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.
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.
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.
Presence of ASDs.
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.
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.
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 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.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015 will collide proton beams with increased luminosity from 1034 up to 3 × 1034cm−2s−1. ATLAS is an LHC experiment designed to measure decay properties of high ...energetic particles produced in the protons collisions. The higher luminosity places stringent operational and physical requirements on the ATLAS Trigger in order to reduce the 40MHz collision rate to a manageable event storage rate of 1kHz while at the same time, selecting those events with valuable physics meaning. The Level-1 Trigger is the first rate-reducing step in the ATLAS Trigger, with an output rate of 100kHz and decision latency of less than 2.5µs. It is composed of the Calorimeter Trigger (L1Calo), the Muon Trigger (L1Muon) and the Central Trigger Processor (CTP). By 2015, there will be a new electronics element in the chain: the Topological Processor System (L1Topo system). The L1Topo system consist of a single AdvancedTCA shelf equipped with three L1Topo processor blades. It will make it possible to use detailed information from L1Calo and L1Muon processed in individual state-of-the-art FPGA processors. This allows the determination of angles between jets and or leptons and calculates kinematic variables based on lists of selected sorted objects. The system is designed to receive and process up to 6Tb s of real time data. The paper reports the relevant upgrades of the Level-1 trigger with focus on the topological processor design and commissioning.
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