Machine recognition of constrained hand printed devanagari

A method is presented for the machine recognition of constrained, hand printed Devanagari characters. A set of very simple primitives is used, and all the Devanagari characters are looked upon as a concatenation of these primitives. Most of the decisions are taken on the basis of the presence/absence or positional relationship of these primitives; and the decision process is a multistage process, where each stage of decision making narrows down the choice regarding the class membership of the input token.     

Recursiveness, causality, and feedback

The various notions of recursiveness, causality, and feedback for stochastic processes are related and organized.     

Sequencing and Scheduling in Robotic Cells: Recent Developments

A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has one or more machines that perform that stage’s processing. Types of robotic cells are differentiated from one another by certain characteristics, including robot type, robot travel-time, number of robots, types of parts processed, and use of parallel machines within stages. We focus on cyclic production of parts. A cycle is specified by a repeatable sequence of robot moves designed to transfer a set of parts between the machines for their processing.We start by providing a classification scheme for robotic cell scheduling problems that is based on three characteristics: machine environment, processing restrictions, and objective function, and discuss the influence of these characteristics on the methods of analysis employed. In addition to reporting recent results on classical robotic cell scheduling problems, we include results on robotic cells with advanced features such as dual gripper robots, parallel machines, and multiple robots. Next, we examine implementation issues that have been addressed in the practice-oriented literature and detail the optimal policies to use under various combinations of conditions. We conclude by describing some important open problems in the field.     

Pulmonary hemorrhage associated with balloon flotation catheters: report of a case and review of the literature

The development of the flow-directed balloon catheter has greatly facilitated the monitoring of seriously ill patients. As the use of this catheter has increased, so have the reports of complications, the most serious of which is fatal pulmonary hemorrhage. Eleven cases of pulmonary hemorrhage have been described in the literature, and we have reported an additional case. The presenting symptom in 10 patients was hemoptysis, and the course of eight of these patients was rapidly fatal. The most frequent significant finding at autopsy was a laceration of a small peripheral pulmonary artery, usually at a bifurcation. The pathogenesis, prophylaxis, and management of this complication are discussed.     

Pebble games for studying storage sharing

Pebble games are played on a directed acyclic graph (dag). Placing a pebble on a vertex may be thought of as entering the value of the subexpression represented by the vertex into accessible storage. In some applications, there are types associated with vertices e.g. some vertices may represent functions, others may represent function values. We are interested in determining if vertices of the same type can share storage. The problem considered is as follows. We are given a labelled dag to be pebbled. A pebble may be placed on a vertex if all sons of the vertex have pebbles—in fact it is legal to move a pebble from a son to a father. Pebbles may be picked up at any time. The objective is to pebble each vertex exactly once. We will be interested in ‘one pebblings of l vertices’ in which there is at most one pebble on vertices with label l, at all times; and ‘stack pebblings of l vertices’ in which the pebbled vertices with label l are along a path, at all times. Results about the existence of such pebblings are presented. The results have applications to testing serializability of database updates, and potential applications to semantics directed compiler generation.     

A requirement for the rac1 GTPase in the signal transduction pathway leading to cardiac myocyte hypertrophy

We have used adenoviral-mediated gene transfer of a constitutively active (V12rac1) and dominant negative (N17rac1) isoform of rac1 to assess the role of this small GTPase in cardiac myocyte hypertrophy. Expression of V12rac1 in neonatal cardiac myocytes results in sarcomeric reorganization and an increase in cell size that is indistinguishable from ligand-stimulated hypertrophy. In addition, V12rac1 expression leads to an increase in atrial natriuretic peptide secretion. In contrast, expression of N17rac1, but not a truncated form of Raf-1, attenuated the morphological hypertrophy associated with phenylephrine stimulation. Consistent with the observed effects on morphology, expression of V12rac1 resulted in an increase in new protein synthesis, while N17rac1 expression inhibited phenylephrine-induced leucine incorporation. These results suggest rac1 is an essential element of the signaling pathway leading to cardiac myocyte hypertrophy.