From April 2002 to March 2005, 18 patients having undergone bidirectional Glenn shunt (BDG) without cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) [off-pump BDG] were retrospectively reviewed. During BDG anastomosis, a temporary bypass was established between superior vena cava (15) or innominate vein (3) and main pulmonary artery (16) or right atrium (2). Hemodynamics and oxygenation were maintained well throug...

Many complex, high-tech products and services can be usefully viewed as a series of “layers.” Like an onion, all the layers work together to produce the end result, each layer in physical or logical contact with its two neighbors. Engineers have proposed layered models for the architecture of telecommunications networks, the Internet, and computer systems. Recently, policy analysts and legal sc...

Today the explorers are scientists, and the uncharted territory they’re searching is confined to the laboratory, but their goal is similar in spirit to that of their predecessors: to uncover the mechanisms that cause us to age, with an eye toward counteracting a host of debilitating conditions that rob humans of their health, productivity, and quality of life. While the outward manifestations o...

Aircraft Engine Health Management Data Mining Tools is a project led by NASA Glenn Research Center in support of the NASA Aviation Safety Program's Aviation System Monitoring and Modeling Thrust. The objective of the Glenn-led effort is to develop enhanced aircraft engine health management prognostic and diagnostic methods through the application of data mining technologies to operational data ...

Relaxor ferroelectrics have been used in a variety of applications, such as piezoelectrics, capacitors, and transducers. Relaxors exhibit broadened permittivity peaks with dispersion of the frequencydependent dielectric constant. In particular, T ;max, the temperature maximum of the ð!Þ, follows the Vogel Fulcher relationship described by ! 1⁄4 !0e Ua=kBðT ;max Tf Þ; ð1Þ where ! is a frequency ...

The dielectric response in relaxor ferroelectrics is analyzed in the framework a model for the polarization dynamics in the presence of polar clusters. We associate the origin of polar clusters with the atoms displaced from their centrosymmerical positions even above Tc. Their collective hopping in multi-well potentials induced by disorder is analogous with the situation in glasses. The theory ...

The principal theme of this paper is that anomalously slow, super-Arrhenius relaxations in glassy materials may be activated processes involving chains of molecular displacements. As pointed out in a preceding paper with Lemaitre, the entropy of critically long excitation chains can enable them to grow without bound, thus activating stable thermal fluctuations in the local density or molecular ...

The financial services industry recognizes the need for advanced security solutions for user identity and transaction processing, while ensuring minimal impact to the online user experience. Users will not accept security controls that encumber the user's daily work. The Portal Security Transaction Protocol (PSTP) is a new signature technology that adds signature semantics to one-time password ...

Chapter 2 describes the various concepts of Active Component Control that can help to meet future engine requirements by an active improvement of the component characteristics. The concept is based on an intelligent control logic, which senses actual operating conditions and reacts with adequate actuator action. This approach can directly improve engine characteristics as performance, operabili...