The paper proposes and develops a novel smart ER microactuator with inherent position feedback mechanism. The microactuator consists of a pair of movable and fixed parallel plate electrodes with variable gap length and an upstream restrictor, and ERF (electro-rheological fluid) is supplied as a working fluid. By applying voltage to the electrodes, with the increased pressure drop due to ERF vis...

The combination of a modal verb and a modal adverb that is similar in modal force (possibility/necessity) and flavor (epistemic/deontic, etc.) allows a concord interpretation in which the two modals somehow ‘fuse’ and communicate just a single modality. This paper presents a case study of modal concord, as it is exemplified in Dutch. It seems that speakers of this language tend to add modal adv...

A combined apparatus of a supercritical CO2 extractor (SFE) and a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS) was developed aiming at the direct analysis of extracts. A fused-silica capillary acts as both a pressure restrictor and an effluent injection nozzle into the TOF-MS. The tip of the nozzle was narrowed by melting and abrasion so that a greater pressure drop occurred at the tip. In the TOF...

BACKGROUND It is possible that psychopathological differences exist between the restricting and bulimic forms of anorexia nervosa. We investigated localized differences of brain blood flow of anorexia nervosa patients using SPECT image analysis with statistic parametric mapping (SPM) in an attempt to link brain blood flow patterns to neurophysiologic characteristics. METHODS The subjects enro...

We report on recent advances in HPSG parsing of German with local ambiguity packing (Oepen and Carroll, 2000), achieving a speed-up factor of 2 on a balanced test-suite. In contrast to earlier studies carried out for English using the same packing algorithm, we show that restricting semantic features only is insufficient for achieving acceptable runtime performance with a German HPSG grammar. I...