Laser beam cutting and welding of coronary stents

Coronary stents are thin-walled and mesh-structured metallic implants, which are made generally by laser beam cutting of high-precision tubes of 90-120 micrometer thickness. The tube material can be 316L stainless steel or L605 type cobalt-chromium alloy. The paper present how laser settings influence geometry and surface quality of the kerf and residual stresses, which play very important role in the precision of stent strut homogeneity. Hungarian Tentaur stent was developed 15 years ago. This coil stent made of 145 micrometers thick stainless steel wire contains 9-25 joints produced by electric resistance projection welding. Developments were bringing out for increasing flexibility of Tentaur stent, and a new design and a new tech-nology was elaborated, which’s based on laser beam mi-crowelding. TentaFlex stent also is constructed from austenitic stainless steel wire, but it does not contain any wire-crossing joint, because stent struts are configured from sinusoidal helix. Stent contains only two welded joints at its ends. Laser welding experiences of these joints are presented in the paper. A Trumpf PowerWeld Nd:YAG laser work station was used for welding, and after optimization of laser settings joints can’t produces from only one side of the coiled stent

The Two Phases of Galaxy Formation

Cosmological simulations of galaxy formation appear to show a two-phase character with a rapid early phase at z>2 during which in-situ stars are formed within the galaxy from infalling cold gas followed by an extended phase since z<3 during which ex-situ stars are primarily accreted. In the latter phase massive systems grow considerably in mass and radius by accretion of smaller satellite stellar systems formed at quite early times (z>3) outside of the virial radius of the forming central galaxy. These tentative conclusions are obtained from high resolution re-simulations of 39 individual galaxies in a full cosmological context with present-day virial halo masses ranging from 7e11 M_sun h^-1 < M_vir < 2.7e13 M_sun h^-1 and central galaxy masses between 4.5e10 M_sun h^-1 < M_* < 3.6e11 M_sun h^-1. The simulations include the effects of a uniform UV background, radiative cooling, star formation and energetic feedback from SNII. The importance of stellar accretion increases with galaxy mass and towards lower redshift. In our simulations lower mass galaxies ($M_* < 9e10 M_sun h^-1) accrete about 60 per cent of their present-day stellar mass. High mass galaxy ($M_* > 1.7e11 M_sun h^-1) assembly is dominated by accretion and merging with about 80 per cent of the stars added by the present-day. In general the simulated galaxies approximately double their mass since z=1. For massive systems this mass growth is not accompanied by significant star formation. The majority of the in-situ created stars is formed at z>2, primarily out of cold gas flows. We recover the observational result of archaeological downsizing, where the most massive galaxies harbor the oldest stars. We find that this is not in contradiction with hierarchical structure formation. Most stars in the massive galaxies are formed early on in smaller structures, the galaxies themselves are assembled late.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Non-collaborative Attackers and How and Where to Defend Flawed Security Protocols (Extended Version)

Security protocols are often found to be flawed after their deployment. We present an approach that aims at the neutralization or mitigation of the attacks to flawed protocols: it avoids the complete dismissal of the interested protocol and allows honest agents to continue to use it until a corrected version is released. Our approach is based on the knowledge of the network topology, which we model as a graph, and on the consequent possibility of creating an interference to an ongoing attack of a Dolev-Yao attacker, by means of non-collaboration actuated by ad-hoc benign attackers that play the role of network guardians. Such guardians, positioned in strategical points of the network, have the task of monitoring the messages in transit and discovering at runtime, through particular types of inference, whether an attack is ongoing, interrupting the run of the protocol in the positive case. We study not only how but also where we can attempt to defend flawed security protocols: we investigate the different network topologies that make security protocol defense feasible and illustrate our approach by means of concrete examples.Comment: 29 page

Service Security and Privacy as a Socio-Technical Problem: Literature review, analysis methodology and challenge domains

Published online September 2015 accepted: 15 September 2014Published online September 2015 accepted: 15 September 2014The security and privacy of the data that users transmit, more or less deliberately, to modern services is an open problem. It is not solely limited to the actual Internet traversal, a sub-problem vastly tackled by consolidated research in security protocol design and analysis. By contrast, it entails much broader dimensions pertaining to how users approach technology and understand the risks for the data they enter. For example, users may express cautious or distracted personas depending on the service and the point in time; further, pre-established paths of practice may lead them to neglect the intrusive privacy policy offered by a service, or the outdated protections adopted by another. The approach that sees the service security and privacy problem as a socio-technical one needs consolidation. With this motivation, the article makes a threefold contribution. It reviews the existing literature on service security and privacy, especially from the socio-technical standpoint. Further, it outlines a general research methodology aimed at layering the problem appropriately, at suggesting how to position existing findings, and ultimately at indicating where a transdisciplinary task force may fit in. The article concludes with the description of the three challenge domains of services whose security and privacy we deem open socio-technical problems, not only due to their inherent facets but also to their huge number of users

Cost Benefit Analysis of Labor Allocation and Training Schemes

Discrepancies in local labor markets occur as unsatisfactory matching of skill within the same region as well as redundant supply and unsatiated demand among regions. Some of this discrepancy could -- in principle -- be removed by letting supply in one region meet demand in another. A reallocation policy of this kind poses a few questions of prominent concern: 1. Can economic disvalue arising from imperfection of labor markets at a regional level be mathematically assessed? 2. Is it possible to define a regional measure of inefficiency on both sides -- demand and supply -- of the labor market? 3. How should vacancies be distributed over skill and space to alleviate inefficiency? These questions are investigated in this paper and a short-run solution is obtained via the primal-dual linear programming formulation of the problem