Search results

In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the statistic that 1 out of every 59 children had a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Young children with ASD have unique needs specifically related to the characteristics that impact their communication and social emotional and behavioral development. These unique needs require early and intensive intervention to minimize their lifelong impact. It is important to identify and use evidence-based interventions to help parents support their children at home, and as a continuation of the skills they are being taught in other settings. This chapter will address the prevalence of young children with ASD, the impact and need for family involvement in intervention, and service provision and potential interventions.

IN order to be able to discriminate with certainty between butter and such margarine as is sold in England, it is necessary to carry out two or three elaborate and delicate chemical processes. But there has always been a craving by the public for some simple method of determining the genuineness of butter by means of which the necessary trouble could be dispensed with. It has been suggested that such easy detection would be possible if all margarine bought and sold in England were to be manufactured with some distinctive colouring added—light‐blue, for instance—or were to contain a small amount of phenolphthalein, so that the addition of a drop of a solution of caustic potash to a suspected sample would cause it to become pink if it were margarine, while nothing would occur if it were genuine butter. These methods, which have been put forward seriously, will be found on consideration to be unnecessary, and, indeed, absurd.

Last month we introduced the advantages of new generation fire alarm systems. We ended our introduction on a cautionary note, however, by warning facilities managers to be wary of the indiscriminate claims of those selling ‘intelligent technology’, which is currently something of a fad in building services. Sound experience of analogue/addressable systems in use is not widespread: the potential for extra capital costs with this equipment and the opportunities for customised designs, means that care must be taken in comparing your needs with the varied facilities available. Some companies specialising in new generation systems accept that they are not the answer for all applications. Others do not Coping with this commercial bias, in the face of genuinely different design philosophies, will prove difficult; more so because of the absence of definite codes and standards (BS 5839 is currently being revised). This article hopes to present some useful information to help you procure the right system.

This chapter reviews the media's fascination with one of the most infamous women in Canadian history. Karla Homolka was found guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of two Ontario teenage girls in the early 1990s. Her husband, Paul Bernardo, was convicted on a number of charges associated with these deaths, including sexual assault and first degree murder. The chapter traces the initial print reports of the arrest, trial and sentencing of Karla Homolka; the application of the ‘Ken and Barbie’ moniker as a description of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo; and the characterization of Karla Homolka's sentencing as the proverbial ‘deal with the devil’. The media continued to pursue Karla Homolka long after she had completed her twelve-year prison sentence and was released into the community. The media's evolution in coverage of this case is described, and it is argued that Karla Homolka's treatment by the media was, and continues to be, an example of the kind of biased coverage that illustrates the gendered manner in which violence is conceptualized in our society, and calls into question the structural and systematic condemnation that is directed towards those women who commit violent crimes. This chapter emphasizes that the lens through which the media covers violent crimes for which women are accused and/or convicted is often clouded with vitriol and malevolence.

Although scholars have shown that group goals can positively affect group performance, very little work has focused on developing an understanding of group feedback as a component of the group goal‐group performance relationship. A current model of individual‐level response to group feedback is examined as a basis for moving towards an interactionist perspective encompassing both the individual and group‐level response to group feedback based on an understanding of groups as information processors. It is suggested that individual feedback provided in groups is a complex phenomena necessitating an understanding of the multiple ways in which information in groups may be processed. Implications for future research are considered.

The nexus where law, social movements, and organizations meet demands further explication. This research adds to our understandings of these dynamics by examining the case of the central Appalachian anti-strip mining movement. After developing a social network technique to analyze over thirty years of newspapers, we find a period of reduced movement activity following the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. Conversely, we observe a reinvigoration of the movement following the passage of the Clean Air Amendments of 1990 and the perverse incentives they created for mountaintop removal mining. Finally, we see that joint participation in lawsuits is a primary tie that binds these groups together.

Little is known about perceptions of medical expenditure risks despite their presumed relevance to the demand for health insurance. This is the first study to examine households’ beliefs about their future spending on health care. The study made a unique elicitation of subjective probabilities of medical expenditures from rural Ethiopians participating in a panel survey and offered the opportunity to enrol in a health insurance programme. The vast majority of respondents give logically consistent responses to the subjective probability questions. The data indicate that the cross-sectional variance of realized expenditures, which is often used to proxy risk exposure, greatly overestimate the risk faced by any single household. Consistent with the serial correlation observed in realized expenditures, expectations are positively correlated with past expenses. They are revised upward in response to an increase in realized expenditure and, to some extent, they predict expenditure incurred in the year ahead. Despite containing information on future medical expenditures, there is no evidence that expectations influence the decision to take out health insurance, although plans to insure are positively related to the perceived volatility of expenses.

These results suggest that adverse selection may not threaten the viability of voluntary health insurance. A caveat is that measurement error in the reported probabilities may weaken the test for adverse selection. Notwithstanding this limitation, measurement of household-specific distributions of future medical expenses is feasible and avoids relying on the cross-sectional variance, which provides an upwardly biased estimate of medical expenditure risk.