Building musical lives: The impact of supporting musical play in the everyday lives of autistic children and their families

Musical spaces have been observed to be highly engaging for autistic children, ameliorating barriers often experienced in communication and interaction. Music interventions with this group are widespread and have frequently noted the importance of integrating caregivers. Yet beyond music therapy, there is limited research on how to support music-making in daily life for autistic children and their families. In particular, there is a lack of long-term ecological evidence with this group for how music can support everyday functioning, care routines, and wellbeing. In this study, 25 families participated in a 12-month program which supported the integration of music into everyday life. Families were interviewed at the end of the project regarding the effectiveness of music as a support for daily routines, play, and wellbeing. Qualitative thematic analysis highlighted how families implemented musical strategies in widespread ways as a medium to support communication, create valued opportunities for shared interaction, and as a way to scaffold everyday caring routines. Families’ uses of musical play strategies, as observed in this study, emphasize the importance of incorporating caregivers and home environments as part of arts programs for autistic children, and the effectiveness of empowering parents to use music as a tool to navigate everyday life

Noninvasiveness and time symmetry of weak measurements

Measurements in classical and quantum physics are described in fundamentally different ways. Nevertheless, one can formally define similar measurement procedures with respect to the disturbance they cause. Obviously, strong measurements, both classical and quantum, are invasive -- they disturb the measured system. We show that it is possible to define general weak measurements, which are noninvasive: the disturbance becomes negligible as the measurement strength goes to zero. Classical intuition suggests that noninvasive measurements should be time symmetric (if the system dynamics is reversible) and we confirm that correlations are time-reversal symmetric in the classical case. However, quantum weak measurements -- defined analogously to their classical counterparts -- can be noninvasive but not time symmetric. We present a simple example of measurements on a two-level system which violates time symmetry and propose an experiment with quantum dots to measure the time-symmetry violation in a third-order current correlation function.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, more information at http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~abednorz/tasym

Alkoxylated β-Naphthol as an Additive for Tin Plating from Chloride and Methane Sulfonic Acid Electrolytes

Beta-naphthol was one of the first additives introduced for smooth and homogeneoustin electrodeposition. Although it can be oxidized under the plating conditions, forming either1,2-napthoquinone or polymeric materials based on naphthioxides, it is still in use. In this work,an investigation of its more stable form, alkoxylated beta-naphthol (ABN), on tin plating is undertaken.For this purpose, chloride based (pH ~5) and methane sulfonic acid (MSA, pH ~0.5) electrolytes,including ABN, were prepared. Reaction kinetics were studied by polarization, Tafel measurements,and cyclic voltammetry. Tin electrodeposits were obtained on flat brass substrates. Surfacemorphology and preferred crystal orientation were studied by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)and X-ray Diffraction (XRD). In both studied electrolytes ABN acts as an inhibitor but in the case ofthe chloride electrolyte it is more pronounced. In the MSA electrolyte this effect was overlaid by thepresence of tin-citrate complexes. In the chloride-based electrolyte, ABN has a grain refining effect,while in the MSA electrolyte an increase of ABN concentration leads to a slight enlargement of theaverage grain size. X-ray analysis shows a constant decrease of the (101) intensity with increasingconcentration of ABN for the sample deposited from both baths