Disaster-readiness of medical facilities in Aichi Prefecture

One month following the Great Hanshin Earthquake of January 17, 1995, we conducted a survey of 173 hospitals in Aichi Prefecture to pinpoint problems related to their actual disaster-readiness and the medical backup systems in place to deal with such disasters. This study revealed that staff at 50% of the surveyed hospitals could reach the hospital within an hour, but that communication is almost entirely dependent on phone lines, suggesting that cordless/portable/mobile phones, radio systems, Internet, communications satellites and the like should be studied in the days to come for possible use as effective communication alternatives in times of disaster. Whereas 92% of the surveyed hospitals had manuals dealing with fire outbreaks, other areas were less well represented. For example, only 36.9% of surveyed hospitals had manuals for earthquakes, 31.7% had manuals for power outages and 14.2% had manuals to deal with flooding and water disasters. New manuals must be developed incorporating the key points garnered from experience (especially Hanshin) and be ready for use immediately. It is the time for each hospital to seriously rethink the measures it should take to deal with disasters.     

An analytic expression of fmax for HBTs

An analytic expression of f_max is derived based on a practical HBT circuit model where collector junction capacitance is split up into internal and external parts. It shows that for advanced HBTs, f_max is well characterized by the product of the base resistance and internal collector capacitance. In other words, the external collector capacitance has only a small impact on the determination of f_max. Good agreement between experimental results and numerical circuit simulation confirms the validity of the HBT circuit model. The influence of the external collector capacitance on maximum available gain is also described     

Very low threshold graded-indexseparate-confinement-heterostructure strained InGaAsPsingle-quantum-well lasers

A low threshold current density of ~100 A/cm² has been obtained at 1.55 μm using a graded-index separate-confinement-heterostructure strained InGaAsP single-quantum-well laser. The design of the laser structure is based on results calculated from the viewpoint of effective carrier injection into the well     

Nonpigmented fixed drug eruption from pseudoephedrine

The biotransformation of oxazepam by Bifidobacterium bifidum was studied. The major metabolite was purified by chromatographic methods and found to be desmethyldiazepam using NMR, IR and other physicochemical data.     

Strengthening of concrete prisms using the plate-bonding technique

This paper presents the use of fracture mechanics for the plate bonding technique. Plates of steel or carbon-fibre reinforced plastic are bonded with an epoxy adhesive to rectangular concrete prisms and loaded in shear up to failure, what is normally known in fracture mechanics as mode II failure. In this special application a linear and a nonlinear approach are presented. The nonlinear equation derived for a realistic shear-deformation curve can only be used for numerical calculations. However, for simplified shear-deformation curves, the derived formula can be solved analytically. Results from tests, which are compared with the theory, are also presented.     

The structure and management of service level agreements innetworks

The paper proposes a structure for quality-of-service (QoS)-centered service level agreements (SLA), and a framework for their real-time management in multiservice packet networks. The SLA is structured to be fair to both parties, the service provider and their customer. The SLA considered here are for QoS assured delivery of aggregate bandwidth from ingress to egress nodes; however, the control and signaling is for the more granular flows or calls. A SLA monitoring scheme is presented in which revenue is generated by the admission of flows into the network, and penalty incurred when flows are lost in periods when the service provider is not SLA compliant. In the SLA management scheme proposed, the results of a prior off-line design are used, in conjunction with measurements taken locally at ingress nodes, to classify the loading status of routes. The routing and resource management are based on virtual partitioning and its supporting mechanism of bandwidth protection. The effectiveness of SLA management is measured by the robustness in performance in the presence of substantial diversity in actual traffic conditions. A simulation testbed called D'ARTAGNAN has been built from which we report numerical results for a case study. The results show that the SLA management scheme is robust, fair and efficient over a broad range of traffic conditions