The Effect of Joint Control Training on the Performance of Multiply Controlled Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review Relevant to Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Other Developmental Disabilities

Skinner (1957) differentiated the roles of the speaker and the listener in a verbal encounter. Although not extensively emphasized, Skinner suggested an individual often behaves verbally even when responding as a listener. Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often display the absence of important, and basic verbal repertoires that limit their ability to engage in a variety of social skills or problem-solving skills. Joint control suggests that multiply controlled verbal responding involves functional control of two 2 or more stimuli or verbal operants. This systematic literature review provides a summary of publications specifying the relation and implications of the analysis of joint control and joint control training in the acquisition of multiply controlled, non-speaker behaviors (e.g., selection-based behavior; , sequencing behavior). The synthesis suggests that joint control training presents as a promising analytic tool in guiding interventions to teach complex, multiply controlled verbal and non-verbal repertoires to children diagnosed with autism ASD and/or other developmental disabilities. Recommendations for future research in joint control, as well as the implementation of joint control training, are provided.

     

Efficient Take‐Back Legislation

Product and waste take‐back is becoming more regulated by countries to protect the environment. Such regulation puts an economic burden on firms, while creating fairness concerns and potentially even missing its primary target: environmental benefits. This research discusses the economic and environmental impacts of extended producer responsibility type of legislation and identifies efficiency conditions. It is shown that the right policy would (i) make producers responsible for their own waste to avoid fairness concerns and (ii) favor eco‐design producers to create stronger environmental benefits. Furthermore, the efficiency of take‐back systems is also driven by environmental classification of products, industry structure, and end‐user willingness to participate in take‐back programs.     

ILP formulation of the degree-constrained minimum spanning hierarchy problem

Given a connected edge-weighted graph G and a positive integer B, the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem (DCMST) consists in finding a minimum cost spanning tree of G such that the degree of each vertex in the tree is less than or equal to B. This problem, which has been extensively studied over the last few decades, has several practical applications, mainly in networks. However, some applications do not especially impose a subgraph as a solution. For this purpose, a more flexible so-called hierarchy structure has been proposed. Hierarchy, which can be seen as a generalization of trees, is defined as a homomorphism of a tree in a graph. In this paper, we discuss the degree-constrained minimum spanning hierarchy (DCMSH) problem which is NP-hard. An integer linear program (ILP) formulation of this new problem is given. Properties of the solution are analysed, which allows us to add valid inequalities to the ILP. To evaluate the difference of cost between trees and hierarchies, the exact solution of DCMST and z problems are compared. It appears that, in sparse random graphs, the average percentage of improvement of the cost varies from 20 to 36% when the maximal authorized degree of vertices B is equal to 2, and from 11 to 31% when B is equal to 3. The improvement increases as the graph size increases.