A Model for Pairs of Beatty Sequences

Two Beatty sequences are recorded by athletes running in opposite directions in a round stadium. This approach suggests a nice interpretation for well known partitioning criteria: such sequences (eventually) partition the integers essentially when the athletes have the same starting point

Noninvasive cardiac output and blood pressure monitoring cannot replace an invasive monitoring system in critically ill patients

Background: Monitoring of cardiac output and blood pressure are standard procedures in critical care medicine. Traditionally, invasive techniques like pulmonary artery catheter (PAC) and arterial catheters are widely used. Invasiveness bears many risks of deleterious complications. Therefore, a noninvasive reliable cardiac output (CO) and blood pressure monitoring system could improve the safety of cardiac monitoring. The aim of the present study was to compare a noninvasive versus a standard invasive cardiovascular monitoring system. Methods: Nexfin HD is a continuous noninvasive blood pressure and cardiac output monitor system and is based on the development of the pulsatile unloading of the finger arterial walls using an inflatable finger cuff. During continuous BP measurement CO is calculated. We included 10 patients with standard invasive cardiac monitoring system (pulmonary artery catheter and arterial catheter) comparing invasively obtained data to the data collected noninvasively using the Nexfin HD. Results: Correlation between mean arterial pressure measured with the standard arterial monitoring system and the Nexfin HD was r2 = 0.67 with a bias of -2 mmHg and two standard deviations of ± 16 mmHg. Correlation between CO derived from PAC and the Nexfin HD was r2 = 0.83 with a bias of 0.23 l/min and two standard deviations of ± 2.1 l/min; the percentage error was 29%. Conclusion: Although the noninvasive CO measurement appears promising, the noninvasive blood pressure assessment is clearly less reliable than the invasively measured blood pressure. Therefore, according to the present data application of the Nexfin HD monitoring system in the ICU cannot be recommended generally. Whether such a tool might be reliable in certain critically ill patients remains to be determined

Detecting People in Artwork with CNNs

CNNs have massively improved performance in object detection in photographs. However research into object detection in artwork remains limited. We show state-of-the-art performance on a challenging dataset, People-Art, which contains people from photos, cartoons and 41 different artwork movements. We achieve this high performance by fine-tuning a CNN for this task, thus also demonstrating that training CNNs on photos results in overfitting for photos: only the first three or four layers transfer from photos to artwork. Although the CNN's performance is the highest yet, it remains less than 60\% AP, suggesting further work is needed for the cross-depiction problem. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46604-0_57Comment: 14 pages, plus 3 pages of references; 7 figures in ECCV 2016 Workshop

Evaluation of the repertory grid method in studies of locals' attitude towards tourism development processes

In this paper the possibility of employing personal construct theory and the repertory grid method in studies of local attitudes towards tourism development from both a theoretical and methodological perspective is assessed. This work follows on from a critical review of the research methods used in past research works which dealt with the question of attitudes and perceptions of local communities toward tourism development in their localities. A case study of local attitudes and perceptions towards tourism development in tourist settlements, over four tourism development stages in Israel, is used to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of personal construct theory and the repertory grid method in tourist environmental cognition studies. Subsequently, methodological conclusions and suggestions about how to overcome the problems which arise in this study are drawn.