19,706 research outputs found
A national UK survey of peripatetic support teams for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disability who display challenging behaviour
Background: The service provision model of peripatetic support teams for people with intellectual disabilities who present challenging behaviour has been well established in the United Kingdom, with a small but growing evidence base. The current context in the UK would appear to indicate an ever-increasing role for such teams, in order to support people in their own communities and reduce the reliance on out-of-area placements. This study sought to establish the current position of such teams within the UK.
Method and materials: 46 teams were given the opportunity to complete an online questionnaire regarding the team's day to day functioning.
Results: 20 services responded to the survey providing a range of data. The results suggested that the services were mainly targeted towards adults, had a range of working practices and therapeutic orientations, with broadly successful outcomes (albeit self reported). The data would also suggest that this type of provision had diminished in recent years.
Conclusions: The implications of the survey are discussed within the context of the current policy in the UK. In particular, the lack of provision for children, the use of evidence based practice and what appears to be a diminishing resource just at the time when it is most needed are explored
Enthalpy-based Thermal Evolution of Loops: II. Improvements to the Model
This paper develops the zero-dimensional (0D) hydrodynamic coronal loop model
"Enthalpy-based Thermal Evolution of Loops" (EBTEL) proposed by Klimchuk et al
(2008), which studies the plasma response to evolving coronal heating,
especially impulsive heating events. The basis of EBTEL is the modelling of
mass exchange between the corona and transition region and chromosphere in
response to heating variations, with the key parameter being the ratio of
transition region to coronal radiation. We develop new models for this
parameter that now include gravitational stratification and a physically
motivated approach to radiative cooling. A number of examples are presented,
including nanoflares in short and long loops, and a small flare. The new
features in EBTEL are important for accurate tracking of, in particular, the
density. The 0D results are compared to a 1D hydro code (Hydrad) with generally
good agreement. EBTEL is suitable for general use as a tool for (a) quick-look
results of loop evolution in response to a given heating function, (b)
extensive parameter surveys and (c) situations where the modelling of hundreds
or thousands of elemental loops is needed. A single run takes a few seconds on
a contemporary laptop
Efficient Hamiltonian programming in qubit arrays with nearest-neighbour couplings
We consider the problem of selectively controlling couplings in a practical
quantum processor with always-on interactions that are diagonal in the
computational basis, using sequences of local NOT gates. This methodology is
well-known in NMR implementations, but previous approaches do not scale
efficiently for the general fully-connected Hamiltonian, where the complexity
of finding time-optimal solutions makes them only practical up to a few tens of
qubits. Given the rapid growth in the number of qubits in cutting-edge quantum
processors, it is of interest to investigate the applicability of this control
scheme to much larger scale systems with realistic restrictions on
connectivity. Here we present an efficient scheme to find near time-optimal
solutions that can be applied to engineered qubit arrays with local
connectivity for any number of qubits, indicating the potential for practical
quantum computing in such systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Shortened and clarified from previous versio
Spatial opinion dynamics and the effects of two types of mixing
Spatially situated opinions that can be held with different degrees of conviction lead to spatiotemporal patterns such as clustering (homophily), polarization, and deadlock. Our goal is to understand how sensitive these patterns are to changes in the local nature of interactions. We introduce two different mixing mechanisms, spatial relocation and nonlocal interaction (“telephoning”), to an earlier fully spatial model (no mixing). Interestingly, the mechanisms that create deadlock in the fully spatial model have the opposite effect when there is a sufficient amount of mixing. With telephoning, not only is polarization and deadlock broken up, but consensus is hastened. The effects of mixing by relocation are even more pronounced. Further insight into these dynamics is obtained for selected parameter regimes via comparison to the mean-field differential equations
Neutrino oscillation probabilities through the looking glass
In this paper we review different expansions for neutrino oscillation
probabilities in matter in the context of long-baseline neutrino experiments.
We examine the accuracy and computational efficiency of different exact and
approximate expressions. We find that many of the expressions used in the
literature are not precise enough for the next generation of long-baseline
experiments, but several of them are while maintaining comparable simplicity.
The results of this paper can be used as guidance to both phenomenologists and
experimentalists when implementing the various oscillation expressions into
their analysis tools.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figure
SOUSA: the Swift Optical/Ultraviolet Supernova Archive
The Ultra-Violet Optical Telescope on the Swift spacecraft has observed
hundreds of supernovae, covering all major types and most subtypes. Here we
introduce the Swift Optical/Ultraviolet Supernova Archive (SOUSA), which will
contain all of the supernova images and photometry. We describe the observation
and reduction procedures and how they impact the final data. We show photometry
from well-observed examples of most supernova classes, whose absolute
magnitudes and colors may be used to infer supernova types in the absence of a
spectrum. A full understanding of the variety within classes and a robust
photometric separation of the groups requires a larger sample, which will be
provided by the final archive. The data from the existing Swift supernovae are
also useful for planning future observations with Swift as well as future UV
observatories.Comment: Accepted for publication in the UV issue of Astrophysics and Space
Science 10 pages, 6 figures SOUSA is an archive in progress with data being
posted to the Swift SN website:
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/sne/swift_sn.htm
Goal-based composition of scalable hybrid analytics for heterogeneous architectures
Crafting scalable analytics in order to extract actionable business intelligence is a challenging endeavour, requiring multiple layers of expertise and experience. Often, this expertise is irreconcilably split between an organisation’s engineers and subject matter domain experts. Previous approaches to this problem have relied on technically adept users with tool-specific training.
Such an approach has a number of challenges: Expertise — There are few data-analytic subject domain experts with in-depth technical knowledge of compute architectures; Performance — Analysts do not generally make full use of the performance and scalability capabilities of the underlying architectures; Heterogeneity — calculating the most performant and scalable mix of real-time (on-line) and batch (off-line) analytics in a problem domain is difficult; Tools — Supporting frameworks will often direct several tasks, including, composition, planning, code generation, validation, performance tuning and analysis, but do not typically provide end-to-end solutions embedding all of these activities.
In this paper, we present a novel semi-automated approach to the composition, planning, code generation and performance tuning of scalable hybrid analytics, using a semantically rich type system which requires little programming expertise from the user. This approach is the first of its kind to permit domain experts with little or no technical expertise to assemble complex and scalable analytics, for hybrid on- and off-line analytic environments, with no additional requirement for low-level engineering support.
This paper describes (i) an abstract model of analytic assembly and execution, (ii) goal-based planning and (iii) code generation for hybrid on- and off-line analytics. An implementation, through a system which we call Mendeleev, is used to (iv) demonstrate the applicability of this technique through a series of case studies, where a single interface is used to create analytics that can be run simultaneously over on- and off-line environments. Finally, we (v) analyse the performance of the planner, and (vi) show that the performance of Mendeleev’s generated code is comparable with that of hand-written analytics
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