I spent most of December and more than half of January engaged in a series of respiratory infections that seemed to be resistant to all the antibiotics that I could find. I began to have visions of being the first to succumb to a new plague which would finally eliminate humanity. Years ago, flying in the old propeller-driven aeroplanes, I used to imagine that I could penetrate directly into the...

We consider the problem of creative geometric design: i.e. creating a shape that can represent a class of geometries, either by varying parameters associated with the boundary data, or by changing aspects of the shape itself. The model of shape we use is based on subdividing the dis-cretizations in qualitative spatial reasoning, called Qualitative Subdivision Algebra, resulting in a nal resolut...

How many times in the past year have I heard the word " syn-ergy " ? And of those times, how many were at home with my wife or out at a restaurant? I would guess that the ratio is something like 10:0, because like so many other management clichés or buzzwords, " synergy " lives only at the office. Things like " cooperation, " " give-and-take, " and " understanding " live at home. Why does this ...

T. IIZUKA and K. IKEDA Tochigi Works Hitachi, Ltd. Shimotsuga-gun, Tochigi-ken, Japan, 329-44 Since applications of rotary compressors driven by inverter motors have become more widespread, l~bricating problems with the sliding parts have been appearing. The sliding parts require sufficient antiseizure and wear-resistant properties under the boundary lubricating conditions. The authors have dev...

One of the oldest methods for computing an eigenvector of a matrix F is based on the solution of a set of homogeneous equations which can be traced back to the times of Cauchy The principal di culty of this approach was identi ed by Wilkinson We remove this obstacle and analyse the viability of this classical method The key to the analysis is provided by the reciprocals of the diagonal elements...