iCan-Play: A Practice Guideline for Assessment and Intervention of Play for Children with Severe Multiple Disabilities

The nature of play in children with severe multiple disabilities (SMD) is complex, as many have significant motor and language impairments. Through the use of assistive technology (AT), children with SMD can play more independently and provide input to caregivers on their preferred play repertoire. This author-developed guideline describes an assessment and intervention to improve play in children with SMD using AT methods. The Interactive Child Activity Narrative of Play (iCan-Play) is an assessment tool used to evaluate play in children with SMD. It provides a comprehensive understanding of children’s play preferences, social and environmental contexts, and frequency of play. The iCan-Play assessment results in a play profile and guides a systematic intervention aimed to address barriers and facilitators of play in children with SMD. The goal is to guide therapists on how to expand play, promote developmentally appropriate play, and assist play by creating meaningful and client-centered goals

Digital Taxation Lessons From Wayfair and the U.S. States’ Responses

This article provides a detailed and structured synthesis of the discussion that took place in the context of the fireside chat event held by the WU Global Tax Policy Center at the Institute of Austrian and International Tax Law on December 17, 2018, at which Hellerstein was the guest speaker. The event was one of the initiatives of the Digital Economy Tax Network, a multi-stakeholder forum, which organized a workshop on the VAT/goods and services tax and the digital economy December 17-18, 2018, in Vienna. In this article, the authors examine the lessons that the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s Wayfair decision might offer for the global debate over how to tax the digital economy

Addressing Ecological Uncertainty and Nature Conservation Conflicts: Adaptive Management Models for English Nature Conservation Law and Policy and Practice: A Case Study of the Humberhead Levels Nature Improvement Area

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of the complexity of nature conservation within a regulatory context by exploring the capacity of English nature conservation law and policy to support the adaptation of decisions to constantly changing ecological conditions and competing interests. The researcher undertook a case study in the Humberhead Levels Nature Improvement Area in order to explore how conservation management operates in practice within the legal framework for nature conservation and how different nature conservation is on the ground. Law’s traditionally adversarial, linear and reductionist approach makes it ill-equipped to respond to these manifestations of social-ecological complexity. Adaptive management is proposed in this thesis as capable of responding to the challenges of uncertainty and conflict. Two models are identified: one that highlights the need for evolving scientific knowledge and another that provides a framework for conflict resolution, stressing the need for collaboration. The thesis suggests that within the English nature conservation legal framework adaptive management, albeit not prescribed, can apply. The thesis also suggests that law primarily sets a framework that delineates action. There are only a few cases where administrative action is prescribed by law. Even within designated areas, the approach taken is one of ‘regulated flexibility’. Wide administrative discretion, underpinned by judicial deference, allows for variable implementation, nevertheless against a set of firm rules to prevent abuse by all parties involved. Within this framework, it lies with the administration to set thresholds of flexibility and choose which of an array of available instruments to implement. The end result can be anywhere across a continuum from technocratic to collaborative, from static to adaptive decision making. The empirical study in the HHL NIA suggests that the scale is tipped in favour of the latter. Both models of adaptive management were evident, each being more prominent in certain stages of decision making. Finally, the thesis proposes that amendments such as a statutory requirement of proactive coherent management planning and the introduction of multilateral and collective agreements are some of the ways that the regime can “adapt” in order to become “adaptive.

25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Numerical Detection Methods

The detection and characterization of self-organized criticality (SOC), in both real and simulated data, has undergone many significant revisions over the past 25 years. The explosive advances in the many numerical methods available for detecting, discriminating, and ultimately testing, SOC have played a critical role in developing our understanding of how systems experience and exhibit SOC. In this article, methods of detecting SOC are reviewed; from correlations to complexity to critical quantities. A description of the basic autocorrelation method leads into a detailed analysis of application-oriented methods developed in the last 25 years. In the second half of this manuscript space-based, time-based and spatial-temporal methods are reviewed and the prevalence of power laws in nature is described, with an emphasis on event detection and characterization. The search for numerical methods to clearly and unambiguously detect SOC in data often leads us outside the comfort zone of our own disciplines - the answers to these questions are often obtained by studying the advances made in other fields of study. In addition, numerical detection methods often provide the optimum link between simulations and experiments in scientific research. We seek to explore this boundary where the rubber meets the road, to review this expanding field of research of numerical detection of SOC systems over the past 25 years, and to iterate forwards so as to provide some foresight and guidance into developing breakthroughs in this subject over the next quarter of a century.Comment: Space Science Review series on SO

Cloning, Characteristics, and Functional Analysis of Rabbit NADPH Oxidase 5

Background: Nox5 was the last member of the Nox enzyme family to be identified. Functionally distinct from the other Nox isoforms, our understanding of its physiological significance has been hampered by the absence of Nox5 in mouse and rat genomes. Nox5 is present in the genomes of other species such as the rabbit that have broad utility as models of cardiovascular disease. However, the mRNA sequence, characteristics, and functional analysis of rabbit Nox5 has not been fully defined and were the goals of the current study. Methods: Rabbit Nox5 was amplified from rabbit tissue, cloned, and sequenced. COS-7 cells were employed for expression and functional analysis via Western blotting and measurements of superoxide. We designed and synthesized miRNAs selectively targeting rabbit Nox5. The nucleotide and amino acid sequences of rabbit Nox5 were aligned with those of putative rabbit isoforms (X1, X2, X3, and X4). A phylogenetic tree was generated based on the mRNA sequence for Nox5 from rabbit and other species. Results: Sequence alignment revealed that the identified rabbit Nox5 was highly conserved with the predicted sequence of rabbit Nox5. Cell based experiments reveal that rabbit Nox5 was robustly expressed and produced superoxide at rest and in a calcium and PMA-dependent manner that was susceptible to superoxide dismutase and the flavoprotein inhibitor, DPI. miRNA-1 was shown to be most effective in down-regulating the expression of rabbit Nox5. Phylogenetic analysis revealed a close relationship between rabbit and armadillo Nox5. Rabbit Nox5 was relatively closely related to human Nox5, but lies in a distinct cluster. Conclusion: Our study establishes the suitability of the rabbit as a model organism to further our understanding of the role of Nox5 in cardiovascular and other diseases and provides new information on the genetic relationship of Nox5 genes in different species

The role of form in morphological priming: evidence from bilinguals

This article explores how bilinguals perform automatic morphological decomposition processes, focusing on within- and cross-language masked morphological priming effects. In Experiment 1, unbalanced Spanish (L1) – English (L2) bilingual participants completed a lexical decision task on English targets that could be preceded by morphologically related or unrelated derived masked English and Spanish prime words. The cognate status of the masked Spanish primes was manipulated, in order to explore to what extent form overlap mediates cross-language morphological priming. In Experiment 2, a group of balanced native Basque-Spanish speakers completed a lexical decision task on Spanish targets preceded by morphologically related or unrelated Basque or Spanish masked primes. In this experiment, a large number of items was tested and the cognate status was manipulated according to a continuous measure of orthographic overlap, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of the role of form overlap in cross-language morphological priming. Results demonstrated the existence of between- language masked morphological priming, which was exclusively found for cognate prime-target pairs. Furthermore, the results from balanced and unbalanced bilinguals were highly similar showing that proficiency in the two languages at test does not seem to modulate the pattern of data. These results are correctly accounted for by mechanisms of early morpho-orthographic decomposition that do not necessarily imply an automatic translation of the prime. In contrast, other competing accounts that are based on translation processes do not seem able to capture the present results