No abstract

One of the primary features of a micro-hybrid vehicle is the automatic shutdown and restart of the engine to avoid engine idling when the vehicle is at rest. The system strategy and its calibration have important significance for the driveability of the vehicle in terms of the vehicle launch behaviour.An unsatisfactory vehicle launch is defined as an inferior launch performance of the vehicle resulting in a stalled engine, a launch with negative vehicle acceleration, and an aborted engine restart due to the inability of the vehicle to provide torque as demanded by the user. In this research, micro-hybrid system optimization for reduction in the percentage of impaired vehicle launch events in real-world usage has been conducted on a start-stop vehicle. The design for the six-sigma process was followed for the optimization study. A high-fidelity electrical and powertrain system and a longitudinal vehicle dynamics model for a start-stop vehicle have been developed. The model has been validated with experimental data. The drivers' behaviour for vehicle launch events from a customer clinic of start-stop vehicles has been used as an input to the model. Using design of experiments, the system has been optimized to maximize the percentage of successful launch events in real-world usage.

Purpose: An association between antibody deficiency and clozapine use in individuals with Schizophrenia has recently been reported. We hypothesized that if clozapine-associated hypogammaglobulinaemia was clinically relevant this would manifest in referral patterns. Methods: Retrospective case note review of patients referred and assessed by Immunology Centre for Wales (ICW) between January 2005 and July 2018 with extraction of clinical and immunologic features for individuals with diagnosis of schizophrenia-like illness. Results: 1791 adult patients were assessed at ICW during this period; 23 patients had a psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. Principal indications for referral were findings of low calculated globulin and immunoglobulins. Clozapine was the single most commonly prescribed antipsychotic (17/23), disproportionately increased relative to reported use in the general schizophrenia population (OR 6.48, 95% CI: 1.79 to 23.5). Clozapine therapy was noted in 6/7 (86%) of patients subsequently requiring immunoglobulin replacement therapy (IgRT). Marked reduction of class-switched memory B-cells (CSMB) and plasmablasts were observed in clozapine-treated individuals relative to healthy age-matched controls. Clozapine duration is associated with CSMB decline. One patient discontinued clozapine, with gradual recovery of IgG levels without use of IgRT. Conclusion: Our findings are consistent with enrichment of clozapine-treatment within schizophrenic individuals referred for ICW assessment over the last 13 years. These individuals displayed clinical patterns closely resembling the primary immunodeficiency CVID, however appears reversible upon drug cessation. This has diagnostic, monitoring and treatment implications for psychiatry and immunology teams and directs prospective studies to address causality and the wider implications for this patient group.

A new evolutionary game is introduced which incorporates states and actions into the strategies of the organisms of the evolving populations. The game centrally features actions that result in demographic flow between states that may not conserve organism numbers. It is by this feature that the game encapsulate a range of other evolutionary games, and can encode almost very complex interactions between organisms, species and populations. The game's formalism is expounded and the nature of the game's equilibrium is discussed. This discussion leads to an algorithm for numerically determining the stable equilibrium points which is exemplified in the context of a modified Hawk-Dove game. The game's flexibility for modeling population dynamics is evaluated and compared with other evolutionary games.

We derive a concentration inequality for the uncertainty in stratified random sampling. Minimising this inequality leads to an iterated online method for choosing samples from the strata. The inequality is versatile and considers a range of factors including: the data ranges, weights, sizes of the strata, as well as the number of samples taken, the estimated sample variances and whether strata are sampled with or without replacement. We evaluate the improvement this method reliably offers against other methods over sets of synthetic data, and also in approximating the Shapley value of cooperative games. The method is seen to be competitive with the performance of perfect Neyman sampling, even without prior information on strata variances. We supply a multidimensional extension of our inequality and discuss some future applications.MSC 2010 subject classifications: 94A20 91A12 60E15.