BACKGROUND Punctal plugs are used for the treatment of tear-deficient type dry eye. We recently examined a case of acute conjunctivitis associated with bacterial biofilm formation on a punctal plug. CASE A 63-year-old woman diagnosed as having tear-deficient type dry eye came to our hospital with a complaint of soreness in her right eye. Punctal plugs had been inserted into this eye 5 1/2 mon...

This paper presents the WANDA Workbench, which is an open framework for electronic data processing. The framework provides generic interfaces for ’plugin’ applications for graphical user interfaces (client desktop with client plug-ins) and processing modules (server with server plug-ins). The applied plug-in concept allows for the functional extension of the workbench without changing the frame...

In this paper we present an Internet browser plug-in for real-time sound synthesis. The plug-in uses the Pure Data (Pd) sound synthesis engine, and allows flexible and transparent sound generation and control embedded into webpages. Pd is a general sound synthesis language that is based on the MAX graphical programming paradigm. It can be used to construct and implement a broad range of sound s...

During driving sleeve of cast-in-place piles by vibratory hammers, soils were squeezed into sleeve and then soil plugging was formed. The physic-mechanical properties of the soil plug have direct influence on the load transmission between the sleeve wall and soil plug. Nevertheless, the researches on this issue are insufficient. In this study, finite element and infinite element coupling model ...

Cigarette paper is the wrapping material surrounding the tobacco to form a cigarette rod. Cigarettes can be made from tobacco, filter cigarette paper and filter papers. Filter papers contain plug wrap papers and tipping papers. The permeability range of the highly porous plug wrap papers is one of their most important properties. In addition, other properties, such as mass (g/m), breaking lengt...

We propose a feature construct for deening features, and use it to provide a plug-and-play framework for exploring feature interactions. Our approach to the feature interaction problem has the following characteristics: Features are treated as rst-class objects during the development phase; A method for integrating a feature into a system description is described. It allows features to override...

The nutritional program impacts all of these factors, but not in a favorably coordinated manner (Table 1). If the seedling is supplied with all of the fertilizer that it has the genetic potential to use (high rate), a totally useless plug will result. This shoot on this plug will grow too large for the surface area provided by the plug cell in which it is growing. One seedling will shade the ne...

Electrical plug loads comprise an increasingly larger share of building energy consumption as improvements have been made to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems. It is anticipated that plug loads will account for a significant portion of the energy consumption of Sustainability Base, a recently constructed high-performance office building at NASA Ames Research...

We report a simple technique to separate plasma from blood in a flowing immiscible plug. We investigate the effect of various control parameters such as blood dilution, injection flow rate, observation time and fluid properties on plasma separation. We find that the technique works best for diluted blood samples at low plug velocities and long observation times. We postulate that the main mecha...