Nuclear Star Clusters and Bulges

Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar systems known and are common in both early- and late-type galaxies. They exhibit scaling relations with their host galaxy which may be related to those of supermassive black holes. These may therefore help us to unravel the complex physical processes occurring at the centres of galaxies. The properties of nuclear stellar systems suggest that their formation requires both dissipational and dissipationless processes. They have stellar populations of different ages, from stars as old as their host galaxy to young stars formed in the last 100 Myr. Therefore star formation must be happening either directly in the nuclear star cluster or in its vicinity. The secular processes that fuel the formation of pseudobulges very likely also contributes to nuclear star cluster growth.Comment: To appear in "Galactic Bulges", E. Laurikainen, R.F. Peletier, and D.A. Gadotti (eds.), Springer Publishin

Friction measuring apparatus Patent

Kinetic and static friction force measurement between magnetic tape and magnetic head surface

Anthropometry and body composition of 18 year old men according to duration of breast feeding: birth cohort study from Brazil

Objective: To assess the association between duration of breast feeding and measures of adiposity in adolescence. Design: Population based birth cohort study. Setting: Pelotas, a city of 320 000 inhabitants in a relatively developed area in southern Brazil. Participants: All newborn infants in the city's hospitals were enrolled in 1982; 78.8% (2250) of all male participants were located at age 18 years when enrolling in the national army. Main outcome measures: Weight, height, sitting height, subscapular and triceps skinfolds, and body composition (body fat, lean mass). Results: Neither the duration of total breast feeding nor that of predominant breast feeding (breast milk plus non-nutritive fluids) showed consistent associations with anthropometric or body composition indices. After adjustment for confounding factors, the only significant associations were a greater than 50% reduction in obesity among participants breast fed for three to five months compared with all other breastfeeding categories (P = 0.007) and a linear decreasing trend in obesity with increasing duration of predominant breast feeding (P = 0.03). Similar significant effects were not observed for other measures of adiposity. Borderline direct associations also occurred between total duration of breast feeding and adult height (P = 0.06). Conclusions: The significant reduction in obesity among children breast fed for three to five months is difficult to interpret, as no a priori hypothesis existed regarding a protective effect of intermediate duration of breast feeding. The findings indicate that, in this population, breast feeding has no marked protective effect against adolescent adiposity

System for recording and reproducing pulse code modulated data Patent

System for recording and reproducing PCM data from data stored on magnetic tap

NTP v. RIM: The Diverging Law Between System and Method Claim Infringement

[Excerpt] “Almost thirty years after the landmark decision of Decca Ltd. v. United States, the Federal Circuit had an opportunity to reevaluate the extraterritorial limits of U.S. patent law in NTP, Inc. v. Research in Motion, Ltd. After withdrawing its initial opinion (“NTP I”) and issuing a second opinion (“NTP II”), the court held that a system having a component located outside U.S. jurisdiction could be subject to U.S. patent law. The court held as a matter of law, however, that a process in which a step is performed outside U.S. jurisdiction could not be subject to U.S. patent law. In NTP I and NTP II, the infringing system included a component located in Canada. Ironically, that infringing system was the platform on which the non-infringing process operated. The court’s justification for this result was based on the “collective” nature of systems compared to the “individual” nature of processes. This article analyzes the court’s decision and recommends an alternative holding in order to unify “system” and process infringement law. Additionally, this article examines the history of “system” claims to determine whether their current use as “machine” claims is consistent with their historical use. Given its historical context, this article then evaluates whether a preamble including a “system” should limit a claim’s scope under the current law. Finally, this article evaluates the effect of the court’s decision on communications and secondary-use patents.

Low friction magnetic recording tape Patent

Development of low friction magnetic recording tap

Development of techniques to enhance man/machine communication

A four-state random stimulus generator, considered to function as an ESP teaching machine was used to investigate an approach to facilitating interactions between man and machines. A subject tries to guess in which of four states the machine is. The machine offers the user feedback and reinforcement as to the correctness of his choice. Using this machine, 148 volunteer subjects were screened under various protocols. Several whose learning slope and/or mean score departed significantly from chance expectation were identified. Direct physiological evidence of perception of remote stimuli not presented to any known sense of the percipient using electroencephalographic (EEG) output when a light was flashed in a distant room was also studied

Reliable routing scheme for indoor sensor networks

Indoor Wireless sensor networks require a highly dynamic, adaptive routing scheme to deal with the high rate of topology changes due to fading of indoor wireless channels. Besides that, energy consumption rate needs to be consistently distributed among sensor nodes and efficient utilization of battery power is essential. If only the link reliability metric is considered in the routing scheme, it may create long hops routes, and the high quality paths will be frequently used. This leads to shorter lifetime of such paths; thereby the entire network's lifetime will be significantly minimized. This paper briefly presents a reliable load-balanced routing (RLBR) scheme for indoor ad hoc wireless sensor networks, which integrates routing information from different layers. The proposed scheme aims to redistribute the relaying workload and the energy usage among relay sensor nodes to achieve balanced energy dissipation; thereby maximizing the functional network lifetime. RLBR scheme was tested and benchmarked against the TinyOS-2.x implementation of MintRoute on an indoor testbed comprising 20 Mica2 motes and low power listening (LPL) link layer provided by CC1000 radio. RLBR scheme consumes less energy for communications while reducing topology repair latency and achieves better connectivity and communication reliability in terms of end-to-end packets delivery performance