Methyltrimethoxysilane [MTM, CH 3 Si(OMe) 3 ] has been demonstrated to be an effective, inexpensive, and safe reagent for the direct amidation of carboxylic acids with amines. Two simple workup procedures that provide the pure amide product without the need for further purification have been developed. The first employs an aqueous base-mediated annihilation of MTM. The second involves simple product crystallization from the reaction mixture providing a low process mass intensity direct amidation protocol.

This review covers all the reported use of stoichiometric silicon reagents for direct amidation of carboxylic acids with amines, commencing with the first example in 1969 up until April 2021.

Wireless networking is a common component in assistive environment designs. In addition to allowing the deployment of multiple sensors that are not physically connected, wireless networking carries an additional benefit -the characteristics and interactions between the wireless mobile node and the wireless base can be examined to determine the otherwise unknown location of the mobile node. Determining the location of the mobile node is the topic of this paper. In particular, this paper explores the relationship between Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and the error in the computed Time-of-Flight (TOF) data. This relationship is exploited to associate probabilities with location readings which are subsequently used to apply particle filtering techniques to reduce the inaccuracy in the location computation. We show that by using RSSI and particle filtering, the wireless node's location can be tracked far more accurately than by accepting TOF as provided.