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This study aims to explore social and motor impairments of children with autism through the perspectives of their caregivers. Social and motor deficits among people with autism are well documented. There is support to suggest a reciprocal relationship between social and motor deficits among people with autism, in that social deficits can act as a barrier to motor skill development and motor deficits can act as a barrier to social skill development.

This study explored social and motor impairments of children with autism through the perspectives of eight caregivers of children with autism.

Many salient findings emerged from the interviews conducted with caregivers, particularly concerning the social and motor development of their children. The relationships between their children’s social and motor deficits were also highlighted.

It is important that health-care professionals educate parents about the consequences of motor impairments or delays and their associations with the development of social skills. As such, routine motor skill monitoring and assessments by caregivers and health-care professionals should be encouraged.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate motor and social deficits of children with autism from the caregivers’ perspectives.

This chapter summarizes the knowledge on sleep and restitution. Sleep constitutes the recuperative process of the central nervous system. The use of the brain during wakefulness will lead to depletion of energy in the cortical areas locally responsible for activity. The level of depletion is monitored and sleep is initiated when critical levels are reached. The attempts to initiate sleep are perceived as sleepiness or fatigue. The ensuing sleep then actively restores brain physiology to normal levels. This also results in restored alertness, memory capacity, and mood. Also, peripheral anabolic processes (secretion of growth hormone and testosterone) are strongly enhanced and catabolic process (secretion of cortisol and catecholamines) are strongly suppressed. In the long run, reduced or impaired sleep leads to metabolic diseases, depression, burnout, and mortality. Stress and irregular hours are among the main causes of disturbed sleep.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the standardisation of two largely overlapping electronic document formats between 2005 and 2008, and its implications for future IT standards development.

The document format controversy is researched as an exemplary case study of the institutional rivalries, perspectives and strategic interests at play in standardisation processes. The study adopts a methodological lens of discursive institutionalism in order to explain how actors assume and perform a variety of roles during the controversy. It consults a range of documentary sources, including media commentary, corporate press releases and blog posts, financial reports and technical specifications.

The study shows that: first, intentions to increase competition in the office software market through the standardisation of document formats led to a standards “arms race”; second, this further entrenched the position of a single market actor; and third, the resulting public debate nevertheless has reinvigorated the push for genuinely open standards.

Information technology standards are often touted as mechanisms for increasing the competitiveness of a market, thereby benefitting consumers and the greater public. In the presence of dominant institutional actors, efforts to standardise can, perversely, undermine this benefit. Increased public scrutiny through online media offers a potential remedy.

This research presents a novel account of the controversy over the document format standardisation process, understood through the lens of discursive institutionalism. It also shows the increasing and potentially putative role of online media in the development of IT standards generally.