Should we use early less invasive hemodynamic monitoring in unstable ICU patients?

In the previous issue of Critical Care, Takala and colleagues presented the results of a multicenter study to investigate whether the early presence of less invasive hemodynamic monitoring improves outcome in patients admitted with hemodynamic instability to the intensive care unit. The authors' results suggest that it makes no difference. We discuss these findings and compare them to the literature on early goal-directed therapy in which monitors are used early but with a protocol

Practical Issues in the Application of Direct Metal Laser Sintering

Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) was introduced to meet the objective of producing metal parts directly from CAD data. CRDM has accumulated six years of experience in applying this technique, mostly to prototyping parts for evaluation. For some applications, such as blow moulds, porosity generated in DMLS has proved to be beneficial, but for others a concession on tolerances or finish are necessary and/or complementary operations are required, which add to manufacturing time and cost. This paper examines such issues through some well chosen examples of parts to demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of the DMLS process.Mechanical Engineerin

Entanglement Swapping Chains for General Pure States

We consider entanglement swapping schemes with general (rather than maximally) entangled bipartite states of arbitary dimension shared pairwise between three or more parties in a chain. The intermediate parties perform generalised Bell measurements with the result that the two end parties end up sharing a entangled state which can be converted into maximally entangled states. We obtain an expression for the average amount of maximal entanglement concentrated in such a scheme and show that in a certain reasonably broad class of cases this scheme is provably optimal and that, in these cases, the amount of entanglement concentrated between the two ends is equal to that which could be concentrated from the weakest link in the chain.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Full counting statistics and conditional evolution in a nanoelectromechanical system

We study theoretically the full distribution of transferred charge in a tunnel junction (or quantum point contact) coupled to a nanomechanical oscillator, as well as the conditional evolution of the oscillator. Even if the oscillator is very weakly coupled to the tunnel junction, it can strongly affect the tunneling statistics and lead to a highly non-Gaussian distribution. Conversely, given a particular measurement history of the current, the oscillator energy distribution may be localized and highly non-thermal. We also discuss non-Gaussian correlations between the oscillator motion and tunneling electrons; these show that the tunneling back-action cannot be fully described as an effective thermal bath coupled to the oscillator.Comment: 7 pages; figure added; typos correcte

An Ontology for Grounding Vague Geographic Terms

Many geographic terms, such as “river” and “lake”, are vague, with no clear boundaries of application. In particular, the spatial extent of such features is often vaguely carved out of a continuously varying observable domain. We present a means of defining vague terms using standpoint semantics, a refinement of the philosophical idea of supervaluation semantics. Such definitions can be grounded in actual data by geometric analysis and segmentation of the data set. The issues raised by this process with regard to the nature of boundaries and domains of logical quantification are discussed. We describe a prototype implementation of a system capable of segmenting attributed polygon data into geographically significant regions and evaluating queries involving vague geographic feature terms

Szego limit theorem for operators with discontinuous symbols and applications to entanglement entropy

The main result in this paper is a one term Szego type asymptotic formula with a sharp remainder estimate for a class of integral operators of the pseudodifferential type with symbols which are allowed to be non-smooth or discontinuous in both position and momentum. The simplest example of such symbol is the product of the characteristic functions of two compact sets, one in real space and the other in momentum space. The results of this paper are used in a study of the violation of the area entropy law for free fermions in [18]. This work also provides evidence towards a conjecture due to Harold Widom.Comment: 18 pages, major revision, to appear in Int. Math. Res. No