Three patients presented with septal fasciitis and panniculitis, associated with clinical and laboratory features which precluded straight-forward classification into eosinophilic fasciitis, localised scleroderma, or lupus erythematosus profundus. Treatment with cimetidine caused the remission of cutaneous manifestations and the extracutaneous abnormalities, such as nailfold capillary disturban...

A new simple, fast and accurate method for liquid crystal cell twist angle and cell gap measurement was demonstrated. It is based on a real time spectral measurement of the linear polarization preservation modes. Prior knowledge of the twist angle or director orientations is not required. This method is straight forward and does not require complicated calculations or curve fitting. This system...

This article contributes a generic model of topic models. To define the problem space, general characteristics for this class of models are derived, which give rise to a representation of topic models as “mixture networks”, a domainspecific compact alternative to Bayesian networks. Besides illustrating the interconnection of mixtures in topic models, the benefit of this representation is its st...

A new direct design method for fuzzy controllers will be presented in this paper. It combines the lucid strategy of compensation used in conventional control systems and the straight forward determination of a fuzzy controller by means of the chain rule of propositional logic. The quality and potential of the proposed method is demonstrated by the design of a fuzzy controller for an automatic c...

Achieving a proper nasal tip projection is a crucial element of a successful rhinoplasty. A large number of correction methods and manoeuvres have been proposed in the medical literature as solutions for the prominent nasal tip, thus complicating the surgeon's strife to choose the ideal plan of action. In the present article, a single straight-forward technique, christened the 'universal retrac...

This paper addresses some classical problems to integrate data sources that are heterogeneous in structure with possibly redundant data along a real world example integrating three bibliographic data sources. We show how XML-technology can be applied for the data integration process in a straight-forward manner to populate a data warehouse, how an ontology can be used as common schema, and how ...

The Relational On-Line Analytical Processing (ROLAP) is emerging as the dominant approach in data warehousing. In order to enhance query performance, the ROLAP approach relies on selecting and materializing in summary tables appropriate subsets of aggregate views which are then engaged in speeding up OLAP queries. However, a straight forward relational storage implementation of materialized ROL...

Most of the ac-ac converters used in home-appliances are based on single-output dc-link inverters, which provides a cost-effective and straight-forward solution. However, this twostage power conversion decreases power density and efficiency. Direct ac-ac conversion has been thoroughly studied in the past. However, the complex control scheme and higher cost has prevented it from being used in lo...

Frequency-domain finite-difference (FDFD) modeling offers several advantages over traditional timedomain methods when simulating seismic wave propagation, including a convenient formulation within the context of wavefield inversion and a straight-forward extension for adding complex attenuation mechanisms. In this short paper we introduce the FDFD method, develop a simple solver for the scalar ...

This paper continues our investigation into the feasibility of exploiting the structure of a parallel program to guide its hardware implementation. We review previous work, and present our new approach to the problem based upon placing netlists hierarchically. It is found that appropriate constraints can be derived from the source code in a straight-forward way, and this information can be used...