Parents' future visions for their autistic transition-age youth: hopes and expectations

Researchers have documented that young adults with autism spectrum disorder have poor outcomes in employment, post-secondary education, social participation, independent living, and community participation. There is a need to further explore contributing factors to such outcomes to better support successful transitions to adulthood. Parents play a critical role in transition planning, and parental expectations appear to impact young adult outcomes for autistic individuals. The aim of this study was to explore how parents express their future visions (i.e. hopes and expectations) for their autistic transition-age youth. Data were collected through focus groups and individual interviews with 18 parents. Parents' hopes and expectations focused on eight primary domains. In addition, parents often qualified or tempered their stated hope with expressions of fears, uncertainty, realistic expectations, and the perceived lack of guidance. We discuss our conceptualization of the relations among these themes and implications for service providers and research.Accepted manuscrip

Exploring Resonant di-Higgs production in the Higgs Singlet Model

We study the enhancement of the di-Higgs production cross section resulting from the resonant decay of a heavy Higgs boson at hadron colliders in a model with a Higgs singlet. This enhancement of the double Higgs production rate is crucial in understanding the structure of the scalar potential and we determine the maximum allowed enhancement such that the electroweak minimum is a global minimum. The di-Higgs production enhancement can be as large as a factor of ~ 18 (13) for the mass of the heavy Higgs around 270 (420) GeV relative to the Standard Model rate at 14 TeV for parameters corresponding to a global electroweak minimum.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures. Version approved for publication. Discussion of Z2 symmetric limit improved and references adde

Top Partners and Higgs Boson Production

The Higgs boson is produced at the LHC through gluon fusion at roughly the Standard Model rate. New colored fermions, which can contribute to $gg\rightarrow h$, must have vector-like interactions in order not to be in conflict with the experimentally measured rate. We examine the size of the corrections to single and double Higgs production from heavy vector-like fermions in $SU(2)_L$ singlets and doublets and search for regions of parameter space where double Higgs production is enhanced relative to the Standard Model prediction. We compare production rates and distributions for double Higgs production from gluon fusion using an exact calculation, the low energy theorem (LET), where the top quark and the heavy vector-like fermions are taken to be infinitely massive, and an effective theory (EFT) where top mass effects are included exactly and the effects of the heavy fermions are included to ${\cal O}(1/M^2_X)$. Unlike the LET, the EFT gives an extremely accurate description of the kinematic distributions for double Higgs production.Comment: 37 pages, 11 figures. Minor changes to Figs. 8-1

Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in the local density of states

The scattering of electrons with inhomogeneities produces modulations in the local density of states of a metal. We show that electron interference contributions to these modulations are affected by the magnetic field via the Aharonov-Bohm effect. This can be exploited in a simple STM setup that serves as an Aharonov-Bohm interferometer at the nanometer scale.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. v2 added reference

Efficiency at maximum power output of an irreversible Carnot-like cycle with internally dissipative friction

We investigate the efficiency at maximum power of an irreversible Carnot engine performing finite-time cycles between two reservoirs at temperatures $T_h$ and $T_c$ $(T_c<T_h)$, taking into account of internally dissipative friction in two "adiabatic" processes. In the frictionless case, the efficiencies at maximum power output are retrieved to be situated between $\eta_{_C}/$ and $\eta_{_C}/(2-\eta_{_C})$, with $\eta_{_C}=1-T_c/{T_h}$ being the Carnot efficiency. The strong limits of the dissipations in the hot and cold isothermal processes lead to the result that the efficiency at maximum power output approaches the values of $\eta_{_C}/$ and $\eta_{_C}/(2-\eta_{_C})$, respectively. When dissipations of two isothermal and two adiabatic processes are symmetric, respectively, the efficiency at maximum power output is founded to be bounded between 0 and the Curzon-Ahlborn (CA) efficiency $1-\sqrt{1-\eta{_C}}$, and the the CA efficiency is achieved in the absence of internally dissipative friction

An Iterative Cyclic Algorithm for Designing Vaccine Distribution Networks in Low and Middle-Income Countries

The World Health Organization's Expanded Programme on Immunization (WHO-EPI) was developed to ensure that all children have access to common childhood vaccinations. Unfortunately, because of inefficient distribution networks and cost constraints, millions of children in many low and middle-income countries still go without being vaccinated. In this paper, we formulate a mathematical programming model for the design of a typical WHO-EPI network with the goal of minimizing costs while providing the opportunity for universal coverage. Since it is only possible to solve small versions of the model optimally, we describe an iterative heuristic that cycles between solving restrictions of the original problem and show that it can find very good solutions in reasonable time for larger problems that are not directly solvable.Comment: International Joint Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management- ABEPRO-ADINGOR-IISE-AIM-ASEM (IJCIEOM 2019). Novi Sad, Serbia, July 15-17t

Lattice density functional theory at finite temperature with strongly density-dependent exchange-correlation potentials

The derivative discontinuity of the exchange-correlation (xc) energy at integer particle number is a property of the exact, unknown xc functional of density functional theory (DFT) which is absent in many popular local and semilocal approximations. In lattice DFT, approximations exist which exhibit a discontinuity in the xc potential at half filling. However, due to convergence problems of the Kohn-Sham (KS) self-consistency cycle, the use of these functionals is mostly restricted to situations where the local density is away from half filling. Here a numerical scheme for the self-consistent solution of the lattice KS Hamiltonian with a local xc potential with rapid (or quasi-discontinuous) density dependence is suggested. The problem is formulated in terms of finite-temperature DFT where the discontinuity in the xc potential emerges naturally in the limit of zero temperature. A simple parametrization is suggested for the xc potential of the uniform 1D Hubbard model at finite temperature which is obtained from the solution of the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz. The feasibility of the numerical scheme is demonstrated by application to a model of fermionic atoms in a harmonic trap. The corresponding density profile exhibits a plateau of integer occupation at low temperatures which melts away for higher temperatures.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

EffiTest: Efficient Delay Test and Statistical Prediction for Configuring Post-silicon Tunable Buffers

At nanometer manufacturing technology nodes, process variations significantly affect circuit performance. To combat them, post- silicon clock tuning buffers can be deployed to balance timing bud- gets of critical paths for each individual chip after manufacturing. The challenge of this method is that path delays should be mea- sured for each chip to configure the tuning buffers properly. Current methods for this delay measurement rely on path-wise frequency stepping. This strategy, however, requires too much time from ex- pensive testers. In this paper, we propose an efficient delay test framework (EffiTest) to solve the post-silicon testing problem by aligning path delays using the already-existing tuning buffers in the circuit. In addition, we only test representative paths and the delays of other paths are estimated by statistical delay prediction. Exper- imental results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the number of frequency stepping iterations by more than 94% with only a slight yield loss.Comment: ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 201