Problem behaviors like self-injury, aggression, or disruption will likely require intervention at some point in the life of a person diagnosed with autism. Behavioral intervention has been proven to be effective for addressing these problems, especially when a functional assessment is conducted. Comprehensive treatment for problem behavior is, however, often fractured across studies, resulting in a dearth of studies that show socially validated improvements in these problem behaviors or illustrate the assessment and treatment process from start to finish. In this article, we describe an effective, comprehensive, and parent-validated functional assessment and treatment process for the severe problem behaviors of 3 children with autism. After an 8- to 14-week outpatient clinic consultation, no problem behavior was observed at the clinic and in the home. Furthermore, behavior that did not occur during baseline (e.g., functional communication, delay and denial tolerance, and compliance with instructions) occurred with regularity.
Understanding and improving the productivity and robustness of plant photosynthesis requires high-throughput phenotyping under environmental conditions that are relevant to the field. Here we demonstrate the dynamic environmental photosynthesis imager (DEPI), an experimental platform for integrated, continuous, and high-throughput measurements of photosynthetic parameters during plant growth under reproducible yet dynamic environmental conditions. Using parallel imagers obviates the need to move plants or sensors, reducing artifacts and allowing simultaneous measurement on large numbers of plants. As a result, DEPI can reveal phenotypes that are not evident under standard laboratory conditions but emerge under progressively more dynamic illumination. We show examples in mutants of Arabidopsis of such "emergent phenotypes" that are highly transient and heterogeneous, appearing in different leaves under different conditions and depending in complex ways on both environmental conditions and plant developmental age. These emergent phenotypes appear to be caused by a range of phenomena, suggesting that such previously unseen processes are critical for plant responses to dynamic environments.
Increasing
power density makes modern electronic devices and power
equipment generate excess heat, which greatly restricts the applications
of polymeric materials because of their poor thermal conductivity.
In the present work, inspired by the structure and production process
of millefeuille cakes, we show that electrostatic spraying of boron
nitride nanosheets (BNNSs) onto electrospun poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA)
nanofibers can produce highly thermally conductive, electrically insulating,
flexible, and lightweight nanocomposites via a scalable method of
building a multilayer PVA/BNNS nanonetwork structure. The PVA/BNNS
nanocomposites exhibit an ultrahigh in-plane thermal conductivity
of 21.4 W/(m·K) at 22.2 vol % BNNS addition, realized by an orientated
BNNS network structure with overlapping interconnections. The BNNS
networks exhibit low thermal resistance and interfacial heat scattering
between BNNSs. Moreover, for heat dissipation applications, the nanocomposites
with an overlapping BNNS network show higher efficiency in dissipating
hot spots than randomly dispersed BNNS or directly hot-pressed BNNS
composites. These PVA/BNNS nanocomposites can be used as high-performance
lateral heat spreaders in next-generation thermal management systems.
Long-term use of imidacloprid in a wide range of rice-growing areas might be associated with high levels of resistance in N. lugens. Therefore, insecticide resistance management strategies must be developed to prevent further increase in resistance.
Behavioral interventions preceded by a functional analysis have been proven efficacious in treating severe problem behavior associated with autism. There is, however, a lack of research showing socially validated outcomes when assessment and treatment procedures are conducted by ecologically relevant individuals in typical settings. In this study, interview-informed functional analyses and skill-based treatments (Hanley et al. in J Appl Behav Anal 47:16-36, 2014) were applied by a teacher and home-based provider in the classroom and home of two children with autism. The function-based treatments resulted in socially validated reductions in severe problem behavior (self-injury, aggression, property destruction). Furthermore, skills lacking in baseline-functional communication, denial and delay tolerance, and compliance with adult instructions-occurred with regularity following intervention. The generality and costs of the process are discussed.
Most massively multiplayer game servers employ static partitioning of their game world into distinct mini-worlds that are hosted on separate servers. This limits cross-server interactions between players, and exposes the division of the world to players. We have designed and implemented an architecture in which the partitioning of game regions across servers is transparent to players and interactions are not limited to objects in a single region or server. This allows a finer grain partitioning, which combined with a dynamic load management algorithm enables us to better handle transient crowding by adaptively dispersing or aggregating regions from servers in response to quality of service violations.Our load balancing algorithm is aware of the spatial locality in the virtual game world. Based on localized information, the algorithm balances the load and reduces the cross server communication, while avoiding frequent reassignment of regions. Our results show that locality aware load balancing reduces the average user response time by up to a factor of 6 compared to a global algorithm that does not consider spatial locality and by up to a factor of 8 compared to static partitioning.
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