfaction and/or disengagement.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming the above-referenced challenges. The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art, or suggestions of the prior art, by inclusion in this section.

Methods and systems for providing a recommendation


Turbine engine casing interiors are visually inspected in a fully assembled turbine casing by mounting an optical camera on a turbine blade that captures optical images, such as of the casing abradable surface. Optical images are recorded as the blade circumferentially sweeps the turbine casing when the turbine is operated in turning gear mode or manually rotated. Blade rotational position data are collected by a rotational position sensor. A data processing system correlates the captured optical images and rotational position data about the turbine casing circumference. This method and apparatus provide an accurate and cost effective solution for accessing a turbine casing interior.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to in-situ optical inspection of steam or gas turbine engine casing interiors—for example in turbine sections, or in the case of a gas turbine engines also its compressor section—such as for inspection of the circumscribing turbine engine casing ring segment. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to in-situ optical inspection by mounting a radially oriented optical camera directly on a turbine blade while in-situ within an industrial gas turbine engine and rotating the rotor so that the blade sweeps at least a portion of the circumscribing turbine casing ring segment in either the compressor or hot gas turbine sections. In other embodiments of the invention the entire circumference of the circumscribing casing ring segment is swept by rotating the rotor while the industrial gas turbine is operated in turning gear mode. Images captured by the sweeping camera field of view are then available for further inspection analysis.
2. Description of the Prior Art
During assembly and at periodic times throughout the life of a gas turbine blade tip clearances must be measured or the turbine casing interior requires visual inspection. Proper tip clearance enables better efficacy of gas turbines and lowers harmful emissions. To date there are ways of measuring tip clearances, but the methods requiring the removal of the upper casing that circumscribes the turbine blade tips during measurement, limiting the number of inspection points, or taking a relatively long time to complete.
There are typically two known common methods for measuring blade tip clearances. In the first method the measurement of tip clearance is typically accomplished by removing the turbine or compressor case upper half to provide access to the blades. Shims are then inserted between the blades tips and the flow path side or ring segments of the lower case at the horizontal joint. Measurements are typically taken at the leading and trailing edge sides of the blade tips for every blade. These measurements are referred to as half shell measurements. This method provides very little accuracy or reproducibility because the lower case tends to change shape without the upper case in place. Also, the half shell measurement locations are not necessarily representative of the local case shape at all angular rotational positions about the entire rotational surface swept by the turbine blade.
The second known common method for measuring blade tip clearances is by opening an inspection port in the side of the engine that is aligned with the blade path. A contact or non-contact probe is inserted into the port to measure the distance of the blade tip from the gas path side of the case or ring segments. There are a limited number of these inspection ports oriented about the turbine casing. Therefore only data from select rows and cord positions can be obtained. Furthermore, as noted above in the description of the first known inspection method the inspection locations may not be representative of the casing shape about the entire rotational circumference of the turbine. In some spots, due to casing shape disparities there may be varying tip gap.
Thus, a need exists for a method to measure turbine blade tip clearances in-situ within an assembled turbine without removing part of the turbine casing that circumscribes the blade tips.
A need also exists for a method to measure turbine blade tip clearances in-situ within an assembled turbine casing, so that localized blade tip gap differences can be identified and measured.
An additional need exists for a method to determine whether the turbine rotor assembly is aligned within its circumscribing turbine casing, so that alignment can be adjusted to assure rotor rotational axis concentricity within the casing. For example, so that turbine vane carriers are centered to the rotor during alignment verification.
Another need exists for a method to inspect the interior of the assembled turbine casing visually about the entire blade rotational circumference.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.

In-situ blade-mounted optical camera inspected systems for turbine engines


An electricity storage device for a solar energy harvesting device comprising at least a first electricity storage unit, at least a second electricity storage unit, a battery monitoring unit and a power converter. The second electricity storage unit is for coupled to an exterior power supply system which charges/discharges the second electricity storage unit in a predetermined voltage. The battery monitoring unit controls the power converter according to the output voltage of the first electricity storage unit for converting the electricity of the first electricity storage unit to the second electricity unit. When the output voltage of the first electricity storage unit is larger than a start voltage, the electricity of the first electricity storage unit is converted to the second electricity storage unit. When the output voltage of the first electricity storage unit is less than a stop voltage, the battery monitoring unit disables the power converter.

1. Field of the Invention
The instant disclosure relates to a solar energy device; in particular, to an electricity storage device for a solar energy harvesting device.
2. Description of Related Art
The energy which is existed on earth falls into shortage yearly by yearly. Such as coal; petroleum; ethanol; nuclear energy; water energy; geo-thermal energy; wind energy; and renewable bio-energy etc., all encounter different drawbacks and difficult reasons on cost; safety; green; and productivity. Because of the usage and human population are increased rapidly, it is inevitable to have a clean; reliable; and cost effective energy for human being to utilize it daily. There are two candidates which can meet the previous criteria—nuclear fusion and solar energy. The nuclear fusion is good but it still cannot go to commercialize due to technical barrier, while solar is the very candidate to fulfill the determinate role on energy sources. Although solar energy harvesting is a feasible and reasonable energy source as compared to other existed candidates, there are some other issues to be breakthrough to make it become a mighty energy source. The issues are solar cells efficiency and photo-voltaic energy harvest/transfer efficiency. III-V compound cell with new quantum dot technology shows amazing efficiency over 70% photo-voltaic conversion but it can be only used on special applications due to its extraordinary fabrication cost. Currently commercial solar cell is silicon based with about up to 21% photo-voltaic conversion efficiency. Even there are some other type solar cells, for example organic polymer and II-VI compound are announced but the reliability; durability; and cost make it is unable to be a suitable candidate. Lately most of solar cell manufactures invest more and more on the improvement of silicon-based solar cells with light intensity collection; incident light recycling; multiple-path absorption, etc. So far, there is not a good photo-voltaic transfer design to accommodate the harvested solar energy transfer into stored voltaic energy and/or usable electric energy. Most of design needs to be under high light incidence to trigger the harvesting energy transfer, for example more than 30-50K Lux.
Currently solar energy harvesting is quite limited to storage and driving capability. The battery type of storage and driving has a contradiction between dual-way demands. For storage, the harvesting (charge) speed needs to be moderate to prolong the battery life and to reduce the storage cost, while driving capability is in the opposite demanding. To co-exist with current commercial battery types, for example USB or adaptor charge controlled battery, the direct energy transfer from solar energy harvesting is impossible due to restriction of charge voltage range values. Hence to use a simple harvesting and transfer boost and charge controller is not possible to meet the requirements of low-light solar energy harvesting and electric energy transfer.

Electricity storage device for solar energy harvesting device


An editing apparatus comprises a selection unit configured to select one file included from a group of a plurality of files of predetermined continuity; a first instruction detection unit configured to detect a first instruction for deleting an anterior portion of time-series data in the file selected by the selection unit, the anterior portion preceding a designated position in time-series; and a processing unit configured to, if the first instruction is detected by the first instruction detection unit, perform processing for deleting a file preceding the selected file from the group of the plurality of files.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an editing apparatus and a control method therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
A recording apparatus for recording moving image data and audio data into a recording medium is conventionally known. A recording apparatus of this sort manages recorded moving image data and audio data as a file in accordance with a predetermined file system. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-183248 suggests file break recording in which a file of moving image data is recorded by dividing the moving image data into files each having a file size that does not exceed the maximum size specified by a file system during a recording of moving image data and audio data. Furthermore, in general, editing of a moving image file incorporates trimming processing for cutting away a portion preceding an editing point of a scene (anterior cut), and trimming processing for cutting away a portion succeeding an editing point of a scene (posterior cut).
However, in the case where a user edits a file group that has been recorded according to the file break recording, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-183248 mentioned above allows editing of a portion of divided files, but does not offer a technique to correct joint relationships with other relevant files. For example, in the case where a file has been divided into and recorded as three files, if the anterior cut processing is applied to the second file among the three files, there is a possibility that the first file, which represents an anterior portion of the files belonging to the same group, is also unnecessary. However, a technique to confirm with the user whether or not the first file is unnecessary and to perform the deletion is not offered.
Furthermore, when the group of divided files is merged after the user has performed the editing, continuity between the aforementioned first file and the second file, to which the anterior cut editing has been applied, must be broken. In this case, the user needs to confirm whether or not to merge them as continuous files and designate files that should be merged.

Editing apparatus and control method therefor


A recording medium transfer apparatus includes a motor control unit for controlling the motor to rotate at higher speed when the recording medium is fed to the liquid ejection area than that when the recording medium is discharged out of the liquid ejection area, and a feed control unit for controlling a next recording medium to be fed simultaneously with discharge of the recording medium, if a position of a rear end of the recording medium when recording or printing has been finished is situated upstream of a predetermined position, which is upstream of the discharge roller as much as a distance between a feed start position of the recording medium and the liquid ejection area, whereas controlling the next recording medium to start to be fed after discharge of the recording medium has been finished, if the position of the rear end of the recording medium when recording or printing has been finished is situated downstream of the predetermined position.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording medium transfer apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to a recording medium transfer apparatus for transferring a recording medium on which recording or printing is performed by ejecting liquid to a liquid ejection area where the liquid is ejected onto the recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A liquid ejecting apparatus such as an inkjet type recording apparatus includes a recording medium transfer apparatus. In order to improve the recording throughput of the liquid ejecting apparatus, it is effective to increase the speed of transferring the recording medium by the recording medium transfer apparatus. However, the transfer speed of the recording medium is restricted depending on the operation state of the liquid ejecting apparatus.
When many recording mediums are discharged, it is necessary to obtain the stackability by which the discharged recording mediums are stacked at approximately the same position on a discharge stacker. In order to obtain the stackability, the discharge speed at which the discharge roller discharges the recording mediums to the discharge stacker is necessarily restricted to a specific value or less, e.g. 10 [ips] (inch per second). If the discharge speed of the recording medium exceeds the specific value, the electrostatic force caused by electrification of the recording medium mainly decreases the stackability. Meanwhile, when the recording medium is fed to the liquid ejection area where liquid is ejected onto the recording medium, in order to increase the throughput, it is preferable that the feed roller should transfer the recording medium at higher speed, e.g. 14 [ips], than the discharge roller during discharge.
For the purpose of cost-down, a technology in which the liquid ejecting apparatus drives both the discharge roller for discharging the recording medium on which recording has been finished and the feed roller for feeding the next recording medium by one motor has been recently developed as disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-283649.
If the discharge and feed rollers are driven by one motor, both the rollers rotate at the same speed. In this case, when the rotation speed of the feed roller becomes high to improve the throughput, the rotation speed of the discharge roller also becomes high, so there is such a problem that the stackability cannot be obtained.


The present disclosure includes a method of controlling a centrifuge for the centrifugal production of a milk product. The steps include taking a milk sample at an outlet of the centrifuge from a liquid phase, adding a substance to the milk sample that increases light transmittance of the milk sample, determining the light transmittance of the milk sample by transilluminating the milk sample using a light source and measuring light intensity via a photo cell, determining the fat content from a measurement of the light transmittance, and controlling the centrifuge as a function of the determination of the fat content. The present disclosure also includes a system for controlling the centrifuge.

The present disclosure relates to a method of controlling and/or regulating a centrifuge for the centrifugal production of a milk product. It also relates to a system for implementing the method.
It is known to, for example, separate milk into skimmed milk and cream by centrifuges. Disk separators are generally used for this purpose.
During the separation into skimmed milk and cream, it is a goal of the centrifugal separation to minimize the fat content in the skimmed milk as much as possible in order to design the economical yield of the method to be as optimal as possible.
Unfortunately, the determination of the fat content of cream or skimmed milk is relatively problematic since the skimmed milk or the cream have a white coloring, so that methods for determining the light transmittance of the skimmed milk are high-expenditure (laboratory) processes, such as the process by Röse-Gottlieb and the process by Mojonier with precisions or a reproducibility of 0.03% and 0.015%.
The present disclosure provides for a method of controlling and/or regulating a centrifuge for the centrifugal production of a milk product as well as a system for implementing the method. The controlling and/or regulating of the centrifuge is simplified and a determination of the fat content becomes possible which is as precise as possible, and is simpler in comparison to the known laboratory processes and is independent of the latter.
Thus, the present disclosure relates to a method of controlling a centrifuge for the centrifugal production of a milk product. The method steps comprise: taking a milk sample at an outlet of the centrifuge from a liquid phase; adding a substance to the milk sample that increases light transmittance of the milk sample; determining the light transmittance of the milk sample by transilluminating the milk sample using a light source and measuring light intensity via a photo cell; determining fat content of the milk sample from a measurement of the light transmittance; and controlling the centrifuge as a function of the determination of the fat content.
The liquid phase from which the mild sample is taken may be skimmed milk. Furthermore, it should be noted that, by adding the substance, such as a suitable alkaline solution, to the milk sample, the pH-value is increased. It then becomes possible in a simple manner to increase the light transmittance of the white milk sample to such an extent that surprisingly it is possible to use an optical method for determining the fat content. The determination of the fat content can be carried out in intervals by a computer in an automated manner. If the computer, in turn, is connected with the control inputs of the actual centrifuge control, or the computer is even used for controlling the centrifuge, it becomes possible to utilize the information not only for monitoring the setting of the centrifuge but also for its controlling and/or also for the regulating as a function of the determination of the fat content. However, a manual monitoring by a person reading a display unit can also be implemented.
The light transmittance of the liquid phase, particularly of the skimmed milk, is increased in that the substance increasing the pH-value is proportioned and added such that the pH-value of the milk sample is increased to 11–14, preferably 12–13, and particularly to 13.
The present disclosure also relates to a system for controlling a centrifuge for the centrifugal production of a milk product. The system includes a device that takes a milk sample from a liquid phase at an outlet of the centrifuge. Also included is a device that adds a substance to the milk sample that increases light transmittance of the milk sample. Further included is a device that determines the light transmittance of the milk sample and from which a fat content of the milk sample is determinable. With regard to the system, it can be constructed, for example, as a separate unit and assigned to or connected with the centrifuge. Further, a device for controlling and/or regulating the setting of the centrifuge as a function of the determined fat content may be preferably assigned to or connected with the device for determining the light transmittance.
Other aspects of the present disclosure will become apparent from the following descriptions when considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.

System and a method for controlling a centrifuge for the production of a skimmed milk product


A method and system for obtaining a pool of speech syllable models. The model pool is generated by first detecting a training segment using unsupervised speech segmentation or speech unit spotting. If the model pool is empty, a first speech syllable model is trained and added to the model pool. If the model pool is not empty, an existing model is determined from the model pool that best matches the training segment. Then the existing module is scored for the training segment. If the score is less than a predefined threshold, a new model for the training segment is created and added to the pool. If the score equals the threshold or is larger than the threshold, the training segment is used to improve or to re-estimate the model.

Generally, the speech recognition research aims to build systems that automatically acquire the structure and meaning of spoken language. But to this day, all common automatic speech recognition (ASR) frameworks are designed to detect predefined words using a predefined grammar. There is the problem that no learning at all is possible with such systems: the underlying models are trained using annotated speech databases in advance and remain fixed during recognition. Although it is clear that human-like speech processing involves learning even during recognition, not much effort was made to develop online-learning systems. So far, all of the conventional approaches have failed to provide computational models for the speech acquisition.
To enable systems to recognize the meaning of speech in a completely unsupervised manner, it is first necessary to acquire the acoustic structure of the language. The reason for acquiring the acoustic structure of the language is that it is necessary to segment a distinct acoustic event in a speech to assign meaning to the acoustical event. Therefore, learning of the speech segmentation must, at least to some extent, precede the learning of the speech semantics. The best segmentation results will be obtained if the model used for segmentation captures the acoustical structure of the language to be segmented as much as possible. This will be the case if each basic unit of speech is modeled by a distinct model. These basic speech units (SU) may be defined in different ways based on linguistic knowledge. The basic speech units need to be chosen by finding a compromise between a low number of speech unit (SU) models to be estimated and more complete capturing of the acoustical speech structure.
Methods used in known speech recognition systems to generate an acoustic model (AM) will be described first.
Supervised Acoustic Model Acquisition
In speech processing, Acoustic Model Acquisition (AMA) refers to the process of using annotated speech utterances to estimate the parameters of models for basic speech units (SU), like phonemes or syllables. Conventionally, there is no method to learn the speech unit (SU) models in an unsupervised manner. To distinguish between the supervised approaches and the method for unsupervised acoustic model acquisition, the former will be referred to as Supervised AMA and the latter as Unsupervised AMA, respectively herein.
Model training methods strongly depend on the mathematical structure used to model the distinct speech units (SU). Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are usually used as speech unit (SU) models although there were a few attempts to replace the HMM. The reason is that given an annotated speech-database, a bunch of HMM centric methods exists that may be applied to train the different speech unit (SU) models. Because annotations are only available for pre-recorded speech utterances, model training must be carried out off-line before the models may be used for online speech recognition tasks. Additionally, the methods for the common HMM training require a large amount of data to estimate the parameters of the speech unit (SU) models; and hence, are not suitable for online learning.
During recognition, the estimated speech unit (SU) models are concatenated to word models using a predefined word-dictionary. The generated word models are subsequently embedded into a large recognition model according to a grammar which defines possible word transitions. Using incoming speech data, the best path through the recognition model is determined which directly leads to a sequence of detected words, i.e. the most likely sequence of speech units (SU).
Other than the restriction of off-line training, another problem with supervised AMA is that it is not possible to model every possible utterance with extremely huge (but always finite) amounts of annotated training data. Therefore, given an annotated training database to use for supervised syllable-based AMA, it is always possible to imagine syllables that are not modeled due to the lack of suitable training data.
Supervised Speech Segmentation
Other than artificial neural networks commonly trained to detect segment onsets and rely on segment or at least onset-annotated speech databases, the major focus in supervised speech segmentation research is about HMM related techniques for segment spotting. For that purpose HMM based keyword-spotting was proposed for speech recognition. Single speech unit (SU) models (also referred to as keyword models) are commonly embedded into a HMM with a dedicated filler model inserted between each model transition. The filler-model or garbage-model is designed to model all parts in the processed utterances that are not described by a speech unit (SU) model. Such systems give a high quality of segmentation. The single speech unit (SU) models must be trained in advance using annotated speech data.
To enable systems trained using such method to cope with non-restricted spontaneous speech utterances, the supervised AMA described above was applied to larger speech databases for training. The basic idea of such attempts is to avoid the use of theoretically and practically difficult concept of filler-model or garbage-model. But no matter how much data is used for training, not all speech units (SU) occurring later during the unsupervised recognition or segmentation may be handled by such an approach.
In general the choice of an appropriate filler model is a major drawback of the HMM-based segment spotting. Recently very few works were presented that do not rely on filler models for segment spotting. Such methods, however, require the annotated speech for speech unit (SU) model training.
Unsupervised Speech Segmentation
Although model-based speech segmentation is generally known as being more powerful, approaches that are not model-based have the benefit of working from scratch without any preparatory training. For example, simple energy based level-tracking for segment generation may be implemented using less than half a dozen predefined parameters. Most unsupervised speech segmentation methods have in common that the speech signal is mapped to a one-dimensional feature space where minima are used to generate segment boundaries dependent on a given sensitivity threshold.
The reason that the approaches not based on model is less powerful compared to the model-based (and so far supervised) approaches is that the structure of speech is encoded using only a small set of parameters. To be more precise, approaches that are not model-based do not include dedicated models for each basic unit of speech as in the case of the model-based speech processing. Although this is sufficient for some applications like single word voice control interfaces, the segmentation performance is far beyond the need required for segmenting spontaneous speech in a human like manner.
A few basic attempts were made using recursive neural network models. After training, these models were able to generalize from utterance boundaries to the word boundaries inside of the utterances. Although hit:false-alarm ratios of 2.3:1 were achieved with such neural network based methods, it is clear that these are not suitable for realistic speech segmentation tasks because of the limited memory capacity. Additionally, all reported ANN based approaches use manually annotated symbolic feature corpora. When restricted to a single speech model, such methods fail to generate segmentation results comparable to the model-based segmentation.
In Hema A. Murthy, T. Nagaraj an, and N. Hemalatha, "Automatic segmentation and labeling of continuous speech without bootstrapping," EUSIPCO, Poster-presentation, 2004, and G. L. Sarada, N. Hemalatha, T. Nagarajan, and Hema A. Murthy, "Automatic transcription of continuous speech using unsupervised and incremental training," Poster-Presentation, InterSpeech 2004, the speech signal to be transcribed is segmented into syllable-like units by an unsupervised method. Similar segments are then grouped together using an unsupervised clustering technique. For each cluster, a dedicated model is derived.
Although this method is appealing, it assumes that the set of segments contains all syllables of the language to model. This approach, however, does not allow online training. Additionally, it uses the unsupervised segmentation method to find all the syllables.
In Giampiero Salvi, "Ecological language acquisition via incremental model-based clustering," 2005, unsupervised incremental clustering of feature frames is applied to child directed speech to estimate a set of Gaussian distributions. These are assumed to model the underlying phonetic classes contained in the utterances for training. Although the approach is based on phonetic models, it is perceptually motivated because no annotation was used. Although such unsupervised approach seems to be appealing, the resulting phonetic models may delineate speech on a level that is too basic to be a realistic solution for speech processing. Indeed no property of speech has been exploited and the investigated problem may be reduced to online-clustering of vectors.

Using child directed speech to bootstrap a model based speech segmentation and recognition system


A surgical template positioning device is provided, and has a template and a dental mold. The template has a first surface formed with at least three spherical recesses, a second surface, and a guiding hole. The dental mold has at least three spherical portions partially embedded in the at least three spherical recesses and an implanted hole having an axis the same as the guiding hole. The at least three spherical recesses have three spherical centers as being three vertices of a triangle, the axis passes through the triangle, and the at least three spherical portions have spherical centers corresponding with the three vertices of the triangle. A method of manufacturing the surgical positioning device is also provided.

The tooth implant is a prosthetic tooth for substituting a whole tooth or a partial true tooth, and thus can solve the disadvantages that the traditional movable prosthetic tooth is not stably firmed or the bone matrix shrinks after many years. In the conventional implantation treatment, when the dentist performs an implant drilling surgery, the tooth implant is firstly designed based on a tooth computed tomography (CT) machine. Parameters during constructing a 3D model by scanning images can be collected to decide an ideal location, angle and depth of implanting, so as to correspondingly manufacture a surgical template positioning device.
However, even though the tooth computed tomography (CT) machine can provide an effective surgical simulated environment, such as effectively displaying the height and thickness of the alveolar bone and the actual distribution locations of nerves and blood vessels and exchanging different viewing angles for surveying the predefined position of tooth implant, it is still limited by the outline of the conventional positioning pins. When the positioning pins are not parallel to each other, the actual relative position will not be able to accurately labeled and thereby causing a parameter reading error, so as to manufacture a defective template. Once such a template is acquired, it is difficult for the dentist to further correct the template based on the actual situation of the oral cavity of the patient.
Because pre-operative assessment defect causes the deviation and dislocation of the drilling position, depth and angle, an artificial tooth implant can not be disposed on a pre-set position, and thus unnecessary complications and medical malpractice occurs.
As a result, it is necessary to provide a method of manufacturing a surgical template positioning device to solve the problems existing in the conventional technologies, as described above.

Method of manufacturing surgical template positioning device


A jelly-roll type electrode assembly is disclosed. The jelly-roll type electrode assembly includes an anode, a cathode, and separators interposed between the anode and the cathode and having a greater length than width. Each of the separators is longer than the anode and the cathode. Each of the separators has a porous substrate and porous coating layers formed on both surfaces of the porous substrate. The porous coating layers include a mixture of inorganic particles and a binder polymer. The porous coating layers are formed only in areas where the separators are in contact with the anode and the cathode. The porous coating layers enhance the heat resistance of the separators. Due to the enhanced heat resistance, the separators can prevent the performance of a battery from deteriorating. In addition, the porous coating layers can be prevented from being separated from the separators during battery assembly processing.

Recently, there has been growing interest in energy storage technologies. As the application fields of energy storage technologies have been extended to mobile phones, camcorders, notebook computers and even electric cars, efforts have increasingly been made towards the research and development of electrochemical devices. In this aspect, electrochemical devices have attracted the most attention. The development of secondary batteries capable of repeatedly charging and discharging has been the focus of particular interest. In recent years, extensive research and development has been conducted to design new electrodes and batteries for the purpose of improving capacity density and specific energy of the batteries.
Many secondary batteries are currently available. Lithium secondary batteries developed in the early 1990's have received a great deal of attention due to their advantages of higher operating voltages and much higher energy densities than conventional batteries using aqueous electrolyte solutions, such as Ni-MH batteries, Ni—Cd batteries and H2SO4—Pb batteries.
Generally, a secondary battery is fabricated by laminating or winding one or more unit cells, each of which includes a cathode, an anode and a separator interposed between the anode and the cathode, accommodating the laminated or wound unit cells in a metal can or a laminate sheet case, and injecting or impregnating an electrolyte solution thereinto.
Constituent electrode assemblies of secondary batteries have a cathode/separator/anode structure and are broadly classified into jelly-roll (i.e. winding) and stack (i.e. laminate) types by the constructions they have. A folding (jelly-roll) type electrode assembly is constructed by interposing a separator between a cathode and an anode, each of which is in the form of a long sheet to which an active material is applied, and winding the electrode structure. A stack type electrode assembly is constructed by sequentially laminating a plurality of cathodes and anodes, each of which has a predetermined size, between which separators are interposed. The jelly-roll type electrode assembly is easy to construct and has an advantage of high energy density per unit weight.
Porous polyolefin substrates are commonly used as separators of lithium secondary batteries including jelly-roll type electrode assemblies. Porous polyolefin substrates tend to undergo extreme thermal shrinkage at temperatures of 100° C. or higher due to their material characteristics and production processes including elongation. Under such circumstances, the introduction of an organic-inorganic porous coating layer into a separator has been suggested as an approach aimed at achieving improved heat resistance. However, when a mandrel is withdrawn or the separator is cut after winding in the course of the fabrication of an electrochemical device, defects may be caused. For example, the inorganic particles may fall off from the organic-inorganic porous coating layer or the organic-inorganic porous coating layer may be separated from the separator.

Electrode assembly and method for constructing the same


A process of preparing an acid addition salt of delta-aminolevulinic acid comprising:. dissolving a lower alkyl 5-bromolevulinate and an alkali metal diformylamide in an organic solvent selected from the group consisting of acetonitrile, methanol, tetrahydrofuran, 2-methyltetrahydrofuran and methylformate or mixtures thereof to form a suspension of an alkyl 5-(N,N-diformylamino) levulinate ester; and hydrolyzing said alkyl 5-(N,N-diformylamino) levulinate with an inorganic acid to form an acid addition salt of delta-amino levulinic acid.

1. Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to a new process for synthesizing delta-amino levulinic acid (also known as 5-aminolevulinic acid) as its hydrochloride salt (DALA. HCl), starting from levulinic acid. In particular, the invention method uses sodium diformylamide as a highly reactive and readily accessible reagent for the amination of the C-5 position of methyl 5-bromolevulinate. This process generates an N,N-diformylamido derivative of the levulinate ester that is hydrolyzed with aqueous hydrochloric acid to generate DALA. HCl as a crystalline solid.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Delta-aminolevulinic acid in the salt form (DALA. HCl) is known to have potent herbicidal activity against a broad spectrum of weeds and plants, and is also the subject of studies for use as an antitumor compound in humans. The known synthesis of DALA. HCl that are based on levulinic acid as a starting material are difficult to carry out because of the use of undesirable reagents that are either very toxic or that are not atom economical. In addition, in the currently known synthesis of DALA. HCl, a hazardous chemical step is required to "deprotect" the resulting amino group.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,380,935 discloses a process for preparing 5-aminolevulinic acid or a salt thereof, which comprises reacting furfurylamine, of which the amino group has been protected, with an oxygen molecule under irradiation by light in the presence of a sensitizer, hydrogenating the resulting compound in the presence of a metallic catalyst, and hydrolyzing the hydrogenated compound.
A process for preparation of N-acyl-derivatives of 5-amino levulinic acid as well as the hydrochloride of the free acid is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,344,974. The process condenses 5-hydroxymethyl furfural with a nitrile in acid solution and the N-acyl aminomethyl furfural compound obtained is converted by photooxidation into a N-acyl-5-aminomethyl-5-hydroxydihydro-2,5-furan-2-one and the latter is reduced with zinc in acetic acid under ultrasonic treatment to N-acyl-5-aminolevulinic acid and by acid hydrolysis the 5-aminolevulinic hydrochloride is obtained.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,284,973 disclose a method of making an acid addition salt of delta-aminolevulinic acid by reacting tetrahydrofurfurylamine with phthalic anhydride under an anhydrous condition to introduce a phthalic group which protects the amino group of tetrahydrofurfuryl amine to give N-tetrahydrofurfuryl pthalimide, carbon atoms of the first-and fourth-positions of the obtained N-tetrahydrofurfurylpthalimide are oxidized at 80.degree. C. using sodium periodate as an oxidizing agent and ruthenium chloride hydrate as a catalyst to yield 5-phthalimidolevulinic acid, and the protecting group of the 5-phthalimidolevulic acid is deprotected using an acid to prepare an acid addition salt of delta-aminolevulinic acid.
A method of producing delta-aminolevulinic acid hydrochloride is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,846,490. The method comprises acylating hippuric acid with monosuccinate acyl-chloride in the medium of 65-picoline, subjecting the thus-obtained c-acyl derivative to hydrolysis and isolating the final product.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,325,877 discloses a method of producing delta-aminolevulinic acid by the use of intermediates of bromoketoesters. However, this patent makes use of metal azides in the amination step to convert the bromoketoesters into delta-aminolevulinic acid.
The foregoing prior art methods do not make use of levulinic acid as a starting material for the synthesis of delta-aminolevulinic acid. The starting materials in these methods are acrylic acid ester, 5-hydroxymethyl-furfural, tetrahdyro-furfurylamine, furfurylamine, and hippuric acid.
There is a need in the art of preparing delta-amino levulinic acid to avoid the difficulty of carrying out the process by relying on the use of undesirable reagents that are either very toxic or not atom economical. There is a further need when preparing delta-aminolevulinic acid to avoid the hazardous chemical step normally required to "deprotect" the resulting amino group.

Synthesis of an acid addition salt of delta-aminolevulinic acid from 5-bromo levulinic acid esters


Described are methods of making an electronic device, such as an RFID tag, including fabricating an antenna by depositing an electrically conductive polymer onto a substrate. The electrically conductive polymer is electrically connected to an electronic component, such as an IC chip or a diode. The electronic component may be placed on the substrate before or after the electrically conductive polymer is deposited. Once deposited, the electrically conductive polymer is cured. The electrically conductive polymer may be deposited in a number of ways, such using a mask having a desired pattern and applying the electrically conductive polymer to the mask, by screen printing the electrically conductive polymer or by printing the electrically conductive polymer using ink jet printing techniques.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the manufacture of electronic devices, and in particular to the manufacture of an electronic device that includes an electronic component such as an integrated circuit chip electrically connected to an antenna, such as a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, using an electrically conductive polymer.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems is expanding rapidly in a wide range of application areas. RFID systems consist of radio frequency tags or transponders (RFID tags) and radio frequency readers or interrogators (RFID readers). The RFID tags include an integrated circuit (IC) chip, such as a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip, or some other electronic component and an antenna connected to the IC chip for communicating with an RFID reader over an air interface by way of RF signals. For ease of description and illustrative purposes, an IC chip is shown herein in connection with certain particular embodiments, but is should be appreciated that other electronic components, such as diodes, may also be used without departing from the scope of the present invention. Specifically, in a typical RFID system, one or more RFID readers query the RFID tags for information stored on them, which can be, for example, identification numbers, user written data, or sensed data. RFID systems have thus been applied in many application areas to track, monitor, report and manage items as they move between physical locations.
A number of RFID and related systems are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,289,237 and 6,615,074, both entitled "Apparatus for Energizing a Remote Station and Related Method," owned by the assignee hereof, describe a system where a remote station, such as an RFID tag, has a conversion device for energizing the remote station responsive to receipt of energy transmitted from a base station, such as an RFID reader. In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 6,856,291, entitled "Energy Harvesting Circuits and Associated Methods," also owned by the assignee hereof, describes an antenna having a circuit for harvesting energy transmitted in space that may form part of an RFID tag. United States Patent Application Publication Nos. 20040189473 and 20040259604, both entitled "Recharging Method and Associated Apparatus," and 20050030181, entitled "Antenna On A Wireless Untethered Device Such As A Chip Or Printed Circuit Board For Harvesting Energy From Space," each describe various embodiments of a system and method for remotely energizing a remote station, such as an RFID tag, having an antenna having an effective area that is larger than it's physical area through the use of RF energy from a base station, such as an RFID reader, ambient energy or ultra-wide band energy. The antenna in such a system may be provided on an integrated circuit chip, such as a monolithic chip, or on a printed circuit board with a suitable substrate.
The IC chip and antenna components of an RFID tag are typically manufactured separately, often at different locations and by different entities. The IC chip and antenna components are then shipped to a manufacturing location where the RFID tags are assembled by attaching an IC chip and an antenna to a substrate, such as non-conducting polymer, plastic, paper, mylar, linen, gauze, FR-4 glass/epoxy laminate or the like, and electrically connecting the IC chip to the antenna. The IC chip typically includes a number of conductive pads, often made of aluminum, that are provided on a surface thereof which serve as points of contact for the electrical connections to the antenna. These points of contact may be on the order of 50 microns square or less. Thus, it is important for the IC chip connection points (the pads) and the corresponding points on the antenna to be aligned with one another before making a connection, which often proves to be difficult. Thus, there is a need for a method of manufacturing an RFID tag or similar electrical component that simplifies the connection of an IC chip to an antenna and the connection of the IC chip and antenna to a substrate.

Method of making an electronic device using an electrically conductive polymer, and associated products

University of Pittsburgh-Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education


A technique for establishing texture metrics and bone mineral density (BMD) within an anatomical region of interest. A digital imaging system is used to acquire a standard digital X-ray image with a wide field of view. The standard digital X-ray image is used to guide the imaging system to obtain an image of a region of interest. The standard digital X-ray image is used to calculate various texture metrics, such as a length of a fracture. A dual-energy digital X-ray image of the region of interest is acquired. The dual-energy digital X-ray image is corrected for scatter. The BMD of the region of interest may be established from the scatter-corrected dual-energy digital X-ray image. The BMD, the texture metrics, and/or the scatter-corrected dual-energy X-ray image may be displayed on the standard digital X-ray image.

The invention relates generally to medical imaging. In particular, the invention relates to digital X-ray medical imaging systems having a flat-panel digital X-ray detector.
The bone mineral density (BMD) of a bone reflects the strength of the bone as represented by calcium content. It is defined as the integral mass of bone mineral per unit of projected area in grams per square centimeter. BMD is a useful tool for the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases and conditions, one of which is osteoporosis.
Osteoporosis is a disease of bone in which the BMD is reduced due to depletion of calcium and bone protein. Osteoporosis predisposes a person to fractures, which are often slow to heal and heal poorly. It is more common in older adults, particularly post-menopausal women; in patients on steroids; and in those who take steroidal drugs. Unchecked osteoporosis can lead to changes in posture, physical abnormality (particularly a condition known colloquially as "dowager's hump"), and decreased mobility. Treatment of osteoporosis includes ensuring that the patient's diet contains adequate calcium and other minerals needed to promote new bone growth, and for post-menopausal women, estrogen or combination hormone supplements.
Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA or DEXA) is an increasingly important bone density measurement technology. In fact, osteoporosis is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a BMD having a value 2.5 standard deviations below peak bone mass (in a 20-year-old sex-matched healthy person average) as measured by DXA. The fundamental principle behind DXA is the measurement of the transmission of X-rays with two different energy levels. By measuring how much X-ray energy is transmitted through the patient, the amount of X-ray energy that is absorbed in the patient can be determined. Soft tissues and bone absorb the two energy level X-rays to different degrees. As a result, the absorption of X-rays by the soft tissue may be distinguished from the absorption of X-rays by bone. The soft tissue image data may then be subtracted from the bone image data, leaving only the image data for bone. The BMD is then determined from the bone image data.
However, a BMD alone may not be sufficient for treatment. Evidence of spinal fractures is another important indicator of bone conditions. Determining whether a fracture is present is important both for treatment and for research purposes. A patient may display a reduced BMD, but a physician may be hesitant or unwilling to begin a particular treatment without a diagnosis of a fracture or a deformity. In a research setting, a diagnosis of fracture is important in studying the incidence and prevalence of osteoporosis in a population, as an entry criterion to a clinical study, or as a measure of efficacy with regard to a particular treatment. In fact, the European Foundation for Osteoporosis has published guidelines for clinical trials in osteoporosis which recommends a definition of osteoporosis as "a disorder where one or more fractures have arisen due to an increase in the fragility of bone." In addition, they propose that studies of the efficacy of new drugs used in treatment of osteoporosis have fracture reduction as their clinical endpoint.
While the presence or absence of vertebral fracture is critical in the diagnosis of osteoporosis, diagnosis of vertebral fracture is often difficult. Over one-half of such fractures are asymptomatic, and in cases of minimal symptoms obvious fracture or deformity will often not be observed, particularly if there is no previous radiological record for comparison. Vertebral morphometry techniques promise to make the determination of vertebral fracture or deformation more objective. These approaches rely on certain indexes or normative values of vertebral body dimensions. In using vertebral morphometry to diagnose fractures, the clinician commonly employs analog radiological imaging techniques. In essence, an analog or digital X-ray image of the patient's vertebrae is taken, and printed onto a fixed media, such as an X-ray radiographic film print. The print is made to a specific scale relative to the patient, e.g., one-to-one, or a specifically reduced or expanded scale. Then the clinician manually measures the size of a vertebra by using a ruler and a straight edge and actually draws on the film to outline the vertebral body, and then measures with the ruler between criteria lines drawn onto the film itself.
There have been recent efforts to computerize this morphometric technique. These efforts still rely on first obtaining an analog X-ray image of the vertebra, digitizing the analog image and then manually selecting the points of measurement. Thus the clinician diagnosing or treating osteoporosis must, at a minimum, use two relatively expensive medical devices: a bone densitometer and an X-ray imaging device. Further, morphometric techniques which rely on analog or digital radiography are complicated by image magnification. The analog/digital radiographic image is typically 10-15% larger than life-size, and the magnification is variable depending on the location of the object relative to the plane of the radiograph. In particular, the front edge of the object, away from the radiographic plate is more magnified than the back edge toward the radiographic plate. The result is that bone edges perpendicular to the plane of the plate, which for morphological measurement should produce a sharp visual demarcation on the fan beam radiograph produce a blurred boundary. Distortions of the spine are particularly acute for cone beam exposures at the edges of the cone beam where the beam is most angled. For vertebral morphology the angulation obscures and distorts intervertebral spacing at the top and bottom of a field rendering morphological measurements imprecise. This impreciseness is exacerbated by the imposition of human error when it is left to the clinician to manually select the measurement point. In addition, variation will often necessarily exist between clinicians and between measurements by the same clinician at different times.
While bone densitometers are capable of generating images, the image quality of these present day bone densitometers is inferior to that of common analog or digital X-ray imaging systems. This is particularly true for scanning systems where resolution is intentionally limited to prevent the need for an overly long scanning time. Thus, the imaging capability of bone densitometers has not been relied on for diagnostic purposes and until the present invention, bone densitometry systems have not been used to determine bone morphology, or to analyze the relationships of bone structures. In addition, there is a need to perform the bone densitometry in the same radiology room using the similar acquisition conditions including the magnification and resolution etc. Unfortunately, a diagnostic X-ray image is also not quantitative due to the scatter present in image.
Therefore, a need exists for a technique that combines the beneficial aspects of a diagnostic X-ray image with the quantitative information provided by a BMD acquisition.

Image guided acquisition of quantitative dual energy data


The objective of the current invention is to provide a solid electrolytic capacitor element with low equivalent series resistance. In this solid electrolytic capacitor element, an anode including a porous sintered body, and a dielectric layer are sequentially formed on an anode lead so as to cover a portion of the anode lead. An intermediate layer including polyethylene glycol is formed on the dielectric layer so as to cover an area around the dielectric layer. An electrolyte layer that includes polypyrrole is formed on the intermediate layer so as to cover an area around the intermediate layer. A cathode that includes: a first electrically conductive layer mainly including graphite particles and a second electrically conductive layer mainly including silver particles is formed on the electrolyte layer so as to cover an area surrounding the electrolyte layer.

Solid electrolytic capacitors have widely been used for various electronic devices, specially in recent years, due to the necessity for instantaneously supplying current to a signal process circuit along with speed-up of signal process circuits of electronic devices, such as personal computers A solid electrolytic capacitor with lower ESR value at high-frequency area is desired. However, due to high contact resistance between a solid electrolyte layer and a dielectric layer, there is a problem of increasing ESR.
To decrease this contact resistance, a solid electrolytic capacitor element having an intermediate layer comprised of organic silane between a solid electrolyte and a dielectric layer has been developed. An example of such solid electrolytic capacitor element is in Japanese published unexamined patent application No. 1993-234826. However, sufficient reduction of contact resistance could not be reached even with such structure, and there has been a limit in reducing ESR of a solid electrolytic capacitor element.
The objective of the current invention is to reduce ESR of a solid electrolytic capacitor element and to provide a manufacturing method of a solid electrolytic capacitor element able to reduce ESR.

Solid electrolytic capacitor element, solid electrolytic capacitor, and manufacturing method therefor


A brake apparatus for vehicles may include: a regenerative brake unit configured to perform a regenerative braking operation of a rear-wheel-drive vehicle; a master cylinder configured to form master braking hydraulic pressure using an operation of an actuator to apply, to front wheels and rear wheels of the rear-wheel-drive vehicle, frictional braking force determined by subtracting regenerative braking force generated by the regenerative brake unit from braking force demanded by a driver; and a valve unit configured to adjust the master braking hydraulic pressure formed by the master cylinder so that the frictional braking force is differentially applied to the front wheels and the rear wheels, and to restrict braking force for the rear wheels from being increased by regenerative braking force applied to the rear wheels.

The present invention relates to a brake apparatus for vehicles, and more particularly, to a brake apparatus for vehicles capable of controlling braking force of vehicle wheels during cooperative control between frictional braking and regenerative braking in a rear-wheel-drive vehicle.
Typically, vehicles which are driven by engines employ a lot of parts, including not only an engine, a transmission, a drive shaft, and a hydraulic brake, but also other engine-related apparatuses such as a fuel supply apparatus, an intake and exhaust apparatus, a cooling and lubricating apparatus, and a dustproof apparatus. Such vehicles cause a problem of air pollution due to exhaust gas.
To solve the foregoing problem, vehicles provided with electric motors, e.g., hydrogen fueled vehicles, next-generation vehicles using fuel cells or solar energy, and so forth have been currently developed. Recently, regenerative braking methods for improving fuel efficiency have been employed as a braking method for vehicles provided with electric motors. The term "regenerative braking" means an operation of braking a vehicle while absorbing, using an electric motor, inertial force of the vehicle that intends to move forward when the vehicle brakes. Energy resulting from counter electromotive force generated by the electric motor is stored in a battery.
Braking force generated by regenerative braking, in other words, regenerative braking force, is limited in amount depending on driving conditions, such as a vehicle speed or a battery-charged state, of the vehicle. Thus, the regenerative braking force may not meet the entirety of braking force demanded as a driver steps on a brake pedal, and the amount of regenerative braking force may be variable. Therefore, there has been proposed a regenerative braking cooperative control technique in which active control of varying frictional braking force depending on varying regenerative braking force is performed so that the sum of the frictional braking force and the regenerative braking force corresponds to the braking force demanded by the driver.
To implement such regenerative braking cooperative control, electric booster braking systems are being expanded. Generally, an electric booster braking system maintains the majority of braking mechanism of the existing vacuum booster, but there is a difference in boosting mechanism therebetween in that, unlike the vacuum booster of boosting braking hydraulic pressure using a difference between air pressure and vacuum pressure, the electric booster braking system boosts the braking hydraulic pressure with the force of an electric booster (i.e., a motor) using electric energy.
With regard to a braking operation of a vehicle, in terms of attitude stability of the vehicle, the case where lock occurs on rear wheels is much more dangerous than the case where lock occurs on front wheels. Therefore, a braking system is typically designed such that rear wheel lock occurs after front wheel lock, and is operated to perform automatic control such as ABS. Consequently, to secure the attitude stability of the vehicle, there is a need to limit braking force to be applied the rear wheels instead of braking force to be applied to the front wheels.
Thus, in the case where the above-mentioned regenerative braking cooperative control is applied to a front-wheel-drive electric vehicle (EV), even if braking force to be applied to the front wheels becomes higher than that to be applied to the rear wheels by simultaneously increasing or reducing the braking pressure to be applied to the four wheels, there is seldom a problem in terms of the attitude stability of the vehicle.
However, in the case where the regenerative braking cooperative control is applied to a rear-wheel-drive electric vehicle (EV), because braking force corresponding to frictional braking force is applied to the front wheels and the sum of frictional braking force and regenerative braking force is applied to the rear wheels, the probability of occurrence of wheel lock in the rear wheels is increased, so that the attitude stability of the vehicle deteriorates.
The related art of the present invention is disclosed in Korean Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-2008-0024651 published on Mar. 19, 2008.


A flame attenuation apparatus for forming flame attenuated fibers, preferably glass fibers, includes means for providing continuous filaments; burner means for providing a high temperature, high energy stream of combustion gases; means for feeding the continuous filaments into the high temperature, high energy stream of combustion gases; and an elongated rod filament guide with a plurality of grooves therein for receiving, guiding and supporting the continuous filaments, as the continuous filaments are fed into the high temperature, high energy stream of combustion gases. The elongated rod is preferably made from graphite with a boron-nitride coating and, preferably, has at least two flat surfaces and at least two curved surfaces with the grooves therein.

The present invention relates to a filament guide for use in a flame attenuation fiberization process and, in particular, to a filament guide which exhibits a prolonged service life and reduces the amount of scrap created over the service life of the filament guide.
One process for manufacturing fine diameter fibers, e.g. discrete length, glass fibers typically ranging from about 0.5 microns to about 7.0 microns in diameter, is the flame attenuation process. In this process continuous primary filaments are drawn from a plurality of outlet orifices of an electrically or gas flame heated pot or melter containing a molten fiberizable material such as glass. The primary continuous filaments are drawn from the heated pot or melter by pull rolls which also function to feed the continuous primary filaments into a high temperature, high energy, gas flame that further attenuates the continuous primary filaments and forms short length, fine diameter fibers from the continuous primary filaments. A filament guide with a plurality of grooves therein, extending in generally vertically oriented planes, extends transversely across the path of travel of the continuous primary filaments immediately above the high temperature, high energy gas flame; guides the continuous primary filaments into the flame; and supports the continuous primary filaments so that the continuous primary filaments can be introduced into the flame at a specific location without being blown haphazardly about by the flame. The discrete length, fine diameter fibers, thus formed, are generally collected to form a fibrous blanket with the fibers randomly oriented within the blanket. To keep the continuous primary filaments separated from each other and prevent the continuous primary filaments from crossing each other as the continuous filaments are introduced into the flame, the filament guide is located just above the flame, e.g. about 1/4 of an inch and the underside of the filament guide has a flat or planar surface so that the grooves in the filament guide which guide and support the continuous primary filaments release the continuous primary filaments immediately prior to their introduction into the flame.
Previously, the filament guides have been made of graphite, with a shape like that shown in FIGS. 3 and 4 of this specification, and have been mounted relative to the continuous primary filaments as shown in FIG. 3. These filament guides cost about three dollars per guide and generally last about four days. A primary cause of filament guide failure has been the bowing of the filament guide in its midsection due to the erosion of the flat underside of the filament guide at its midsection by the flame of the attenuation burner which weakens the filament guide.
With a four day filament guide service life, a 16 unit flame attenuated fiber production line would require about 1436 filament guides per year at a cost of about $4308 per year. While this operating cost appears to be relatively low, about $40 worth of scrap fiber is created every time one of these guides is changed resulting in a total operating cost in connection with the use of such guides of about $62,000 per year. Thus, there has been a need to increase the service life and otherwise improve the operation of these filament guides in flame attenuation fiberization processes.

High temperature, grooved filament guide which is coated with a thermally conductive material


A refrigeration system including a two-stage type compressor having independent low-pressure and high-pressure compressing portions, a heat-releasing device having independent primary and secondary heat-releasing paths, an expansion valve and a cooler. The refrigerant primarily compressed by the low-pressure compressing portion is primarily released in heat by the primary heat-releasing path. The primarily heat-released refrigerant is secondarily compressed by the high-pressure compressing portion. The secondarily compressed refrigerant is secondarily released in heat by the secondary heat-releasing path to thereby obtain a low-temperature and high-pressure refrigerant. The low-temperature and high-pressure refrigerant is decompressed and expanded by an expansion valve and passes through the cooler to absorb the heat in a room air, and then returns to the low-pressure compressing portion of the compressor. In this system, the refrigerant temperature during the heat-releasing procedure can be kept low.

The following description sets forth the inventor's knowledge of related art and problems therein and should not be construed as an admission of knowledge in the prior art.
Conventionally, as a refrigerant for use in a vapor compression type refrigeration cycle, Freon series refrigerants were mostly used. In recent years, however, in view of global environmental conservations, as shown in Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP2001-82369 A and Japanese Unexamined Laid-open Patent Publication No. JP2001-99522 A, a refrigeration cycle using a natural refrigerant such as carbon dioxide (CO2) has come to the front.
As a refrigerant system having a CO2 refrigerant refrigeration cycle, for example as shown in FIG. 7, it can be considered that the refrigerant system is provided with a compressor 101, a heat-releasing device (radiator) 102, an intermediate heat exchanger 103, an expansion valve 104, a cooler 105 and an accumulator 106.
The status of the refrigerant in this in-service refrigeration system is illustrated in the Mollier diagram shown in FIG. 8.
As shown in FIGS. 7 and 8, in this refrigeration cycle, the refrigerant is compressed by the compressor 101 to be shifted from the point A to the point B, resulting in a high-temperature and high-pressure gaseous refrigerant. This gaseous refrigerant passes through the heat-releasing device 102 to be cooled by the ambient air to thereby be shifted from the point B to the point C. Subsequently, this refrigerant passes through the intermediate heat exchanger 103 to be sub-cooled by exchanging heat with the return traveling refrigerant, which will be mentioned later, to thereby be shifted from the point C to the point D. Thereafter, the refrigerant is decompressed and expanded by the expansion valve 104 to thereby be shifted to the point D to the point E. Then, this low-temperature and low-pressure refrigerant passes through the cooler 105 to cool the air in a room by absorbing heat from the air. On the other hand, the temperature of the refrigerant itself increases to be shifted from the point E to the point F. Furthermore, the high-temperature and low-pressure refrigerant released from the cooler 105 (i.e., the return traveling refrigerant) is introduced into the accumulator 106 in which only the gaseous refrigerant is extracted. This return traveling refrigerant exchanges heat with the aforementioned forward traveling refrigerant in the intermediate heat exchanger 103 to further increase the temperature to thereby be shifted from the point F to the point A. Then, the refrigerant returns to the compressor 101.
As explained above, in the refrigeration cycle using CO2 as a refrigerant, a supercritical cycle in which the refrigerant pressure exceeds the critical pressure occurs in the high-pressure region in the heat-releasing device 102. Thus, the refrigerant pressure in the high-pressure region becomes higher than that of a refrigeration cycle using Freon series refrigerant, and the refrigerant temperature at the inlet portion of the heat-releasing device becomes higher. Concretely, as shown in the point B in FIG. 8, the refrigerant becomes a high-temperature state exceeding 120° C.
As a result, in cases where an aluminum heat-releasing device with relatively lower heat resistance, which is used in a car air-conditioning refrigeration system, is used as the heat-releasing device 102, there is a possibility that the heat-releasing device components and the like may receive a bad influence by the aforementioned high temperature.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a refrigeration system capable of solving the problems inherent in the aforementioned prior art, keeping the refrigerant temperature lower during the heat-releasing procedure and avoiding harmful effects due to high temperature on a heat-releasing device or the like.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a compressing and heat-releasing apparatus and a heat-releasing device used in the aforementioned refrigeration system.

Refrigeration system, compressing and heat-releasing apparatus and heat-releasing device


Warm air is distributed through a device and diffused along a person's body who is lying under a blanket. Warm air is supplied to the invention from a base unit that has various settings with respect to temperature of air supplied to the invention. The device has three distribution tubes that are long enough to extend from a person's feet to their upper torso while they are lying down. Heating takes place both conductively where the device is in contact with the patient and convectively where the warmed air circulates about the skin. The device is constructed from a light weight tissue paper that is plastic coated on one side and perforated at regular intervals. Heated air is supplied to the invention near the person's feet and is channeled to the several tubes toward the person's upper body. The heated air diffuses through perforations in the tubes as it moves up through the tubes and warms or maintains the body temperature of the patient. Blankets of varying tightnesses of weaves are placed over both the device and the patient thereby holding the desired amount of air near the patient while at the same time insulating against the exterior elements of the environment.

(1) Field of the Invention
This invention relates to medical devices used to either warm the human body or maintain a normal body temperature. More specifically, it relates to warming devices that use air as the medium in which heat is supplied. Those with ordinary skill in the art are medical personnel who regularly use such equipment.
(2) Description of the Related Art
There are many times when it is desirable to either raise a person's body temperature or maintain it at a normal level. Most of these instances are encountered by medical personnel when dealing with persons who have suffered some sort of physical trauma; these traumas include injuries, surgery, anesthetization and over exposure to extremely cold environmental conditions.
There are times when a person is especially vulnerable to body heat loss when such a loss is most undesirable. This is encountered by medical personnel during and after surgical operations. At these times it is important to maintain the patient's body temperature at a normal level. Maintenance of a body's temperature is often accomplished with warming devices.
A common method used to both raise and maintain a person's body temperature is the use of a blanket. The blanket acts as an insulator by both retaining the patient's body heat and shielding the patient from the external environment. The blanket, however, does not introduce any additional heat. In order to introduce additional heat, electric blankets are sometimes used that have heating elements incorporated into their design.
Another method for raising and maintaining a person's body temperature is to supply warm air to the body surface. One such device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,706,988 as a flexible bag that is placed over a portion of the body and then inflated with warm air thereby warming that portion of the body inside the bag. This device is limited to treating localized areas of the body and is not useful in warming the whole person.
A device for both heating and cooling the human body is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,093,834 in which a blanket type apparatus is used to distribute either cooled or warmed air to a person lying down. The apparatus takes the form of a fabric blanket which has a plurality of layers sewed together to form different enclosures. The enclosure nearest the person diffuses some of the conditioned air to the person while the remainder of the air is forced into a second enclosure forming an inflated insulating air layer about the person. A similar device to that disclosed by Gaugler is seen in U.S. Pat. No. 2,601,189 in which a blanket type bed covering is used to diffuse conditioned air to a person lying on a bed. The blanket consists of an air impervious top layer and an air pervious bottom layer which is next to the person and made from either sponge rubber or a plastic foam. The air diffuses through the bottom layer, thereby cooling or warming the person.
Additional art is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,572,188 issued to Augustine, et al. The Augustine patent shows a cover that is placed over a person lying down. The cover comprises an array of parallel tubes which run the length of the person's body and are joined together to form a continuous cover over the person. The side of the cover near the patient is perforated, thereby allowing air to escape from the tubes. The side of the cover away from the patient is impervious to air. Conditioned air is supplied to the inflatable tubes which when inflated cause the cover to form a arched enclosure about the patient. The air is channeled through the tubes and distributed about the patient through the perforations on the bottom of the cover. In use, the Augustine device must be fully inflated to form a tentlike structure above the patient's body which terminates at one end above the chest and in front of the face. The inflated cover is both bulky and encumbering to the patient. A confining and restrictive effect is experienced by patients who are recovering from anesthesia since they are often disoriented. The device, being somewhat thick and bulky, must often be moved or removed so that medical personnel may perform routine or emergency procedures involved in patient care.
None of the above described devices provide means for localizing the application of the conditioned air with respect to the patient's body while at the same time having the ability to warm or cool the patient's entire body.


The present disclosure concerns a tablet holder securing a tablet to a stroller, chair, table, or the like. The tablet holder involves a multiple adjustable mechanisms to accommodate different size of the tablet and viewing angles. The tablet holder provides a secure platform for the user to interact with the tablet, and it is conveniently foldable and can be disassembled while not in use.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a tablet holder. More particularly, the holder of the present invention is particularly adapted for use with a stroller, carriage or other mobile apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
There are a variety of different electronic tablets and the like that may be used by people of all ages. This includes instructional computers or tablets for young children. These typically are used in a stationary manner and for educational purposes.
One of the advantages of using such electronic tablets is its mobility. Electronic tablets are built to be light and easily accessible for using them while traveling. Electronic tablets can provide an entertaining or educational use for children when parents are traveling with them. Such use of electronic tablets can be very helpful when parents need their children to be occupied while attending to other matters. However, using electronic tablets while traveling increases the chance of damaging them which commonly occurs due to unforeseen accidents. When electronic tablets are operated by children while traveling, the chance of damaging them is even higher.
While there are many holsters for electronic tablets exist to protect the electronic tablets from being damaged in case of an accidental drop or the like, such holsters do not provide a stable platform to hold the electronic tablets in place while a child interacts with them.
Therefore, a need exists for a tablet holder that can be mounted to a stroller to prevent damages that may occur to electronic tablets when a child operates them while in motion. A need also exists for a tablet holder that can be easily adjustable while providing a stable platform.