Harvesting energy from the environment by using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) or photovoltaic cells provides a solution for battery-free sensor networks or electronic healthcare systems. In these systems, the harvested energy is supplied at a very low voltages, requiring a low-startup-voltage power circuit for kick-start from low voltage. A previous sub-100mV-startup-voltage boost converter ...

The startup time of open source desktop applications and environments does not compare well with other systems, especially closed-source systems. We perform a detailed analysis of the startup of the GNOME desktop environment using a mixture of available open-source tools and ad-hoc measuring techniques, identifying bottlenecks and examining strategies to improve performance. Our results show th...

OBJECTIVE Maternal skin-to-skin contact (M-SSC) has been found to reduce adverse consequences of prematurity, however, its neurobiological mechanisms have been unknown. The purpose of the study was to examine oxytocin mechanism in modulating parental stress and anxiety during M-SSC and P-SSC (paternal SSC) with their pre-term infants. METHODS Twenty-eight stable pre-term infants and their par...

SMB represents one of the widely established periodic adsorption processes and its periodic and nonlinear dynamics presents a significant challenge to the formulation and solution of the optimal startup issue. A multistage startup concept allowing to adjust operating conditions stage-wise is proposed. The startup problem is then formulated aiming at driving the system towards the reference cycl...

Typical management strategies proven to work in already established businesses do not work as expected in startups. Startups do not yet have a business model and product that they could focus on, but are still looking for a working business model. Lean Startup is a method for startup management that focuses on quick iteration and on fast learning to find an iterable business model. As a method,...

Due to their higher efficiency of energy utilisation heat-integrated column systems have been widely used in chemical industry. However, the heat-integration leads to difficulties in startup of such columns, i.e. a long startup time and thus considerable costs will be resulted. In this work, a study consisting of modelling, simulation, optimisation and experimental verification is made for deve...

This paper presents a realization for the reliable and fast startup of distributed systems written in Erlang. The traditional startup provided by the Erlang/OTP library is sequential, parallelization usually requires unsafe and ad-hoc solutions. The proposed method calls only for slight modifications in the Erlang/OTP stdlib by applying a system dependency graph. It makes the startup safe, quic...

OBJECTIVES To determine if anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibody titers can distinguish the overlap syndrome of systemic sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis (SSc-RA) in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc) and to investigate the clinical significance of anti-CCP antibodies in SSc. METHODS Serum levels of anti-CCP antibodies were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay i...

Application startup latency has become a performance problem for both desktop applications and web applications. In this paper, we show that much of the latency experienced during application startup can be avoided by more e ciently packing application code pages. To take advantage of more e cient packing, we describe the implementation of demand paging for web applications. Finally, we show th...