Reducing False Alarms of Intensive Care Online-Monitoring Systems: An Evaluation of Two Signal Extraction Algorithms

Online-monitoring systems in intensive care are affected by a high rate of false threshold alarms. These are caused by irrelevant noise and outliers in the measured time series data. The high false alarm rates can be lowered by separating relevant signals from noise and outliers online, in such a way that signal estimations, instead of raw measurements, are compared to the alarm limits. This paper presents a clinical validation study for two recently developed online signal filters. The filters are based on robust repeated median regression in moving windows of varying width. Validation is done offline using a large annotated reference database. The performance criteria are sensitivity and the proportion of false alarms suppressed by the signal filters

High-j single-particle neutron states outside the N=82 core

The behaviour of the i13/2 and h9/2 single-neutron strength was studied with the (4He,3He) reaction on 138Ba, 140Ce, 142Nd and 144Sm targets at a beam energy of 51 MeV. The separation between the single-neutron states i13/2 and h9/2 was measured in N =83 nuclei with changing proton number. To this end spectroscopic factors for states populated in high-l transfer were extracted from the data. Some mixing of l=5 and 6 strength was observed with states that are formed by coupling the f7/2 state to the 2+ and 3- vibrational states and the mixing matrix elements were found to be remarkably constant. The centroids of the strength indicate a systematic change in the energies of the i13/2 and h9/2 single-neutron states with increasing proton number that is in quantitative agreement with the effects expected from the tensor interaction.Comment: 12 pages of text, 3 diagram

Learning from health care in other countries: the prospect of comparative research

It is widely accepted that policy-makers (in Nepal and elsewhere) can learn valuable lessons from the way other countries run their health and social services. We highlight some of the specific contributions the discipline of sociology can make to cross-national comparative research in the public health field. Sociologists call attention to often unnoticed social and cultural factors that influence the way national reproductive health care systems are created and operated. In this paper we address questions such as: ‘Why do these health services appear to be operating successfully in one country, but not another?’; ‘What is it in one country that makes a particular public health intervention successful and how is the cultural context different in a neighbouring country?’ The key examples in this paper focus on maternity care and sex education in the Netherlands and the UK, as examples to highlight the power of cross-national research. Our key messages are: a) Cross-national comparative research can help us to understand the design and running of health services in one country, say Nepal, by learning from a comparison with other countries, for example Sri Lanka or India. b) Cultural factors unique to a country affect the way that reproductive health care systems operate. c) Therefore, we need to understand why and how services work in a certain cultural context before we start trying to implement them in another cultural context

Biologische Bodenentseuchung für eine umweltgerechte und intensive Gehölzproduktion

Der wiederholte Nachbau von Gehölzen der Familie der Rosaceae führt zu einer Nachbaukrankheit, die als Bodenmüdigkeit beschrieben wird. Eine wirksame Bekämpfung der Bodenmüdigkeit war die chemische Desinfektion mit Basamid® Granulat, basierend auf der Freisetzung eines Isothiocyanates (ITC). Die Zulassung von Basamid® Granulat ist in Deutschland abgelaufen. Eine Alternative könnte die Biofumigation darstellen. Bei der Biofumigation werden Glucosinolat(GS)-haltige Pflanzenteile von Vertretern der Brassicaceae in den Boden eingearbeitet. Die toxischen GS-Abbauprodukte, vor allem ITC, führen zu einer biologischen Bodendesinfektion. In dem berichteten Projekt wurde die Wirkung der ein- und zweijährigen Biofumigation von Brassica juncea und Raphanus sativus mit dem Anbau von Tagetes patula NEMAMIX, der Anwendung von Basamid® Granulat und des fortgesetzten Nachbaus der Indikatorpflanzen Malus sylvestris ‘Bittenfelder, Malus M4 bzw. M106 und Rosa corymbifera ‘Laxa’ verglichen. Das beste Wachstum der Indikatorpflanzen erbrachte ein vorausgegangener, zweijähriger Anbau von Tagetes patula NEMAMIX. Die praxisübliche Anwendung von Basamid® Granulat zeigte wenig Wirkung. Vermutlich war der Boden zum Anwendungstermin zu trocken. Eine geringe Wirkung erbrachte auch die ein- oder auch zweijährige Biofumigation mit Brassica juncea und Raphanus sativus. Auch die im Rahmen der Projektverlängerung zusätzlich geprüfte Einarbeitung von Brassica juncea-Samenmehl, die Verwendung der speziellen Saatgutmischung viterra®BIOFUMIGATION zur klassischen Biofumigation sowie die Dämpfung des Bodens mit Hilfe des CombiMIXERs an zwei nachbaukranken Baumschulstandorten brachten nicht die erhofften positive Effekte auf das Pflanzenwachstum der Indikatorpflanzen. Wieder war die einjährige Kultur von Tagetes die erfolgreichste Var. im Vergleich zum unbehandelten nachbaukranken Boden. Es konnten nur wenig positive Effekte auf das Wachstum der Indikatorpflanzen statistisch gesichert werden. Selbst in den Fällen, in denen signifikante Unterschiede auftraten, reichten diese Effekte aus Sicht der Praxis bei weitem nicht aus, um die durch Minderwuchs entstehenden Ertragsverluste auszugleichen. Mögliche Gründe für die schlechte Wirkung der geprüften Varianten werden diskutiert

Die Evolution einer Standardarchitektur für Betriebliche Informationssysteme

Echterhoff D, Grasmugg S, Mersch S, Mönckemeyer M, Spitta T, Wrede S. Die Evolution einer Standardarchitektur für Betriebliche Informationssysteme. In: Spitta T, Borchers J, Sneed HM, eds. Software-Management 2002. LNI. Vol P-23. Bonn: GI e.V.; 2002: 131-142.The paper outlines the history of a standard architecture for small and medium sized administrative systems. It has been developped 1985 in the Schering AG / Berlin, and applied in several firms over more than 15 years. Some of the about 150 applications, developped and maintained by more than 100 programmers, are still in operation. In 1999 a revision of the architecture and a new implementation in Java was started. The latest version is a four-level-architecture for distributed systems with a browser as user interface. Aside architectural considerations we discuss some of our design and implementation experiences with java

The 21Na(p,gamma)22Mg Reaction and Oxygen-Neon Novae

The 21Na(p,gamma)22Mg reaction is expected to play an important role in the nucleosynthesis of 22Na in Oxygen-Neon novae. The decay of 22Na leads to the emission of a characteristic 1.275 MeV gamma-ray line. This report provides the first direct measurement of the rate of this reaction using a radioactive 21Na beam, and discusses its astrophysical implications. The energy of the important state was measured to be E$_{c.m.}$= 205.7 $\pm$ 0.5 keV with a resonance strength $\omega\gamma = 1.03\pm0.16_{stat}\pm0.14_{sys}$ meV.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic, and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: 1) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; 2) how agents learn and represent compositional lexica; 3) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and 4) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.Peer reviewe

The Free Will Theorem

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this result is robust, and deduce that neither hidden variable theories nor mechanisms of the GRW type for wave function collapse can be made relativistic. We also establish the consistency of our axioms and discuss the philosophical implications.Comment: 31 pages, 6figure