bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Total customer satisfaction as a business strategy
Authors: Smith William B. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThere are two fundamental goals which are universal in business. The first is to grow market share, and the second to grow profits. In order to accomplish these goals, the company must differentiate itself from its competitors, in the customer's view, in one or more of the five following areas: (1) price, (2) delivery, (3) performance, (4) quality, (5) total customer experience.Stressing one area of differentiation to the exclusion of the others will not achieve the goals. For example, in stressing price alone, a company has defined its products as a commodity and as Dev Dion of the Strategic Planning Institute once said, ‘The producers of commodities reap commensurate rewards.’ Similarly, stressing fast delivery of a product of poor quality, or stressing superior quality for a product providing marginally useful performance are both losing strategies.The only strategy I know of which provides equally balanced focus on all five major areas of differentiation is total customer satisfaction, as the fundamental objective of the company. Bob Galvin, when Chairman of Motorola, summed it up by saying, ‘If you take care of the customer better than any of your competition, the business will take care of itself.’ In saying this, however, he meant not only the product, but all of the other ways in which you and the customer interact.
Maintenance planning and resource allocation in a urea fertilizer plant
Authors: Kumar Dinesh , Pandey P. C. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThis paper is devoted to the analysis and computation of overall as well as various subsystem availabilities of a urea fertilizer plant. Based on the analysis, appropriate maintenance strategies for different situations have been developed. Using Lagrange's multiplier technique the cost of maintenance and manpower is analysed. By minimizing the maintenance cost allocation to various subsystems, the optimum repair policy is determined.
A review of the literature on the use of SPC in batch production
Authors: Al‐Salti M. , Statham A. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThe major concern of this paper is to provide a review of the use of SPC techniques in batch production. Data transformation is considered as one of the most important activities when implementing SPC in such an environment. Other activities include focusing attention on the process rather than on the product and the use of standardized control charts (SCCs) in place of traditional charts. Aspects of data transformation are dealt with especially with regard to explaining the mechanism of data transformation and selecting as well as evaluating several transformation techniques. In addition, a method of sensitivity analysis for SCCs is also included.
Reliability engineering based on field information—The way ahead
Authors: Møltoft Jørgen 
Published: July 2007

AbstractBased on analysis of field reliability information a reliability model proper for engineering is developed and demonstrated. The development of the model is performed by applying the well known but often forgotten scientific method in which theoretical models are continuously compared with observations and subsequently modified/further developed until a reasonable consistency has been achieved. The tools used are by no means advanced. The model presented has been applied successfully in many industrial case studies, one of which will be described in the paper.
A shewhart‐like charting technique for high yield processes
Authors: Xie W. , Xie M. , Goh T. N. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractA Shewhart‐like charting technique is developed in this paper to overcome the difficulties the traditional control chart encounters in the control of processes with a very low fraction non‐conforming. The technique uses the number of conforming items between two consecutive non‐conforming ones to monitor the fraction non‐conforming of a process, leading to a chart that is informative and easy to interpret. The approach discussed is especially suitable for real‐time and automatic statistical quality control.
Lifetime modelling with aid of a modified complementary weibull distribution
Authors: Gera Amos E. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThe complementary Weibull distribution may serve as a lifetime model for various applications. A modification of this distribution is introduced. Its purpose is to enable the calculation of the MTBF integral, which does not exist for the regular complementary Weibull function. An efficient quadrature technique is provided. Its utility is validated through some examples.
Risk assessment of a new high speed railway
Authors: Leighton C. L. , Dennis C. R. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractA quantitative risk assessment has been carried out by W. S. Atkins Ltd. and Kennedy and Donkin Transportation Ltd. for the conceptual stage of the proposed Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The assessment is one of the first for a railway system. It includes an integrated computer model. The whole risk model for the CTRL from base event data, through fault and event trees, to individual, collective and societal risks is processed using Lotus 1‐2‐3 spreadsheets. Variations to the design and operational assumptions and to the input data can be introduced into the model and the effect on risk calculated rapidly. This versatility is particularly useful because of the early stage of the project. It can be used to assist designers in consideration of possible design changes.
Speech recognition based on top‐down and bottom‐up phoneme recognition
Authors: Matsunaga Sho‐Ichi , Shikano Kiyohiro 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThis paper discusses a speech recognition system which integrates the top‐down and bottom‐up phoneme recognitions. The system is based on the recognition of phonemes, where the top‐down and bottom‐up processings are combined using a table called a blackboard. In top‐down processing, the segmentation and the scoring are performed for each phoneme in the total speech interval, and in the bottom‐up processing, only for the interval in which the phoneme segmentation can be performed with certainty. By this scheme, the two recognition processings cooperate, while maintaining their independence. In the proposed system, the linguistic processing and the acoustic processing are structured hierarchically. The two parts are combined through the blackboard, avoiding duplicated processings in the same environment. To evaluate the constructed system, a spoken word recognition experiment with the word dictionaries composed of 100 or 643 city names, and the continuous speech recognition experiment for 235 minimal phrases uttered by two examinees were performed. It was observed as a result that the recognition performance by the traditional top‐down processing is almost maintained, while the processing time is decreased to one‐half or one‐third in word recognition and less than one‐fourth in minimal phrase recognition.
Design and implementation of an nmos image processor based on quaternary logic
Authors: Hanyu Takahiro , Kameyama Michitaka , Higuchi Tatsuo 
Published: July 2007

AbstractIn 4‐valued image processing, cellular logic operations can be performed by template or pattern matching. The simplification of the image processing algorithm is discussed using a minimization technique of multiple‐valued logic functions. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of hardware implementation, a new pattern matching scheme is proposed so that two different templates can be processed simultaneously in a pipelining manner. Based on these double pattern matching cells, a compact NMOS image processing chip has been implemented. It is demonstrated that the compactness derives from deduced interconnections in the double pattern matching cells using a quaternaryT‐gate realized with pass transistors.
Design of VLSI‐oriented radix‐4 signed‐digit arithmetic circuits using multiple‐valued logic
Authors: Kawahito Shoji , Kameyama Michitaka , Higuchi Tatsuo 
Published: July 2007

AbstractRadix‐4 signed‐digit (SD) arithmetic circuits using multiple‐valued logic are proposed from the viewpoint of VLSI implementation. Because of the property of sign‐symmetry in the SD number representation, a new bi‐directional current‐mode MOS technology is employed very effectively in implementing very fast and compact SD arithmetic circuits. These basic operations are simulated and evaluated using SPICE2. Finally, it is demonstrated that these arithmetic circuits can be fabricated using 2 um CMOS technology. For example, a multiply time of 40 ns can be achieved in the SD multiplier with a 17 × 16 bit precision.
High‐efficient coding for ct‐image archiving
Authors: Hiroyuki  , Yoshinao Koizumi,  , Tsuneo  
Published: July 2007

AbstractThis paper considers a new high‐efficient coding scheme of the CT image and projection data. There are two kinds of redundancies in the CT image: one is the statistical redundancy based on the correlation between pixels; the other is the deterministic redundancy resulting from the image formation process—i.e., the CT images are reconstructed from a finite number of sampled projection data. The significant information about an object in the CT image can be specified by considering the reconstruction process. Based on the investigation of such redundancies, a new reversible coding scheme of CT image with high compression ratio is proposed in which both statistical and deterministic redundancies can be removed.
A hypercube design on wafer‐scale integration
Authors: Ito Hideo , Suzuki Nobuyuki 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThis paper proposes a hypercube network (HC) design on the wafer‐scale LSI (WSI). HC is considered interesting as a network structure, which is suited to the general or dedicated parallel processing machine. There also exist commercial HC machines. With the development of LSI fabrication technologies as the background, WSI is now feasible where a large‐scale parallel processing system is installed on a wafer.The major problems in WSI are how to build in the required network structure on the planar structure wafer, and how to improve the yield by avoiding the defects generated in the fabrication process. In most of the past studies, the array (lattice) structure is employed in the realization of the network on WSI, and HC is seldom employed. In this paper sub‐HC with 2PPEs is constructed as the row network (RN); and by connecting 2d‐pRNs along the column direction, HC with 2dPEs is constructed.In other words, RN is constructed by the Diogenes method to compose an HC as a one‐dimensional structure, and then the structure is extended to two dimensions by adding new switches and bus structures, resulting in a structure suited to WSI. Two structures are considered: the structure with redundant PE only in RN and the structure containing redundant RNs. A rough evaluation for the yield also is presented.
Data compression and depth shape reproduction of stereoscopic images
Authors: Yamaguchi Hiroyuki , Tatehira Yasushi , Akiyama Kenji , Kobayashi Yukio 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThree‐dimensional visual communications, realized with stereoscopic images, can achieve total display realism. To create a three‐dimensional (3‐D) transmission and display system, the large amount of information typically contained in natural images must be reduced and coded by an efficient technique appropriate for stereoscopic images.As the initial step in realizing such a coding scheme, statistical characteristics of stereoscopic images and image characteristics viewed from the aspect of human stereopsis are presented.First, the possibility of data compression that exploits the cross correlation between right and left images is shown. Based on this, a method that shifts one image horizontally and subtracts it from the corresponding area of the other is proposed and evaluated. Next, it is shown that complete depth amplitude reproduction of stereoscopic images through the use of existing CRT display systems is difficult. This is due to the poor horizontal resolution of the forementioned systems even though the depth spatial frequency bandwidth of stereoscopic images can be reduced without deteriorating depth shape reproduction accuracy. Finally, a method for overcoming discontinuous depth reproduction is proposed and its effectiveness is confirmed.
A scene interpretation system that solves multiplicity of scene description
Authors: Etoh Minoru , Kishino Fumio 
Published: July 2007

AbstractIt is desirable to arrive at the scene description at a higher level, by grouping such image features as edges and region boundaries to generalize the scene interpretation or to recognize the object with a structure. Often, however, the feature extraction and the grouping are not unique, conflicting, or contain errors. Here, this problem is called the multiplicity of scene description.The basic framework is presented for constructing a system to solve this problem, which is composed of the following two processes: (1) the image features and the spatial relationships are considered as hypothesis and are managed in ATMS. The conflicting scene descriptions are represented by the multiple context; and (2) the bottom‐up processing is realized by the rule base. The rule base is composed of the hypothetic knowledge permitting contained errors and the constraining knowledge declaring the relations among alternative data. Based on this framework, the following system is realized. The feature extraction and structurization are executed for the stereo color gray‐level images. A subclass of generalized plane composing an orthogonal hexahedron are derived as the three‐dimensional description elements for the scene. Then the scene is interpreted by the matching to the model.In the proposed system, the scene description and interpretation are derived as more than one maximal set composed of the hypothesis together with its derivation, which can account for the largest number of observed edges and region boundaries. Some examples of processing also are shown.
Collision avoidance with the omnidirectional image sensor COPIS
Authors: Yagi Yasushi , Kawato Shinjiro , Tsuji Saburo 
Published: July 2007

AbstractRecently there has been vigorous research on intelligent mobile robots equipped with vision that can understand and move around in the environment. When a robot moves around in man‐made environments, e.g., in buildings, not only is there the danger of collisions with obstacles in front of the robot but there is also the danger of collisions with moving objects approaching the robot from the sides and from behind. For this reason, acquiring information from all directions while the robot is moving is desired.This paper presents a method that uses the omni‐directional image sensor COPIS to detect moving objects in man‐made environments (such as in a room) and avoids collisions. Moving objects and obstacles in danger of colliding with the robot are detected from changes in the azimuth angles of the objects from the robot motion. Furthermore, the robot velocity is changed by decelerating as the way to avoid collisions, and the motion and position information of these objects are determined. This motion and position information is obtained by calculating the direction of relative motion between the robot and an object from the movement loci of the azimuth angle of the object obtained from the temporal image sequence before and after a velocity change. The COPIS system can acquire in real time visual images of all the surroundings of the robot by using a conic mirror. Additionally, the results of actual tests are presented when the proposed method is used for a robot moving inside a building in which there are moving objects.
A functional disk system for relational database processing: Design and performance evaluation
Authors: Kitsuregawa Masaru , Nakano Miyuki 
Published: July 2007

AbstractThis paper considers a relational database processing system and proposes a new high‐performance secondary memory system and a functional disk system aiming at the high‐speed processing. The traditional commercial relational DBMS employs the simple nest‐loop and sort‐merge as processing methods for relational algebra operations. However, the proposed functional disk system employs the dynamic clustering algorithm so that the processing load is reduced drastically. Such processes as the hash operation, the cluster management mechanism, the record extraction from the physical block and on‐the‐fly operation, which takes time by the software, are implemented by hardware. The clustering following the data transfer from the disk is then realized.The performance is improved further by using several processors so that the generated clusters are processed in parallel. Usually, the performance is deteriorated greatly due to the mismatch between OS and DBMS constructed on OS. To solve this problem, the dedicated input/output driver and the buffer management routine were developed in the functional disk system by optimizing the dynamic clustering technique.The functional disk system aims at the drastic performance improvement by introducing the database processing mechanism into the secondary memory system. To verify the effectiveness of this idea, an experimental system was constructed. In spite of the simple structure composed of a disk and 4 MC68020, the experimental system achieved a much higher performance than the existing commercial relational database system in the performance evaluation using the Wisconsin benchmark. Thus, the effectiveness of the functional disk system is verified.
Speech recognition using various sequential networks
Authors: Nakagawa Seiichi , Hayakawa Isao 
Published: July 2007

AbstractIn this paper, we describe two neural network‐based approaches to speech recognition. One is a purely neural network approach that approximates a multipleorder hidden Markov model (HMM). It is an extension of a sequential network and is called the neural Markov model (NMM). The other approach is a combination of sequential networks and the DP matching (DTW) method.NMM is based on the idea that a sequential network is similar to a hidden Markov model (HMM) with one state; we attempt to approximate an HMM with several states by concatenating sequential networks.For this purpose, we tried two approaches: (1) using only neural networks, and (2) applying the DP matching method to the output of the networks. The speaker‐independent recognition rate using the first approach was 65.4 percent for nine syllables that included voiced plosive consonants. The second method produced a 88.1 percent recognition rate for artificial word data consisting of two concatenated syllables. These results outperformed those obtained with the HMM.
Declining maternal mortality ratio in Uganda: Priority interventions to achieve the Millennium Development Goal
Authors: Mbonye A.K. , Mutabazi M.G. , Asimwe J.B. , Sentumbwe O. , Kabarangira J. , Nanda G. , Orinda V. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractPurpose: We conducted a survey to determine availability of emergency obstetric care (EmOC) and to provide data for advocating for improved maternal and newborn health in Uganda. Methods: The survey, covering 54 districts and 553 health facilities, assessed availability of EmOC signal functions, documented maternal deaths and the related causes. Three levels of health facilities were covered. Findings: Few health units had running water; electricity or a functional operating theater. Yet having these items had a protective effect on maternal deaths as follows: theater (OR 0.56, P < 0.0001); electricity (OR 0.39, P < 0.0001); laboratory (OR 0.71, P < 0.0001) and staffing levels (midwives) OR 0.20, P < 0.0001. The availability of midwives had the highest protective effect on maternal deaths, reducing the case fatality rate by 80%. Further, most (97.2%) health facilities expected to offer basic EmOC, were not doing so. This is the likely explanation for the high health facility‐based maternal death rate of 671/100,000 live births in Uganda. Conclusion: Addressing health system issues, especially human resources, and increasingaccess to EmOC could reduce maternal mortality in Uganda and enable the country to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG).
DRUG RESOURCE UNITS: ON BEING USED BY THE COMMUNITY
Authors: POLS R.G. 
Published: July 2007

AbstractInterdisciplinary co‐operation is discussed from the perspective of the Drug Resource Unit. Drug Resource Units are defined and the interplay with Drug Resource Units and the community served is also discussed.Alternative models of General Hospital Drug Resource Units are presented and discussed from community health and consultation/liaison points of view.Difficulties of implementation are highlighted.
Endogenous Mechanisms of Inhibition of Platelet Function
Authors: JIN RICHARD C. , VOETSCH BARBARA , LOSCALZO JOSEPH 
Published: July 2007

ABSTRACTPlatelets play an important role in coagulation, in maintenance of hemostasis, and in the pathophysiology of thrombotic diseases. In response to blood vessel injury, platelets accumulate at the site, recruit other platelets, promote clotting, and form a hemostatic plug to prevent hemorrhage. By contrast, several inhibitory mechanisms modulate platelet function and act in a synergistic manner to prevent pathologic thrombus formation. This review focuses on the principal endogenous inhibitors of platelet function and the central role of the normal endothelium in these inhibitory processes. The main endothelium‐derived platelet inhibitors include nitric oxide, prostacyclin, and Ecto‐ADPase/CD39/NTPDase. Each of these factors is discussed in turn, and the specific mechanisms by which they inhibit platelet function are reviewed.
Noninvasive Imaging of Angiogenesis Inhibition Following Nitric Oxide Synthase Blockade in the Ischemic Rat Heart in Vivo
Authors: WALLER CHRISTIANE , HILLER KARL‐HEINZ , RüDIGER THOMAS , KRAUS GüNTER , KONIETZKO CHRISTIAN , HARDT NELLY , ERTL GEORG , BAUER WOLFGANG RUDOLF 
Published: July 2007

ABSTRACTObjective: Nitric oxide synthase inhibition has anti‐angiogenic properties. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging was used to image the functional significance of these microvascular changes in a rat model of chronic ischemic myocardium in vivo.Methods: The authors quantitatively determined myocardial perfusion and regional blood volume, left ventricular geometry, and function using MR imaging. Animals received either L‐NAME + hydralazine or no treatment and were investigated 1 and 2 weeks after induction of coronary artery stenosis or sham operation at rest and during vasodilatation. Double‐labeling immunohistochemistry was used to visualize angiogenesis and to compare with data obtained by MR imaging.Results: Left ventricular mass and end‐diastolic volumes were comparable in both groups 2 weeks after treatment. However, basal and maximum perfusion in animals with L‐NAME + hydralazine treatment were reduced compared to animals not treated (p < .05). Basal regional blood volume remained constant in all groups, whereas maximum regional blood volume was reduced by L‐NAME + hydralazine (p < .05). Endothelial cell proliferation, a direct marker for angiogenesis, was reduced by L‐NAME + hydralazine (p < .01). Conclusions: MR imaging allows noninvasive quantification of functional microcirculation and angiogenesis in the rat heart in vivo. Nitric oxide synthase blockade results in changes in functional microcirculation and in an inhibition of angiogenesis in both ischemic and nonischemic myocardial tissue.