BACKGROUND Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) often produce skewed distributions of individual scores after a healthcare intervention. For health performance indicators derived from skewed distributions, funnel plots designed with symmetric control limits may increase the risk of false alarms about poor performance. AIM To investigate the accuracy of funnel plots with symmetric control...

" Congenital internal bending back of the sternum and ribs as the cause of difficulty in breathing. " My father showed me a boy seven years old at the house of a nobleQaan of Andlau, whose ensiform cartilage and other parts of the chest bone, together with the ribs, was bent back towards the internal parts, 8o that a great hollow appeared there. The diaphragm, he pointed out, deemed to contract...

A bang-bang controller is proposed which is able to ensure reference signal tracking with prespecified time-varying error bounds (the funnel) for nonlinear systems with relative degree one or two. For the design of the controller only the knowledge of the relative degree is needed. The controller is guaranteed to work when certain feasibility assumptions are fulfilled, which are explicitly give...

In North America, cerambycid beetles can have significant ecological and economic effects on forest ecosystems, and the rate of introduction and/or detection of exotic species is increasing. Detection and survey programs rely on semiochemical-baited intercept traps which are often ineffective for large woodborers like cerambycid beetles. This study examined the effects of flight intercept trap ...

Insect immune defenses include encapsulation and the production of lysozymes and phenoloxidase. However, the highly mobile larvae of parasitoid Ormiine flies (Ormia ochracea) can evade initial encapsulation, and instead co-opt host immune responses to form a critical respiratory funnel connecting them to outside oxygen. Here we ask how field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus) respond immunologic...

Abstract We study output reference tracking of systems with high relative degree via feedback only; this is, where the derivatives are unknown. To end, we prove that conjunction funnel pre-compensator a minimum phase system arbitrary yields same which is as well. The error between original system’s and pre-compensator’s evolves within prescribed performance funnel; moreover, known explicitly. T...