Abstract: The invention provides a novel system for dispensing paper products, particularly paper napkins. The system includes a moveable napkin carrier platform and a vacuum roller that picks up and dispenses a paper product.

Abstract: A syringe pump has a pusher (86) that pushes in the plunger (81) of a syringe (8) to dispense medication. A pivoted barrel size sensor arm (201) engages the syringe barrel (82) at one end (203) and carries three flags (207, 208 and 209) at the other end (205), which move across three sensors (217, 218 and 219) such that each sensor can change from a first state to a second state and back to a first state as the arm moves, to provide nine different size outputs.

Abstract: The present invention provides an improved technique for accessing information in a peer-to-peer network. According to specific embodiments of the present invention, each file accessible in the peer-to-peer network is assigned a respective hash ID or fingerprint ID which is used to describe the contents of that file. Files in the peer-to-peer network may be identified and/or accessed based upon their associated hash ID values. In this way it is possible to identify identical files stored in the peer-to-peer network which have different file names and/or other metadata descriptors. Since the content of all files having the same hash ID will be identical, an automated process may be used to retrieve the desired content from one or more of the identified files.

Abstract: A digital multimedia newsroom production system allows users of the system to create, browse and catalog multimedia assets. The system includes a journalist workstation for accessing multimedia assets stored in a multimedia archive to create a multimedia storyboard of a news story to be broadcast from the system. The storyboard includes frames of video retrieved from one or more sources, and text retrieved from one or more sources or generated by a user of the journalist workstation. In one embodiment of the invention, multimedia data captured by the newsroom production system undergoes a dual digitization process to create a high resolution version of the media data and a low resolution version of the media data. The low resolution version of the media data can be efficiently stored in the system and may be transmitted over a low-bandwidth network to the journalist workstation for use in the creation of a storyboard.