Peroperative manometric evaluation of posterior fundoplication by celioscopy

A severe allergic reaction to a porcelain-fused-to-metal fixed partial denture containing 79% palladium, 2% gold, and 19% copper, resulting in a variety of symptoms and hospitalization of the patient, is reported. The reaction occurred 4 hours after cementation of the fixed partial denture. Suggestions for use of nongold metal alloys are discussed.     

Nouveaux verres fluores transmetteurs dans l'infrarouge dans les systemes LnF3BaF2ZnF2

A new family of fluoride glasses have been isolated in the ternary systems LnF₃BaF₂ZnF₂ with Ln = rare earth and yttrium. The melt must be quenched to reduce the crystallization. These glasses have a good I.R. transmission: the absorption edge is in the 9 μ region.     

A New Adaptive Neuro-sliding Mode Control for Gantry Crane

This paper presents a new adaptive neuro-sliding mode control for gantry crane as varying rope length. This control method derived from combining the sliding surfaces of three subsystem of the gantry crane (trolley position, rope length, anti-swing) to draw out two system sliding surfaces: the trolley position with the anti-swing and the rope length and the anti-swing. On the based of the sliding mode control principle, drawn out the equivalent controller and the switching controller for gantry crane. But due to the uncertain parameters-nonlinear model of gantry crane with the bound disturbances, combining the neural approximate method, defined the neural controller and the compensation controller for the difference between the equivalent controller and the neural controller for two system control inputs: trolley position and rope length. The adaptive control laws for these controllers were deduced from Lyapunov’s stable criteria to asymptotically stabilize the sliding surfaces. Simulation studies are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control.     

Confluence and Semantics of Constraint Simplification Rules

Constraint Simplification Rules (CSR) is a subset of the Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language. CHR is a powerful special-purpose declarative programming language for writing constraint solvers. The CSR subset of CHR forms essentially a committed-choice language consisting of guarded rules with multiple heads that replace constraints by simpler ones until they are solved. This paper gives declarative and operational semantics as well as soundness and completeness results for CSR programs.We also introduce a notion of confluence for CSR programs. Confluence is an essential syntactical property of any constraint solver. It ensures that the solver will always compute the same result for a given set of constraints independent of which rules are applied. It also means that it does not matter for the result in which order the constraints arrive at the constraint solver.We give a decidable, sufficient and necessary syntactic condition for confluence of terminating CSR programs. Moreover, as shown in this paper, confluence of a program implies consistency of its logical meaning (under a mild restriction).     

Performance analysis of opportunistic nonregenerative relaying

Opportunistic relaying in cooperative communication depends on careful relay selection. However, the traditional centralized method used for opportunistic amplify‐and‐forward protocols requires precise measurements of channel state information at the destination. In this paper, we adopt the max–min criterion as a relay selection framework for opportunistic amplify‐and‐forward cooperative communications, which was exhaustively used for the decode‐and‐forward protocol, and offer an accurate performance analysis based on exact statistics of the local signal‐to‐noise ratios of the best relay. Furthermore, we evaluate the asymptotical performance and deduce the diversity order of our proposed scheme. Finally, we validate our analysis by showing that performance simulation results coincide with our analytical results over Rayleigh fading channels, and we compare the max–min relay selection with their centralized channel state information‐based and partial relay selection counterparts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DNA-protein noncovalent cross-linking: ruthenium dipyridophenazine biotin complex for the assembly of proteins and gold nanoparticles on DNA templates

We report the first example of a small molecule that can noncovalently cross-link DNA with streptavidin and streptavidin-labeled materials. Molecule 1 possesses a ruthenium dipyridophenazine DNA-intercalating moiety and a biotin unit; these two units are adequately separated to ensure efficient cross-linking of DNA with protein. Complex 1 is essentially nonemissive in aqueous solution and when bound to streptavidin, however, its luminescence is turned "on" when it binds to DNA. We have used these properties to establish that this complex can simultaneously bind to DNA and streptavidin, and can thus bring these two biomolecules together. We also synthesized a related molecule, 3, in which the biotin and DNA-intercalating moieties are covalently bound. While complex 3 can intercalate into DNA through a threading mechanism, luminescence experiments show that it cannot simultaneously bind DNA and streptavidin, most likely due to the proximity of its two molecular-recognition units. The cross-linking ability of molecule 1 was used to template the assembly of streptavidin molecules on circular plasmid DNA, as visualized by atomic force microscopy. In addition, using 1, we show the organization of discrete groups of gold nanoparticles labeled with streptavidin on a linear DNA template of finite size, with transmission electron microscopy. In these experiments the DNA template acted as a "molecular ruler" that dictated the number of particles in the assembly.     

A Parallel Concatenated Convolutional-Based Distributed Coded Cooperation Scheme for Relay Channels

In this paper, we investigate a coded cooperation diversity scheme suitable for L-relay channels operating in the soft-decode-and-forward (soft-DF) mode. The proposed scheme is based on parallel concatenated convolutional codes (PCCC). To improve the overall performance through diversity, the coded cooperation operates by sending the systematic and the first parity outputs via L?+?1 independent fading paths. Instead of using only a centralized turbo code system at the source node, we have proposed a DCC scheme, where the first recursive systematic coding is done at both source and relay nodes. At the destination, the received replicas are combined using the maximal ratio combining (MRC). The entire codeword, comprising the MRC sequence and the second parity part, is decoded via the maximum a-posteriori (MAP) algorithm and turbo decoding principle. We analyze the proposed scheme in terms of bit error rate (BER). In fact, we define the explicit upper bounds for error rate assuming Binary phase shift keying (BPSK) transmission for fully interleaved channels with channel state information (CSI). We use the Rayleigh fading channels with independent fading. Our study shows that the full diversity order is achieved when the source-relay link is more reliable than the other links. Otherwise, the diversity decreases. However, in both cases, it is shown that significant performance improvements are possible to achieve over non-cooperative coded systems. Theorical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.     

Antenna subset selection at multi‐antenna relay with adaptive modulation

In this paper, we proposed several antenna selection schemes for cooperative diversity systems with adaptive transmission. The proposed schemes were based on dual‐hop relaying where a relay with multiple‐antenna capabilities at reception and transmission is deployed between the source and the destination nodes. We analyzed the performance of the proposed schemes by quantifying the average spectral efficiency and the outage probability. We also investigated the trade‐off of performance and complexity by comparing the average number of active antennas, path estimations, and signal‐to‐noise ratio comparisons of the different proposed schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.