Human environmental heat transfer simulation with CFD – the advances and challenges

The modelling and prediction of human thermoregulatory responses and comfort have gone a long way during the past decades. Sophisticated and detailed human models, i.e. the active multi-nodal thermal models with physiological regulatory responses, have been developed and widely adopted in both research and industrial practice. The recent trend is to integrate human models with environmental models in order to provide more insight into the thermal comfort issues, especially in the non-homogeneous and transient conditions. This paper reviews the logics and expectations of coupling human models with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. One of main objectives of such approaches is to take the advantage of the high resolution achievable with the CFD, to replace the empirical methods used in the human models. We aim to initiate debates on the validity of this objective, and to identify the technical requirements for achieving this goal. A simple experiment with 3D human models of different sizes and shapes is also reported. Initial results shows the presence of arms may be important. Further experiments are required to establish the impact of size and shape on simulation result

Optimal funding and investment strategies in defined contribution pension plans under Epstein-Zin utility

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member’s working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member’s personal preferences. The plan’s optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired pattern of consumption over the lifetime of the member. We investigate these strategies under the assumption that the member has an Epstein-Zin utility function, which allows a separation between risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, and we also take into account the member’s human capital. We show that a stochastic lifestyling approach, with an initial high weight in equity-type investments and a gradual switch into bond-type investments as the retirement date approaches is an optimal investment strategy. In addition, the optimal contribution rate each year is not constant over the life of the plan but reflects trade-offs between the desire for current consumption, bequest and retirement savings motives at different stages in the life cycle, changes in human capital over the life cycle, and attitude to risk

Single-particle subband structure of Quantum Cables

We proposed a model of Quantum Cable in analogy to the recently synthesized coaxial nanocable structure [Suenaga et al. Science, 278, 653 (1997); Zhang et al. ibid, 281, 973 (1998)], and studied its single-electron subband structure. Our results show that the subband spectrum of Quantum Cable is different from either double-quantum-wire (DQW) structure in two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) or single quantum cylinder. Besides the double degeneracy of subbands arisen from the non-abelian mirrow reflection symmetry, interesting quasicrossings (accidental degeneracies), anticrossings and bundlings of Quantum Cable energy subbands are observed for some structure parameters. In the extreme limit (barrier width tends to infinity), the normal degeneracy of subbands different from the DQW structure is independent on the other structure parameters.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Quantum Cable as transport spectroscopy of 1D DOS of cylindrical quantum wires

We considered the proposed Quantum Cable as a kind of transport spectroscopy of one-dimensional (1D) density of states (DOS) of cylindrical quantum wires. By simultaneously detecting the direct current through the cylindrical quantum wire and the leaked tunneling current into the neighboring wire at desired temperatures, one can obtain detailed information about 1D DOS and subband structure of cylindrical quantum wires.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, late

A Unified and Complete Construction of All Finite Dimensional Irreducible Representations of gl(2|2)

Representations of the non-semisimple superalgebra $gl(2|2)$ in the standard basis are investigated by means of the vector coherent state method and boson-fermion realization. All finite-dimensional irreducible typical and atypical representations and lowest weight (indecomposable) Kac modules of $gl(2|2)$ are constructed explicitly through the explicit construction of all $gl(2)\oplus gl(2)$ particle states (multiplets) in terms of boson and fermion creation operators in the super-Fock space. This gives a unified and complete treatment of finite-dimensional representations of $gl(2|2)$ in explicit form, essential for the construction of primary fields of the corresponding current superalgebra at arbitrary level.Comment: LaTex file, 23 pages, two references and a comment added, to appear in J. Math. Phy

Interacting Individuals Leading to Zipf's Law

We present a general approach to explain the Zipf's law of city distribution. If the simplest interaction (pairwise) is assumed, individuals tend to form cities in agreement with the well-known statisticsComment: 4 pages 2 figure

Kernel Regression For Determining Photometric Redshifts From Sloan Broadband Photometry

We present a new approach, kernel regression, to determine photometric redshifts for 399,929 galaxies in the Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In our case, kernel regression is a weighted average of spectral redshifts of the neighbors for a query point, where higher weights are associated with points that are closer to the query point. One important design decision when using kernel regression is the choice of the bandwidth. We apply 10-fold cross-validation to choose the optimal bandwidth, which is obtained as the cross-validation error approaches the minimum. The experiments show that the optimal bandwidth is different for diverse input patterns, the least rms error of photometric redshift estimation arrives at 0.019 using color+eClass as the inputs, the less rms error amounts to 0.020 using ugriz+eClass as the inputs. Here eClass is a galaxy spectra type. Then the little rms scatter is 0.021 with color+r as the inputs.Comment: 6 pages,2 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA