We've had that experience too with our son (diagnosed with Asperger's). Put him with someone who gets his condition and he thrives. Put him with someone who insists that he "be normal all the time" and doesn't get or even want to get Asperger's and he withers. Right now, his school seems to have all the right people in place and it's amazing how much he's thriving - a welcome change from many years of struggling.
That said, I totally get where you're coming from. My daughter is autstic, and we've spent an enormous amount of time and money on various therapies to help her interact more easily with the world around her. Notice that I didn't say, "change her," or, "cure her," or, "make her fit in." She's a wonderful person who just has a really hard time communicating with others and dealing with the sensory load that people live with all the time. I just want to help her develop the ability to compensate for that so she can have the opportunities to interact with others that she deserves.
The way I always put it (especially to people who know computers) is that neurotypical people run "Neurotypical Society OS" natively. They know all of the rules and norms. Those on the spectrum, though, don't run this OS. They can - with a lot of help/time/practice - emulate it, but it will always be somewhat short of the "natively run" version. In addition, it can put a lot of strain on someone on the spectrum to emulate Neurotypical Society OS so they'll need time to decompress.
Our jobs as parents of kids on the spectrum are to help our kids emulate this OS while still helping them realize how wonderful their native OS can be.
How does one get a friend? What is friendship and how does one interact with friends? Is anyone who is nice to me a friend? What if my friend says something that I take as mean? Is that person no longer my friend? What can I tell a friend that I can't tell non-friends?
To you, these questions might seem insanely easy. To someone with Autism/Asperger's, they honestly have no clue. While people who are neurotypical seem to just pick up social rules naturally, those on the spectrum can't. It's as if they've been dropped in a weird alien land that doesn't make any sense and they're expected to instantly behave just like the natives behave.
You should see what happens in my house when my son (diagnosed with Asperger's) gets stuck on something and I (not diagnosed but almost certainly have Asperger's as well) get stuck on the opposite thing. My wife and neurotypical younger son get caught in the crossfire of two "stuck Aspies." Not fun for anyone involved!
Exactly this. Before we knew our child had Asperger's, our son's principal at the time insisted he was just being defiant and needed to be punished. So we did this and it backfired big time. His behaviors got worse, not better. Finally, we were so fed up, we paid a doctor to observe him (3 hours in the class without him knowing he was the one being observed and 3 hours by himself) and the doctor said he had Asperger's Syndrome (as well as Anxiety Disorder - threat of punishment would trigger his anxieties big time and he wouldn't be able to control himself).
Using If-Then's can be helpful. If he's going on and on about something, I'll tell him "finish it in your head, not out of your mouth" and he'll suddenly be quiet until he's done. (Just telling him "shut up" keeping him quiet until the compulsion to finish his story gets overwhelming - so in about 2 seconds.) When he gets overwhelmed, we've learned to quickly remove him from the situation so he can decompress. It's all about finding those ways of working with his issues and helping him learn what comes naturally to other kids.
I don't know a lot, but I am willing to bet that autistic people are as different from each other as they differ from us. The whole thing is a spectrum, what works with one won't necessary work with others.
Exactly this. The popular quote among parents of kids with autism is "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." There can be some commonality between groups (not looking in eyes, flapping arms, etc) but not everyone who is autistic will do all of these things all the time. What is really helpful for one kid with autism can do absolutely nothing (or even be harmful) to another child with autism. As the parent of a child diagnosed with Asperger's, I can assure you that finding that right type/level of support can be an uphill battle. Completely worth it in the end, but there are times when you just want to scream at the world.
It's not just the quality of the therapists, but in the case of social skills groups, the quality of the group itself.
My son is diagnosed Autistic and we sent him to a social skills group for awhile. At first, it went great. He made some fantastic strides in social skills. Then, the kids in the group changed. Suddenly, we began seeing not-so-nice behaviors coming from him. He was looking at the people in his group and modeling his behaviors on them. Instead of improving, he was backsliding. Same therapist, different groups of kids.
My son is diagnosed on the spectrum (Asperger's). He's 11 (6th grade, middle school). Intellectually, he's probably about 13. Socially/emotionally, though, he's about 6. Without proper supports*, he quickly winds up socially isolating himself with his actions. The ways of making and keeping friends that come naturally to everyone else don't come naturally to him. He *wants* friends, but just doesn't know how to make them. Worse, he will interpret any sign of kindness as friendship and follow this person. This can either annoy the person whom he is now "best friends" with or cause harm to him if the wrong person uses this against him. This goes way beyond "he doesn't belong to the popular kids group and has to sit with the outcasts."
* By the way, "proper supports" also includes educating the other students so they know why my son does what he does. We all think of kids as mean individuals ready to take advantage of anyone they can, but they can also be helpful and supportive. We've had peers of his come up to talk to us when they spotted a problem that my son was having. They were concerned about him and wanted to make sure he was ok.
My son has Asperger's Syndrome (actually diagnosed by a medical professional who spent 6 hours directly observing my son). I deal with actual-Asperger's every day. You don't get a diagnosis from someone watching some news clips. If Putin sees a medical professional and actually obtains a diagnosis, I'll change my mind, but you can't declare he has Asperger's based on a couple of people who watched a clip or two of him and decided "that's kinda Aspy."
Years ago, my wife and I went to Vegas. We're not big gamblers, but did a little gambling. The cost we sunk in was rationalized as entertainment - not an attempt to make money. We were able to be entertained for a couple of hours on not much cash.
With the lottery, we do play every so often, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I'm perfectly capable of fantasizing about what I'd do if I won $40 million without buying the ticket. (After giving money to family, paying off bills, putting money away for the kids' college funds, and taking a celebratory vacation, I'd probably just deposit the remainder and live off the interest.)
When I was renting, everything that needed to be repaired seemed to also be an excuse for raising the rent. When we had a hot summer and our air conditioning broke, our landlord claimed that fixing the AC cost so much that it necessitated a large rent increase.
With buying a house, our payments are fixed. Yes, repairs are our responsibility (and given that we have an older house, we've had more than our fair share), but those can either be prioritized (peeling paint comes after fixing a broken chimney) or done by ourselves to save money where possible. We can also hire people we prefer to do the job instead of dealing with whoever gave our landlord a lowball rate. (That AC repairman tried claiming that no central AC system could cool an apartment below 80. Odd since I grew up in a house with central AC and we could cool the house to 60 if we wanted to.)
If we are designing a submarine for use somewhere exotic and oil-rich wouldn't it make sense to save time by adding the weapons systems now? You know we'll end up needing them, and designing them in after the fact will be much more annoying and probably take longer.
I agree. Add some weapons now. Also, it should probably be designed like a marine creature to avoid suspicion from any possible alien marine life. You know what this means, right?
Good point. But if they react like this based on one terror attack 14 years ago, imagine how the government would react if everything that happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe happened in real-life. It would make the NSA's activities seem positively legal by comparison!
Also don't forget the alien invasion from Avengers and the Ultron attack that's likely coming up in the second Avengers movie. World governments - not just the US - would be going ballistic if all of this occurred in a mere 3 years. (I've often wondered how people function in the comics with superhero/villain battles everywhere and world-ending threats a daily occurrence. "Looks like Loki is trying to destroy Manhattan with Dr. Doom." "Is it Thursday already?")
We know that Captain America 3 is going to be called "Civil War" and will most likely be an adaptation of the superhero conflict between the government (and the heroes supporting them) insisting that all heroes register (including secret identities) and the heroes who said they didn't want to be a part of any government list. I wonder if, in the MCU, all of these events have resulted in a government paranoia about these super-powered folks running around. Which one of these costumed guys will be the next Loki or Ultron? Are any of them working for Hydra? Look at how our government listens in (oops... "collects meta data") on all of our communication based on the current threat of a terror attack. Now imagine an alien invasion, a traitorous vice president working with a terrorist, a Nazi-era evil organization resurfacing by taking down the world's premier security organization and crashing some large vehicles in DC, and then a robot wanting to destroy humanity. Our government would be going insane and anyone who questioned their actions would be rounded up as a potential Hydra agent. If you spoke up and had superpowers. Instant threat. This could easily be a recipe for a "civil war."
If it's anything like the voice recognition on my smartphone, it will mishear the activation phrase (turning on when something completely different from the activation phrase was spoken), silently listen in on the conversation, and then "helpfully" suggest results based on what it heard.
(My smartphone's voice activation is now disabled.)
Not to mention that Smart TVs have a bad record of having their interfaces/applications updated. If your Smart TV's interface is aging, you need to buy a new SmartTV. If the interface on your Roku (connected to your "dumb TV") is aging, you can buy a new Roku for much less. If another company overtakes Roku and makes something much superior, you can ditch your Roku and buy one of those. Smart TVs are today's equivalent of those TVs that had VCRs and/or DVD players built in instead of hooking up a separate VCR and/or DVD player.
When I got my newest phone, I tried out the voice recognition feature. I set it up and gave it a custom activation phrase that I figured wouldn't come up in normal conversation. What I didn't count on, though, was my phone apparently mishearing half of what I said. Several times a day, I'd hear the beeping noise it made when it recognized me ordering it to do something - but I hadn't said my activation phrase at all. My kids had a good laugh at the weird things that it mistook for an activation phrase. They'll still shout "she has a record" at my phone even though I've long turned off the voice recognition.
Even if you don't get into the "recording everything around you and sending it to the parent company" issues, why not just use a button to begin voice commands? I can voice-search Google by pressing a microphone icon, I don't need my phone listening to me all the time just in case I utter something at the phone. Have smartphones made data-access so easy and have we gotten so lazy that "click this icon and get the weather" is too hard and we need to say "Phone, give me the weather"?!!!
The government is regulating because these utilities plan to do away with business practices (peering, traffic neutrality) that were widely accepted and taken for granted when their respective monopolies were awarded.
If you still didn't quite get that, allow me to translate: These monopolies intend to re-architect the Internet to suit their profit model, and to prevent others from getting started the way that they did.
There's also the other wrinkle to this whole discussion: Verizon brought this upon themselves. The FCC enacted some weak network neutrality rules that almost all of the ISPs liked. It would have essentially let the ISPs do whatever they wanted. Only Verizon didn't like having any rules at all so they sued. They were successful in getting the rules knocked down, but at the expense of the courts telling the FCC they would have to declare that ISPs fall under Title II. So the FCC did this. Verizon got greedy and it came back to bite them in the rear.
Actually, if concentration camp photos were leaked during the war, maybe the Allies would have done more to liberate them quicker or disrupt them so that they couldn't kill as many people.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to agree with Fox and think that ISIS wants these videos shown so that people will fear them. I also worry that showing these videos will add fuel to the "all Muslims are evil terrorists" fire. Still, showing the video (in an opt-in capacity) could have some positive results. (Rallying people against ISIS even if they might have sympathized with the group previously.)
And, unfortunately, there are groups of people who deny that the Holocaust never happened. (I guess those 12 million people killed just "got lost walking home.") All evidence for the Holocaust is written off as inconsequential or part of a pro-Holocaust conspiracy.
I wonder if, a generation from now, we'll have terrorism deniers who will claim that there were actually no terrorist attacks in the middle east? (We already have the 9-11 deniers, so we're partway there.)
Blocking IPs (even if only for a short period of time) would help. In my case, the troll kept hitting my website so I set up an IP block to make it look like my site consisted of nothing but one big 404 page. She kept proclaiming how she got my site taken down - all the while not realizing that I was still tweeting out links to new articles.
There was also the added wrinkle that this person was not in the US while I (and many other people) were there. She actually harassed someone in her own country and that person started legal action, but the legal system there fizzled it out and nothing ever happened as a result.
It was always humorous to see this troll touting her follower numbers. They were always low but (when she could maintain an account long enough) above zero. Of course, the reason for this is that many people/organizations set up their accounts to automatically follow back anyone who follows you. You could make a bot whose sole purpose was to follow every Twitter user it saw, but never to tweet anything, and it would wind up getting thousands of followers given enough time.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had that experience too with our son (diagnosed with Asperger's). Put him with someone who gets his condition and he thrives. Put him with someone who insists that he "be normal all the time" and doesn't get or even want to get Asperger's and he withers. Right now, his school seems to have all the right people in place and it's amazing how much he's thriving - a welcome change from many years of struggling.
The way I always put it (especially to people who know computers) is that neurotypical people run "Neurotypical Society OS" natively. They know all of the rules and norms. Those on the spectrum, though, don't run this OS. They can - with a lot of help/time/practice - emulate it, but it will always be somewhat short of the "natively run" version. In addition, it can put a lot of strain on someone on the spectrum to emulate Neurotypical Society OS so they'll need time to decompress.
Our jobs as parents of kids on the spectrum are to help our kids emulate this OS while still helping them realize how wonderful their native OS can be.
How does one get a friend? What is friendship and how does one interact with friends? Is anyone who is nice to me a friend? What if my friend says something that I take as mean? Is that person no longer my friend? What can I tell a friend that I can't tell non-friends?
To you, these questions might seem insanely easy. To someone with Autism/Asperger's, they honestly have no clue. While people who are neurotypical seem to just pick up social rules naturally, those on the spectrum can't. It's as if they've been dropped in a weird alien land that doesn't make any sense and they're expected to instantly behave just like the natives behave.
You should see what happens in my house when my son (diagnosed with Asperger's) gets stuck on something and I (not diagnosed but almost certainly have Asperger's as well) get stuck on the opposite thing. My wife and neurotypical younger son get caught in the crossfire of two "stuck Aspies." Not fun for anyone involved!
Exactly this. Before we knew our child had Asperger's, our son's principal at the time insisted he was just being defiant and needed to be punished. So we did this and it backfired big time. His behaviors got worse, not better. Finally, we were so fed up, we paid a doctor to observe him (3 hours in the class without him knowing he was the one being observed and 3 hours by himself) and the doctor said he had Asperger's Syndrome (as well as Anxiety Disorder - threat of punishment would trigger his anxieties big time and he wouldn't be able to control himself).
Using If-Then's can be helpful. If he's going on and on about something, I'll tell him "finish it in your head, not out of your mouth" and he'll suddenly be quiet until he's done. (Just telling him "shut up" keeping him quiet until the compulsion to finish his story gets overwhelming - so in about 2 seconds.) When he gets overwhelmed, we've learned to quickly remove him from the situation so he can decompress. It's all about finding those ways of working with his issues and helping him learn what comes naturally to other kids.
Exactly this. The popular quote among parents of kids with autism is "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." There can be some commonality between groups (not looking in eyes, flapping arms, etc) but not everyone who is autistic will do all of these things all the time. What is really helpful for one kid with autism can do absolutely nothing (or even be harmful) to another child with autism. As the parent of a child diagnosed with Asperger's, I can assure you that finding that right type/level of support can be an uphill battle. Completely worth it in the end, but there are times when you just want to scream at the world.
It's not just the quality of the therapists, but in the case of social skills groups, the quality of the group itself.
My son is diagnosed Autistic and we sent him to a social skills group for awhile. At first, it went great. He made some fantastic strides in social skills. Then, the kids in the group changed. Suddenly, we began seeing not-so-nice behaviors coming from him. He was looking at the people in his group and modeling his behaviors on them. Instead of improving, he was backsliding. Same therapist, different groups of kids.
My son is diagnosed on the spectrum (Asperger's). He's 11 (6th grade, middle school). Intellectually, he's probably about 13. Socially/emotionally, though, he's about 6. Without proper supports*, he quickly winds up socially isolating himself with his actions. The ways of making and keeping friends that come naturally to everyone else don't come naturally to him. He *wants* friends, but just doesn't know how to make them. Worse, he will interpret any sign of kindness as friendship and follow this person. This can either annoy the person whom he is now "best friends" with or cause harm to him if the wrong person uses this against him. This goes way beyond "he doesn't belong to the popular kids group and has to sit with the outcasts."
* By the way, "proper supports" also includes educating the other students so they know why my son does what he does. We all think of kids as mean individuals ready to take advantage of anyone they can, but they can also be helpful and supportive. We've had peers of his come up to talk to us when they spotted a problem that my son was having. They were concerned about him and wanted to make sure he was ok.
To be fair, it was decided that some terrorists might have muses so all muses have been blocked.
Back in line, Citizen Unit #3858375.
No, he doesn't. That was just some bogus analysis by people who have never directly observed him to reach a diagnosis: http://www.forbes.com/sites/fayeflam/2015/02/09/stories-claiming-putin-has-aspergers-reveal-more-about-pathology-in-media-than-in-russian-leader/
My son has Asperger's Syndrome (actually diagnosed by a medical professional who spent 6 hours directly observing my son). I deal with actual-Asperger's every day. You don't get a diagnosis from someone watching some news clips. If Putin sees a medical professional and actually obtains a diagnosis, I'll change my mind, but you can't declare he has Asperger's based on a couple of people who watched a clip or two of him and decided "that's kinda Aspy."
Years ago, my wife and I went to Vegas. We're not big gamblers, but did a little gambling. The cost we sunk in was rationalized as entertainment - not an attempt to make money. We were able to be entertained for a couple of hours on not much cash.
With the lottery, we do play every so often, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I'm perfectly capable of fantasizing about what I'd do if I won $40 million without buying the ticket. (After giving money to family, paying off bills, putting money away for the kids' college funds, and taking a celebratory vacation, I'd probably just deposit the remainder and live off the interest.)
When I was renting, everything that needed to be repaired seemed to also be an excuse for raising the rent. When we had a hot summer and our air conditioning broke, our landlord claimed that fixing the AC cost so much that it necessitated a large rent increase.
With buying a house, our payments are fixed. Yes, repairs are our responsibility (and given that we have an older house, we've had more than our fair share), but those can either be prioritized (peeling paint comes after fixing a broken chimney) or done by ourselves to save money where possible. We can also hire people we prefer to do the job instead of dealing with whoever gave our landlord a lowball rate. (That AC repairman tried claiming that no central AC system could cool an apartment below 80. Odd since I grew up in a house with central AC and we could cool the house to 60 if we wanted to.)
I agree. Add some weapons now. Also, it should probably be designed like a marine creature to avoid suspicion from any possible alien marine life. You know what this means, right?
Robotic Shark with frickin' lasers!
Good point. But if they react like this based on one terror attack 14 years ago, imagine how the government would react if everything that happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe happened in real-life. It would make the NSA's activities seem positively legal by comparison!
Also don't forget the alien invasion from Avengers and the Ultron attack that's likely coming up in the second Avengers movie. World governments - not just the US - would be going ballistic if all of this occurred in a mere 3 years. (I've often wondered how people function in the comics with superhero/villain battles everywhere and world-ending threats a daily occurrence. "Looks like Loki is trying to destroy Manhattan with Dr. Doom." "Is it Thursday already?")
We know that Captain America 3 is going to be called "Civil War" and will most likely be an adaptation of the superhero conflict between the government (and the heroes supporting them) insisting that all heroes register (including secret identities) and the heroes who said they didn't want to be a part of any government list. I wonder if, in the MCU, all of these events have resulted in a government paranoia about these super-powered folks running around. Which one of these costumed guys will be the next Loki or Ultron? Are any of them working for Hydra? Look at how our government listens in (oops... "collects meta data") on all of our communication based on the current threat of a terror attack. Now imagine an alien invasion, a traitorous vice president working with a terrorist, a Nazi-era evil organization resurfacing by taking down the world's premier security organization and crashing some large vehicles in DC, and then a robot wanting to destroy humanity. Our government would be going insane and anyone who questioned their actions would be rounded up as a potential Hydra agent. If you spoke up and had superpowers. Instant threat. This could easily be a recipe for a "civil war."
If it's anything like the voice recognition on my smartphone, it will mishear the activation phrase (turning on when something completely different from the activation phrase was spoken), silently listen in on the conversation, and then "helpfully" suggest results based on what it heard.
(My smartphone's voice activation is now disabled.)
Not to mention that Smart TVs have a bad record of having their interfaces/applications updated. If your Smart TV's interface is aging, you need to buy a new SmartTV. If the interface on your Roku (connected to your "dumb TV") is aging, you can buy a new Roku for much less. If another company overtakes Roku and makes something much superior, you can ditch your Roku and buy one of those. Smart TVs are today's equivalent of those TVs that had VCRs and/or DVD players built in instead of hooking up a separate VCR and/or DVD player.
When I got my newest phone, I tried out the voice recognition feature. I set it up and gave it a custom activation phrase that I figured wouldn't come up in normal conversation. What I didn't count on, though, was my phone apparently mishearing half of what I said. Several times a day, I'd hear the beeping noise it made when it recognized me ordering it to do something - but I hadn't said my activation phrase at all. My kids had a good laugh at the weird things that it mistook for an activation phrase. They'll still shout "she has a record" at my phone even though I've long turned off the voice recognition.
Even if you don't get into the "recording everything around you and sending it to the parent company" issues, why not just use a button to begin voice commands? I can voice-search Google by pressing a microphone icon, I don't need my phone listening to me all the time just in case I utter something at the phone. Have smartphones made data-access so easy and have we gotten so lazy that "click this icon and get the weather" is too hard and we need to say "Phone, give me the weather"?!!!
There's also the other wrinkle to this whole discussion: Verizon brought this upon themselves. The FCC enacted some weak network neutrality rules that almost all of the ISPs liked. It would have essentially let the ISPs do whatever they wanted. Only Verizon didn't like having any rules at all so they sued. They were successful in getting the rules knocked down, but at the expense of the courts telling the FCC they would have to declare that ISPs fall under Title II. So the FCC did this. Verizon got greedy and it came back to bite them in the rear.
Actually, if concentration camp photos were leaked during the war, maybe the Allies would have done more to liberate them quicker or disrupt them so that they couldn't kill as many people.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to agree with Fox and think that ISIS wants these videos shown so that people will fear them. I also worry that showing these videos will add fuel to the "all Muslims are evil terrorists" fire. Still, showing the video (in an opt-in capacity) could have some positive results. (Rallying people against ISIS even if they might have sympathized with the group previously.)
And, unfortunately, there are groups of people who deny that the Holocaust never happened. (I guess those 12 million people killed just "got lost walking home.") All evidence for the Holocaust is written off as inconsequential or part of a pro-Holocaust conspiracy.
I wonder if, a generation from now, we'll have terrorism deniers who will claim that there were actually no terrorist attacks in the middle east? (We already have the 9-11 deniers, so we're partway there.)
No, to stop the ship, you launch your specially trained sharks... ... with lasers attached to them! *puts pinky to mouth*
Blocking IPs (even if only for a short period of time) would help. In my case, the troll kept hitting my website so I set up an IP block to make it look like my site consisted of nothing but one big 404 page. She kept proclaiming how she got my site taken down - all the while not realizing that I was still tweeting out links to new articles.
There was also the added wrinkle that this person was not in the US while I (and many other people) were there. She actually harassed someone in her own country and that person started legal action, but the legal system there fizzled it out and nothing ever happened as a result.
It was always humorous to see this troll touting her follower numbers. They were always low but (when she could maintain an account long enough) above zero. Of course, the reason for this is that many people/organizations set up their accounts to automatically follow back anyone who follows you. You could make a bot whose sole purpose was to follow every Twitter user it saw, but never to tweet anything, and it would wind up getting thousands of followers given enough time.