Structural,electrical and electrochemical characterization of Ni-Pr oxide thick films

Oxides with metallic conductivity could and have been used instead of noble metals as insert electrodes in aqueous solutions as well as electrodes for high temperature fuel cells and electrolysers and as catalysts for the conversion of exhaust gases from internal combustion engines. The aim of this paper is to report the results of a physico-chemical characterization (structure, morphology, electrochemical behaviour) of Ni-Pr oxides which have been proposed as electrode materials for high temperature fuel cells.The electrochemical characterization was carried out in aqueous solutions at room temperature and with solid electrolytes at high temperature. Evidence has been found in the former case for an oxide electrode type of behaviour. In the high temperature case, very low overvoltage values have been observed during cathodic oxygen reduction, while the electrode undergoes a reaction with oxygen during anodic oxygen evolution.     

Multi-document summarization based on the Yago ontology

Sentence-based multi-document summarization is the task of generating a succinct summary of a document collection, which consists of the most salient document sentences. In recent years, the increasing availability of semantics-based models (e.g., ontologies and taxonomies) has prompted researchers to investigate their usefulness for improving summarizer performance. However, semantics-based document analysis is often applied as a preprocessing step, rather than integrating the discovered knowledge into the summarization process.This paper proposes a novel summarizer, namely Yago-based Summarizer, that relies on an ontology-based evaluation and selection of the document sentences. To capture the actual meaning and context of the document sentences and generate sound document summaries, an established entity recognition and disambiguation step based on the Yago ontology is integrated into the summarization process.The experimental results, which were achieved on the DUC’04 benchmark collections, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to a large number of competitors as well as the qualitative soundness of the generated summaries.     

Efficient BEM-based substrate network extraction in silicon SoCs

This paper is focused on the efficient extraction of the substrate network in complex system-on-chip designs. A boundary element method (BEM)-based approach, which employs spatial-frequency domain Green's function analysis, is considered and very high efficiency is achieved by a novel formulation of the boundary conditions which describe both resistive and capacitive couplings. The efficiency of the proposed technique is further increased taking advantage of the inherent information compression provided by the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed by comparison with a commercial substrate extraction tool and its computational advantage is illustrated on the basis of computer simulation results.     

Three-dimensional Simulation of the dependence of the programming window of SOI nanocrystal memories on the channel width

In this paper, we present an approach based on three-dimensional simulations for the investigation of the dependence of the programming window of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) nanocrystal memories on the width of the silicon channel. Recent experiments show that the threshold voltage shift after programming increases with decreasing channel width. By evaluating the consequences of possible assumptions on the charge stored in the nanocrystals, we show that such behavior can be consistently explained by the preferential injection of electrons, during the program operation, through the oxide near the edges of the channel. As a consequence, charge is mostly stored in the dots close to the edges and, therefore, is more and more effective as the channel width is decreased. Experiments and simulations on SOI nanocrystal memories show support of our interpretation with respect to different proposed mechanisms.     

Current saturation and voltage gain in bilayer graphene field effect transistors

The emergence of graphene with its unique electrical properties has triggered hopes in the electronic devices community regarding its exploitation as a channel material in field effect transistors. Graphene is especially promising for devices working at frequencies in the 100 GHz range. So far, graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) have shown cutoff frequencies up to 300 GHz, while exhibiting poor voltage gains, another important figure of merit for analog high frequency applications. In the present work, we show that the voltage gain of GFETs can be improved significantly by using bilayer graphene, where a band gap is introduced through a vertical electric displacement field. At a displacement field of -1.7 V/nm the bilayer GFETs exhibit an intrinsic voltage gain up to 35, a factor of 6 higher than the voltage gain in corresponding monolayer GFETs. The transconductance, which limits the cutoff frequency of a transistor, is not degraded by the displacement field and is similar in both monolayer and bilayer GFETs. Using numerical simulations based on an atomistic p(z) tight-binding Hamiltonian we demonstrate that this approach can be extended to sub-100 nm gate lengths.     

Evaluation of the respiratory function by lung scintigraphy in patients candidates for pulmonary resection

Sixty-one patients undergoing pulmonary resection were studied pre- and post-operatively by spirometry, arterial gas determination, and quantitative ventilation/perfusion lung scanning. Our results showed that ventilation and/or perfusional scintigraphic scanning is currently the most reliable method in identifying patients at risk for postoperative respiratory insufficiency. Specifically, this technique was successful in detecting pulmonary areas other than those to be resected presenting ventilation or perfusional abnormalities. Therefore, the technique is particularly useful in predicting residual pulmonary function.     

Surgical versus endovascular treatment in cerebral aneurysm. The opinion of a neurosurgeon]

The examination of deaths due to electricity may require a comparison between current marks on the body and the electrodes suspected to have caused them. Normally the identification of the responsible electrode is carried out by analysing metal traces on the current marks. We however examined the conductor for traces of biological material after experimentally produced current marks. The surfaces of the conductors were investigated using a low-power macroscope and burnt tissue could always be recognised. Subsequently, all electrodes were carefully swabbed, extracted with chelex and typed for short tandem repeat polymorphisms using PCR. This procedure was successful in all cases. Therefore, DNA analysis can be a powerful tool to supplement conventional scene reconstruction in cases of deaths due to electricity.     

A possible correlation between the blood leukocyte formula and the use of glucocorticoids as growth promoters in beef cattle

The frequency of lumbar disc hemiation amounts to 5.1% with the male and 3.7% with the female population. Because of the often long-time pain-conditional impairment of the patients as well as the varied therapy-possibilities, the treatment of the ruptured lumbar intervertebral disc represents a special challenge. The indication to the operation for the lumbar disk-herniation results from the malfunctions of the nerve roots, the pains, as well as the temporal course of the symptoms. New and important developments have given the introduction of micro-surgical operation-techniques into the orthopedics. This development has led to it that many orthopedists and neurosurgeons the micro-surgical operation-technique prefers. Important for the micro-surgical lumbar discectomy is the operation-microscope, a good preoperative diagnostics as well as a particular micro-surgical operation-instrument. Through the different enlargement-possibilities of the operation-microscope, all anatomical structures can increase and are done visibly for the surgeon as well as the assistant. Intraoperative injuries of the dura as well as the spinal-nerves are certainly avoided hereby. The micro-surgical discectomie requires no longer time like the conventional operation of the disk. The postoperative stay in the hospital as well as the time of the work-incompetence is reduced. Postoperative inflammations of the disk-area as well as renewed operations are rarer with the microchirurgischen technique. If an operation is necessary, so this should not be out-hesitated too long in order to avoid bed results.