I’ve just recently finished a graduate level communications class for which we had to present two 5-minute presentations. My first talk was about differences between the U.S. culture and other cultures in “smiling rates” and the understanding of when smiling is appropriate. I’ve decided to make my second speech about autism. The big stumbling block [...]
Connection between levels of fetal testosterone and autistic traits
I wanted to title this post “Would you want to know if your child might be autistic?” but after reading in the Guardian Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen’s response article titled “Our research was not about prenatal screening for autism,” I have decided to give my post a different, more neutral title, and closer to the title [...]
Engineers, Hips, and Autism
The headline “Men who don’t find curvy women attractive ‘could father children with autism‘” sounds just too weird to pass up. I found it through Google alert on a rather curious blog “What Sorts of People.” The entry does not comment on the title, just refers people to an article in the Daily Mail Reporter, [...]
Biomedical Treatments for Autism
Saturday, November 1, and Sunday, November 2, 2008 there will be a conference in Weston, Massachusetts titled “Successful Inclusion in School & Community†organized by Autism Conferences of America. It looks interesting and I would like to see “Learning Social Skills Through Play: Life’s Most Important Skill Made Fun!†by Rick Clemens, MA, and would [...]
No Autistics Allowed? (the story of Alex Barton)
Everyone has already heard this unbelievable story – a teacher in a kindergarten classroom “led†her pupils “to vote […] out of class†a five-year-old being evaluated for Asperger Syndrome. The first coverage of this story (or one of the first) appeared on TCPalm.com (May 23, 2008 “St. Lucie teacher has students vote on whether [...]
Autism 101: A basic definition
What is autism? The Autism Society of America, “the nation’s leading grassroots autism organization,†founded in 1965, says on their introductory web page that “Autism is a complex developmental disability that […] affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Autism is defined by a certain set of behaviors and is a ‘spectrum [...]