Laboratories for an undergraduate course in power electronics

Laboratory exercises to accompany an undergraduate power electronics course are discussed. Topics include inductors, periodic steady state, drive circuits, PWM control, average switch models, and startup. These laboratories present an evolutionary sequence of increasingly difficult, design-oriented power electronics laboratories     

On the implementation of bytecode compression for interpreted languages

This paper describes a new method for code space optimization for interpreted languages called LZW‐CC . The method is based on a well‐known and widely used compression algorithm, LZW , which has been adapted to compress executable program code represented as bytecode. Frequently occurring sequences of bytecode instructions are replaced by shorter encodings for newly generated bytecode instructions. The interpreter for the compressed code is modified to recognize and execute those new instructions. When applied to systems where a copy of the interpreter is supplied with each user program, space is saved not only by compressing the program code but also by automatically removing the unused implementation code from the interpreter. The method's implementation within two compiler systems for the programming languages Haskell and Java is described and implementation issues of interest are presented, notably the recalculations of target jumps and the automated tailoring of the interpreter to program code. Applying LZW‐CC to nhc98 Haskell results in bytecode size reduction by up to 15.23% and executable size reduction by up to 11.9%. Java bytecode is reduced by up to 52%. The impact of compression on execution speed is also discussed; the typical speed penalty for Java programs is between 1.8 and 6.6%, while most compressed Haskell executables run faster than the original. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Scientific Paragon to Hospital Mall: The Evolving Design of the Hospital, 1885–1994

Since 1885, the hospital has evolved from a public charity to a scientific paragon. A growing chorus of criticism, though, attacks its impersonality and inhospitality, especially in the emerging competitive health market which emphasizes ambulatory care. Hospital administrators have responded by asking designers to re-create the hospital into a more welcoming and accessible place. A popular method of achieving comfort and familiarity has been to adapt elements of the shopping mall to the hospital and even to consider merging mall and hospital. This adaptation raises important concerns about the evolution of attitudes toward illness and death, private and public spaces, and the mall as a modern design standard. This article highlights one unusual implication, the possibility that the mall, viewed as a reason for the diminishment of public space, might be a means of opening to the public one of society's most closed institutions—the hospital.     

Determination of total dietary fibre and available carbohydrates: A rapid integrated procedure that simulates in vivo digestion

The new definition of dietary fibre introduced by Codex Alimentarius in 2008 includes resistant starch and the option to include non‐digestible oligosaccharides. Implementation of this definition required new methodology. An integrated total dietary fibre method was evaluated and accepted by AOAC International and AACC International (AOAC Methods 2009.01 and 2011.25; AACC Method 32–45.01 and 32–50.01, and recently adopted by Codex Alimentarius as a Type I Method. However, in application of the method to a diverse range of food samples and particularly food ingredients, some limitations have been identified. One of the ongoing criticisms of this method was that the time of incubation with pancreatic α‐amylase/amyloglucosidase mixture was 16 h, whereas the time for food to transit through the human small intestine was likely to be approximately 4 h. In the current work, we use an incubation time of 4 h, and have evaluated incubation conditions that yield resistant starch and dietary values in line with ileostomy results within this time frame. Problems associated with production, hydrolysis and chromatography of various oligosaccharides have been addressed resulting in a more rapid procedure that is directly applicable to all foods and food ingredients currently available.

     

Painful justice: an ethical perspective on the allocation of trauma services in Australia

Australia faces general and particular problems in the just distribution of trauma services, such as a proliferation of expensive technologies, economic and geographic limitations on their provision, and inequities in allocation. The ethics of shalom in which people live in harmonious relationships with each other, the world and God provide a moral framework for the discussion of the allocation of health care. Ethics deal with people and their relationships, which entails examining the nature and consequences of an action or policy and the character of the persons and institutions involved. The goal of health care, including trauma services, is not to 'fight disease' or to improve the health of the community, but to return people to proper functioning as people-in-relationships, as far as this is practicable. In applying this to the equitable provision of trauma services in Australia, we should distinguish between sustenance rights and community-provided mercies. The former are basic services that we need in order to function meaningfully in the community, and to which we are entitled (eg., basic health care). The latter are other benefits that we as members of the community choose to provide for each other, but to which we are not entitled per se (eg., ICU, Tertiary Trauma Centres). We should do all we reasonably can to ensure that all people receive their healthcare sustenance rights, that healthcare mercies are equitably distributed, and that the person-orientation of health care is maintained in the face of 'technological imperatives'.     

Codistribution of procathepsin B and mature cathepsin B forms in human prostate tumors detected by confocal and immunofluorescence microscopy

Ascorbic acid can recycle alpha-tocopherol from the tocopheroxyl free radical in lipid bilayers and in micelles, but such recycling has not been demonstrated to occur across cell membranes. In this work the ability of intracellular ascorbate to protect and to recycle alpha-tocopherol in intact human erythrocytes and erythrocyte ghosts was investigated. In erythrocytes that were 80% depleted of intracellular ascorbate by treatment with the nitroxide Tempol, both 2,2'-azobis(2-amidinopropane) dihydrochloride (AAPH) and ferricyanide oxidized alpha-tocopherol to a greater extent than in cells not depleted of ascorbate. In contrast, in erythrocytes in which the intracellular ascorbate concentration had been increased by loading with dehydroascorbate, loss of alpha-tocopherol was less with both oxidants than in control cells. Protection against AAPH-induced oxidation of alpha-tocopherol was not prevented by extracellular ascorbate oxidase, indicating that the protection was due to intracellular and not to extracellular ascorbate. Incubation of erythrocytes with lecithin liposomes also generated an oxidant stress, which caused lipid peroxidation in the liposomes and depleted erythrocyte alpha-tocopherol, leading to hemolysis. Ascorbate loading of the erythrocytes delayed liposome oxidation and decreased loss of alpha-tocopherol from both cells and from alpha-tocopherol-loaded liposomes. When erythrocyte ghosts were resealed to contain ascorbate and challenged with free radicals generated by AAPH outside the ghosts, intravesicular ascorbate was totally depleted over 1 h of incubation, whereas alpha-tocopherol decreased only after ascorbate was substantially oxidized. These results suggest that ascorbate within the erythrocyte protects alpha-tocopherol in the cell membrane by a direct recycling mechanism.     

Psychiatric morbidity following motor vehicle accidents: a review of methodological issues

Motor vehicle accidents (MVAs), even those of a nonserious nature, appear to increase the risk of severe psychiatric morbidity in survivors. The present review examines the evidence indicating the levels of psychiatric morbidity in MVA survivors. Although no consistent profile has emerged, the most commonly reported symptoms are depression, anxiety, irritability, driving phobia, anger, sleep disturbances, and headache, with rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across studies of 0% to 100%. Variability in the type and severity of psychiatric outcomes may be due, in part, to methodological inadequacies in many studies, particularly the use of biased population samples, inclusion of subjects exposed to varied types of accidents, an absence of a clear definition of PTSD, a reliance on clinical judgment rather than the use of objective psychometric measures, the failure to include ratings of injury severity, and the absence of assessments for past exposure to traumatic events or preexisting posttraumatic reactions. The most important concern relates to the use of nonrepresentative samples, usually patients referred for medicolegal assessment in whom issues of compensation are of central importance. Gender and age differences distinguish the compensation group from the general population of MVA survivors, who therefore may also differ in the vulnerability to posttraumatic morbidity. It is argued that more systematic research on unselected subject samples is critical to establish epidemiological data on the true nature and extent of psychiatric morbidity following MVAs.     

Nonintersecting subspaces based on finite alphabets

Two subspaces of a vector space are here called "nonintersecting" if they meet only in the zero vector. Motivated by the design of noncoherent multiple-antenna communications systems, we consider the following question. How many pairwise nonintersecting M/sub t/-dimensional subspaces of an m-dimensional vector space V over a field F can be found, if the generator matrices for the subspaces may contain only symbols from a given finite alphabet A/spl sube/F? The most important case is when F is the field of complex numbers C; then M/sub t/ is the number of antennas. If A=F=GF(q) it is shown that the number of nonintersecting subspaces is at most (q/sup m/-1)/(q/sup Mt/-1), and that this bound can be attained if and only if m is divisible by M/sub t/. Furthermore, these subspaces remain nonintersecting when "lifted" to the complex field. It follows that the finite field case is essentially completely solved. In the case when F=C only the case M/sub t/=2 is considered. It is shown that if A is a PSK-configuration, consisting of the 2/sup r/ complex roots of unity, the number of nonintersecting planes is at least 2/sup r(m-2)/ and at most 2/sup r(m-1)-1/ (the lower bound may in fact be the best that can be achieved).     

A new table of constant weight codes

A table of binary constant weight codes of length n⩽28 is presented. Explicit constructions are given for most of the 600 codes in the table; the majority of these codes are new. The known techniques for constructing constant weight codes are surveyed, and a table of (unrestricted) binary codes of length n⩽28 is given