OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to implement and evaluate a classroom-based Animal-Assisted Activities (AAA) program on social functioning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). DESIGN This was a multisite, control-to-intervention design study. SETTINGS/LOCATION The study was conducted in 41 classrooms in 15 schools in Brisbane, Australia. SUBJECTS Sixty-four (64) 5- t...

We construct quasiconformal mappings in Euclidean spaces by integration of a discontinuous kernel against doubling measures with suitable decay. The differentials of mappings that arise in this way satisfy an isotropic form of the doubling condition. We prove that this isotropic doubling condition is satisfied by the distance functions of certain fractal sets. Finally, we construct an isotropic...

The authors present the central capacity sharing (CCS) model and derive equations describing its behaviors to explain results from dual-task situations. The predictions of the CCS model are contrasted with those of the central bottleneck model. The CCS model predicts all of the hallmark effects of the psychological refractory period (PRP) pardigm: -1 slope of the PRP effect at short stimulus on...

Stimuli that are clearly positive or negative (hence valence-laden stimuli) have the potential to interrupt unrelated task processing. A typical example is the emotional Stroop effect (ESE) in which responding to a certain task feature (e.g., color) is delayed by the presentation of task-irrelevant valent stimuli (e.g., negative pictures) compared to valence-neutral stimuli. Here we scrutinize ...

Recently, multi-time stepping methods have become very popular among scientist due to their high stability in problems with critical conditions. One important shortcoming of these methods backs to their high amount of uncontrolled amplitude decay. This study proposes a new multi-time stepping method in which the time step is split into two sub-steps. The first sub-step is solved using the well-...

We study the coupling of basic quantitative portfolio selection strategies with a financial news article prediction system, AZFinText. By varying the degrees of portfolio formation time, we found that a hybrid system using both quantitative strategy and a full set of financial news articles, performed the best. With a 1-week portfolio formation period we achieved a 20.79% trading return using a...

Modular organization in control architecture may underlie the versatility of human motor control; but the nature of the interface relating sensory input through task-selection in the space of performance variables to control actions in the space of the elemental variables is currently unknown. Our central question is whether the control architecture converges to a serial process along a single ...

background: the purpose of this study was to examine whether the frequency of breakfast eating was related with overweight/obesity in korean adolescents. method: we analyzed the data collected in the 5 th kyrbws, in which 72,399 adolescents participated in 2009. we assessed the association between frequency of breakfast eating and body mass index by using multivariate logistic regression analys...

OBJECTIVE To determine the optimal methotrexate dose in individual patients and to explore whether this optimal dose and the level of disease activity at that dose could be predicted. METHODS Data from CAMERA II trial comparing MTX and MTX with 10 mg of prednisone both in a tight control treatment strategy in early RA was used. For each patient a curve for disease activity over time was fitte...