A rectangular base strip and a pliable magnetized strip are of substantially equal dimensions. An end portion of one side of the base strip is connected to an end portion of a side of the magnetized strip. Double-sided tape is used to adhesively connect the other side of the base strip to a wall of a bath facility. Because of a magnetic attraction between the strips, an edge of a shower curtain is self releasably maintained between unconnected portions of the strips. In other words, the edge is ...

A prosthetic device for controlling urinary continence is disclosed. The device has an opening pressure that varies in response to changes in physiologic parameters. The device can be controlled by the patient voluntarily without manual intervention. A nonsurgical method of maintaining urinary continence is also disclosed.

A suction, or vacuum, is created by the coupling of two sections of tubing of dissimilar size. The larger section of tubing has an open ended reservoir attached to one end thereof. The smaller section of tubing has an end plate attached at a point approximately one third of its length. The longer portion of the smaller section of tubing is inserted into the larger tube until the end plate mated to the reservoir. A fluid medium such as water or air is pumped into the reservoir under high pressure...

A computer implemented method maintains an index of a database. The database stores information as a plurality of records. Batches of records are indexed by storing index entries in a memory. Each index entry includes a word entry for each unique portion of information of the database, and one or more location entries pointing at occurrences of the portions of information. The index entries are organized according to a collating order of the word entries. The location entries are stored sequenti...

A prosthetic device for controlling urinary continence is disclosed. The device has an opening pressure that varies in response to changes in physiologic parameters. The device can be controlled by the patient voluntarily without manual intervention. A nonsurgical method of maintaining urinary continence is also disclosed.

A replication protocol which includes associating a database version vector with each copy of the database in the system is provided. Each database version vector keeps track of the total number of updates to any data items in its respective database replica and from which server those updates were originally performed. During replication between two replicas, the database version vectors of the replicas are compared to efficiently determine if update replication is necessary. If the database ve...

A circuit for maintaining the luminous intensity of a light emitting diode (LED) (12) comprising at least one light emitting diode (LED) (12) for producing an luminous intensity; a sensor (22,24) for sensing a condition proportional to the luminous intensity of the LED (12) and for producing a luminous intensity signal; a power supply (16) electrically connected to the LED (12) for supplying pulses of electrical energy to the LED (12); and wherein the power supply (16) includes a switching devic...

A hat having elongated support members extending from the exterior of the crown of the hat, for supporting the hat upon the head of the wearer, to prevent the hat from causing any undue adverse affect to the wearer's hair style. An alternative embodiment of the hat further includes a casing having a framing that is either attached to the crown or a brim, which framing may be twisted to collapse the hat into a small compact size and shape.

In a multi-threaded computing environment, a shared cache system reduces the amount of redundant information stored in memory. A cache memory area provides both global readable data and private writable data to processing threads. A particular processing thread accesses data by first checking its private views of modified data and then its global views of read-only data. Uncached data is read into a cache buffer for global access. If write access is required by the processing thread, the data is...

An apparatus is provided for relaxing an apneic obstruction in a nasopharyngeal airway of a patient. A bolus chamber and a rearward chamber are defined within a housing. A movable piston within the housing is actuated using a pair of magnets. When an impeller, mounted within the rearward chamber, rotates as a result of patient exhalation into the rearward chamber, the repulsive force between said magnets causes said piston to move and drive a bolus of air into the airway of the patient.