IMPORTANCE The economic effect of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) on individuals with the disorder, their families, and society as a whole is poorly understood and has not been updated in light of ...recent findings. OBJECTIVE To update estimates of age-specific, direct, indirect, and lifetime societal economic costs, including new findings on indirect costs, such as individual and parental productivity costs, associated with ASDs. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A literature review was conducted of US and UK studies on individuals with ASDs and their families in October 2013 using the following keywords: age, autism spectrum disorder, prevalence, accommodation, special education, productivity loss, employment, costs, and economics. Current data on prevalence, level of functioning, and place of residence were combined with mean annual costs of services and support, opportunity costs, and productivity losses of individuals with ASDs with or without intellectual disability. EXPOSURE Presence of ASDs. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Mean annual medical, nonmedical, and indirect economic costs and lifetime costs were measured for individuals with ASDs separately for individuals with and without intellectual disability in the United States and the United Kingdom. RESULTS The cost of supporting an individual with an ASD and intellectual disability during his or her lifespan was $2.4 million in the United States and £1.5 million (US $2.2 million) in the United Kingdom. The cost of supporting an individual with an ASD without intellectual disability was $1.4 million in the United States and £0.92 million (US $1.4 million) in the United Kingdom. The largest cost components for children were special education services and parental productivity loss. During adulthood, residential care or supportive living accommodation and individual productivity loss contributed the highest costs. Medical costs were much higher for adults than for children. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The substantial direct and indirect economic effect of ASDs emphasizes the need to continue to search for effective interventions that make best use of scarce societal resources. The distribution of economic effect across many different service systems raises questions about coordination of services and sectors. The enormous effect on families also warrants policy attention.
The increased energy and luminosity of the LHC in the run-2 data taking period requires a more selective trigger menu in order to satisfy the physics goals of ATLAS. Therefore the electronics of the ...central trigger system is upgraded to allow for a larger variety and more sophisticated trigger criteria. In addition, the software controlling the central trigger processor (CTP) has been redesigned to allow the CTP to accommodate three freely configurable and separately operating sets of sub detectors, each independently using the almost full functionality of the trigger hardware. This new approach and its operational advantages are discussed as well as the hardware upgrades.
For the next run of the LHC, the ATLAS Level-1 trigger system will include topological information on trigger objects from the calorimeters and muon detectors. In order to supply coarse grained muon ...topological information, the existing MUCTPI (Muon-to-Central-Trigger-Processor Interface) system has been upgraded. The MIOCT (Muon Octant) module firmware has been then modified to extract, encode and send topological information through the existing MUCTPI electrical trigger outputs. The topological information from the muon detectors will be sent to the Level-1 Topological Trigger Processor (L1Topo) through the MUCTPI-to-Level-1-Topological-Processor (MuCTPiToTopo) interface. Examples of physics searches involving muons are: search for Lepton Flavour Violation, Bs-physics, Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics and others. This paper describes the modifications to the MUCTPI and its integration with the full trigger chain.
Starting in 2014, the LHC will collide bunches of protons at up to 14 TeV with aninstantaneous luminosity increasing above the design value of 1 x 10 super(34) cm super(-2)s super(-1). Even thoughthe ...resulting higher event rate will challenge the existing ATLAS data acquisition system, thetrigger rate can be reduced by selecting channels based on their expected decay topology andthus reducing background. This will be achieved by introducing a new FPGA based module inthe Level-1 Trigger: the Topological Processor (L1Topo). With L1Topo it will be possible toconcentrate detailed information from the entire calorimeters and the muon detector into a single module. L1Topo will receive a total aggregate bandwidth of approximately 1 Tb/s. High density optical I/O and state of the art FPGAs with embedded multi-Gb/s transceivers will be required. For a typicalalgorithm, the topology data will be processed in less than 100 ns. This paper focuses on thedesign of the first L1Topo prototype and results from a full-size, full-function demonstrator module. Implementation details of a topological algorithm and latency figures are presented.
Abstract
The Global Trigger Versatile Module (GVM) has been developed within the framework of the ATLAS detector Phase-II upgrade. The GVM acts as an auxiliary hardware component that can be used for ...development, testing and operational purposes within and beyond the ATLAS Global Trigger in projects requiring high bandwidth and processing capabilities. The module is designed to host an advanced Xilinx Ultrascale+ VU13P FPGA and Finisar BOA optical modules, running at high data rates up to 25.8 Gb/s, as well as other hardware resources needed for the Global Trigger, located on a high-density PCB, optimized for high-speed data transmission. A testing program of the Global Trigger Versatile Module includes verification of the main hardware functionality of the module, performance evaluation of the high-speed optical modules and the FPGA, and Global Common Module development firmware tests.
The existing ATLAS trigger consists of three levels. The level 1 (L1) is an FPGAs based custom designed trigger, while the second and third levels are software based. The LHC machine plans to bring ...the beam energy to the maximum value of 7 TeV and to increase the luminosity in the coming years. The current L1 trigger system is therefore seriously challenged. To cope with the resulting higher event rate, as part of the ATLAS trigger upgrade, a new electronics module is foreseen to be added into the ATLAS Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger electronics chain: the topological Processor (TP). Such a processor needs fast optical I/O and large aggregate bandwidth to use the information on trigger object position in space (e.g. jets in the calorimeters or muons measured in the muon detectors) to improve the purity of the L1 triggers streams by applying topological cuts within the L1 latency budget. In this paper, an overview of the adopted technological solutions and the R&D activities on the demonstrator for the TP ("GOLD") are presented.
The three-dimensional (3D) structure of habitat-forming corals has profound impacts on reef ecosystem processes. Elucidating coral structural responses to the environment is therefore crucial to ...understand changes in these ecosystems. However, little is known of how environmental factors shape coral structure in deep and dark waters, where cold-water coral (CWC) reefs thrive. Here, we attempt to infer the influence of current flow on CWC framework architecture, using 3D scanning to quantify colony shape traits (volume compactness and surface complexity) in the reef-building CWC
Desmophyllum pertusum
from adjacent fjord and offshore habitats with contrasting flow regimes. We find substantial architectural variability both between and within habitats. We show that corals are generally more compact in the fjord habitat, reflecting the prevailing higher current speeds, although differences in volume compactness between fjord and offshore corals are more subtle when comparing the fjord with the more exposed side of the offshore setting, probably due to locally intensified currents. Conversely, we observe no clear disparity in coral surface complexity between habitats (despite its positive correlation with volume compactness), suggesting it is not affected by current speed. Unlike volume compactness, surface complexity is similarly variable within a single colony as it is between colonies within the same habitat or between habitats and is therefore perhaps more dependent than volume compactness on microenvironmental conditions. These findings suggest a highly plastic, trait-specific and functionally relevant structural response of CWCs to current flow and underscore the importance of multiple concurrent sources of hydrodynamic forcing on CWC growth.
Cold-water corals are important bioengineers that provide structural habitat for a diverse species community. About 70 % of the presently known scleractinian cold-water corals are expected to be ...exposed to corrosive waters by the end of this century due to ocean acidification. At the same time, the corals will experience a steady warming of their environment. Studies on the sensitivity of cold-water corals to climate change mainly concentrated on single stressors in short-term incubation approaches, thus not accounting for possible long-term acclimatisation and the interactive effects of multiple stressors. Besides, preceding studies did not test for possible compensatory effects of a change in food availability. In this study a multifactorial long-term experiment (6 months) was conducted with end-of-the-century scenarios of elevated pCO2 and temperature levels in order to examine the acclimatisation potential of the cosmopolitan cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa to future climate change related threats. For the first time multiple ocean change impacts including the role of the nutritional status were tested on L. pertusa with regard to growth, ‘fitness’, and survival. Our results show that while L. pertusa is capable of calcifying under elevated CO2 and temperature, its condition (fitness) is more strongly influenced by food availability rather than changes in seawater chemistry. Whereas growth rates increased at elevated temperature (+ 4°C), they decreased under elevated CO2 concentrations (~ 800 µatm). No difference in net growth was detected when corals were exposed to the combination of increased CO2 and temperature compared to ambient conditions. A 10-fold higher food supply stimulated growth under elevated temperature, which was not observed in the combined treatment. This indicates that increased food supply does not compensate for adverse effects of ocean acidification and underlines the importance of considering the nutritional status in studies investigating organism responses under environmental changes.
Cosmic-ray tests of the DØ preshower detector Baringer, P; Bross, A; Buescher, V ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
08/2001, Letnik:
469, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The DØ preshower detector consists of scintillator strips with embedded wavelength-shifting fibers, and a readout using Visible Light Photon Counters. The response to minimum ionizing particles has ...been tested with cosmic-ray muons. We report results on the gain calibration and light-yield distributions. The spatial resolution is investigated taking into account the light sharing between strips, the effects of multiple scattering and various systematic uncertainties. The detection efficiency and noise contamination are also investigated.
Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) are photo-sensors consisting of an array of hundreds to thousands pixels with a typical pitch of 10-100 mum. They exhibit an excellent photon counting and time ...resolution. Therefore applications of SiPMs are emerging in many fields. In order to characterize SiPMs, the PRISMA Detector Lab at Mainz has established three automated test setups. Setup-A is dedicated to measure the gain, the dark count rate and the optical crosstalk probability. The temperature dependencies are characterized by operating the setup in a climate chamber. Setup-B is an optical system to measure the photon detection efficiency. Setup-C addresses the most challenging aspect of comparing SiPMs which is the uniformity of the active surface. Because of the small pixel size, a micro focus lens is attached to a picosecond laser diode to collimate the beam into the sub-structures of the sensors. A three-axis micro-positioning system moves the SiPMs into the focus of the laser spot and then automatically scans the active surfaces. In this paper we present the measurements of several SiPMs and compare their performance.
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