A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / Introduction: With the increase in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) each year comes the need for individualized interventions necessary for children with autism. Many of the treatments currently available are time consuming, costly, and rely heavily on behavioral interventionists despite the lack of qualified interventionists to provide these services. Therefore, there is a growing recognition of the need for efficient, cost-effective treatment models that involves families in the intervention. This study examined the effects of continuous parent training and feedback for 3 months in Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) through telemedicine on responsivity to language opportunities in children with ASD versus a control group of parents receiving one week of PRT training alone. We hypothesized that with telemedicine support, the child’s verbal communication would increase. Methods: 30 child-parent dyads from Tucson, AZ were enrolled in this randomized control trial. Subjects were 24-60 months of age and met DSM-IV criteria for autism at the time of enrollment. All subjects received one week of intensive parent training at the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center (SARRC) in PRT. The support group received telemedicine feedback three times weekly for three months. Data was analyzed using two sample t-tests and Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Results: The control group had a mean responsivity in function verbal utterances of 64.3% and the telemedicine group had a 62.7% verbal responsivity rate prior to initiation of telemedicine support. At three month follow-up, the control group had a mean responsivity rate of 58.6% and the telemedicine group had a mean responsivity of 64.3%. A two sample t-test showed a no significant difference between the two groups with a p-value of 0.51. Conclusions: This study did not find any significant difference between the telemedicine and control groups. However, there is a trend towards increased verbal communication in the telemedicine group. We therefore recommend further studies to determine the utility of telemedicine and parent training in PRT in the treatment of children with ASD.

We introduce an electoral pollster in a two-candidate costly voting model to study the incentives that pollsters have regarding the release of poll results. In our model, the pollster has private knowledge about the distribution of citizens\' preferences, but it may report false information to the public. If this happens, we say the pollster is misreporting the poll. An often heard criticism about pollsters is that they might manipulate in order to benefit some candidate. We show that they have incentives to misreport even in the absence of ideological motives. Moreover, misreported polls are welfare-improving relative to truthful polls. / Introduz-se um instituto de pesquisa eleitoral em um modelo de voto custoso a fim de estudar quais incentivos os institutos possuem ao divulgarem suas pesquisas. No nosso modelo, o instituto possui informação privada a respeito da distribuição de preferências da sociedade sobre os candidatos, mas pode escolher reportar incorretamente essa informação ao público. Se isso acontece, diremos que o instituto manipulou a pesquisa eleitoral. Uma preocupação comum das pessoas em relação aos institutos de pesquisa é a possibilidade de eles manipularem uma pesquisa eleitoral com o objetivo direto de beneficiar um determinado candidato. Nós mostramos que eles possuem incentivos para manipular a pesquisa mesmo na ausência de motivações partidárias. Ainda, essa manipulação aumenta o bem-estar da sociedade, em comparação com pesquisas verdadeiras.

We introduce an electoral pollster in a two-candidate costly voting model to study the incentives that pollsters have regarding the release of poll results. In our model, the pollster has private knowledge about the distribution of citizens\' preferences, but it may report false information to the public. If this happens, we say the pollster is misreporting the poll. An often heard criticism about pollsters is that they might manipulate in order to benefit some candidate. We show that they have incentives to misreport even in the absence of ideological motives. Moreover, misreported polls are welfare-improving relative to truthful polls. / Introduz-se um instituto de pesquisa eleitoral em um modelo de voto custoso a fim de estudar quais incentivos os institutos possuem ao divulgarem suas pesquisas. No nosso modelo, o instituto possui informação privada a respeito da distribuição de preferências da sociedade sobre os candidatos, mas pode escolher reportar incorretamente essa informação ao público. Se isso acontece, diremos que o instituto manipulou a pesquisa eleitoral. Uma preocupação comum das pessoas em relação aos institutos de pesquisa é a possibilidade de eles manipularem uma pesquisa eleitoral com o objetivo direto de beneficiar um determinado candidato. Nós mostramos que eles possuem incentivos para manipular a pesquisa mesmo na ausência de motivações partidárias. Ainda, essa manipulação aumenta o bem-estar da sociedade, em comparação com pesquisas verdadeiras.

In some recent papers, the weight based statistical bounds have arguably explained time complexity better than the count based mathematical bounds. This is definitely true for average case where for an arbitrary code it is difficult to identify the pivotal operation or pivotal region in the code for taking the expectation and/or when the probability distribution, over which expectation is taken, becomes unrealistic over the problem domain. In worst case, it can certify whether a mathematical bound is conservative or not. Here we revisit the results on Bubble sort in sequential mode and make an independent study of the same algorithm in parallel mode using statistical bound

Submitted by Irene Nascimento (irene.kessia@ufpe.br) on 2016-07-20T18:36:01Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Tese Deposito.pdf: 4856530 bytes, checksum: 6ceda14e0eb8a880086c1ff37b155a45 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-20T18:36:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Tese Deposito.pdf: 4856530 bytes, checksum: 6ceda14e0eb8a880086c1ff37b155a45 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-01-26 / Esta tese analisa a relação entre o protagonismo político do Poder judiciário e a judicialização das políticas de saúde e de proteção dos direitos da criança e do adolescente a partir do estudo de dois programas desenvolvidos pelo Conselho Nacional de Justiça, a saber: o Fórum da Saúde e o Cadastro Nacional de Adoção. Investigou-se a ascensão política do Judiciário com o objetivo de tornar conhecidas as relações e os processos sociais que deram origem à prática política dos agentes jurídicos e à estruturação do campo jurídico-político. Nesse sentido, oferece uma perspectiva crítica, elaborada a partir da articulação entre a teoria dos campos de Pierre Bourdieu e o conceito de justiça social de Nancy Fraser. Segue uma proposta de análise crítico-reflexiva que considera a posição da pesquisadora, recorre ao entendimento da gênese dos processos sociais e privilegia o estudo da prática política do Judiciário por meio de ações e discursos cujos sentidos remetem à reprodução do campo jurídico e à expansão de suas fronteiras em direção ao campo político. Ao fim, propõe um novo entendimento para a prática da judicialização, conceituando-a como estratégia de ação dos agentes jurídicos no campo político, de forma que o protagonismo do Judiciário se configura como expressão desta estratégia que agrega capital político e visa a conferir legitimidade às decisões políticas tomadas pelo Judiciário na esfera extrajudicial. O sentido prático dessa estratégia é a ampliação do poder político do Judiciário, o que impõe a necessidade de atualizar a discussão sobre a relação entre Estado e Sociedade no que se refere aos processos deliberativos da experiência democrática contemporânea, particularmente no que diz respeito às políticas sociais, que envolvem um complexo sistema de direitos econômicos, culturais e políticos que exigem não um novo Judiciário, mas uma esfera deliberativa plural e paritária. / This thesis analyzes the relation between the pivotal political role of the judiciary and the judicialization of health, children, and adolescent rights policies from the study of two programs developed by the National Justice Council, namely the Health Forum and the National Register of Adoptions. The political rise of the judiciary was investigated with the aim of displaying the relationships and social processes which gave rise to the political practice of legal agents and to the structuring the judicial-political field. In this sense, the thesis offers a critical perspective, drawn from the articulation between the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the concept of social justice of Nancy Fraser. The thesis follows a proposal of critical-reflexive analysis which considers the position of the researcher; which resorts to the understanding of the origin of social processes; and which favors the study of the political practice of the judiciary through actions and speeches whose sense refer to the reproduction of the legal field and to the expansion of its borders into the political field. At the end, the thesis proposes a new understanding to the practice of judicialization, conceptualizing it as an action strategy of legal agents in the political field, so that the pivotal role of the judiciary is configured as an expression of this strategy, which adds political capital and aims to confer legitimacy to the political decisions taken by the judiciary out of the scope of the court. The practical sense of this strategy is the expansion of the political power of the judiciary, which imposes the need to update the discussion about the relation between state and society concerning the deliberative processes of contemporary democratic experience, particularly regarding social policies, which involve a complex system of economic, cultural, and political rights, which do not demand a new judiciary, but a plural and equal deliberative sphere.

Pivotal Response Training (PRT) is an intervention that was originally developed by Koegel & Koegel (2006) that teaches pivotal behaviors to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Research places a significant emphasis on teaching parents and other caregivers to implement these procedures with their children. However, PRT is often implemented and trained with wide variability. The purpose of this literature review was to critically review the literature on parent-implemented PRT and evaluated the issues identified within the literature. A multiple step search procedure is conducted for this literature review and eighteen articles were selected based on the inclusionary criteria. Results of the review identify trends in the current literature of how parents have been trained to implemented PRT. This review also highlights the need for future research on parent implemented PRT to assess parent’s treatment integrity once initial competency with the PRT intervention has been met, and the need for future research to focus on assessing social validity in several ways. / Applied Behavioral Analysis

The correlation coefficient (CC) is a standard measure of the linear association between two random variables. The CC plays a significant role in many quantitative researches. In a bivariate normal distribution, there are many types of interval estimation for CC, such as z-transformation and maximum likelihood estimation based methods. However, when the underlying bivariate distribution is unknown, the construction of confidence intervals for the CC is still not well-developed. In this thesis, we discuss various interval estimation methods for the CC. We propose a generalized confidence interval and three empirical likelihood-based non-parametric intervals for the CC. We also conduct extensive simulation studies to compare the new intervals with existing intervals in terms of coverage probability and interval length. Finally, two real examples are used to demonstrate the application of the proposed methods.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Statistics / Christopher Vahl / Veterinary drugs are used extensively for disease prevention and treatment in food producing animals. The residues of these drugs and their metabolites can pose risks for human health. Therefore, a withdrawal time is established to ensure consumer safety so that tissue, milk or eggs from treated animals cannot be harvested for human consumption until enough time has elapsed for the residue levels to decrease to safe concentrations. Part of the process to establish a withdrawal time involves a linear regression to model drug residue depletion over time. This regression model is used to calculate a one-sided, upper tolerance limit for the amount of drug residue remaining in target tissue as a function of time. The withdrawal period is then determined by finding the smallest time so that the upper tolerance limit falls below the maximum residue limit. Observations with measured residue levels at or below the limit of quantitation (LOQ) of the analytical method present a special challenge in the estimation of the tolerance limit. Because values observed below the LOQ are thought to be unreliable, they add in an additional source of uncertainty and, if dealt with improperly or ignored, can introduce bias in the estimation of the withdrawal time. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests excluding such data while the European Medicine Agency (EMA) recommends replacing observations below the LOQ with a fixed number, specifically half the value of the LOQ. However, observations below LOQ are technically left censored and these methods are do not effectively address this fact. As an alternative, a regression method accounting for left-censoring is proposed and implemented in order to adequately model residue depletion over time. Furthermore, a method based on generalized (or fiducial) inference is developed to compute a tolerance limit with results from the proposed regression method. A simulation study is then conducted to compare the proposed withdrawal time calculation procedure to the current FDA and EMA approaches. Finally, the proposed procedures are applied to real experimental data.

Children with autism have deficits in social interactions and verbal and nonverbal communication and engagement in rigid and repetitive activities and/or interests (ASA, 2008). A joint attention (JA) repertoire has been identified as a behavioral cusp for later social development and thus, JA deficits serve as an early indicator for diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (Vismara & Lyons, 2007; Whalen & Schbreibman, 2003). A JA repertoire consists of both responses to- and initiations for-bids for coordinated attention. Previous research has shown teaching strategies such as pivotal response and discrete trial training for joint attention skills to be effective (Vismara & Lyons, 2007; Whalen & Schreibman, 2003). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate a mixture of pivotal response and discrete trial training as an intervention method for training joint attention behaviors with children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in a home setting. In addition, this study evaluated the effects of interspersing targets during training and incorporated generalization probes to assess JA initiations in the form of shifting eye gaze and pointing. Lastly this study examined a parent training procedure to determine if it would promote maintenance after skill acquisition. Results show that all targets were acquired when taught simultaneously. The results show that 2 of the 3 participants made JA initiations during probes throughout intervention. Lastly, the results indicated that parent training did not help maintain JA responding for participant one.

Robust parameter estimation and pivotal inference is crucial for credible statistical conclusions. This thesis addresses these issues in three contexts: long-memory parameter estimation robust to low frequency nonstationary contamination, long-memory properties of financial time series, and inference on structural changes in a joint segmented trend with heterogeneous noise. Chapter 1 considers robust estimation of the long-memory parameter allowing for a wide collection of contamination processes, in particular low frequency nonstationary processes such as random level shifts. We propose a robust modified local-Whittle estimator and show it has the usual asymptotic distribution. We also provide modifications to further account for short-memory dynamics and additive noise. The proposed estimator provides substantial efficiency gains compared to existing methods in the presence of contaminations, without sacrificing efficiency when these are absent. Chapter 2 applies the modified local-Whittle estimator to various volatilities series for stock indices and exchange rates to robustly estimate the long-memory parameter. Our findings suggest that all series are a combination of long and short-memory processes and random level shifts, with the magnitude of each component varying across series. Our results contrast with the view that long-memory is the dominant feature. Chapter 3 is concerned with pivotal inference about structural changes in a joint segmented trend with heterogeneous noise. We provide tests for changes in the slope and the variance of the noise valid when both may be present, each allowed to occur at different dates. We suggest procedures for four testing problems.