Improved diagnosis using enhanced fault dominance

Defect diagnosis can benefit from fault dominance relations to reduce the set of defect candidate sites. This paper presents new fault dominance collapsing operators that further reduce the set of candidates considered during the initial phase of diagnosis. In contrast to existing dominance-based methods which operate on pairs of faults, the proposed method operates on sets of faults. Fault-related entities are generated to guide the diagnosis process. The proposed collapsing operators can be used to accelerate effect-cause diagnosis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a higher collapsing ratio than existing methods.     

Infrared emission properties and energy transfer in ZnO-SiO2:Yb composites

Intense near-infrared emission at 1 μm has been obtained in ZnO-SiO₂:Yb³⁺ composites via a facile sol-gel method upon broadband ultraviolet light excitation. Systematic optical measurements including static and time-resolved photoluminescence have been performed to elucidate the energy transfer from ZnO quantum dots to Yb³⁺ ions. The dependence of energy transfer efficiency on Yb³⁺ concentration has been investigated in detail. Codoping with Li⁺ ions leads to about twice enhancement of the near-infrared luminescence intensity around 1 μm at room temperature. The enhancement in the luminescence intensity could be mostly attributed to the modification of the local symmetry around Yb³⁺ ions by codoping with Li⁺ ions.     

结肠镜检查者肠道准备无效的原因分析及应对措施

目的:探讨结肠镜检查者肠道准备无效的原因及应对措施.方法:有经验的肠镜检查医师根据肠道清洁效果评价指标进行评价.结果:1313例检查者中有49例肠道准备无效.结论:服药方法、疾病因素、年龄、心理状态、肠镜检查次数等都对肠道准备效果产生了影响.     

WIPO Panels’ interpretation of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) three-prong test

The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) is a unique process that resolves domain name disputes effectively and inexpensively. This paper, through an analysis of the UDRP three-prong test, revealed that even though the UDRP affords a great degree of discretion to the WIPO Panels deciding any given case, there is some consistency and predictability inherent in the UDRP process.     

Europe should stop taxing innovation

After nearly 48 years of failure to create the EU patent, language issues and the design of a centralised patent-litigation court still dominate headlines. But behind these issues there are high financial stakes and control power to play for. The recent EU Council deal on an ‘enhanced’ European patent system does not solve the above problems, and has not eliminated lingering governance issues. The risk for Europe is that a final patent agreement might be reached that does not cure the system of its major ills, and thus does not bring about any significant improvement for those that need it most: entrepreneurs and innovative companies starting out on the innovation process. The creation of an effective single EU patent requires (i) English-only post-grant translation, (ii) the end of nationally granted patents, (iii) phasing-out of the current ‘European patent’, (iv) lower fees for young innovative companies, and (v) a radical shake-up of the governance of the European Patent Office.     

Synthesis of crystalline metal nitride and metal carbide nanostructures by sol–gel chemistry

Attention toward nanosized metal nitrides and carbides is rapidly increasing thanks to their chemical characteristics that make them as valid and sustainable alternatives to noble metals in catalysis and to air-sensitive metals or oxides for applications under harsh conditions. They are mostly used as bulk phase or micron sized powders, due to an intrinsic difficulty to synthesize them as nanoparticles in a systematic and scalable fashion. However, nanosized metal nitrides and carbides could exhibit improved performances, e.g. in catalysis due to a higher surface area, and can be shaped more easily than corresponding larger grains for further specific applications. Recently, sol–gel chemistry has closed this gap and now enables the simple, cheap, and sustainable production of metal nitride and carbide nanoparticles.In the present review we give an overview on recent sol–gel based pathways for the synthesis of metal nitride and carbide nanoparticles, believing that a better knowledge of the potentialities of these still hardly touched materials stimulates research interest and applications.     

A fast parallel (23, 12, 7) QR decoder based on syndrome-weight determination

In this paper, a time-area efficient hardware decoder of the (23, 12, 7) quadratic residue code, or Golay code, is presented. The key feature of this proposed algorithm lies in fast determination of error positions through the analysis on the weight of syndromes without large operations in finite fields. Comparing with the algorithm using one syndrome, the proposed algorithm is more suitable for the parallel hardware design by using two syndromes. Based on an Altera Cyclone II field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device (EP2C35F484C6), the area cost and the time delay of the complete system are reduced by up to 86.4% and 22.5%, respectively. Using the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 0.18-μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) standard cell library, the proposed decoder is 91.8% smaller and 8.3% faster.     

Additive noise removal using a novel fuzzy-based filter

The paper proposes a new fuzzy-based two-step filter for restoring images corrupted with additive noise. The goal of the first step is to compute the difference between the central pixel and its neighborhood in a selected window and to compute a fuzzy membership degree for each difference value using a Gaussian membership function. Computed fuzzy membership values are appropriately utilized as weights for each pixel and then computes the weighted average representing the modified value for the current central pixel. The second step is used as an augmented step to the first one and its goal is to improve the result obtained in the first step by reducing the noise in the color component differences without destroying the fine details of the image. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed method gives better results compared to existing advanced filters for additive noise reduction. Both visual, quantitative and qualitative analysis have been done to prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.