An electrolysis needle assembly having a shank for attachment to an electrolysis handle which includes an air flow source and a forward portion from which the needle extends. Each is provided with an air flow slot so as to enable air to be directed from the handle along the needle assembly to the skin of the patient and in which a needle protective cap is provided for such forward end. The cap is used to manipulate the assembly as in attaching and removing the needle from the electrolysis handle.

The majority of presently utilized electrolysis needles are of the re-sterilizable type and include an extremely fine tip or blade constructed of surgical steel wire which is adapted to be inserted into a hair follicle of a patient along side a hair shaft in the dermis. This fine tipped portion is mechanically clenched or otherwise attached to a larger shank portion and in turn is adapted to be received into an electrical connection socket in the hand held instrument portion of an overall electrolysis device. A description of such prior art needles and electrolysis machines is set forth in U.S. Pat. No. 4,785,808 issued Nov. 22, 1988 to the present inventor. The specification of U.S. Pat. No. 4,785,808 is hereby incorporated into the present application by specific reference thereto.
Electrolysis machines also in some cases incorporate a source of pressurized air generated in the machine itself or elsewhere and direct a flow of such air through the instrument body and thence along or close to the needle so as to contact the area of the patient's skin adjacent the point of penetration to cool the skin or otherwise distract the patient from the slight discomfort produced by such process. In such air flow procedures, it is a simple matter to regulate the flow of such by modifying the hole size in the end of the protective cap through which the fine needle projects, that is, the opening between the cap and needle is adjusted larger or smaller dependent upon the amount of air flow desired.
Such re-sterilizable needles include a number of disadvantages as set forth in the above referred to patent and, accordingly, fully disposable needle assemblies in which the needle is embedded within a plastic body so as to form, in effect, a one-piece construction which after use is discarded have become increasingly desirable. Such one-piece needle assemblies are as explained in the aforementioned patent provided with a rearwardly extending shank portion which extends into a forwardly disposed receiving socket at the forward end of the hand held portion of the electrolysis instrument. With such constructions, however, there are no means to provide the aforementioned cooling and/or distracting air flow adjacent the patient's skin and, accordingly, such effect would be desirable as an object of the present invention.
A further object of the present invention is the provision of a system and apparatus by which completely disposable needle assemblies such as described in the aforementioned patent may be more easily removed from the hand held electrolysis unit such that the operator has less likelihood of coming in contact with the needle portion of the needle assembly which after use must be considered contaminated under today's procedures.
These and other objects of the present invention are accomplished by the provision of a disposable, single use, throw away electrolysis needle assembly having a forward portion from which a needle forwardly projects, a shank portion disposed rearwardly thereof and adapted to contact the face of the electrolysis instrument handle surrounding the needle assembly receiving socket thereof and a rearwardly extending shank portion adapted to extend into and be connected with the socket and wherein at least the shank portion and flange are provided with at least one radially inwardly extending channel such that air from a pressurized air source existing in the socket may pass through said needle assembly so as to contact the skin of the human patient adjacent the contact point of the needle therewith and further in which a hollow tubular safety cap is provided for fitment over the forward end of the needle assembly and by which the needle assembly may be inserted and withdrawn by the hand held portion of the electrolysis body itself and which is subsequently disposed along with the needle assembly while such protective cap is positioned on the forward end of the needle body and thus covers the forwardly extending needle portion thereof.
Other objects, features and advantages of the invention shall become apparent as the description thereof proceeds when considered in connection with the accompanying illustrative drawings.

Safe use fully disposable electrolysis needle assembly


A solar cell system may maximize solar cell efficiency and minimize energy loss by collecting as much light as possible, using refraction and total internal reflection. The solar cell system includes a solar cell, a layer of a first transparent material placed on the top end of the solar cell, a layer of a second transparent material filling the interior cavity of the solar cell, a plurality of photo-voltaic surface cells incorporated in the solar cell, and the side walls and bottom end of the solar cell are coated with a reflective material.

The present invention generally relates to solar cells. More specifically, the present invention relates to a three-dimensional (3-D) solar cell that maximizes the solar cell efficiency and minimizes energy loss.
Solar energy generation is an important and growing area in the field of environmentally friendly energy production. A solar cell, also called photo-voltaic cell, is a device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect. Solar cells are composed of various semiconducting materials, which absorb the different wavelengths in sunlight with different efficiencies. Currently known solar cells typically have the form of a flat structure. Unfortunately having a flat structure with only one type of photo-voltaic material only allows the solar cell to absorb a small portion of the sun's energy. Using multiple types of photo-voltaic materials, which absorb wavelengths in sunlight differently, together in one apparatus; the energy in the spectrum of sunlight can be more fully utilized and a greater proportion of the energy in sunlight can be converted to electricity.
As can be seen, there is a need to provide solar cells that provide more surface area for energy generation and with greater energy conversion efficiency.

Three-dimensional total internal reflection solar cell


A flexible lighting strip for producing a chasing light effect comprising:. an insulated three conductor wire PA0 Light Emitting Diodes mounted by the memory of the wire insulation and oriented in such a manner that a four channel chase effect may be achieved with the use of only three conductors.. The system is of indefinite length and may be field cut or manufactured in finite length modules.. The strip may be surface mounted or installed in a suitable enclosure.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a lighting system which produces either or both a static lighting effect and a chasing light effect. By chasing light effect is meant the optical illusion of moving light in a string or cascade of LED's. This type of lighting display produces a dynamic sensation and is particularly useful as background lighting in casinos, restaurants and other places of entertainment. The invention may also be use in public places to indicate direction of exits or displays. A full on (not chasing) effect may be achieved by running the chase sequence so fast that the human eye cannot perceive any flicker and it appears that the system is static and all on.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In all prior art with LED's, direct electrical current, (DC) is applied in one direction only and therefore a common return conductor is required for the system to operate (i.e. if a four channel system is constructed, five conductors are required; one to each set of LED's and one as a common return conductor).
The return conductor in these systems under full on condition i.e. not chasing, must be capable of handling the sum of the power supplied on the each of the other four conductors. It must therefore be larger or it will limit the practical length that can be run with any one electrical feed.
Systems using LED's have been designed but they all use a common return conductor and individual feed or supply conductors to each set of LED's to produce the chasing effect.
None of the prior art reverses the direction of the current in the electrical conductors to control which of the LED's are illuminated at a particular time. This is the reason that more complicated connectors and a greater number of conductors are required for a chasing effect in other systems.
Manufacturers caution against applying reverse voltage to LED's and some go so far as to recommend using a protective device to ensure that the LED can never experience this condition.
Accordingly, using reverse voltage to the LED's to achieve a four-channel chase with only three conductors represents a new and not obvious use of LED technology.
By using only three conductors and no common return, economical production is possible in continuous lengths exceeding 200 lineal feet.
Installation and replacement of LED's is easy and can be performed with a minimum of equipment. There is also extreme flexibility in the installation of the LED's along the length of the conductors.
This ensures that the product can be competitive with existing tape and tube light systems in the marketplace while offering benefits that no existing system offers.
Incandescent lights may be powered by either alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) and systems which produce a chasing effect using incandescent lamps are in existence. However, these systems also use a common return conductor. Because a common return conductor is used in these systems, the capacity of the system is inherently limited in terms of the distance the conductors may be run. A five conductor system for four channels is also necessary in these applications.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,164,008 shows LED's in series soldered or welded to etched conductors, a common return conductor is indicated and there are no provisions to reverse the voltage to any of the LED's. This patent is directed towards the clothing market and only intended for use on garments.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,173,035 discloses LED's soldered to a flexible printed circuit board fabricated in layers and of discrete finite lengths. The conductors are etched and require that the LED's be soldered in place, limiting flexibility of lamp spacing and ease of replacement. This system requires five conductors for a four channel chase. At no time is reverse voltage applied to the LED's.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,263,640 shows an incandescent light source light chasing system. It uses a number of incandescent lamps in series attached to discrete wires. The use of four feed wires and a common return is essential to operation.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,743 shows a plastic insulator with conductors inserted into continuous slots where the legs of lamps or LED's may also be inserted. However some form of cover is required for any installation and a common return conductor is necessary. There is no mention of using reverse voltage to achieve any special effects.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,997,197 shows LED's mounted to the sides and end of skateboards. Provision is made for chasing/flashing but a common return is again required.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,950,958 shows a round tubular "rope" type incandescent elongate light strip. It is not suited for flat application to surfaces, uses incandescent lamps at fixed intervals, and requires a common return conductor for both static and chasing applications.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,027,037 shows a typical sequencing controller for a chasing light system using pulse width modulation to control dimming. Once again a common return conductor is required and there is no provision for changing the direction of voltage and current to achieve any special effects or control any specific lights.

Strip lighting system using light emitting diodes


A spinning reel has a reel body having a projection portion, a rotary frame, a bail arm and a toggle urge mechanism for switching over, via a drive arm, the bail arm between a fishing-line releasing position to a fishing-line retrieving position. Either a contacted portion of the drive arm to be contacted by the projection portion or this projection portion is projectable and retractable through contact with the other and is urged in a projecting direction by a projection urging mechanism. The projection urging mechanism has a push-out urging force equal to or substantially equal to a push-in force applied thereto by either the contacted portion or the projection portion in association with the rotary movement of the rotary frame in the line retrieving direction.

1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a spinning reel, and more particularly to a spinning reel including a rotary frame having a pair of support arms, a bail arm extending between and pivotably attached to the support arms, the bail arm being switchable between a line releasing position for feeding a fishing line and a line retrieving position for retrieving the fishing line, a toggle urge mechanism for selectively maintaining the bail arm either at the line releasing position or the line retrieving position, and a position switchover mechanism for forcibly switching the bail arm from the line releasing position to the line retrieving position against an urging force of the toggle urge mechanism in association with a rotary movement of the rotary frame in a line retrieving direction. The position switchover mechanism includes a drive arm disposed inside one of the support arms for driving the bail arm and a projection formed on a surface of a reel body so as to drive the drive arm per se to a position corresponding to the line retrieving position through contact with the drive arm which is rotatable in unison with the rotary frame.
2 Description of the Related Art
In this type of spinning reel, when a handle is operated to rotate the rotary frame in the line retrieving direction, the drive arm and the projection on the reel body come into contact with each other thereby to automatically switch the bail arm to the line retrieving position, so that the construction can prevent a user from failing to effect the switchover operation by mistake. A conventional position switchover mechanism is disclosed, for example, in FIG. 1 of Japanese laid-open utility model gazette No. 62-80570. In this construction, there is provided a toggle urge mechanism for selectively urging a bail arm either to a line releasing position or to a line retrieving position by affecting an arm which carries the bail arm and is pivotably supported to the support arms of the rotary frame. A spring holder of this toggle urge mechanism is supported within the support arm. And, a piston pin which is projectably and retractably held within the spring holder is connected with the pivotable arm. Further, there is provided a drive arm for pivoting the bail arm to the line retrieving position by affecting the spring holder.
On the other hand, a reel body includes a projection operable to drive the drive arm through contact with this drive arm.
Both the drive arm and the projection are formed of a highly rigid material. For casting a fishing tackle, the bail arm has to be manually and directly switched over from the line retrieving position to the line releasing position. However, for the above-described rigidity, there sometimes arises a problem that the drive arm and the projection come into too strong contact and become locked with each other in case the drive arm and the projection happen to be located in a same rotational phase.
With the above, the bail arm will be stuck at an intermediate position between the line retrieving position and the line releasing position. If the user attempts to release the locked condition in a forcible manner, this may result in damage to the spring holder and/or the drive arm.


A catalyst composition comprising at least an heteropolyacid deposited on a porous titania carrier.

Glycerin is obtained in large amount as a byproduct when bio-fuel is produced from bio resources that do not depend on fossil resources, and research of new uses of glycerin is under development.
We have proposed, in PCT/JP2009/057818 and PCT/JP2009/057819, an improved dehydration catalyst comprising mainly a compound in which protons in a heteropolyacid are exchanged at least partially with at least one cation selected from elements belonging to Group 1 to Group 16 of the Periodic Table of Elements.
WO2007/058221 discloses a process for producing acrolein by dehydration reaction of glycerin in gas-phase in the presence of heteropolyacid used as a solid acid catalyst. The heteropolyacid is those of Group 6 element such as tungstosilicic acid, tungstophosphoric acid and phosphomolybdic acid. These heteropolyacids are supported on bi-modal pore size distribution silica carrier and produce acrolein at a yield of 86%. This dehydration reaction of glycerin, however, is effected without oxidation gas but using nitrogen stream as carrier gas, so that deposition of carbon increase seriously and hence there is a problem of deterioration in time of stability, activity and selectivity of the catalysis.
Tsukuda et al. "Production of acrolein from glycerol over silica-supported heteropoly acid" CATALYSIS COMMUNICATIONS, vol. 8, no. 9, 21 Jul. 2007, pp 1349-1353, Chai et al., "Sustainable production of acrolein: gas phase dehydration of glycerol over 12-tungstophosphoric acid supported on ZrO2 and SiO2", GREEN CHEMISTRY, vol. 10, 2008, pp. 1087-1093, and Chai et al., "Sustainable production of acrolein: preparation and characterization of zirconia-supported 12-tungstophosphoric acid catalyst for gas phase dehydration of glycerol", APPLIED CATALYSIS A: GENERAL, vol. 353, 2009, pp. 213-222 disclose that silica or zirconia-supported heteropoly acid is effective as a catalyst for dehydration of glycerol.
However, there is no usable catalyst in the industrial scale at higher performance.
WO2007/058221 (Nippon Shokubai) discloses a process for dehydrating polyhydric alcohols by using a catalyst containing an element of group 6 (Cr, Mo, W), in particular, comprising a heteropolyacid which can be supported on a carrier containing Al, Si, Ti or Zr. Examples show the acrolein yield of 70% for PW/Al2O3 70% for PW/ZrO2, 87% for SiW/SiO2 but the conversion decreases from 100% to 70% in 8 hours.
U.S. patent No. 2009054538 (BATTELLE) discloses catalyst composition comprising phosphotungstic or phosphomolybdic acid on silica support and the acrolein yields obtained are not over 71% with the catalysts.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,919,725 discloses a catalyst comprising heteropoly salts and heteropolyacid salts deposited on a porous support of silica, zirconia and titania. This catalyst is used for aromatic alkylation such as alkylation of phenol with olefins but there is no mention of glycerol dehydration.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,983,565 discloses a process for preparing a catalyst composition by impregnating titania pellets with an aqueous solution consisting of tungstosilicic acid or molybdosilicic acid or their salts followed by drying and calcination. The catalyst composition is prepared preferably by impregnating a preformed pellet by immersing titania pellets in an aqueous solution of the tungstosilicic acid or molybdosilicic acid, for example. However, this patent teaches nothing about such a feature defined in the present invention that protons in the heteropolyacid are exchanged by at least one cation selected from elements belonging to Group 1 to Group 16 of the Periodic Table of Elements. Still more, this catalyst is used to prepare linear polyethylenepolyamine but there is no mention in dehydration of glycerol.

Catalyst and process for preparing acrolein and/or acrylic acid by dehydration reaction of glycerin

Abstract: A catalyst composition comprising at least an heteropolyacid in which protons in the heteropolyacid may be partially exchanged by at least one cation selected from elements belonging to Group 1 to Group 16 of the Periodic Table of Elements that have been deposited on a porous titania carrier.

Abstract: A method for preparing the catalyst composition, comprising impregnating a titania carrier with a solution of at least one metal selected from elements belonging to the Group 1 to Group 16 of the Periodic Table of Elements or onium, drying and firing the resulting solid mixture, secondly impregnating the resulting solid mixture with a solution of heteropolyacid, drying, and firing the resulting solid mixture.

Abstract: A process for preparing acrolein and acrylic acid by dehydration of glycerin, carried out in the presence of the catalyst.


Aspects of the present disclosure provide a method and a system for providing a selection of golden tools for better defect density and product yield. A golden tool selection and dispatching system is provided to integrate different components for robust golden tool selection and dispatching. The golden tool selection system selects a set of golden tools based on performance of a set of manufacturing tools and provides a fully automated operational environment to produce a product using the set of golden tools.

A golden product is a product that has zero defect. In the semiconductor manufacturing industry, it is often difficult to manufacture a golden product because of unavoidable defects in the fabrication process. Defects in a product are typically measured in terms of a defect density, which represents the number of defects detected in a given area of the product. In order to approach or achieve the production of a golden product, a reduction in defect density is necessary. However, the reduction of defect density is often difficult to achieve because different products may have different defect density improvement rates. For example, a large die product may show a better product yield than a smaller die product, even though both products' defect densities are reduced at a same rate. A need exists for a method that focuses defect density reduction on products that provide the best return-on-investment for the manufacturing facilities in order to generate a better product yield. A need also exists for a service model that gains better defect density and yield for products that are critical to the customers.

Method and system for providing a selection of golden tools for better defect density and product yield

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd.


A computer implemented method includes: providing a database of digital images of colors and metadata related to the colors; using one or more search criteria to identify one or more of the digital image colors; displaying the digital images of the identified colors; selecting a color of interest from the displayed colors; using the metadata to identify additional information related to the color of interest; displaying the digital image of the selected color and the additional information; and using the displayed digital image of the selected color and the additional information to make a final color selection. An apparatus that can be used to implement the method is also provided.

There are many industries in which color selection of paint is relevant, including the architectural coatings, automotive OEM, and aerospace businesses, as well as many industrial businesses; industrial businesses that deal with consumer goods have a particular interest in color selection, such as appliances, metallic office furniture, motorcycles, and consumer electronics including cell phones, MP3 players, and the like.
The current process for the selection of a color for the purpose of painting an interior or exterior of a building entails the use of color stripe cards and/or color sample jars, the use of which requires the individual making the color selection to either travel to a location to retrieve these items or to order them and have them shipped to a specified location. This causes a significant delay in the overall process of purchasing and applying paint.
Various known systems currently enable a consumer to select a paint color based upon a color shown on a computer display. In addition, color confidence tools such as color visualization aid the consumer in the color selection process. These methods alone, however, are limited by the accuracy of the users computer display thereby causing some doubt regarding a color choice in the consumer's mind.
Improved methods and apparatus for selecting and/or matching color are desired.

Web-based architectural color selection system


A transmission timing information sending method, a transmission timing information receiving method, and related apparatus are disclosed. In an embodiment a method includes configuring, by a base station, higher layer signaling, wherein the higher layer signaling comprises at least one transmission timing set comprising at least one transmission timing value, and the at least one transmission timing set is related to at least one of the following factors: a subcarrier width, a TDD manner, or a terminal capability, sending, by the base station, the higher layer signaling to a terminal, determining, by the base station, downlink control information (DCI), wherein the DCI is used to instruct the terminal to determine the transmission timing value in the at least one transmission timing set, wherein the determined transmission timing value is a slot that the terminal is instructed to use when sending feedback information and sending, by the base station, the DCI to the terminal.

In an existing system (for example, an LTE system), a base station and user equipment exchange data and information with each other through frequency division duplex (FDD) or time division duplex (TDD). A transmission timing relationship used during communication between a base station and a terminal is predefined and obtained by the base station and the terminal. Transmission timing may be an interval between sending downlink data by the base station and sending uplink acknowledgement feedback information by the terminal, and is, for example, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) timing, or may be an interval between sending uplink scheduling indication information by the base station and sending uplink data by the terminal. For example, during FDD-based transmission, the base station sends downlink data in a subframe n, and the terminal feeds back acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) information of a data packet in a subframe n+4, and therefore transmission timing information or HARQ timing information is four subframes.
Similarly, during TDD-based transmission, when an initial subframe of a data packet sent by the base station is n, it is usually specified that the terminal feeds back ACK/NACK information in a subframe n+4. Because uplink subframe and downlink subframe configurations (simply referred to as uplink downlink subframe configurations) in a radio frame are different, it is difficult to feed back information in the subframe n+4 at any time. Therefore, the standard predefines HARQ timing information for a specified uplink downlink subframe configuration.
In a next generation wireless communications system, types of services supported and application scenarios are diversified. In addition, types of uplink and downlink subframes in a radio frame dynamically change in a case of dynamic TDD. This causes an increase in a quantity of transmission timing relationships. Using the predefined manner will cause a decrease in system flexibility, and in this case, a design requirement of a next generation system cannot be satisfied. If downlink control information (DCI) is used to indicate transmission timing, relatively long information bits need to be predefined in the DCI, to include all possible timing relationships. This results in an increase in control signaling overheads.

Transmission timing information sending method, transmission timing information receiving method, and apparatus


An electrical connector is provided for a flat electrical cable. The connector includes a housing loaded with a plurality of terminals. An actuator is movable mounted on the housing for biasing the cable into engagement with the terminals. A latching system is operatively associated between the housing and the actuator for retaining the actuator on the housing. The latching system includes a first latch mechanism latchable in a first direction and a second latch mechanism latchable in a second direction distinct from and at an angle to the first direction.

Very generally, electrical connectors are devices provided for interconnecting electrical circuits. A typical electrical connector includes a dielectric housing, such as of plastic material or the like, which mounts a plurality of terminals terminated to the electrical circuits. The circuits may range from discrete electrical wires to circuit traces on a printed circuit board. Although the invention herein is applicable for a wide variety of electrical connectors, it is shown herein in conjunction with an electrical connector for a flat electrical cable.
Typically, an electrical connector for a flat cable includes a dielectric housing loaded with a plurality of terminals in a generally parallel array and on a given pitch. The housing has an opening or mouth for receiving the flat cable. An actuator is movably mounted on the housing for retaining the flat cable inserted into the housing and for biasing conductors of the cable against the terminals. There are various types of actuators, such as actuators which are pivotally mounted on the housing, as by an integral or living hinge portion of the plastic material. Other actuators are separate or independent of the housing, as with a sliding type actuator that moves in and out of the mouth or opening in the housing along the flat cable.
One of the problems with connectors having separate or independent actuators, such as the sliding actuators, is that the actuators have a tendency to loosen from the housing and even fall therefrom. Therefore, various latch means have been provided for holding the actuator in a first, loading position whereafter the actuator can be moved to a final, terminating position once the flat cable is inserted into the housing. Some connectors actually have two sets of latch means, one latch means for holding the actuator in its first, loading position and a second latch means for holding the actuator in its final, terminating position.
Nevertheless, the various latch means of the prior art still have proven ineffective if the actuator is jolted or unintentionally moved or skewed relative to the housing which has a tendency to disengage the latch means. For instance, a particular latch means may be effective in a given direction, but if the actuator is twisted or moved in a different direction, the actuator becomes loosened or unlatched from the housing. The present invention is directed to solving these problems by providing a unidirectional latching system in electrical connectors of the character described.


A method of and apparatus for bending a sheet of material heated to a formable, state such as glass, resinous polymeric material, viscoelastic material, and thermoplastic material, provides an improved pressing member for pressing the heated sheet against a first rigid mold which reduces the size of the buckles in the bent sheet, eliminates the need for a second rigid mold, reduces the process control steps, reduces the risk of damaging the rigid mold, increases the tolerances for the positioning of the sheet in the apparatus, and increases the range of application. The pressing member includes a flexible diaphragm which rolls the heated sheet against a rigid mold by first applying a pressure to a portion of the heated sheet and then radiating the pressure from that portion to the remaining surface area of the heated sheet in a rolling action. The bending apparatus includes a rigid mold and a flexible diaphragm pressurized into a convex shape for initially pressing on a portion of the heated sheet. A control system moves the pressing member toward the rigid mold and maintains the pressure on the flexible diaphragm so that as the pressing member is moved toward the rigid mold, the flexible member generally conforms to the shape of the rigid mold and rolls the heated sheet onto the rigid mold. To further reduce the size of any buckles, a holder for supporting the heated sheet between the rigid mold and the flexible diaphragm is provided. The holder includes a support surface for supporting the heated sheet generally planar before bending.

The present invention relates to an improved method of and apparatus for bending glass or other sheet material heated to a formable state. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for bladder-molding glass.
A conventional glass bending apparatus typically includes two rigid molds--a male mold and female mold--which are brought together to conform a heated sheet of glass positioned therebetween to the shape of the two molds during the press cycle of the bending process. Some bending methods may include a slump bending step, which is initiated before the press cycle begins. In such a step, the heated glass sheet may be held in a holder that includes a generally concave, upper support surface, formed by a formable material such as a stainless steel mesh sheet. Since the sheet of glass is heated to a temperature in the range of 1000 degrees Fahrenheit to 1250 degrees Fahrenheit and is, therefore, in a partially molten state, the glass sheet partially conforms to the concave shape of the mesh sheet. Thereafter, as the female mold is moved towards the male mold, the female mold presses against the edge portions of the heated sheet of glass and the male mold presses on the center of the heated sheet of glass to start the press cycle of the bending process. As the two molds are pressed together, the bearing contact and pressure exerted by the molds on the edge portions and in the center causes the molds to further bend the sheet of glass. As the sheet bends, the bearing contact and pressure from the female mold expands from the edge portions of the sheet inward until it meets with the bearing pressure from the male mold, somewhere between the center and the perimeter of the sheet. Consequently, as the bearing pressure expands inwardly from the perimeter of the glass sheet, buckles form at the periphery of the plate to relieve forces due to the foreshortening of the compression side of the glass. As the bending is increased the buckles extend toward the center. The magnitude of the buckles are the greatest at the edge of the glass sheet, diminishing toward the center of the sheet.
The larger the buckles and the further the buckles extend into the glass sheet, the smaller the useable area of the glass. This useable area is referred to as the "quality area." The size of the quality area directly impacts the value of the glass. The larger the quality area, the larger the size of the final product--the curved glass--and the greater the profit. In optical quality glass or plastic, the tolerance for distortions in the surface of the glass is extremely low. Hence the size of the quality area for optical glass is relatively small when conventional glass bending techniques are used.
In addition to the limitations on the quality of the glass produced by conventional glass bending techniques, there are numerous process controls. The male and female molds require accurate alignment. This step can take up to two hours. Furthermore, the two rigid molds of the conventional glass bending apparatus require substantially perfect alignment of the heated sheet of glass between the two molds. If the glass sheet is not properly aligned, the peripheral edges of the sheet rest in a non-horizontal plane within the female mold so that when the female mold is moved toward the male mold, the male mold will first make contact with a portion of the glass that is off-set from the center of the glass sheet. Therefore, the glass sheet will have a bend that is off-center and, more than likely, the glass sheet will exhibit exaggerated buckling at least on one side of the plate. Moreover, the conventional glass bending apparatus requires the temperature of the heated sheet of glass to be controlled within about 5 degrees. Also, debris, such as broken pieces of glass, that may be inadvertently left in the molding apparatus could damage one or both of the molds during the bending process.
It will be understood from the foregoing that the conventional bending apparatus requires numerous control steps and inputs, because it is very sensitive to changes in the sheet size, the material properties of the sheet, the state of the sheet, i.e., its temperature and condition, alignment of the molds, and placement of the sheet within the assembly. At the same time, due to the variations in the glass sheet, the pressures exerted by the female and male molds are typically non-uniform and, consequently, result in less control in the bending process.
Consequently, there is a need for an improved glass bending apparatus and method that will reduce the size of the buckles of the glass sheet during bending, increase the size of the quality zone, provide a greater range of tolerance for the alignment of a heated sheet of glass within the molding apparatus, reduce the number of process steps and inputs required to control the process, and reduce the risk of damage to the molds, while at the same time providing more control and uniformity to the bending process.


A display device includes a flexible substrate including a first region including a display region, a second region including a curved region, and a third region including a terminal region; an electro-optical element located in the display region; and a resin layer continuously extending from the first region to the third region.

Recently, a sheet-like display device including a substrate that is flexible (hereinafter, referred to as a "flexible substrate") as a support substrate has been progressively developed. Such a display device including a flexible substrate is foldable, and has an advantage of, when being incorporated into a housing of a mobile terminal or the like, allowing a peripheral portion (bezel portion) of a display screen to be decreased in size.
Generally, a display region of a display device has various signal lines such as scanning signal lines, video signal lines and the like located therein. These signal lines extend to a terminal region located in the vicinity of the display device, and are connected with a flexible printed circuit board (FPC board). Therefore, a support substrate has a plurality of lines and the terminal region provided thereon in addition to the display region. For example, United States Patent Application Publication No. 2016/0172428 discloses a technology by which the display device is folded along a region between the display region and the terminal region and the terminal region is folded back toward a rear surface of the display region to decrease the size of the bezel portion of the display screen.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.


This invention broadly comprises a novel segment protection scheme (survivability framework) for a network, which we refer to as PROMISE (Protection using MultIple SEgments). It combines the best of existing link and path protection schemes (e.g., bandwidth efficiency and fast recovery). The PROMISE approach divides an active path or AP (along which a survivable connection is established) into several, possibly overlapping active segments or ASs, and then protects each AS with a detour called backup segment or BS (instead of protecting the AP as a whole as in path protection schemes). This facilitates the bandwidth sharing not only among the BSs for different APs, but also among those for the same AP. In addition, recovery time can be shortened due to the limited length of each AS and BS. This technology can be applied to MPLS, ATM, SONET, WDM and other high-speed link layers under the evolving G-MPLS framework.

As our national security, economy and even day-to-day life rely more and more on computer and telecommunication networks, avoiding prolonged disruptions to information exchange due to unexpected failures, such as a broken fiber link, becomes increasingly important. Hence, it is critical for a network to be survivable (or fault-tolerant).
Two known survivability schemes are protection and restoration. The major difference between the two is that in protection, recovery from a failure (e.g., the detour set-up and spare capacity allocation) is done at the time of connection setup or network design (i.e., prior to the failure), whereas in restoration, it is dynamically determined after the failure occurs. In general, protection schemes can recover more quickly as the detour is already determined (as long as the detour is not broken), but are less bandwidth efficient than restoration schemes. On the other hand, restoration schemes can survive one or multiple failures (as long as the destination is still reachable, and there is sufficient bandwidth), but they cannot guarantee the recovery time (including the time to find a detour), and/or the amount of information loss for real-time applications, making them unsuitable for mission-critical applications.
In designing a survivable network, the major challenges to be addressed are how to allocate minimal amount of spare resources (e.g., bandwidth) (and thus achieve a maximal efficiency), using scalable (e.g., fast polynomial-time) algorithms, and in case a failure occurs, be able to quickly recover from it (i.e., by re-routing affected traffic using the spare resources). These issues are challenging because the objectives to optimize bandwidth usage, algorithm complexity and recovery time often conflict with each other.
For instance, a common fault-recovery approach is called (failure-independent) path protection, whereby for every mission-critical active path (AP) to be established, a link (or node) disjoint backup path (BP) is also to be established. One way to reduce the amount of spare bandwidth needed is to use shared path protection, which allows the new BP to share the bandwidth allocated to some existing BPs. In order to guarantee the recovery of all critical traffic after a link (or node) failure, two BPs can share bandwidth only if their corresponding APs are link (or node) disjoint (see FIG. 1a for an example). However, finding an optimal pair of link (or node) disjoint paths that minimizes the total bandwidth consumption by the request, given that bandwidth sharing is possible, is an NP-hard problem. In addition, the optimal pair, (if found, by using branch-and-bound techniques), often includes a long BP (consisting of many "zero or super low cost" links on which the bandwidth allocated to existing BPs can be shared), and this results in a long recovery time. Existing efforts in achieving maximal bandwidth efficiency often resort to integer linear programming (ILP) which is not tractable/feasible for large-scale networks. Other existing heuristic approaches sacrifice bandwidth efficiency, or trade recovery time for bandwidth efficiency.
Others have attempted solutions in the past, and we examine these efforts briefly in terms of bandwidth efficiency, algorithm or implementation complexity, and recovery time. Usually, protection schemes can be classified into two types: those used for ring networks, and those used for mesh networks.
Protection schemes for rings are known. The concept of Self Healing Rings or SHR has been applied at the SDH/SONET, Tsong-Ho Wu, Fiber Network Service Survivability, Artech House, 1992, Tsong ho Wu, "Emerging technologies for fiber network survivability," in IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 33, February 1995, pp. 58-59, 62-74, ATM, R. Kawamura, "Architectures for ATM network survivability," in IEEE Communications Surveys, 1998, pp. 2-11, R. Kawamura and H. Ohta, "Architectures for ATM network survivability and their field deployment," in IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 37, No. 8, August 1999, pp. 88-94, as well as WDM layers, P. Demeester et al., "Resilience in multilayer networks," in IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 37, No. 8, 1999, pp. 70-75.
They can recover quickly (e.g., in 50 ms in SONET), as recovery is either based on 1+1 protection as in Unidirectional Path-Switched Rings or UPSRs, where the receiver (destination) selects a better signal among those arriving along two diverse routes, or based on loopback as in Bidirectional Line-Switched Rings or BLSRs, (also called Shared Protection Rings or SPRINGs), which uses a mechanism called Automatic Protection Switching (APS).
Depending on where a detour originates, mesh protection schemes can be classified into link protection (which re-routes from the immediate upstream node of a failed link), path protection (which re-routes at the source of a connection) or their variations (such as ring-based and non-ring based protection, etc.).
In link protection, for every link carrying traffic under normal (working) situations, called active links, a backup segment or BS (here, the term "segment" loosely refers to one or more consecutive links), from one end of the link to the other end, is used as the detour. This is illustrated in FIG. 1b, where the two active links from node 1 to node 2, and from node 2 to node 3, respectively, are shown in bold, and their corresponding backup segments, denoted by BS1 and BS2, respectively, are show in dashed lines.
In path protection, for every active path or AP from source S to destination D, a BP from S to D is used as the detour. Path protection can be either failure-dependent or failure independent. Failure independent approach means the BP has to be link (node) disjoint with the AP, in order to protect against any single link (respectively, node). FIGS. 1a and 1c show two examples where BPs are node-disjoint and link-disjoint with their corresponding APs, respectively. Failure independent path protection is more common than its failure-dependent counterpart as the former can usually achieve a much faster recovery at little extra cost (in terms of bandwidth consumption) especially if the bandwidth along the non-broken part of the AP is released after the traffic is re-routed onto the BP.
The major difference between link and path protection (even though FIGS. 1b and 1c look similar) is that in link protection, when only the (bold) link from nodes 2 to 3 fails, for example, traffic from nodes 1 to 3 will use the (bold) link from nodes 1 to 2, and then be re-routed to BS2; while in path protection, if the (bold) link from node 2 fails, the traffic from S will be re-routed to BS1 and BS2.
In addition, in link or path protection, backup bandwidth can be shared or non-shared. Usually shared schemes are much more bandwidth efficient (and cost-effective) than non-shared schemes. An example of shared path protection is shown in FIG. 1a. Since a single link (or node) failure will not affect both AP1 and AP2 at the same time, whose bandwidth requirements are assumed to be w1 and w2 (units), respectively, their corresponding BPs can share bandwidth on the common link e. More specifically, the amount of backup bandwidth that needs to be reserved on link e is max{w1, w2} (instead of w1+w2).
Ring-Based Protection is a variation of link or path protection, which uses the links in a mesh network to form a set of rings, and in general relies on loopback or APS for recovery as similarly done in BLSRs. Ring-based approaches include node cover, O. J. Wasem, "Optimal topologies for survivable fiber optic networks using SONET self-healing rings," in GLOBECOM'91, Vol. 3, 1991, pp. 57.5.1-57.5.7, O. J. Wasem, "An algorithm for designing rings for survivable fiber networks," in IEEE Trans. on Reliability, Vol. 40, October 1991, pp. 428-432 and ring cover, G. Ellinas et al., "Protection cycle covers in optical networks with arbitrary mesh topologies," in OFC'00, March 2000, G. Ellinas and T. E. Stern, "Automatic protection switching for link failures in optical networks with bi-directional links," in GLOBECOM'96, 1996, Vol. 1, 1996, pp. 152-6, G. Ellinas, A. G. Hailemariam, and T. E. Stern, "Protection cycles in mesh WDM networks," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 18, No. 10, October 2000, pp. 1924-1937, W. D. Grover and D. Stamatelakis, "Cycle-oriented distributed precon-figuration: Ring-like speed with mesh-like capacity for self-planning network reconfiguration," in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'98), Vol. 1, 1998, pp. 537-43. The former chooses a set of rings that can cover all the nodes in a mesh network, but the traffic carried on any uncovered links in the mesh network cannot be protected against failure. The latter also chooses a set of rings, which may cover all the links as in the so-called Cycle Double Cover (CDC) approach, Ellinas, et al., supra, or only some of them as in the so-called Pre-configured protection cycle (P-Cycle) approach, Grover and Stamatelakis, supra, but in either case, every link failure can be recovered.
CDC approach covers each link in a mesh network with exactly two cycles of opposite directions. Though it improved upon the cycle cover methodology, L. M. Gardner, M. Heydari, and et al., "Techniques for finding ring covers in survivable networks," in GLOBECOM'94, San Francisco, Calif., November 1994, pp. 1862-1866, it has a limited applicability because if the network is (or becomes) non-planar, it is only conjectured that a CDC exists, F. Jaeger, "A survey of the double cycle cover conjecture," in Cycles in Graphs, North-Holland, Ed Annals of Discrete Mathematics 115, 1985, 1985, p. January 12. Even for a planar graph, it is difficult, if possible at all, to have small protection cycles (so that recovery can take place along shorter detours).
The P-Cycle approach provides a way to protect both covered (or on-cycle) and uncovered (off-cycle) links, resulting in better bandwidth efficiency, Grover and Stamatelakis, supra, D. Stamatelakis and W. D. Grover, "IP layer restoration and network planning based on virtual protection cycles," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol 18, No. 10, October 2000, pp. 1938-1949. However, detours can also be long, and in addition, the number of p-cycles needed can be large, which requires complicated co-ordination amongst these p-cycles for the purpose of recovery. Also, obtaining optimal solutions is an NP-hard problem, D. Stamatelakis and W. D. Grover, "Theoretical underpinnings for the efficiency of restorable networks using preconfigured cycles ("p-cycles")," in IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 48 No. 8, August 2000, pp. 1262-1265, and different algorithms to select the p-cycles are needed for link and node failures (unlike in path protection where a simple transformation exists).
More recently, heuristic algorithms to route APs in wavelength-division multiplex (or multiplexed (WDM) mesh networks already "covered" with a set of rings were proposed in F. Poppe, H. D. Neve, and G. H. Petit, "Constrained shortest path first algorithm for lambda-switched mesh optical networks with logical overlay OCh/SP rings," in IEEE Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing, 2001, pp. 150-154. Heuristics to protect LSPs in MPLS networks by constructing rings from spanning trees rooted at every possible egress nodes were also studied in Radim Bartos and Mythilikanth Raman, "A heuristic approach to service restoration in MPLS networks," in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC'01), Helsinki, Finland, June 2001, pp. 117-121. Though it was shown that the approach improved over the so-called Fast Rerouting, Dimitry Haskin and Ram Krishnan, "A method for setting an alternative label switched paths to handle fast reroute," in Draft-haskin-mpls-fast-reroute-05, November 2000, and RSVP backup tunnels, D. O. Awduche, L. Berger, and et al, "RSVP-TE: Extensions to RSVP for LSP tunnels," in Draft-ietfmpls-rsvp-lsp-tunnel-07, August 2000, Der-Hwa Gan, Ping Pan, and et al., "A method for MPLS LSP fast-reroute using RSVP detours," in Draft-gan-fast-reroute-00, April 2001, it has a limited flexibility (as other rings-based approaches). More specifically, because it requires that the protection paths for all APs that terminate at a given egress router be determined simultaneously, one cannot take advantage of the bandwidth available somewhere else to support efficient dynamic establishment of connections.
There are several approaches that do not require a ring cover (although BLSR-like loopback may still be used for recovery). In M. Medard, S. G. Finn, R. A. Barry, and R. G. Gallager, "Redundant trees for preplanned recovery in arbitrary vertex-redundant or edge-redundant graphs," in IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, Vol. 7 No. 5, 1999, pp. 641-652, S. G. Finn, M. Medard, and R. A. Barry, "A novel approach to automatic protection switching using trees," in ICC'97, 1997, pp. 272-276, redundant trees are constructed in such a way that for any link or node failure, every node remains connected to at least one of the trees. In S. G. Finn, M. Medard, and R. A. Barry, "A new algorithm for bi-directional link self-healing for arbitrary redundant networks," in OFC'98, 1998, p. ThJ4, M. Medard, S. G. Finn, and R. A. Barry, "WDM loop-back recovery in mesh networks," in INFOCOM'99, 1999, pp. 752-759, M. Medard, S. S. Lumetta, and Y. C. Tseng, "Capacity-efficient restoration for optical networks," in OFC'00, 2000, pp. 207-9, ThO2, the Generalized Loopback approach, which constructs a primary digraph and the conjugate secondary digraph in a two/four-fiber mesh network, was proposed. When a link failure occurs, recovery starts from one end of a failed link, and follows the secondary digraph in a manner similar to loopback in BLSRs. In S. S. Lumetta, M. Medard, and Y. Tseng, "Capacity versus robustness: A tradeoff for link restoration in mesh networks," in IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, Vol. 18, No. 12, December 2000, pp. 1765-1775, an extension of this approach was proposed, which logically removes some non-critical links in the secondary digraph (so they can carry non mission-critical traffic). This improves the bandwidth efficiency significantly, but results in longer detours and associated degradation of signal transmission quality.
Also related are the two approaches in Ching-Fong Su and Xun Su, "Protection path routing onWDMnetworks," in Proceedins—OFC, 2001, pp. TuO2-1, Ching-Fong Su and Xun Su, "An online distributed protection algorithm in WDM networks," in ICC'01, 2001, and Murali Kodialam and T. V. Lakshman, "Dynamic routing of locally restorable bandwidth guaranteed tunnels using aggregated link usage information," in INFOCOM'01, 2001, pp. 376-385, respectively, where a detour for each link starts from its upstream node but either ends at the node next to the downstream node of the link, or can end at any downstream node (up to the destination of the connection). While they represent an interesting deviation from link/path protection and their ring-based variations, only Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations and/or ad hoc heuristics have been proposed. In addition, the bandwidth efficiency of both approaches, especially the first, can be low due to the need to find a detour for each link, and neither approach, especially the second, made any attempts to limit the length of the detour.
Finally, in Pin-Han Ho and H. T. Mouftah, "A framework of a survivable optical internet using short leap shared protection (SLSP)," in 2001 IEEE Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing, 2001, pp. 21-25, it is suggested that an AP is divided into several segments, each of which is protected using BLSRs. Again, only rudimentary exhaustive search algorithms (with backtracking) and heuristics were suggested, and no performance results in terms of bandwidth efficiency, and recovery time (or the length of the detours) were provided. There have also been many IETF drafts on MPLS protection/restoration schemes (including e.g., Haskin et al., Awduche et al., and Gan et al., suppra. But none of them contains, (or is supposed to contain), any implementation details such as algorithms or performance results, and it is clear that much work needs to be done in exploring the advantage of these protection schemes.
The protection schemes for ring networks have only 50% (or lower) bandwidth efficiency (i.e., the spare bandwidth used for protection is no less than that required to carry the working traffic). The bandwidth inefficiency problem is further exacerbated by the need to upgrade the bandwidth on all the links in a SDH/SONET ring (called the "fork-lift" requirement). In addition, detours (loopbacked routes) can be very long, which not only wastes bandwidth, but also affects signal transmission performances such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit-error-rate (BER), making all-optical data communications difficult.
For protection schemes used in mesh networks, link protection uses "local" recovery (re-routing), which is why, in general, it can be faster than path protection which recovers at the source node only (with a few exceptions including the case of 1+1 link/path protection). In general, assuming that some intermediate nodes are capable of failure detection and re-routing, recovery time is proportional to the length of the backup segment that protects against a failure (and possibly the active segment which is affected by the failure as well).
On the other hand, link protection is less bandwidth efficient than path protection, B. Doshi and et al., "optical network design and restoration," Bell Labs Technical Journal, pp. 58-84, January-March 1999, S. Ramamurthy and B. Mukherjee, "Survivable WDM mesh networks, part I—protection," in INFOCOM'99, New York, USA, March 1999, pp. 21-25, S. Ramamurthy and B. Mukherjee, "survivable WDM mesh networks, part II: restoration," in ICC'99, Vol. 3, 1999, pp. 2023-30, Yijun Xiong and Lorne G. Mason, "Restoration strategies and spare capacity requirements in selfhealing ATM networks," in IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999, pp. 98-110, S. Kuroyanagi and T. Nishi, "Optical path restoration schemes and cross-connect architectures," in GLOBECOM'98, November 1998, pp. 2282-88. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, in link protection, a BS uses 3 links for every active link, thus the backup to active bandwidth ratio is 3 (when there is no backup bandwidth sharing), whereas in path protection, this ratio is 1.5 (also without backup bandwidth sharing).
As a variation of link or path protection, ring-based approaches generally are not bandwidth efficient. In addition, they do not adapt well to the changes in the network topology due to their need to perform major reconstruction of the desired set of rings. It is also found in S. S. Lumetta and M. Medard, "Towards a deeper understanding of link restoration algorithms for mesh networks," in INFOCOM'01, Vol. 1, 2001, pp. 367-375, that they result in a significantly poor performance in terms of the ability to recover from subsequent failures.
As for existing non-ring based protection schemes, no existing schemes can achieve better bandwidth efficiency than shared path protection while having a much shorter backup segment, as well as a scalable algorithm.


A vital product data (VPD) system is connected to a network, allowing the VPD system to be accessed for inquiries about VPD. The VPD system includes a baseboard management controller (BMC), a VPD cache, a platform initialization system and a tamper detection switch. The BMC communicates with the tamper detection switch and sets a VPD flag to false when tampering is detected. Queries to the BMC through the network for VPD are then held pending and the VPD cache refreshed with a no-boot power on, using the platform initialization system to collect the new VPD capturing the nature of any modifications after tampering.

The present invention relates to out of band (OOB) access to a server, and more specifically, to vital product data (VPD) maintained by a baseboard management controller (BMC) for OOB access.
Out of Band (OOB) operation refers to accessing a server computer (or other platform) when the main part of the system is powered down. Typically OOB access is directed to a baseboard management controller (BMC).
One of the types of OOB queries made to a BMC is to obtain an inventory or description of the server and of any optional components. This server inventory information is often referred to as vital product data (VPD). Often the information the BMC reports is generated or supplemented by data provided by the server's power on initialization phase.
The configuration of a server can be changed by the customer. Examples of changes include the addition or removal of memory, CPUs, adapter cards, disk drives, mother board expansions (such as "sidecars"), and other similar devices. After such changes are made and before the server is powered on, an out of band query can be made to obtain the VPD from the BMC. When this happens, erroneous information can be reported.
There is a need, therefore, for accurate reporting of VPD even when the server has been reconfigured during power off.

Out of band vital product data collection

Lenovo Enterprise Solutions (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.


The present disclosure relates to a pre-5th-Generation (5G) or 5G communication system to be provided for supporting higher data rates Beyond 4th-Generation (4G) communication system such as Long Term Evolution (LTE). According to embodiments in the present disclosure, an antenna device for dual polarization of a wireless communication system, comprises a print circuit board (PCB); a first feeding line configured to provide a first polarization signal; a second feeding configured to provide a second polarization signal; and a patch antenna comprising a radiating region and cutting regions. Objects corresponding to the cutting regions are disposed to support the radiating region on the PCB.

1) Field
The disclosure relates to an antenna structure and an electronic device including the same.
2) Description of Related Art
To meet the demand for wireless data traffic having increased since deployment of 4G communication systems, efforts have been made to develop an improved 5G or pre-5G communication system. Therefore, the 5G or pre-5G communication system may also be called a 'Beyond 4G Network' or a 'Post LTE System'.
The 5G communication system is considered to be implemented in higher frequency (mmWave) bands, e.g., 60 GHz bands, so as to accomplish higher data rates. To decrease propagation loss of the radio waves and increase the transmission distance, the beamforming, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), Full Dimensional MIMO (FD-MIMO), array antenna, an analog beam forming, large scale antenna techniques are discussed in 5G communication systems.
In addition, in 5G communication systems, development for system network improvement is under way based on advanced small cells, cloud Radio Access Networks (RANs), ultra-dense networks, device-to-device (D2D) communication, wireless backhaul, moving network, cooperative communication, Coordinated Multi-Points (CoMP), reception-end interference cancellation and the like.
In the 5G system, Hybrid FSK and QAM Modulation (FQAM) and sliding window superposition coding (SWSC) as an advanced coding modulation (ACM), and filter bank multi carrier (FBMC), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and sparse code multiple access (SCMA) as an advanced access technology have been developed.
A dual polarization antenna including two antenna ports is used for polarization diversity. In order to increase communication performance, improvement of the performance of a cross polarization ratio (CPR) has been required in a dual polarization antenna.
The above information is presented as background information only to assist with an understanding of the disclosure. No determination has been made, and no assertion is made, as to whether any of the above might be applicable as prior art with regard to the disclosure.

Antenna structure and electronic device including the same


Floorboards for installation of floors in herringbone pattern are formed with two opposite sides inverted relative to each other. The invention further comprises methods for producing and making floorings comprising such floorboards, as well as fitting pieces and sets of parts for such floorings.

1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to the technical field of locking systems for floorboards. The invention concerns on the one hand a locking system for floorboards which can be joined mechanically in different patterns and, on the other hand, floorboards provided with such a locking system and various methods of installation. The invention is particularly suited for use in mechanical locking systems integrated with the floorboard, for instance, of the types described and shown in WO94/26999, WO96/47834, WO96/27721, WO99/66151, WO99/66152, WO00/28171, SE0100100-7 and SE0100101-5 which are herewith incorporated by reference, but is also usable in other joint systems for joining of flooring. More specifically, the invention relates to locking systems which enable laying of mainly floating floors in advanced patterns.
The present invention is particularly suited for use in floating wooden floors, such as massive wooden floors or parquet floors. These types of floor often consist of a surface layer, a core and a balancing layer and are formed as rectangular floorboards intended to be joined along both long sides and short sides.
2. Background of the Application
The following description of prior-art technique, problems of known systems as well as the object and features of the invention will therefore as non-limiting examples be aimed mainly at this field of application. However, it should be emphasized that the invention can be used in optional floorboards which are intended to be joined in different patterns by means of a mechanical joint system. The invention may thus also be applicable to homogeneous wooden floors, laminate floors with a surface of laminate and a core of e.g. fiberboard and floors with a surface of plastic and/or cork and the like.
Traditional parquet floors are usually laid in a floating manner, i.e. without glue, on an existing subfloor which does not have to be quite smooth or plane. Any irregularities are eliminated by means of underlay material in the form of e.g. cardboard, cork or foam plastic which is laid between the floorboards and the subfloor. Floating floors of this kind are usually joined by means of glued tongue-and-groove joints, (i.e. joints with a tongue on one floorboard and a tongue groove on an adjoining floorboard) on long side and short side. In laying, the boards are joined horizontally, a projecting tongue along the joint edge of one board being inserted into a tongue groove along the joint edge of an adjoining board. The same method is used on long side as well as short side, and the boards are usually laid in parallel both long side against long side and short side against short side.
In addition to such traditional floors which are joined by means of glued tongue/tongue groove joints, floorboards have been developed in recent years, which do not require the use of glue but which are instead joined mechanically by means of so-called mechanical joint systems. These systems comprise locking means which lock the boards horizontally and vertically. The mechanical joint systems can be formed by machining the core of the board. Alternatively, parts of the locking system can be made of a separate material which is integrated with the floorboard, i.e. already joined with a floorboard in connection with the manufacture thereof at the factory. The floorboards are joined, i.e. interconnected or locked together, by various combinations of angling, snapping-in and insertion along the joint edge in the locked position. By interconnection is here meant that floorboards with connecting means are mechanically interconnected in one direction, for instance horizontally or vertically. By locking-together, however, is meant that the floorboards are locked both in the horizontal and in the vertical direction.
The principal advantages of floating floors with mechanical joint systems are that they can be laid quickly and easily by different combinations of inward angling and snapping-in. They can also easily be taken up again and be reused in some other place.
All currently existing mechanical joint systems and also floors intended to be joined by gluing have vertical locking means which lock the floorboards across the surface plane of the boards. The vertical locking means consist of a tongue which enters a groove in an adjoining floorboard. The boards thus cannot be joined groove against groove or tongue against tongue. Also the horizontal locking system as a rule consists of a locking element on one side which cooperates with a locking groove on the other side. Thus the boards cannot be joined locking element against locking element or locking groove against locking groove. This means that the laying is in practice restricted to parallel rows. Using this technique, it is thus not possible to lay traditional parquet patterns where the boards are joined long side against short side in "herringbone pattern" or in different forms of diamond patterns.
Such advanced patterns have originally been laid by a large number of wood blocks of a suitable size and shape being glued to a subfloor, according to a desired pattern, possibly followed by grinding to obtain an even floor surface and finishing in the form of e.g. varnish or oil. The wood blocks according to this technique have no locking means whatever, since they are fixed by gluing to the subfloor.
Another known method of laying advanced patterns implies that the wood blocks are formed with a groove along all edges of the block. When the wood blocks are then laid, tongues are inserted into the grooves in the positions required. This results in a floor where the wood blocks are locked in the vertical direction relative to each other by the tongue engaging in tongue grooves of two adjoining wood blocks. Optionally this method is supplemented with gluing to lock the floor in the horizontal directions and to lock the floor in the vertical direction relative to the subfloor.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,787,027 (Wasleff) discloses another system for laying a herringbone parquet floor. The system comprises a plurality of wood blocks which are laid on a subfloor to form a herringbone parquet floor. Each wood block is provided with a set of tongues and tongue grooves which extend over parts of each edge of the wood block. When the wood blocks are laid in a herringbone pattern, tongues and tongue grooves will cooperate with each other so that the wood blocks are locked together mechanically in both the vertical and the horizontal direction. The tongues and tongue grooves that are shown in Wasleff, however, are of a classical type, i.e. they cannot be snapped or angled together, and the locking effect is achieved only when a plurality of wood blocks are laid together to form a floor. The system according to Wasleff consists of two types of wood blocks, which are mirror inverted relative to each other as regards the location of tongues and tongue grooves. The design of the locking system is such that a shank-end mill is necessary to form the tongue grooves shown. This is a drawback since machining using a shank-end mill is a relatively slow manufacturing operation.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,426,820 (Terbrack) discloses that floorboards can be joined long side against short side if the floor consists of two different floorboards which a joint system which can be laid merely by inward angling, which is not displaceable in the locked position and in which floorboards cannot be joined by snapping-in. Moreover FIGS. 11 and 23 show floorboards which are mirror inverted relative to each other. This is, however, not discussed in detail in the description. Col. 5, lines 10–13, seems to contain an indication that it is possible to join short side and long side. However, it is not shown how a complete floor can be joined using such floorboards to form a pattern. Owing to the non-existence of displaceability in the joined position and snappability, it is not possible to create, using such floorboards as disclosed by Terbrack, a floor of the type at which the present invention aims.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,295,341 (Kajiwara) discloses snappable floorboards which have two different long sides. One part of the long side is formed with a groove part and another part with a tongue part. Nor are such floorboards displaceable in the locked position. The manufacture is complicated, and nor can they be used to provide the desired pattern.
"Boden Wand Decke", Domotex, January 1997 shows a laminate floor where floorboards with different surfaces have been joined to form a floor having a simple pattern. It is also shown that floorboards have been joined long side against short side, but only in such a manner that all the short sides which are joined with a long side extend along a straight line. Consequently, this is an application of a prior-art system.

Flooring and method for laying and manufacturing the same


The disclosure discloses a method for querying group's dispatching area information, which comprises: a user sending a request for querying group's dispatching area information to a base station through a user terminal; and the base station querying the group's dispatching area information according to request for querying the group's dispatching area information, and returning a response to the group's dispatching area information query to the user terminal. The disclosure also discloses a query system for the querying group's dispatching area information correspondingly. The present invention can improve the validity, the dispatching reliability and accuracy of the group call.

Trunking communication is a special dispatching communication method, providing commanding and dispatching communication functions via a simplex communication mode. Trunking communication is widely applied to various fields, such as medical care and rescue, transportation, municipal administration, manufacturing and mining industries, public security, and military. Professional digital trunking communication based on the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology has the advantages of high rate of frequency utilization, wide coverage, great user capacity, clear sound, energy efficiency, environmental friendliness, high conversation confidentiality, among others. FIG. 1 shows a schematic diagram of a network structure of a trunking communication system. As shown in FIG. 1, the network structure of the trunking communication system is generally composed of a Mobile Station (MS), a Base Station Sub-System (BSS), a Mobile Switching Sub-system (MSS), a Dispatching Sub-System (DSS), a Packet Data Service Sub-system (PDSS) and an Operation and Maintenance Centre (OMC).
Trunking communication involves two concepts: group and dispatching area, wherein a group is a logic collection of certain number of group members, and a group call initiated from each member can be heard by all the group members. A dispatching area is defined by dividing the network coverage of a communication system, and the minimum unit of a dispatching area may be a cell of the base station. A dispatching area of a group may also include multiple cells. Based on the setting of the dispatching area, a trunking communication system generally allows two types of group calls: non-dispatching area group calls and dispatching area group calls. Relatively speaking, non-dispatching area group calls have no restrictions and are like regular group calls. Restrictions for dispatching area group calls include:
(1) a user outside the dispatching area cannot be called;
(2) a user outside the dispatching area can initiate a call; and
(3) a call will not be dropped when a user moves outside the dispatching area during the call process.
Normally, it may be required that a group member can only be called within a certain geographical region, namely, only users in this region can be called. Setting dispatching area can realize this purpose and has the following advantages:
(1) some special services require communications to be confidential and only certain people in certain regions can communicate;
(2) the utilization efficiency of the whole system resource is increased and the system capacity is also increased; and under the same conditions, non-dispatching area group calls will consume more system resource compared to dispatching area group calls given the same number of users; and
(3) a group member in the dispatching area can push to talk (PTT) to communicate with all other group members so that the call connection time is shortened.
Most of the group calls initiated by a trunking communication user terminal are dispatching area group calls. However, a user may not be able to get real-time information from its user terminal about which dispatching area a group belongs to and which groups can call the user. Conventional solution to this problem is to fix dispatching areas and dispatching purposes for certain groups, which have to be memorized by users. However, this method has the problems of low adaptability and low reliability, and in an urgent dispatching scene, the consequences of mal-operation cannot be underestimated.

Method and system for querying group's dispatching area information


Disclosed is an apparatus for obtaining toner particles with improved dispersion of additive components therein comprised of a toner extrusion device containing therein a blending chamber, a screw mixing means, a heating means, a toner supply means, and a means for injecting the additive components into the extrusion device enabling a decrease in the melting temperature of the toner resin particles contained therein.

This invention is generally directed to an apparatus and process for the preparation of toner particles, and more specifically the present invention is directed to a continuous economical process for the preparation of toner particles wherein there is effected a liquid injection into the toner components during processing thereof, enabling an increase in the viscosity of the toner polymer, in view of the lowering of the melt temperature thereby permitting a more desirable dispersing of the pigment particles therein.
In one embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a continuous process for the preparation of toner particles wherein there is injected into the polymer components selected a liquid with a boiling point below the melt temperature of the toner composition, whereby the liquid vaporizes enabling the absorption of heat generated by the shearing of the polymer melt and thereby desirably lowering the melt temperature of the toner resin particles. Liquid injection is effected in one specific embodiment with a specially designed nozzle means, however other means of injection can be used, which means are appropriately situated in a toner extrusion apparatus. This apparatus allows the continuous automatic control of toner processing parameters including the degree of dispersion of the pigment particles in the toner resin particles. With the selection of such an extrusion apparatus the properties of the toner composition can be determined during the processing thereof eliminating the need for sampling the toner subsequent to its complete preparation, which sampling is usually accomplished with each batch of toner being prepared. A suitable extrusion apparatus and process is described in a copending application U.S. Ser. No. 535,517/83, now abandoned, entitled "Apparatus and Process for Controlling Toner Properties", the disclosure of this application being totally incorporated herein by reference.
Numerous devices and processes are known for effecting the preparation of toner particles. Examples of commercially known processes include the melt blending of the toner components in a Banbury apparatus. Other methods include spray drying, dispersion polymerization, solution polymerization, and the like. Also it is known that toner compositions can be obtained with an extrusion apparatus. An extrusion apparatus and process enables a number of advantages not achievable with the Banbury process in that, for example, extrusion is a continuous rather than batch operation and, the extrusion process is more susceptible to automation, allowing more economical operation.
Moreover, it is known that water injection processes may be used for the purpose of removing undesirable volatile components during the processing of polymer compositions. However, there is no teaching in this prior art as to the concept of selecting liquid injection for the purpose of controlling, for example, the melt temperature of the polymer components needed for obtaining toner compositions, and wherein there results improved pigment dispersion. The prior art is silent with respect to processing toner compositions with a liquid injection means.
Toner compositions selected for causing the development of images in electrostatic imaging systems must be of the proper triboelectric charge in order to achieve high quality developed images of suitable resolution. The triboelectric charge is primarily effected by the degree of dispersion of the pigment particles and/or charge enchancing additives incorporated therein. Dispersion of the pigment particles and internal charging additives is directly dependent on the magnitude of the shear stress and the temperature history of the polymer components during the melt mixing processes. Accordingly in most situations a reduction in the polymer melt temperature generates higher stress enabling a more favorable dispersion therein of the pigment particles and the charge enhancing additives. However, in many of the apparatuses and processes described herein for obtaining toner particles, such as the Banbury roll mill, the compounding extruder, and the continuous mixing apparatus, the surface area required for heat transfer to reduce the melt temperature is severly limited.
Thus there remains a need for processes and apparatus for the continuous preparation of toner compositions wherein there can be effected a reduction in the melt temperature of the toner components. Moreover, there remains a need for a simple, economical extrusion toner processing apparatus wherein the melting temperature of the polymer components can be desirably lowered by a liquid injection process. Further, there continues to be a need for enabling the liquid injection of components into the toner compositions being prepared, and wherein this injection can be effected in a continuous manner during the extrusion process. Moreover, there remains a need for a continuous process and apparatus which will enable increased dispersion of pigment particles, and/or charge enhancing additives into the toner composition components, thereby desirably effecting the resulting triboelectric charge contained on the toner resin particles. Additionally, there continues to be a need for an apparatus and process wherein liquid injection of water, suspensions with pigment particles, and charge enhancing additives, or solution mixtures having incorporated therein charge enhancing additives, can be accomplished in a continuous manner, and wherein the properties of the toner compositions produced may be continuously monitored during processing that is, on line, enabling the necessary adjustments to the equipment to be effected immediately and automatically. Furthermore, there continues to be a need for a process and apparatus which will enable a simple, economical method for continuously monitoring and maintaining the capacitance and conductance values of toner components selected for preparing the toner compositions, and wherein during toner processing there can be injected by a nozzle various components into a toner composition causing the melting temperature thereof to be desirably reduced. Also, there continues to be a need for an apparatus and process which continuously and accurately measures the capacitance, or the amount of pigment particles contained in the toner resin selected, and the conductance, that is the degree of dispersion of the pigment particles in the toner resin particles, which measurements are desirably accomplished on line enabling the automatic adjustment of various processing parameters in order that toner particles of desired properties can be obtained. Additionally, there continues to be a need for the preparation of toner particles by extrusion processes, wherein there is injected various components into the polymer resinous particles, and where toner compositions can be prepared in a continuous manner rather than in batches as is effected with the known Banbury roll mixers, which extrusion apparatus contains as an integral part thereof, a nozzle injecting means, and an optional sensing device. Moreover, there remains a need for a process and apparatus wherein there can be injected into a toner composition aqueous solutions, a suspension containing therein carbon black particles, or charge enhancing additives, a solution having dissolved therein charge enhancing additives, waxes, and the like, desirably enabling the lowering of the melt temperature of the toner composition, and causing the viscosity of the polymer contained therein to increase.

Process and apparatus for preparing toner particles


A relative position detection device is designed with multiple Hall Effect sensors. In one embodiment, the multiple Hall Effect sensors comprise two different types of Hall Effect sensors. The two different types can be linear and digital. The output of the sensors is used to determine the position an accelerator control, such as a twist grip, and to control an engine or motor in accordance with the operator demand evidenced by the position of the accelerator control.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a relative position detection device capable of detecting a reference position of a first member and a second member that are displaceable relative to each other. More particularly, the present invention relates to a straddle-type vehicle in which a drive device, such as a motor or an engine, is controlled using the relative position detection device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the motorcycle art, an accelerator grip is rotationally mounted on a handlebar and the accelerator is rotated with respect to the handlebar to open and close a throttle valve of the internal combustion engine. On many motorcycles, an electric relative position detection device is used, in which the rotational movement of the accelerator is detected by a potentiometer and the throttle valve is opened and closed by an actuator based upon the output voltage from the potentiometer.
To reduce the likelihood of a malfunction in the potentiometer resulting in undesired throttle positional control, a separate mechanical switch also is provided that is capable of detecting a completely-closed position of the accelerator so as to close the throttle valve if the accelerator is positioned in the closed position and the throttle valve is not fully closed.
An improved system also has been developed that features a magnetic relative position detection device in which a magnet is disposed in an accelerator and the rotational position of the accelerator is detected via changes in the magnetic flux density. In addition, a further improved system makes use of a Hall Effect sensor.
For example, in JP-A-Hei 7-324637, for the purpose of detecting the rotational position of the accelerator so as to control ignition of the internal combustion engine, a magnet is fixed to an accelerator, two digital Hall Effect sensors are secured to the handle and it is judged whether the accelerator is in the idling range, the middle-speed range or the high speed range. Nevertheless, detection of the amount of rotation of the accelerator necessary to control the opening and closing of the throttle valve still is performed using a potentiometer or the like. Moreover, because the magnet is relatively small, if the accelerator grip is rotated, the gap between the magnet and the Hall Effect sensor grows to such a degree that the magnetic flux density exerted on the Hall Effect sensor become very small. Thus, if a magnetic force is present in the vicinity of the sensor, the outside magnetic force can result in improper operation of the system.
Further, FIG. 2 of JP-A-2002-256904 disclosed a relative position detection device in which a permanent magnet is fixed to an accelerator and two Hall Effect sensor that function in the same manner as each other are fixed to a housing fastened to a handle shaft. In this case, although the details are not clear, an electric signal is output in response to the position of the permanent magnet during rotation of the accelerator using two similarly functioning Hall Effect sensors.
However, since in a relative position detection device using a conventional potentiometer, the potentiometer is larger than an accelerator, the potentiometer is more likely to degrade the aesthetics of the vehicle if the potentiometer is disposed around the accelerator. Therefore, it usually is disposed at a position other than around the accelerator and is connected to the accelerator with a conductive wire or the like, which is likely to increase the number of parts, human-hours required for assembling and the like. In addition, over time, the conductive wire is likely to elongate over time and, therefore, increases the need for maintenance.

Relative position detection device for motor vehicle


A projection apparatus is formed employing a solid state light source having either an associated or integrated sensor to monitor a thermal condition of a region of the solid state light source. The sensor is equipped to output a signal indicative of the thermal condition of the monitored region. In various embodiments, a controller is also provided to conditionally initiate one or more thermal management actions based at least in part on the thermal condition of the region as indicated by the signal.

Historically, projection engines of projection systems have been designed employing high intensity discharge lamps. These prior art projection engines/systems suffer from a number of disadvantages. For examples, the lamps typically have relatively short lives, and reduced brightness after an initial period of usage. Further, there is an appreciable period of waiting for the lamp to warm up, when a projection engine/system is first turned on. During that period, either no image is available or the available images are of poor quality.
Resultantly, there has been a lot of interest in developing and manufacturing in a mass scale projection engines and projection systems employing solid state light sources. Such engines/systems typically have the aforementioned disadvantages in a lesser degree. However, the issues still have to be addressed.

Thermal management of projection apparatus


A method, apparatus practicing the method, a system and an interface for displaying an array of computer-readable files having time portions thereof is described. The time portions are configured to display computer-readable files associated with respective time periods to order the computer-readable files along a timeline. The time portions being configured to define at least one of a past portion adapted to display computer-readable files associated with a time before a present time, a present portion adapted to display computer-readable files associated with the present time, and a future portion adapted to display computer-readable files associated with a time past the present time.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer systems and more specifically to a method, a system and an interface that facilitates localization and organization of user-selectable elements. More precisely, the present invention relates to a method for managing arrays of user-selectable elements in association with a geographical or a celestial position; separating user-selectable elements in portions of time; and displaying advertising.
b 2. Description of the Related Art
With the always-increasing amount of information one has to deal with on a daily basis it becomes harder to manage the information on an item-by-item basis. An alternative information management system adapted to organize large amount of information would be beneficial to the user.
United States Patent Application Publication No.: US 2007/0214169 A1, published on Sep. 13, 2007 discloses a Multi-dimensional locating system and method (title). The patent application discloses ways for managing and displaying vectors of documents and other computer-readable files. A vector of documents that groups a plurality of documents along a predetermined order, inter alia, is taught.
United States Patent Application Publication No.: US 2007/0271508 A1, published on Nov. 22, 2007 discloses a Multi-dimensional locating system and method (title). A plurality of vectors of documents and other computer-readable files sharing a common timeline is disclosed.
With the possibility of displaying vectors of documents and other information elements it is desirable to associate arrays of user-selectable elements and/or user-selectable elements with a position/location.
It is also desirable to separate documents and other information elements on an information element vector in accordance with the past, the present and the future.
It is desirable to display advertising in relation with the selected attribute(s) associated with an information element vector to more precisely direct the advertising or the message to a receptive audience.

Array of documents with past, present and future portions thereof


An apparatus for thaw detection of a frozen item is disclosed, the apparatus comprising a housing container comprising a first transparent section and a second opaque section, at least one low density floating object and at least one high density object both encased within the housing container, wherein the housing container is filled with a filling mixture and melting of the filling mixture results in the at least one low density floating object and at least one high density object to be visible in the first transparent section of the housing container, thereby enabling thaw detection of the frozen item. Also disclosed is a method of manufacturing an apparatus for thaw detection of a frozen item.

Background description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided herein is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
There is increasing global consumption of frozen foods due to their low cost, malleability to long-term storage, and ease of transport. However, the danger of Food-poisoning bacteria can grow in frozen food while it is thawing. To avoid thawing frozen food and exposure to the temperature danger zone some means detection is favorable to indicate whether frozen items have been previously thawed. A number of devices mostly sensors have been invented to detect whether a thawing and subsequent freezing have taken place. There is an evident lack of reliable techniques to monitor the condition of these subjects during transport from the production site and to the consumer. Although, the available electronic devices only give readings of the average temperature of the whole freezing the use of such apparatus with each and not every item in the frozen food is both totally impracticable and prohibitively costly.
Therefore, there exists a need for a solution for the above listed drawbacks associated with traditional impedance measurement methods, and which proves to be a remedy for the same.

Apparatus for thaw detection of a frozen item and method of manufacturing the same