Investigation of wake structure of isolated and intersecting flat plates

Imperial Users onl

Psychological assessment in vocational rehabilitation: A qualitative exploration of acculturation assessment and clinician testing practices

The vocational rehabilitation (VR) system, which provides services to people with disabilities to gain employment, often requires psychological testing to determine client access to services and vocational planning. Cultural bias inherent in standardized tests and inappropriate administration of tests can lead to invalid test results. Assessment of acculturation and test adaptations have been suggested as methods of cultural bias remediation. This study examined the testing practices of 25 psychologists who test VR clients via telephone interview. The study explored psychologists (a) clinicians’ definitions/conceptualizations of acculturation, (b) clinicians’ perceptions of the role of acculturation in the testing process for clients, (c) the influence of client acculturation of clinician testing practices, (d) the method in which acculturation is assessed, (e) clinicians’ perceptions of the challenges of testing clients who are culturally different from themselves, and (f) clinicians’ perceptions of the role of their cultural background on the testing process. Some of the results indicated that most clinicians conceptualized acculturation within an assimilation paradigm, assessed acculturation via the clinical interview, altered their test practices due to client level of acculturation, and often questioned the validity of test results from culturally different clients. The themes from the six research questions are discussed and the study\u27s implications for theory, research, and practices are detailed

A new species of Liolaemus related to L. nigroviridis from the Andean highlands of Central Chile (Iguania, Liolaemidae)

Indexación: Web of Science; Scopus.The Liolaemus nigroviridis group is a clade of highland lizards endemic to Chile. These species are distributed from northern to central Chile, and currently there are no cases of sympatric distribution. This study describes a new species, Liolaemus uniformis sp. n., from this group, and provides a detailed morphological characterization and mitochondrial phylogeny using cytochrome-b. Liolaemus uniformis was found in sympatry with L. nigroviridis but noticeably differed in size, scalation, and markedly in the color pattern, without sexual dichromatism. This new species has probably been confused with L. monticola and L. bellii, both of which do not belong to the nigroviridis group. The taxonomic issues of this group that remain uncertain are also discussed.https://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=601

Reconciling Semiclassical and Bohmian Mechanics: I. Stationary states

The semiclassical method is characterized by finite forces and smooth, well-behaved trajectories, but also by multivalued representational functions that are ill-behaved at turning points. In contrast, quantum trajectory methods--based on Bohmian mechanics (quantum hydrodynamics)--are characterized by infinite forces and erratic trajectories near nodes, but also well-behaved, single-valued representational functions. In this paper, we unify these two approaches into a single method that captures the best features of both, and in addition, satisfies the correspondence principle. Stationary eigenstates in one degree of freedom are the primary focus, but more general applications are also anticipated.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

A Stochastic Mobility Prediction Algorithm for finding Delay and Energy Efficient Routing Paths considering Movement Patterns in Mobile IoT Networks

In Mobile IoT Networks, the network nodes are constantly moving in a field, causing interruptions in the communication paths and, thus, generating long delays at the time of building a communication path from a source IoT node to the gateway (destination node). Communication interruptions affect the delay performance in delay-sensitive applications such as health and military scenarios. In addition, these IoT nodes are equipped with batteries, whereby it is also necessary to accomplish energy consumption requirements. In summary, a gateway node should not receive messages or packets coming from the IoT nodes with undesired delays, whereby it is pertinent to propose new algorithms or techniques for minimizing the delay and energy consumption experimented in the IoT network. Due to IoT nodes are attached to humans, animals or objects, they present a specific movement pattern that can be analyzed to improve the path-building with the aim of reducing the end-to-end delay. Therefore, we propose the usage of a mobility prediction technique based on a Stochastic Model to predict nodes’ positions in order to obtain minimum cost paths in terms of energy consumption and delay in mobile IoT networks. Our stochastic model is tuned and evaluated under the Markov-Gauss mobility model, considering different levels of movement randomness in order to test how the capability prediction of our proposal can impact the delay and energy consumption in mobile IoT networks in comparison with others routing algorithms

Costs of cannabis testing compliance: Assessing mandatory testing in the California cannabis market.

Most U.S. states that have regulated and taxed cannabis have imposed some form of mandatory safety testing requirements. In California, the country's largest and oldest legal cannabis market, mandatory testing was first enforced by state regulators in July 2018, and additional mandatory tests were introduced at the end of 2018. All cannabis must be tested and labeled as certified by a state-licensed cannabis testing laboratory before it can be legally marketed in California. Every batch that is sold by licensed retailers must be tested for more than 100 contaminants, including 66 pesticides with tolerance levels lower than the levels allowable for any other agricultural product in California. This paper estimates the costs of compliance with mandatory cannabis testing laws and regulations, using California's testing regime as a case study. We use state government data, data collected from testing laboratories, and data collected from lab equipment suppliers to run a set of Monte Carlo simulations and estimate the cost per pound of compliance with California's new cannabis testing regulations. We find that cost per pound is highly sensitive to average batch size and testing failure rates. We present results under a variety of different assumptions about batch size and failure rates. We also find that under realistic assumptions, the loss of cannabis that must be destroyed if a batch fails testing accounts for a larger share of total testing costs than does the cost of the lab tests. Using our best estimates of average batch size (8 pounds) and failure rate (4%) in the 2019 California market, we estimate testing cost at $136 per pound of dried cannabis flower, or about 10 percent of the reported average wholesale price of legal cannabis in the state. Our findings explain effects of the testing standards on the cost of supplying legal licensed cannabis, in California, other U.S. states, and foreign jurisdictions with similar testing regimes