The Myth of Attention-Seeking Behavior: Supporting Health and Wellness in People with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Intellectual Disabilities

As a behavioural consultant, one of the most common phrases used in referral information is that the individual is engaging in a series of behaviors “just to get attention”. Attention has been postulated as a motivation for behavior by the most widely used behavioral assessments such as the Motivation Assessment Scale, the Functional Assessment Screening Tool and others. This article will present the concept that people do not want attention, rather they want the things attention brings, such as safety, affection, acceptance and other needs. In a sense, attention is the means to an end, and not the end itself. A conceptualization for identifying the reinforcers sought by people using behavior to get the attention of others is presented within the context of a single case study.

Water storage changes in North America retrieved from GRACE gravity and GPS data

As global warming continues,the monitoring of changes in terrestrial water storage becomes increasingly important since it plays a critical role in understanding global change and water resource management.In North America as elsewhere in the world,changes in water resources strongly impact agriculture and animal husbandry.From a combination of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment（GRACE） gravity and Global Positioning System（GPS） data,it is recently found that water storage from August,2002 to March,2011 recovered after the extreme Canadian Prairies drought between 1999 and 2005.In this paper,we use GRACE monthly gravity data of Release 5 to track the water storage change from August,2002 to June,2014.In Canadian Prairies and the Great Lakes areas,the total water storage is found to have increased during the last decade by a rate of 73.8 ± 14.5 Gt/a,which is larger than that found in the previous study due to the longer time span of GRACE observations used and the reduction of the leakage error.We also find a long term decrease of water storage at a rate of-12.0 ± 4.2 Gt/a in Ungava Peninsula,possibly due to permafrost degradation and less snow accumulation during the winter in the region.In addition,the effect of total mass gain in the surveyed area,on present-day sea level,amounts to-0.18 mm/a,and thus should be taken into account in studies of global sea level change.

Characteristics of gravity signal and loading effect in China

The complex geographical environment in China makes its gravity signals miscellaneous.This work gives a comprehensive representation and explanation in secular trend of gravity change in different regions,the key features of which include positive trend in inner Tibet Plateau and South China and negative trend in North China plain and high mountain Asia（HMA）.We also present the patterns of amplitudes and phases of annual and semiannual change.The mechanism underlying the semiannual period is explicitly discussed.The displacement in three directions expressed in terms of geo-potential spherical coefficients and load Love numbers are given.A case study applied with these equations is presented.The results show that Global Positioning System（GPS） observations can be used to compare with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment（GRACE） derived displacement and the vertical direction has a signal-noise-ratio of about one order of magnitude larger than the horizontal directions.

Can a Michelson-Morley Experiment Designed with Current Solar Velocity Distinguish between Non-Relativistic and Relativistic Theories?

If Michelson were to answer the question posed in the title, given the line of reasoning he used in 1881, Michelson would seat at his desktop computer to calculate the expected fringeshifts for several solar speeds around 400 km/s and various directions of motion. Present author did exactly the same in 2001 to plan his repetition of Michelson and Morley’s (MM) 1887 experiment. The paper sketchedly summarizes the procedure to calculate expected fringeshifts in the MM interferometer for solar speeds available at Miller’s epoch. In a pre-relativistic context, amplitudes of several fringeshifts may be expected in both MM and Miller experiments. However, all interferometer experiments up to 1930 were designed under the (incorrect from a modern viewpoint) assumption that fringeshifts would be smaller than one fringe-width. The inescapable conclusion is that those experiments were not appropriate to measure the true value of solar motion, always yielding a small, but lower than expected, value for solar speed. The ensuing “negative” interpretation led to the birth of relativity theory and to a new series of experiments implicitly designed to test the relativistic hypothesis of length-contraction, while the earlier “positive” experiments were designed to test a different hypothesis: whether the motion of Earth relative to some preferred frame can be measured using an interferometer of constant dimensions. With the benefit of hindsight this writer repeated the MM experiment, correcting main weaknesses identified up to the Michelson-Morley-Miller (MMM) measurements at Mount Wilson from April 1925 to February 1926. A new possible reinterpretation of the MMM data as a sequence of stationary measurements is pointed out. Our Michelson-Morley-Miller-Munera (MMMM) experiment at Bogota (Colombia) from January 2003 to June 2005 gave values for solar absolute velocity in the same range as those obtained by astronomical means. Surprisingly, our results are compatible with modern third-party MM-type experiments designed and interpreted within relativistic contexts. Thus, a so far unexplored possibility arises: can interferometric experiments distinguish between pre-relativistic and relativistic theories? Our answer is negative.