Datasets:

Dhruvil47

/

sentence_followup

like 0

In 2012, the NHS estimated that the overall prevalence of autism among adults aged 18 years and over in the UK was 1.1%.

Rates of PDD-NOS's has been estimated at 3.7 per 1,000, Asperger syndrome at roughly 0.6 per 1,000, and childhood disintegrative disorder at 0.02 per 1,000.

CDC estimates about 1 out of 59 (1.7%) for 2014, an increase from 1 out of every 68 children (1.5%) for 2010.

In the UK, from 1998 to 2018, the autism diagnoses increased by 787%.

This increase is largely attributable to changes in diagnostic practices, referral patterns, availability of services, age at diagnosis, and public awareness (particularly among women), though unidentified environmental risk factors cannot be ruled out.

The available evidence does not rule out the possibility that autism's true prevalence has increased; a real increase would suggest directing more attention and funding toward psychosocial factors and changing environmental factors instead of continuing to focus on genetics.

The sex ratio averages 4.3:1 and is greatly modified by cognitive impairment: it may be close to 2:1 with intellectual disability and more than 5.5:1 without.

Several theories about the higher prevalence in males have been investigated, but the cause of the difference is unconfirmed; one theory is that females are underdiagnosed.

Although the evidence does not implicate any single pregnancy-related risk factor as a cause of autism, the risk of autism is associated with advanced age in either parent, and with diabetes, bleeding, and use of psychiatric drugs in the mother during pregnancy.

The risk is greater with older fathers than with older mothers; two potential explanations are the known increase in mutation burden in older sperm, and the hypothesis that men marry later if they carry genetic liability and show some signs of autism.

Most professionals believe that race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background do not affect the occurrence of autism.

Several other conditions are common in children with autism.

The percentage of autistic individuals who also meet criteria for intellectual disability has been reported as anywhere from 25% to 70%, a wide variation illustrating the difficulty of assessing intelligence of individuals on the autism spectrum.

In comparison, for PDD-NOS the association with intellectual disability is much weaker, and by definition, the diagnosis of Asperger's excludes intellectual disability.

Anxiety disorders are common among children with ASD; there are no firm data, but studies have reported prevalences ranging from 11% to 84%.

Many anxiety disorders have symptoms that are better explained by ASD itself, or are hard to distinguish from ASD's symptoms.

Epilepsy, with variations in risk of epilepsy due to age, cognitive level, and type of language disorder.

Several metabolic defects, such as phenylketonuria, are associated with autistic symptoms.

Although the DSM-IV rules out the concurrent diagnosis of many other conditions along with autism, the full criteria for Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Tourette syndrome, and other of these conditions are often present and these co-occurrent conditions are increasingly accepted.

Sleep problems affect about two-thirds of individuals with ASD at some point in childhood.

These most commonly include symptoms of insomnia such as difficulty in falling asleep, frequent nocturnal awakenings, and early morning awakenings.

Sleep problems are associated with difficult behaviors and family stress, and are often a focus of clinical attention over and above the primary ASD diagnosis.

The Table Talk of Martin Luther, compiled by his notetaker, Mathesius, contains the story of a 12-year-old boy who may have been severely autistic.

The earliest well-documented case of autism is that of Hugh Blair of Borgue, as detailed in a 1747 court case in which his brother successfully petitioned to annul Blair's marriage to gain Blair's inheritance.

The Wild Boy of Aveyron, a feral child caught in 1798, showed several signs of autism; the medical student Jean Itard treated him with a behavioral program designed to help him form social attachments and to induce speech via imitation.

The New Latin word autismus (English translation autism) was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910 as he was defining symptoms of schizophrenia.

He derived it from the Greek word autós (αὐτός, meaning "self"), and used it to mean morbid self-admiration, referring to "autistic withdrawal of the patient to his fantasies, against which any influence from outside becomes an intolerable disturbance".

A Soviet child psychiatrist, Grunya Sukhareva, described a similar syndrome that was published in Russian in 1925, and in German in 1926.

Asperger was investigating an ASD now known as Asperger syndrome, though for various reasons it was not widely recognized as a separate diagnosis until 1981.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities.

Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner's first paper on the subject, notably "autistic aloneness" and "insistence on sameness", are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders.

It is not known whether Kanner derived the term independently of Asperger.

Kanner's reuse of autism led to decades of confused terminology like infantile schizophrenia, and child psychiatry's focus on maternal deprivation led to misconceptions of autism as an infant's response to "refrigerator mothers".

Starting in the late 1960s autism was established as a separate syndrome.

It took until 1980 for the DSM-III to differentiate autism from childhood schizophrenia.

In 1987, the DSM-III-R provided a checklist for diagnosing autism.

In May 2013, the DSM-5 was released, updating the classification for pervasive developmental disorders.

The grouping of disorders, including PDD-NOS, autism, Asperger syndrome, Rett syndrome, and CDD, has been removed and replaced with the general term of Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The two categories that exist are impaired social communication and/or interaction, and restricted and/or repetitive behaviors.

The Internet has helped autistic individuals bypass nonverbal cues and emotional sharing that they find difficult to deal with, and has given them a way to form online communities and work remotely.

The autism rights movement advocates for including greater acceptance of autistic behaviors; therapies that focus on coping skills rather than on imitating the behaviors of those without autism, and the recognition of the autistic community as a minority group.

Autism rights or neurodiversity advocates believe that the autism spectrum is genetic and should be accepted as a natural expression of the human genome.

This perspective is distinct from fringe theories that autism is caused by environmental factors such as vaccines.

A common criticism against autistic activists is that the majority of them are "high-functioning" or have Asperger syndrome and do not represent the views of "low-functioning" autistic people.

Among those who find work, most are employed in sheltered settings working for wages below the national minimum.

While employers state hiring concerns about productivity and supervision, experienced employers of autistic people give positive reports of above average memory and detail orientation as well as a high regard for rules and procedure in autistic employees.

A majority of the economic burden of autism is caused by decreased earnings in the job market.

Some studies also find decreased earning among parents who care for autistic children.

Albedo (; ) is the measure of the diffuse reflection of solar radiation out of the total solar radiation and measured on a scale from 0, corresponding to a black body that absorbs all incident radiation, to 1, corresponding to a body that reflects all incident radiation.

Surface albedo is defined as the ratio of radiosity Je to the irradiance Ee (flux per unit area) received by a surface.

The proportion reflected is not only determined by properties of the surface itself, but also by the spectral and angular distribution of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface.

These factors vary with atmospheric composition, geographic location, and time (see position of the Sun).

While bi-hemispherical reflectance is calculated for a single angle of incidence (i.e., for a given position of the Sun), albedo is the directional integration of reflectance over all solar angles in a given period.

The temporal resolution may range from seconds (as obtained from flux measurements) to daily, monthly, or annual averages.

Unless given for a specific wavelength (spectral albedo), albedo refers to the entire spectrum of solar radiation.

Due to measurement constraints, it is often given for the spectrum in which most solar energy reaches the surface (between 0.3 and 3 μm).

This spectrum includes visible light (0.4–0.7 μm), which explains why surfaces with a low albedo appear dark (e.g., trees absorb most radiation), whereas surfaces with a high albedo appear bright (e.g., snow reflects most radiation).

Albedo is an important concept in climatology, astronomy, and environmental management (e.g., as part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program for sustainable rating of buildings).

The average albedo of the Earth from the upper atmosphere, its planetary albedo, is 30–35% because of cloud cover, but widely varies locally across the surface because of different geological and environmental features.

The term albedo was introduced into optics by Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1760 work Photometria.

Deeply shadowed cavities can achieve an effective albedo approaching the zero of a black body.

When seen from a distance, the ocean surface has a low albedo, as do most forests, whereas desert areas have some of the highest albedos among landforms.

This is far higher than for the ocean primarily because of the contribution of clouds.

Earth's surface albedo is regularly estimated via Earth observation satellite sensors such as NASA's MODIS instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites, and the CERES instrument on the Suomi NPP and JPSS.

These calculations are based on the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), which describes how the reflectance of a given surface depends on the view angle of the observer and the solar angle.

BDRF can facilitate translations of observations of reflectance into albedo.

Earth's average surface temperature due to its albedo and the greenhouse effect is currently about .

If Earth were frozen entirely (and hence be more reflective), the average temperature of the planet would drop below .

If only the continental land masses became covered by glaciers, the mean temperature of the planet would drop to about .

In contrast, if the entire Earth was covered by water – a so-called ocean planet – the average temperature on the planet would rise to almost .

In 2021, scientists reported that Earth dimmed by ~0.5% over two decades (1998-2017) as measured by earthshine using modern photometric techniques.

This may have both been co-caused by climate change as well as a substantial increase in global warming.

That said, albedo and illumination both vary by latitude.

Albedo is highest near the poles and lowest in the subtropics, with a local maximum in the tropics.

Tropical and sub-tropical rainforest areas have low albedo, and are much hotter than their temperate forest counterparts, which have lower insolation.

Because insolation plays such a big role in the heating and cooling effects of albedo, high insolation areas like the tropics will tend to show a more pronounced fluctuation in local temperature when local albedo changes.

Arctic regions notably release more heat back into space than what they absorb, effectively cooling the Earth.

This has been a concern since arctic ice and snow has been melting at higher rates due to higher temperatures, creating regions in the arctic that are notably darker (being water or ground which is darker color) and reflects less heat back into space.

A layer of snowfall increases local albedo, reflecting away sunlight, leading to local cooling.

In principle, if no outside temperature change affects this area (e.g., a warm air mass), the raised albedo and lower temperature would maintain the current snow and invite further snowfall, deepening the snow–temperature feedback.

However, because local weather is dynamic due to the change of seasons, eventually warm air masses and a more direct angle of sunlight (higher insolation) cause melting.

When the melted area reveals surfaces with lower albedo, such as grass, soil, or ocean, the effect is reversed: the darkening surface lowers albedo, increasing local temperatures, which induces more melting and thus reducing the albedo further, resulting in still more heating.

Over Antarctica snow albedo averages a little more than 0.8.

If a marginally snow-covered area warms, snow tends to melt, lowering the albedo, and hence leading to more snowmelt because more radiation is being absorbed by the snowpack (the ice–albedo positive feedback).

Just as fresh snow has a higher albedo than does dirty snow, the albedo of snow-covered sea ice is far higher than that of sea water.

Sea water absorbs more solar radiation than would the same surface covered with reflective snow.

When sea ice melts, either due to a rise in sea temperature or in response to increased solar radiation from above, the snow-covered surface is reduced, and more surface of sea water is exposed, so the rate of energy absorption increases.

The extra absorbed energy heats the sea water, which in turn increases the rate at which sea ice melts.

As with the preceding example of snowmelt, the process of melting of sea ice is thus another example of a positive feedback.

Both positive feedback loops have long been recognized as important for global warming.

Cryoconite, powdery windblown dust containing soot, sometimes reduces albedo on glaciers and ice sheets.

The dynamical nature of albedo in response to positive feedback, together with the effects of small errors in the measurement of albedo, can lead to large errors in energy estimates.

In the case of evergreen forests with seasonal snow cover albedo reduction may be great enough for deforestation to cause a net cooling effect.

Trees also impact climate in extremely complicated ways through evapotranspiration.

The water vapor causes cooling on the land surface, causes heating where it condenses, acts a strong greenhouse gas, and can increase albedo when it condenses into clouds.

Scientists generally treat evapotranspiration as a net cooling impact, and the net climate impact of albedo and evapotranspiration changes from deforestation depends greatly on local climate.

In seasonally snow-covered zones, winter albedos of treeless areas are 10% to 50% higher than nearby forested areas because snow does not cover the trees as readily.

Deciduous trees have an albedo value of about 0.15 to 0.18 whereas coniferous trees have a value of about 0.09 to 0.15.

Variation in summer albedo across both forest types is associated with maximum rates of photosynthesis because plants with high growth capacity display a greater fraction of their foliage for direct interception of incoming radiation in the upper canopy.

The result is that wavelengths of light not used in photosynthesis are more likely to be reflected back to space rather than being absorbed by other surfaces lower in the canopy.

Studies by the Hadley Centre have investigated the relative (generally warming) effect of albedo change and (cooling) effect of carbon sequestration on planting forests.

They found that new forests in tropical and midlatitude areas tended to cool; new forests in high latitudes (e.g., Siberia) were neutral or perhaps warming.

The reflectivity of a water surface is calculated using the Fresnel equations.

At the scale of the wavelength of light even wavy water is always smooth so the light is reflected in a locally specular manner (not diffusely).

The glint of light off water is a commonplace effect of this.

At small angles of incident light, waviness results in reduced reflectivity because of the steepness of the reflectivity-vs.-incident-angle curve and a locally increased average incident angle.

Although the reflectivity of water is very low at low and medium angles of incident light, it becomes very high at high angles of incident light such as those that occur on the illuminated side of Earth near the terminator (early morning, late afternoon, and near the poles).

However, as mentioned above, waviness causes an appreciable reduction.

Because light specularly reflected from water does not usually reach the viewer, water is usually considered to have a very low albedo in spite of its high reflectivity at high angles of incident light.

Note that white caps on waves look white (and have high albedo) because the water is foamed up, so there are many superimposed bubble surfaces which reflect, adding up their reflectivities.

Albedo and climate in some areas are affected by artificial clouds, such as those created by the contrails of heavy commercial airliner traffic.

A study following the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields during Iraqi occupation showed that temperatures under the burning oil fires were as much as colder than temperatures several miles away under clear skies.

The size of this effect is difficult to quantify: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global mean radiative forcing for black carbon aerosols from fossil fuels is +0.2 W m−2, with a range +0.1 to +0.4 W m−2.

Black carbon is a bigger cause of the melting of the polar ice cap in the Arctic than carbon dioxide due to its effect on the albedo.

The study of albedos, their dependence on wavelength, lighting angle ("phase angle"), and variation in time composes a major part of the astronomical field of photometry.

For small and far objects that cannot be resolved by telescopes, much of what we know comes from the study of their albedos.

For example, the absolute albedo can indicate the surface ice content of outer Solar System objects, the variation of albedo with phase angle gives information about regolith properties, whereas unusually high radar albedo is indicative of high metal content in asteroids.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, has one of the highest known optical albedos of any body in the Solar System, with an albedo of 0.99.

Another notable high-albedo body is Eris, with an albedo of 0.96.

Many small objects in the outer Solar System and asteroid belt have low albedos down to about 0.05.

Such a dark surface is thought to be indicative of a primitive and heavily space weathered surface containing some organic compounds.

The overall albedo of the Moon is measured to be around 0.14, but it is strongly directional and non-Lambertian, displaying also a strong opposition effect.

Although such reflectance properties are different from those of any terrestrial terrains, they are typical of the regolith surfaces of airless Solar System bodies.

Two common optical albedos that are used in astronomy are the (V-band) geometric albedo (measuring brightness when illumination comes from directly behind the observer) and the Bond albedo (measuring total proportion of electromagnetic energy reflected).

Their values can differ significantly, which is a common source of confusion.

In detailed studies, the directional reflectance properties of astronomical bodies are often expressed in terms of the five Hapke parameters which semi-empirically describe the variation of albedo with phase angle, including a characterization of the opposition effect of regolith surfaces.

One of these five parameters is yet another type of albedo called the single-scattering albedo.

It is used to define scattering of electromagnetic waves on small particles.

In most instances, the transmitted pulse is circularly polarized and the received pulse is measured in the same sense of polarization as the transmitted pulse (SC) and the opposite sense (OC).

The echo power is measured in terms of radar cross-section, , , or (total power, SC + OC) and is equal to the cross-sectional area of a metallic sphere (perfect reflector) at the same distance as the target that would return the same echo power.

Those components of the received echo that return from first-surface reflections (as from a smooth or mirror-like surface) are dominated by the OC component as there is a reversal in polarization upon reflection.

If the surface is rough at the wavelength scale or there is significant penetration into the regolith, there will be a significant SC component in the echo caused by multiple scattering.

A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Its name in English is a (pronounced ), plural aes.

It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives.

The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar.

The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ.

The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type.

The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged.

The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write the Latin language, and the resulting letter was preserved in the Latin alphabet that would come to be used to write many languages, including English.

First was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other "permanent" media.

There was also a cursive style used for everyday or utilitarian writing, which was done on more perishable surfaces.

Due to the "perishable" nature of these surfaces, there are not as many examples of this style as there are of the monumental, but there are still many surviving examples of different types of cursive, such as majuscule cursive, minuscule cursive, and semicursive minuscule.

Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles.

The known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial.

At the end of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe.

Among these were the semicursive minuscule of Italy, the Merovingian script in France, the Visigothic script in Spain, and the Insular or Anglo-Irish semi-uncial or Anglo-Saxon majuscule of Great Britain.

By the 9th century, the Caroline script, which was very similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making, before the advent of the printing press.

These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version.

The Italic form, also called script a, is used in most current handwriting; it consists of a circle and vertical stroke on the right ("ɑ").

This slowly developed from the fifth-century form resembling the Greek letter tau in the hands of medieval Irish and English writers.

The Roman form is used in most printed material; it consists of a small loop with an arc over it ("a").

In some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form.

Graphic designers refer to the Italic and Roman forms as "single decker a" and "double decker a" respectively.

Italic type is commonly used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest (set in Roman type).

There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a ("ɑ"), also called Latin alpha, is used in contrast with Latin "a" (such as in the International Phonetic Alphabet).

The double sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark.

However, occurs in many common digraphs, all with their own sound or sounds, particularly , , , , and .

In English grammar, "a", and its variant "an", is an indefinite article, used to introduce noun phrases.

Finally, the letter A is used to denote size, as in a narrow size shoe, or a small cup size in a brassiere.

Alabama () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered by Tennessee to the north; Georgia to the east; Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south; and Mississippi to the west.

Alabama is the 30th largest by area and the 24th-most populous of the U.S. states.

With a total of of inland waterways, Alabama has among the most of any state.

Alabama is nicknamed the Yellowhammer State, after the state bird.

Alabama is also known as the "Heart of Dixie" and the "Cotton State".

The state tree is the longleaf pine, and the state flower is the camellia.

Alabama's capital is Montgomery, and its largest city by population and area is Huntsville.

Its oldest city is Mobile, founded by French colonists in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana.

Greater Birmingham is Alabama's largest metropolitan area and its economic center.

Originally home to many native tribes, present-day Alabama was a Spanish territory beginning in the sixteenth century until the French acquired it in the early eighteenth century.

The British won the territory in 1763 until losing it in the American Revolutionary War.

Spain held Mobile as part of Spanish West Florida until 1813.

In December 1819, Alabama was recognized as a state.

During the antebellum period, Alabama was a major producer of cotton, and widely used African American slave labor.

In 1861, the state seceded from the United States to become part of the Confederate States of America, with Montgomery acting as its first capital, and rejoined the Union in 1868.

Following the American Civil War, Alabama would suffer decades of economic hardship, in part due to agriculture and a few cash crops being the main driver of the states economy.

Similar to other former slave states, Alabamian legislators employed Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and discriminate against African Americans from the late 19th century up until the 1960s.

In the early 20th century, despite the growth of major industries and urban centers, white rural interests dominated the state legislature through the mid-20th century.

During this time, urban interests and African Americans were markedly under-represented.

High-profile events such as the Selma to Montgomery march made the state a major focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

During and after World War II, Alabama grew as the state's economy diversified with new industries.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville would help Alabama's economic growth in the mid-to-late 20th century, by developing an aerospace industry.

Alabama's economy in the 21st century is based on automotive, finance, tourism, manufacturing, aerospace, mineral extraction, healthcare, education, retail, and technology.

The state's geography is diverse, with the north dominated by the mountainous Tennessee Valley and the south by Mobile Bay, a historically significant port.

In the Alabama language, the word for a person of Alabama lineage is (or variously or in different dialects; the plural form is ).

The suggestion that "Alabama" was borrowed from the Choctaw language is unlikely.

The word's spelling varies significantly among historical sources.

The first usage appears in three accounts of the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1540: Garcilaso de la Vega used , while the Knight of Elvas and Rodrigo Ranjel wrote Alibamu and Limamu, respectively, in transliterations of the term.

As early as 1702, the French called the tribe the , with French maps identifying the river as .

Other spellings of the name have included Alibamu, Alabamo, Albama, Alebamon, Alibama, Alibamou, Alabamu, Allibamou.

Some scholars suggest the word comes from the Choctaw (meaning 'plants' or 'weeds') and (meaning 'to cut', 'to trim', or 'to gather').

The meaning may have been 'clearers of the thicket' or 'herb gatherers', referring to clearing land for cultivation or collecting medicinal plants.

The state has numerous place names of Native American origin.

However, there are no correspondingly similar words in the Alabama language.

An 1842 article in the Jacksonville Republican proposed it meant 'Here We Rest'.

This notion was popularized in the 1850s through the writings of Alexander Beaufort Meek.

Trade with the northeastern tribes by the Ohio River began during the Burial Mound Period (1000BCE700CE) and continued until European contact.

The agrarian Mississippian culture covered most of the state from 1000 to 1600 CE, with one of its major centers built at what is now the Moundville Archaeological Site in Moundville, Alabama.

This is the second-largest complex of the classic Middle Mississippian era, after Cahokia in present-day Illinois, which was the center of the culture.

Analysis of artifacts from archaeological excavations at Moundville were the basis of scholars' formulating the characteristics of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC).