A Community-Based Accommodation Program for Adults with Autism and Mental Retardation

There is a paucity of treatment literature for significant and intractable behavior problems in adults with autism and mental retardation. Four adults with autism, severe to profound mental retardation, and serious, long-term behavior problems participated in an accommodation training program as an adjunct to more traditional behavioral and medical treatments. The accommodation program consisted of designing highly structured and predictable daily routines to reduce the impact of environmental factors that had previously resulted in behavior problems. Following three to six years of participation in the accommodation program, a significant treatment effect size was obtained for all participants. The benefits of this approach for improving the treatment-resistant problem behaviors and quality of life for adults with autism and mental retardation in a community-based setting are discussed as well as directions for future research

Behavior Problems in Toddlers With and Without Developmental Delays: Comparison of Treatment Outcomes

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of an in-home parent management program for toddlers with behavior problems and developmental delays by comparing outcomes for a group of toddlers with developmental delays (n = 27) and a group of toddlers without developmental delays (n = 27). The majority of children lived in single parent, low-income homes. Results suggest that the parent management program is equally effective for children with and without developmental delays. Parents from both groups reported clinically significant improvement in their children\u27s behavior and parenting practices. Clinical implications regarding the importance of these findings for improving outcomes for toddlers with behavior problems and developmental delays living in poverty were discussed

Health and Health-related Problems in a Cohort of Apprentices in Switzerland

Out of a cohort of 1200 apprentices in Switzerland, 781 boys and 417 girls completed a questionnaire on their perceived health and health problems in their selected apprenticeship. Each participant was interviewed afterwards by the school nurses in three state-owned professional schools where the apprentices attended their classes. Ninety-five per cent of the respondents enjoyed excellent health, 28 cases had nervous system or psychological problems, 17 cases had problems of a locomotor nature, 12 subjects had gastrointestinal or endocrinological symptoms, and there was one with a past history of a malignant disease. Twelve cases also had respiratory symptoms or diagnoses. One hundred and nineteen apprentices reported that they had been troubled by the workplace. Exposure to solvents, chemicals in general, dust, smoke and noise were often mentioned as causes. Thirty-eight of them had contacted their family physician in connection with these problems. The cohort had experienced, mostly during their first year, 191 cases of accident necessitating medical care. Cuts, shocks and falls were the most common occurrences. Meat cutters and butchers had the highest frequency of accidents. Near-accidents had been experienced so far by 46 per cent of the respondents. At the interviews, school nurses provided counsel and intervened in flagrant cases of occupational risks, It seems that an ordinary medical certificate does not predict accident-proneness or possible medical problems, while in-school health programmes could provide rapid intervention and suppor

Older Adults and Forgoing Cancer Screening

Although there is a growing recognition that older adults and those with extensive comorbid conditions undergo cancer screening too frequently, there is little information about patients’ perceptions regarding cessation of cancer screening. Information on older adults’ views of screening cessation would be helpful both for clinicians and for those designing interventions to reduce overscreening

Global Existence and Regularity for the 3D Stochastic Primitive Equations of the Ocean and Atmosphere with Multiplicative White Noise

The Primitive Equations are a basic model in the study of large scale Oceanic and Atmospheric dynamics. These systems form the analytical core of the most advanced General Circulation Models. For this reason and due to their challenging nonlinear and anisotropic structure the Primitive Equations have recently received considerable attention from the mathematical community. In view of the complex multi-scale nature of the earth's climate system, many uncertainties appear that should be accounted for in the basic dynamical models of atmospheric and oceanic processes. In the climate community stochastic methods have come into extensive use in this connection. For this reason there has appeared a need to further develop the foundations of nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations in connection with the Primitive Equations and more generally. In this work we study a stochastic version of the Primitive Equations. We establish the global existence of strong, pathwise solutions for these equations in dimension 3 for the case of a nonlinear multiplicative noise. The proof makes use of anisotropic estimates, $L^{p}_{t}L^{q}_{x}$ estimates on the pressure and stopping time arguments.Comment: To appear in Nonlinearit

Update of Atlas of Major Texas Oil Reservoirs Data Base and Atlas of Major Texas Gas Reservoirs Data Base

Updating both the "Atlas of Major Texas Oil Reservoirs: Database" (Holtz and others, 1991) and the "Atlas of Major Texas Gas Reservoirs: Database" (Garrett and others, 1991) centered on updating cumulative production data current to December 31, 1992, for reservoirs already in the database and adding new significant-sized reservoirs (cumulative production greater than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent) to the databases. Addition of new reservoirs to the database resulted in the modification of existing plays or the determination of new plays. Play boundaries were also modified to accommodate the additional reservoirs. Oil and gas production data used for the cumulative production update and the determination of significant-sized reservoirs were obtained from Dwight's Energy data. For reservoirs already included in the Atlas databases, annual production values were added to the cumulative production already determined by the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) or reported by the Railroad Commission of Texas. For new reservoirs, the cumulative production values reported by Dwight's Energy data were applied. Oil reservoirs originally listed in both databases because of large gas production were combined and now are listed only in the updated Oil Atlas database.Bureau of Economic Geolog

Local asymptotic normality for qubit states

We consider n identically prepared qubits and study the asymptotic properties of the joint state \rho^{\otimes n}. We show that for all individual states \rho situated in a local neighborhood of size 1/\sqrt{n} of a fixed state \rho^0, the joint state converges to a displaced thermal equilibrium state of a quantum harmonic oscillator. The precise meaning of the convergence is that there exist physical transformations T_{n} (trace preserving quantum channels) which map the qubits states asymptotically close to their corresponding oscillator state, uniformly over all states in the local neighborhood. A few consequences of the main result are derived. We show that the optimal joint measurement in the Bayesian set-up is also optimal within the pointwise approach. Moreover, this measurement converges to the heterodyne measurement which is the optimal joint measurement of position and momentum for the quantum oscillator. A problem of local state discrimination is solved using local asymptotic normality.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, published versio