Speech and language difficulties in children with and without a family history of dyslexia

Comorbidity between SLI and dyslexia is well documented. Researchers have variously argued that dyslexia is a separate disorder from SLI, or that children with dyslexia show a subset of the difficulties shown in SLI. This study examines these hypotheses by assessing whether family history of dyslexia and speech and language difficulties are separable risk factors for literacy difficulties. Forty-six children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) and 36 children receiving speech therapy (SLT) were compared to 128 typically developing children. A substantial number (41.3%) of the children with FRD had received SLT. The nature of their difficulties did not differ in severity or form from those shown by the other children in SLT. However, both SLT and FRD were independent risk factors in predicting reading difficulties both concurrently and 6 months later. It is argued that the results are best explained in terms of Pennington's (2006) multiple deficits model

Stochastic evaluation of sewer inlet capacity on urban pluvial flooding

In this paper we present an innovative methodology to stochastically assess the impact of sewer inlet conditions on urban pluvial flooding. The results showed that sewer inlet capacity can have a large impact on the occurrence of urban pluvial flooding. The methodology is a useful tool for dealing with uncertainties in sewer inlet operational conditions and contribute to comprehensive assessment of urban pluvial risk assessment

The CTMC-Heston model: calibration and exotic option pricing with SWIFT

This work presents an efficient computational framework for pricing a general class of exotic and vanilla options under a versatile stochastic volatility model. In particular, we propose the use of a finite state continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) model, which closely approximates the classic Heston model but enables a simplified approach for consistently pricing a wide variety of financial derivatives (...