In a comparative fungal blood culture study, a lysis-centrifugation system (Isolator; Du Pont Co., Wilmington, Del.) detected 89% of all episodes of fungemia; the lysis-centrifugation system detected fungemia exclusively or significantly earlier than did a biphasic brain heart infusion bottle system 83% of the time. The lysis-centriguation system was particularly useful in the early detection o...

A floating raft system (FRS) is typically used for vibration isolation of shipboard machinery. Earlier investigations have analyzed the effectiveness of this system using progressive receptance/mobility based approaches. In this paper, a vibration power flow based approach in the framework of component mode synthesis (CMS) is proposed. Both fixed-fixed and fixed-free CMS formulations are compar...

A new fail-safe, variable stiffness, and variable damping isolator (VSDI) device is designed, developed and tested utilizing magneto-rheological elastomers (MREs). This system provides a simultaneous controllable stiffness and damping. The performance of the VSDI is investigated experimentally under dynamic shear loads. The results demonstrate that this VSDI is capable of increase of stiffness ...

The balanced amplifier is used in applications requiring a better input match than is possible with a single-ended amplifier. While the impedance matching property of the balanced amplifier is well known, its noise behavior appears not to be widely understood. It is shown that the outgoing noise waves at the input and output of a balanced amplifier are uncorrelated even though they originate in...

This paper presents the performance of a new magnetorheological elastomer-based semi-active/passive variable stiffness and damping isolator (VSDI) in a scaled building system. The force of the VSDI can be controlled in real time by varying the applied magnetic field. To demonstrate the performance of the VSDI, four prototypes are built and utilized in a scaled three-story building. A Lyapunov-b...

Hypernymy is the key relation that serves to form the ontology of the noun and verb concepts in WordNet and provides a common way of making induction along the hypernymy tree for the NLP researchers. Howerver, we find 2 kinds of abnormal hypernymy in WordNet 2.0, the cases of ring and isolator for short, which can largely harass the reasoning and eventually lead to errors.

Earthquakes are one of the natural hazards that occur due to sudden violent movement of earth’s surface which releases energy and has destructive power in many parts of the world. The development of recent technologies for the control of seismic hazards catches the attention of structural engineers to make the structures seismically resistant. The seismic base isolation technique is a passive p...

The need for tunable optical transmitters in optical networking is growing at a rapid rate. A tunable optical transmitter is the combination of a tunable laser, an isolator, and a modulator. Although today lasers and modulators could be integrated together on a single chip, an integrated component of this type would not be useful because the absence of an isolator between the two elements would...

Recent technological developments have created new devices that could improve and simplify the construction of stimulus isolators. HEXFET transistors can switch large currents and hundreds of volts in nanoseconds. The newer opto-isolators can give a pulse rise time of a few nanoseconds, with output compatible with MOSFET devices, in which delays are reduced to nanoseconds. Integrated DC/DC conv...

Interferometric gravitational wave detection relies on precisely monitoring the distance between the test masses at the end of each arm which, conveniently, also serve as the end mirrors of the interferometer. For terrestrial detectors, this measurement is corrupted by seismic noise that is several orders of magnitude larger than the anticipated gravitational wave induced motion [1]. To reduce ...