Hashimoto's thyroiditis associated with Riedel's thyroiditis and retroperitoneal fibrosis

This article describe the case of a 38-year-old woman with simultaneous involvement of the thyroid by Hashimoto's thyroiditis and Riedels's disease, associated with retroperitoneal fibrosis and lipidic endarteritis. According to a large review of the literature on the occurrence of this rare condition the difficulty in sharply defining the two thyroid processes is discussed. The chronology of the events is analyzed, and etiopathogenic hypotheses are listed with emphasis on the relationship between the vascular lesions and the onset of the fibrosing process.     

Annealing effects of polymers and their underlying molecular mechanisms

This paper indicates that changes in chain mobility, heat capacity, WAXS crystallinity, SAXS long period, SAXS peak intensity, specific volume and morphology as a function of increasing temperature, occur in three fairly distinct annealing ranges (I, II and III) that are more or less the same for all crystallized polymers with a lamellar morphology. It is shown that none of the proposed molecular models to date, including the well-known fold surface premelting model, can satisfactorily account for all the experimental data. However, a new molecular interpretation, based primarily on electron microscopy and SAXS studies of changes such as lateral ‘melting’ from edges of microparacrystallites (mPC) within the lamellae seen at the annealing temperatures can account for the data. With our new molecular interpretation, the effect of temperature increase is established to result in a slight breakup of the laterally aligned mPC within the lamellae at low annealing temperatures in range I, and selective lateral ‘melting’ of the exposed mPC and recrystallization at higher annealing temperatures in ranges II and III, with the recrystallization being very limited in range III. Annealing effects seen in cold- or hot-drawn polymers with a fibrillar morphology can also be readily accounted for by this very general molecular mechanism occurring in the same annealing temperature ranges.     

Thyroid insular carcinoma

This review article illustrates the several histological and immunohistochemical patterns of thyroid insular carcinoma and their associated disease. Differential diagnosis are also discussed. Poorly differentiated thyroid carcinomas are overviewed. The interest of transgenic mice models is presented.     

Steady state creep in two Ni-Al alloys

Creep of two Ni-AI alloys containing 4.8 and 7.0 wt pct Al was studied in the temperature range 873 to 1073 K and stress range 30 to 400 MPa. The former alloy represents the solid solution of aluminum in nickel, the latter a solid solution strengthened by NI3AI particles. As to its creep behavior the solid solution alloy belongs to the Class n of solid solu-tions,i.e. the creep controlling mechanism is the same as in pure nickel. From the analy-sis of an effective stress dependence of steady state creep rate it follows that the mo-tion of jogged screw dislocations can be considered as the most probable creep control-ling mechanism. The apparent activation energy of creep in the two phase alloy increases with tempera-ture. This effect is caused by changes in the volume fraction of second phase particles and by the onset of climb around particles at high temperatures. At lower temperatures particles are cut by dislocation pairs.     

Isomorphism,form equivalence and sequence equivalence of PD0L forms

It is shown that if two PD0L forms F₁ and F₂ are form equivalent, i.e., generate the same family of languages, then the PD0L sequences E(F₁) and E(F₂) are isomorphic, provided one of the sequences contains a word of length greater than one. This result leads to a simple algorithm of deciding the form equivalence of two PD0L forms F₁ and F₂. Moreover, we obtain the rather surprising result that F₁ and F₂ are form equivalent if and only if they are sequence equivalent, i.e., generate the same family of PD0L sequences (excluding again the trivial case that F₁ and F₂ generate only words of length one).     

Ursachen der Porigkeit von Oxydschichten auf Eisen

An einer Eisen-Bor-Legierung mit 0,08% B Durchführung von Oxydationsversuchen hei 900 bis 1100 °C. Metallographische Untersuchung der Oxydschichten. Folgerungen über die Bedeutung des Bors für die Porigkeit der Oxydschichten. Vergleich mit früheren an einer Eisen-Phosphor-Legierung mit 0,09% P erhaltenen Ergebnissen. Erörterung des Bildungs- und Wachstumsvorganges von Poren in Zunderschichten.     

On SAT instance classes and a method for reliable performance experiments with SAT solvers

A recent series of experiments with a group of state-of-the-art SAT solvers and several well-defined classes of problem instances reports statistically significant performance variability for the solvers. A systematic analysis of the observed performance data, all openly archived on the Web, reveals distributions which we classify into three broad categories: (1) readily characterized with a simple ²-test, (2) requiring more in-depth analysis by a statistician, (3) incomplete, due to time-out limit reached by specific solvers. The first category includes two well-known distributions: normal and exponential; we use simple first-order criteria to decide the second category and label the distributions as near-normal, near-exponential and heavy-tail. We expect that good models for some if not most of these may be found with parameters that fit either generalized gamma, Weibull, or Pareto distributions. Our experiments show that most SAT solvers exhibit either normal or exponential distribution of execution time (runtime) on many equivalence classes of problem instances. This finding suggests that the basic mathematical framework for these experiments may well be the same as the one used to test the reliability or lifetime of hardware components such as lightbulbs, A/C units, etc. A batch of N replicated hardware components represents an equivalence class of N problem instances in SAT, a controlled operating environment A represents a SAT solver A, and the survival function (where x represents the lifetime) is the complement of the solvability function where x may represent runtime, implications, backtracks, etc. As demonstrated in the paper, a set of unrelated benchmarks or randomly generated SAT instances available today cannot measure the performance of SAT solvers reliably — there is no control on their hardness. However, equivalence class instances as defined in this paper are, in effect, replicated instances of a specific reference instance. The proposed method not only provides a common platform for a systematic study and a reliable improvement of deterministic and stochastic SAT solvers alike but also supports the introduction and validation of new problem instance classes.     

Frequency dependence of the conductivity of amorphous germanium films between 20 Hz and 26 GHz

Conductivity measurements on amorphous Ge films in the frequency range 20 Hz–26 GHz are described. Above 100 MHz the frequency dependence of the conductivity at room temperature satisfied the power law σ∝ω^s with s=0.45-0.7. No saturation of the conductivity was observed. When the Ge films were doped with 0.1–1 at. % Sb the conductivity was frequency independent up to 26 GHz. A.c. hopping conduction seems to be compatible with the experimental results.