- “A Most Extraordinary Life.” (H/T F)
- You heard about the woman who got charged $83,000 for two doses of anti-scorpion venom worth $100 per dose. Here’s some background on why — and how Obamacare is only going to make it worse.
- What do you do when your beagle eats your cash? (Hint: It’s easier, though no less unpleasant, than getting your cash back from asset-forfeiting govthugs.)
- Survival preps: A week in a bucket. BusyPoorDad posted this is this morning’s comments. A very good idea, though I’d aim for a less grain-heavy mix of foods.
- Sometimes you see a claim that’s based on “research” and you just know, with every molecule of your being, before you even read the details, that it’s bogus. Example: this assertion that computer hackers are no more Aspergers-y than the rest of us. I give you 10 seconds to spot the faulty research technique. 1 … 2 …
- Amen, Bruthah Joel.
RE: hacker study
Self-reporting by a very select group of people socilaized enough to attend conferences?
No mention of an actual control study of other professions?
Or (just to t/r/o/l/l/ stir up discussion):
The question of whether Asperger’s should even be a distinct subdiagnosis of autism (largely based on no “clinically significant delay in the onset of language”). Or if it should be considered “autism” at all based on that language difference?
Bear —
“Self-reporting by a very select group of people socilaized enough to attend conferences?”
Precisely! Yes on the lack of a control study, too. But I just LOL’d over the idea that anybody would think they were getting a typical cross-section of computer geeks at conferences. Big social events! Heck, all the geeks I know stay home huddled at their computers in dark rooms getting conference reports electronically (if at all). And yes, letting them self-identify on top of that.
I wonder who funded that study?
“I wonder who funded that study?”
Duh. You and I did.
Any child who doesn’t grow up buying into the Ken-Barbie or GI Joe stereotypes, who doesn’t beg for every shiny new thing seen on TV, or doesn’t hang with the right crowds (especially those who can’t find a crowd with which to hang), confuses and frightens those who think everyone should fit in a nice, neat, slot in their psycho-shape-board.
So, they call it a “condition” and try to beat, medicate, or bamboozle us out of being ourselves.
I went through it, myself. It ain’t fun.
Still trying to track down who funded this crap (University of Ontario, so it might not have been US tax-victim dollars directly).
Because of general interest, and to stay abreast of sci-tech for my previous SF writing, I spend a fair bit of time looking at study summaries. the idiots at Psychotic Science are usally good for true silleness (college students like to drink alcohol! and more recently, an Aussie professor “proved” that anthropogenic global warming skeptics believe the moon landings were faked) but the soft sciences have no lock on stupidity. An English researcher discovered torrification a couple of years ago and was soliciting more money to research how to produce the new biofuel commercially. I referred her to Kingsford Charcoal. Then there were the ladies who invented writable conductive ink for electronics. I referred them to the prototyper’s conductive ink pen that’s been on the market for at least 15 years.
Two of my favorites were the professor who invented a way to record voice messages and send them to cell phones so the recipient could listen to it any time, rather than taking a call while driving (after several emails back and forth, I realized this guy truly hadn’t heard of voicemail, and probably has trouble even turning his cell phone on); and the lady who determined that pre-cooked canned beans are cheaper than dry beans (it helps to understand that part of her funding came from the Canned Food Alliance).
What did all those have in common?
Tax-victim funding.
(And, yes, I really do contact the lead authors on some of these just to give them a chance to explain what the f@#K was going through the tiny little puddles of gray mush in their pointy heads. Gotta have a hobby, and ink and paper only take up so much time.)
Just to be fair, while I’d rather see .gov out of the business of research, not every summary I encounter is BS. Bill Miller at Oak Ridge did a project on an improved roof design. Intuitively, it looked good. Refined and combined some existing techniques. The press release was pretty vague, so I contacted Miller with some questions. He immediately sent me the complete paper (otherwise blocked behind a paywall) and some additional information. To tell the truth, with the full paper and extra data, I was even more impressed. His team didn’t exactly discover the Higgs boson (neither did CERN, actually), but it has a lot more immediate and practical value.
I did a One Bucket Per Month contest a couple of years back. Got some great ideas. From high-end to bare bones. It really is a great way to have a good deal of food in a compact and portable container.
http://bisonrma.blogspot.com/2010/08/win-some-silver-one-bucket-per-month.html
I would suppose that Aspergers is just a way to identify and label those of us who are just extremely introverted. I’ve been an introvert all my life, can spend days and weeks on my own with no outside contact and flourish. I had to teach myself to reach out to people, function in society, get up in front of large groups of people and talk etc. It can be done, but I had the personal desire to improve and support of parents that didn’t let me rot in the basement.
In third grade I was attending a small, 8 room schoolhouse typical of many rural schools. The first year teacher thought I was a problem because I continously daydreamed and looked out the window. Off the the school psychologist I went. The good Dr spent a few minutes talking to me and my parents, then talked with the teach even longer. Since I always had my work done and to standard, did not disturb the other students and stayed in my seats, his advice was to leave me alone. His secondary advice was to provide me with more challenging work. No labels, no drugs, just a recommendation for good instructional methods.
Matt, another. Good for your school shrink! Sounds like a good “prescription.”
I definitely agree that people are grossly “over-labeled,” particularly with labels that imply disease or disorder And even where there really is something “wrong,” that’s not to say we should pop a pill for it or take a long course of therapy. Cure depression and you end a lot of art. Cure Aspergers and you may end a lot of tech and science. How fortunate you were to find someone in authority who just recognized you were being you — and needed greater challenges.
Have to differ with you on Aspergers just being deep introversion, though. Plenty of us are deep introverts but have no traits of Aspergers (e.g. we’re very attuned to people even as we retreat from them, we’re adept with language, etc.). I’m more introverted than my Aspergers-y brother, for instance, but I started talking when I was nine months old and was beginning to read at age two. He (in typical A-style) barely spoke a word until he was three and never really did become comfortable with reading or speaking. He’s very smart. But never developed any understanding of how social interaction works.
There’s a trait missing from that list. People with ASD have trouble controlling their “input filters”. Their senses are either full-on or full-off, which is a major part of why they (we, I’m one too) tend to avoid crowds and noisy or social situations. Most people subconsiously filter out which inputs they need to pay attention to, such as the expression on the face of the person you’re talking to, and which ones they don’t need to pay attention to, like the hum of the ventilation system or the flower on the lapel of the person at the other end of the room. People on the autism spectrum are easily overwhelmed because that filter is wonky. Crowds are overwhelming, new places feel unsafe. Social cues change too fast to analyze. It’s nuts!
Some people shut down, some people melt down.
There’s a forum called “Wrong Planet” that I was a part of for a little while. It helped a lot.
1. The membership at a conference may (or may not) be a systematically skewed population.
2. Black Hat and DefCon are not “hacker’s” conferences, for values of “hacker” equivalent to “solitary computer intruder”. They’re conferences primarily for security _professionals_. Not, of course, generally the suit-and-tie type of “professional” that makes the drones making decisions in Big Corporations feel a warm glow of happiness, of course, but professionals nonetheless. Folks there are still proud of being scruffy, but they generally have jobs in the security biz. Or else they wouldn’t be able to afford to go.
3. Self-reporting is unreliable.
4. No proper control group. (Indeed, if you could manage to get universal participation of BlackHat/DefCon attendees, it might make a kindasorta-OK _control_ group against which to measure the scores of the sorts of people the author means by “hackers”.)
5. Does anyone really care? Seriously? I mean, besides the author, who’s looking for a quick-and-dirty way of coming up with some statistics (however dubious their provenance) to base a paper on?
By the way…I would not necessarily assume that aspies, per se, won’t be in attendance at a conference. Different people react in different ways to different kinds of stimulation. It’s no less true on the spectrum than in the general population. But it’s still a bad sampling methodology, precisely because the bias is both _unknown_ and _uncontrollable_.
For more perspective on medicine and government involvement, this blog by G. Keith Smith, M.D. is a great resource. He really “gets it.”
Here is his take on the scorpion thing:
Hospital Considers Hiring Scorpions
http://surgerycenterofoklahoma.tumblr.com/post/30933930213/hospital-considers-hiring-scorpions
Scorpion Hospital Lessons Continue
http://surgerycenterofoklahoma.tumblr.com/post/31016918106/scorpion-hospital-lessons-continue
Oh, and nobody has ever really been able to put any sort of label on me. I just wiggle out of them too fast. LOL I’m a raving extrovert who can happily spend a month at home all alone. It does help to have the internet, however. Then I can talk to people while sitting comfortably in my jammies! 🙂