�Beam me up, Scotty! - Teleportation, and Personal Identity

Near the end of the Nineteenth Century a Prussian woman arrived at her local telegraph office with a bowl of sauerkraut she wanted sent to her son. She insisted that, if soldiers could be sent to the front by telegraph, certainly her sauerkraut could be sent the same way. (Standage, 1998) The Prussian woman thought that communication and transportation could coincide. She may have been correct. In 1993 an IBM scientist, Charles H. Bennett, predicted that quantum teleportation is possible, but only if the original object is destroyed. More recently, in October, 1998, Caltech scientist H. Jeff Kimble succeeded in instantaneously transporting information contained in the quantum state of a photon one meter across a lab bench without it traversing any physical medium in between. Kimble and his colleagues used an extremely delicate quantum mechanical phenomenon, �quantum entanglement.� Kimble"s findings suggest that teleportation of the sort depicted in the Star Trek television series and movies is theoretically possible

Congenital Short QT Syndrome

Long QT intervals in the ECG have long been associated with sudden cardiac death. The congenital long QT syndrome was first described in individuals with structurally normal hearts in 1957.1 Little was known about the significance of a short QT interval. In 1993, after analyzing 6693 consecutive Holter recordings Algra et al concluded that an increased risk of sudden death was present not only in patients with long QT interval, but also in patients with short QT interval (<400 ms).2 Because this was a retrospective analysis, further evaluation of the data was not possible. It was not until 2000 that a short-QT syndrome (SQTS) was proposed as a new inherited clinical syndrome by Gussak et al.3 The initial report was of two siblings and their mother all of whom displayed persistently short QT interval. The youngest was a 17 year old female presenting with several episodes of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation requiring electrical cardioversion.3 Her QT interval measured 280 msec at a heart rate of 69. Her 21 year old brother displayed a QT interval of 272 msec at a heart rate of 58, whereas the 51 year old mother showed a QT of 260 msec at a heart rate of 74. The authors also noted similar ECG findings in another unrelated 37 year old patient associated with sudden cardiac death

A study of the use of abstract types for the representation of engineering units in integration and test applications

Physical quantities using various units of measurement can be well represented in Ada by the use of abstract types. Computation involving these quantities (electric potential, mass, volume) can also automatically invoke the computation and checking of some of the implicitly associable attributes of measurements. Quantities can be held internally in SI units, transparently to the user, with automatic conversion. Through dimensional analysis, the type of the derived quantity resulting from a computation is known, thereby allowing dynamic checks of the equations used. The impact of the possible implementation of these techniques in integration and test applications is discussed. The overhead of computing and transporting measurement attributes is weighed against the advantages gained by their use. The construction of a run time interpreter using physical quantities in equations can be aided by the dynamic equation checks provided by dimensional analysis. The effects of high levels of abstraction on the generation and maintenance of software used in integration and test applications are also discussed

Some design constraints required for the use of generic software in embedded systems: Packages which manage abstract dynamic structures without the need for garbage collection

The embedded systems running real-time applications, for which Ada was designed, require their own mechanisms for the management of dynamically allocated storage. There is a need for packages which manage their own internalo structures to control their deallocation as well, due to the performance implications of garbage collection by the KAPSE. This places a requirement upon the design of generic packages which manage generically structured private types built-up from application-defined input types. These kinds of generic packages should figure greatly in the development of lower-level software such as operating systems, schedulers, controllers, and device driver; and will manage structures such as queues, stacks, link-lists, files, and binary multary (hierarchical) trees. Controlled to prevent inadvertent de-designation of dynamic elements, which is implicit in the assignment operation A study was made of the use of limited private type, in solving the problems of controlling the accumulation of anonymous, detached objects in running systems. The use of deallocator prodecures for run-down of application-defined input types during deallocation operations during satellites

Some design constraints required for the assembly of software components: The incorporation of atomic abstract types into generically structured abstract types

It is nearly axiomatic, that to take the greatest advantage of the useful features available in a development system, and to avoid the negative interactions of those features, requires the exercise of a design methodology which constrains their use. A major design support feature of the Ada language is abstraction: for data, functions processes, resources, and system elements in general. Atomic abstract types can be created in packages defining those private types and all of the overloaded operators, functions, and hidden data required for their use in an application. Generically structured abstract types can be created in generic packages defining those structured private types, as buildups from the user-defined data types which are input as parameters. A study is made of the design constraints required for software incorporating either atomic or generically structured abstract types, if the integration of software components based on them is to be subsequently performed. The impact of these techniques on the reusability of software and the creation of project-specific software support environments is also discussed

High-density nuclear matter with nonlocal confining solitons

An infinite system of nonlocal, individually confining solitons is considered as a model of high-density nuclear matter. The soliton-lattice problem is discussed in the Wigner-Seitz approximation. The cell size is varied to study the density dependence of physical quantities of interest. A transition to a system where quarks can migrate between solitons is found. We argue that this signals quark deconfinement. The model is applied to the calculation of selected in-medium properties.Comment: 23 pages with 10 figure