OBJECTIVE To report our experiences of surgical diagnostic procedures in patients with unidentified mediastinal pathology. METHODS From July 1995 to July 1999, 72 patients with mediastinal pathology had 73 surgical procedures for the purpose of tissue diagnosis. Of the 72 patients, 39 were female and 33 male, with an average age of 54 years. Mediastinoscopy and anterior mediastinotomy were pe...

Consider the following heuristic for planar Euclidean instances of the traveling salesman problem (TSP): select a subset of the edges which induces a planar graph, and solve either the TSP or its graphical relaxation on that graph. In this paper, we give several motivations for considering this heuristic, along with extensive computational results. It turns out that the Delaunay and greedy tria...

A method has been developed in the present study for the determination of the sediment yield from a catchment using a GIS. The method involves spatial disaggregation of the catchment into cells having uniform soil erosion characteristics. The surface erosion from each of the discretized cells is routed to the catchment outlet using the concept of sediment delivery ratio, which is defined as a f...

Shear bands form in most bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) within a narrow range of uniaxial strain ey @ 2%. We propose this critical condition corresponds to embryonic shear band (ESB) propagation, not its nucleation. To propagate an ESB, the far-field shear stress s1 Eey/2 must exceed the quasi-steady-state glue traction sglue of shear-alienated glass until the glass transition temperature is appr...

The different regimes of flow when separating two solid rough surfaces in contact via a layer of a simple yield stress fluid are identified. Generic scalings for the adhesion energy and for the geometrical characteristics of the final deposits (after separation) as a function of the initial aspect ratio of the sample are found. We show that there is a strong pinning effect which might be at the...

In the past, logic diagnosis was primarily used to support failure analysis labs. It was typically done on a small sample of defective chips, therefore long processing times, manual generation of diagnostic patterns, and usage of expensive equipment was acceptable. In addition to failure analysis, yield learning relied on test chips and in line inspection. Recently, sub-wavelength lithography p...

&ONE OF THE wonders of the MeadConway revolution was in providing a clean break between the design process and manufacturing. Circuits could neatly be represented by stick diagrams, and the separation requirements between features on a die could be captured by a set of design rules. In nanoscale CMOS technologies, this division between design and manufacturing is no longer as simple. In the mod...

We examine how changes in yield variability affect the welfare of cereal grain and oilseed buyers and producers around the world. We simulate trade patterns and welfare for 21 countries with a Ricardian trade model that incorporates bilateral trade costs and crop yield distributions. The model shows that world trade volumes would need to increase substantially if crop yield variability were to ...