Loop antenna over a conducting cone with a spherical cap

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163889/1/mia2bf01314.pd

Electrochemical Characterization of Riboflavin-Enhanced Reduction of Trinitrotoluene

There is great interest in understanding trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dinitrotoluene (DNT) contamination, detection and remediation in the environment due to TNT’s negative health effects and security implications. Numerous publications have focused on detecting TNT in groundwater using multiple techniques, including electrochemistry. The main degradation pathway of nitrotoluenes in the environment is reduction, frequently with biological and/or photolytic assistance. Riboflavin has also been noted to aid in TNT remediation in soils and groundwater when exposed to light. This report indicates that adding riboflavin to a TNT or DNT solution enhances redox currents in electrochemical experiments. Here AC voltammetry was performed and peak currents compared with and without riboflavin present. Results indicated that TNT, DNT and riboflavin could be detected using AC voltammetry on modified gold electrodes and the addition of riboflavin affected redox peaks of TNT and DNT. Poised potential experiments indicated that it is possible to enhance reduction of TNT in the presence of riboflavin and light. These results were dramatic enough to explain long term enhancement of bioremediation in environments containing high levels of riboflavin and enhance the limit of detection in electrochemically-based nitrotoluene sensing

Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models

The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets. Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support. Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to advise the design of such instruction sets. As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental environment for further research

MERCURY FILM AND GLASSY CARBON THIN-LAYER ELECTROCHEMICAL TRANSDUCERS FOR TRACE DETERMINATION OF EASILY REDUCED COMPOUNDS

The marriage of liquid chromatography and electrochemical techniques (LCEC) has resulted in many useful applications in the last ten years, primarily with regard to easily oxidized compounds. The promise of LCEC for reductive substances has been slower to achieve due to problems with dissolved oxygen, trace metal ions, and the lack of reliable transducers. The goal of this work was to develop a solid electrode reductive transducer suitable for detection of trace amounts of easily reducible analytes of interest in environmental and pharmaceutical chemistry. A LCEC detector is described based on the use of a mercury film electrode (Au/Hg) in a thin-layer cell with the auxiliary electrode placed across the channel from the working electrode. The placement of the auxiliary electrode has provided a transducer with a linear range over five orders of magnitude while maintaining subpicomole detection limits for easily reduced analytes. Compounds undergoing specific surface surface reactions with mercury (e.g. thiols) can also be detected. While the Au/Hg transducer has a higher negative potential limit (by approximately 250 mV) and shorter equilibration times, the glassy carbon transducer is more convenient to use. Reductive and oxidative mode LCEC has been applied to the determination of nitro aromatics, nitrate esters, nitramines, and diphenylamines in military explosives and single and double base smokeless gunpowders. A sensitive and highly specific method is presented for the detection of organic gunshot residue on the hand of individuals who have discharged a weapon. The detection limits at S/N = 3 were on the order of 0.5, 1, 2, and 0.3 picomoles for nitro aromatic, nitramine and nitrate ester explosive compounds, and diphenylamines, respectively. The static solution and hydrodynamic electrochemical behavior of nifedipine and its photodecomposition products was investigated by cyclic voltammetry and series dual-electrode LCEC. The series dual-electrode transducer with quantitation at the downstream electrode minimized interference caused by reduction of dissolved oxygen, thus simplifying sample handling. Other applications include the determination of chloramphenicol and adriamycin in plasma as well as the agricultural products parathion, methyl parathion, cyolane and cytrolane in runoff water

Optimal Type Lifting

Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages have used explicit run-time type passing to support advanced optimizations such as intensional type analysis, representation analysis and tagless garbage collection. Unfortunately, maintaining type information at run time can incur a large overhead to the time and space usage of a program. In this paper, we present an optimal type-lifting algorithm that lifts all type applications in a program to the top level. Our algorithm eliminates all run-time type constructions within any core-language functions. In fact, it guarantees that the number of types built at run time is strictly a static constant. We present our algorithm as a type-preserving source-to-source transformation and show how to extend it to handle the entire SML'97 with higher-order modules. 1 Introduction Recent compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages [25, 27] have begun to use variants of the Girard-Reynolds polymorphic -calculus [5, 22] as their intermediate languag..

Medical Negligence : An Overview

Medical professionals are treated as next to God. They provide humanitarian services and gives solace to individuals suffering from various diseases and disorders. Due to their great service to humanity, the doctors and medical professionals are treated with reverence and since the ancient times the medical profession has been considered as a noble profession. However with the passage of time, there has been a change in the doctor - patient relationship. During the last few decades a number of incidents have come to light in which the patients have suffered due to the error and inadvertent conduct of doctors. Due to the increasing conflicts and legal disputes between the doctors and patients, most of the legal systems have developed various rules and principles to deal with such inadvertent behavior of doctors. This has led to the development of a new branch of jurisprudence, i.e. medical negligence. Hence, any negligence on part of the medical professional would be treated as either a tort of negligence or a deficiency in service under Consumer Protection Act, 1986. As the profession involves the idea of an occupation requiring purely intellectual skills or of manual skills controlled by the intellectual skill of the operator, it is distinctively different from an occupation, which is substantially production or sale or arrangement for the production or sale of commodities. Medicine is a highly complex domain. It is difficult for consumer laws to review medical negligence cases with flawless technical clarity and accuracy. Thus medical negligence is not purely a matter of consideration for judiciary but also the technical inputs of specialized experts in the field have substantial weightage while deciding the case of medical negligence against doctors. The present paper is devoted to introvert inspection of negligence in medical profession in the light of existing laws with more emphasis on the interpretation of consumer protection law by judiciary

Optimal Type Lifting

. Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages have used explicit run-time type passing to support advanced optimizations such as intensional type analysis, representation analysis and tagless garbage collection. Unfortunately, maintaining type information at run time can incur a large overhead to the time and space usage of a program. In this paper, we present an optimal type-lifting algorithm that lifts all type applications in a program to the top level. Our algorithm eliminates all run-time type constructions within any core-language functions. In fact, it guarantees that the number of types built at run time is strictly a static constant. We present our algorithm as a type-preserving source-to-source transformation and show how to extend it to handle the entire SML'97 with higher-order modules. 1 Introduction Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages [16, 17] usually use variants of the Girard-Reynolds polymorphic -calculus [5, 26] as their intermediate language (I..