There's a lot of discussion about this over at dailykos - apparently tarballs take a while to form, as opposed to the brownish goo seen on the "60 Minutes" piece. So if they're actually tarballs they're not from this release of oil. They're being analyzed.
As a rule of thumb, if you can put together a fully formed sentence, you almost certainly don't have meaningful levels of ASD.
Please provide some kind of scientific-journal citation for this assertion.
While you're looking, let me point out an underlying assumption which it appears to be making: that the verbal/written communication process is a "black box" where ideas go in one end and words come out the other, such that the quality of the cognitive process(es) generating the ideas can be reliably deduced from the quality and quantity of the words.
Please consider this alternative view: the communicative layer is not an inherent part of the cognitive processes, which lie further within the individual. There is no reason that "typical-appearing verbal/written communication" cannot be the output of a laborious and oft-fragile emulation, which is prone to occasionally crashing or producing unexpected/undesirable results. If intensive effort at this emulation manages to produce typical-looking verbal output, the individual making the effort is rewarded by being told that s/he cannot possibly be autistic. Thanks a lot for *that*.
And yes, my username is my DSM code. And yes, I was formally diagnosed, and no, I was not "faking" all the stuff which I've gone through over the years (and still sometimes do). Sheesh.
...part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)......is in New Haven.
Well, at least they got the city name right. When I was in Data Systems at Southern New England Telephone (also in New Haven), I got a look at a cleaned-up list of city names in the Customer Records and Billing master database. According to it, we had at least one customer in East Fartford (rather than East Hartford), which might've shown up in "F" rather than "H" in the example you gave...
I know I keyed some code from listings in Dr. Dobb's into my Processor Tech SOL-20, but can't remember if it was assembler source or binary. It was a long time ago, and hey, it was the '70s... oh wow.
My wife works at a county library branch, where the vast majority of donated books are sold very cheaply for fundraising (only a few are suitable for adding to the library's collection). She recently snagged two SF anthologies for a total of forty US cents.
...and can vouch for the "dumpster diving" approach. For a while, physical mockups (without the electronics) were just tossed in the dumpster; I saw neighborhood kids brandishing their "prizes". Later on, one of the guys took to hanging them in a tree outside our 2nd-floor office window; that didn't go over well when our VP found out...
If the battery got too low while my Rio One was playing, the firmware would sometimes become corrupted. I got proficient at running the "firmware restore" utility...
In about that same time period I was working on a homebuilt power supply for a ham transmitter. I had temporarily bridged in more filter capacity and shortly thereafter absentmindedly picked up the still-charged electrolytic by both leads - *one in each hand*. The PS was about 350 volts. Fortunately the muscle contractions flung the thing out of my hands. They say a learning experience is anything we survive...
A slide rule will give you a couple/few significant digits of the answer, but no notion of where the decimal point should be. Thus you had to have some sense of the magnitude of the expected result, which helped weed out implausibly large or small "answers".
An engineer I knew in the early '70s had a metal circular slide rule. Occasionally he would carry it around in both hands, with a matzoh cracker held against its underside with his thumbs. In the midst of a conversation, he would feign taking a bite of the slide rule, pushing the cracker forward at the last instant and crunching into it instead. The effect was startling...
Mother Jones ran an article about the use of electric shock to manage severe self-injurious behavior. It'd be a Good Thing if deep brain stimulation could do this in a more humane way...
"Not anymore hipocritical than than the enviromentalist's darling Al Gore living in a house that sucks enough energy..."
Um, that was an old mansion which is undergoing renovation and energy efficiency fixes. This work was delayed by the need to get local ordinances brought up to date regarding solar panel retrofits. It also has numerous offices in it, so calling it a "house" is misleading.
I prefer another automotive analogy: earning the money for one's own car rather than having it paid for by others.
Working hard for something seems likely to lead to that "something" being more appreciated and taken better care of. OTOH when communication and social interaction are very easy, they could just as easily be taken for granted, toyed with, deliberately broken for the hell of it, and just generally trivialized.
Seems awfully easy to lose track of what is really meaningful in life if the basics aren't even worth thinking about. As an autistic person, I'm grateful for having to pay attention to interactions - I'm much more apt to value them that way; to take care with them.
I guess some folks actually enjoy living the social equivalent of an Obfuscated Code Contest. But if seeking to understand and meaningfully interact with others isn't important, why are we here?
- Dave - lots of presentations/research notes at my URL
I was made a maintenance programmer fresh out of training, and before long I got my first callout (rather dated jargon follows): One of our routine nightly batch jobs ABENDed with a S0C7 (data error) while opening (not even reading yet) a file, and in I went at about 2AM. But what bad customer data could there be in a COBOL OPEN statement...?
Turned out one of our contract software guys had made a simple change to the file retention period - so trivial, he said, there was no need to test it. He was rather chagrined the next day.
Yeah, this was a long time ago - 1973 or so. But some cherished principles hold up pretty well, such as: Test the damn "trivial" changes!
Well... thats fine for all of you higher functioning types on the spectrum (and the Slashdot Self-Diagnosed Aspergers Posse) but many autistics are *severely* disabled, with no speech, and no chance of an independant life. You can choose not to be treated or 'cured', and that's fine, as your condition is managable. But this could mean that some severely disabled people get the chance to express themselves and *have* an identity.
I see a few dubious assumptions in that. One is that an "independent" life is more desirable - I have an official HFA/AS diagnosis (and the DSM code is the basis of my username, and see my site for several conference presentations I've given) and am dependent on a good-sized support system despite living without onsite staff (well, aside from my wife:-) ). So setting "independence" as a goal can get murky - the whole point of socialization is to develop interdependence.
Another is that having speech inherently means having good communicative skills. Mine tend to vanish under stress, which is when they'd be the most useful. "Functioning level" is not a constant, and is highly situational. Claiming that "high-functioning" and "low-functioning" autistic folks are very different is very misleading. It also tends to marginalize those autistic folks who can, inconveniently, speak for ourselves rather than giving others the authority to speak for us (and thereby press their agenda on us).
Another is that one's internal state can be deduced from one's external appearance/behavior. How can you judge the quality-of-life of an autistic person? Saying "Their life doesn't look like I think it should so it's not any good" may be tempting but that doesn't mean it's accurate.
I'd also suggest taking another look at what might constitute an "identity". It seems from what sociology I've taken that the very humanity of we autistic folks may be in some doubt - but IMO that points to an inadequacy of the definition. Because we don't behave/interface like the "standard model" we are therefore deficient? Make the damn effort to understand us, keeping in mind that behavior is communication too. In the process you will learn a great deal about yourself, and have the opportunity to reconsider what quality-of-life really is.
Elsewhere in this discussion "Charly" was brought up (well, the story the movie was based on). See the movie, and pay close attention to his response at a conference when he is asked, "What do you see?" What passes for "quality-of-life" among many nonautistic people would be funny were it not so sad.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of discussion about this over at dailykos - apparently tarballs take a while to form, as opposed to the brownish goo seen on the "60 Minutes" piece. So if they're actually tarballs they're not from this release of oil. They're being analyzed.
The "department" names are often the best part of /. for me...
"Don't Touch Me There!"
...the "2001" reference was spot on. Who thinks those things up? For me it's the coolest part of /.
Some folks there are in the multi-KW range, others commuting almost daily testing various motors and batteries. Lots of, well, roll-your-own activity.
As a rule of thumb, if you can put together a fully formed sentence, you almost certainly don't have meaningful levels of ASD.
Please provide some kind of scientific-journal citation for this assertion.
While you're looking, let me point out an underlying assumption which it appears to be making: that the verbal/written communication process is a "black box" where ideas go in one end and words come out the other, such that the quality of the cognitive process(es) generating the ideas can be reliably deduced from the quality and quantity of the words.
Please consider this alternative view: the communicative layer is not an inherent part of the cognitive processes, which lie further within the individual. There is no reason that "typical-appearing verbal/written communication" cannot be the output of a laborious and oft-fragile emulation, which is prone to occasionally crashing or producing unexpected/undesirable results. If intensive effort at this emulation manages to produce typical-looking verbal output, the individual making the effort is rewarded by being told that s/he cannot possibly be autistic. Thanks a lot for *that*.
And yes, my username is my DSM code. And yes, I was formally diagnosed, and no, I was not "faking" all the stuff which I've gone through over the years (and still sometimes do). Sheesh.
...part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)... ...is in New Haven.
Well, at least they got the city name right. When I was in Data Systems at Southern New England Telephone (also in New Haven), I got a look at a cleaned-up list of city names in the Customer Records and Billing master database. According to it, we had at least one customer in East Fartford (rather than East Hartford), which might've shown up in "F" rather than "H" in the example you gave...
Views Total: 1,510 Today: 1,421
Just thought you might want to know :-)
I know I keyed some code from listings in Dr. Dobb's into my Processor Tech SOL-20, but can't remember if it was assembler source or binary. It was a long time ago, and hey, it was the '70s... oh wow.
Well, this thing is right off the scale...
In the cafeteria at Southern New England Telephone, we would regularly encounter stuff best described as FILLER PIC X VALUE LOW-VALUES.
My wife works at a county library branch, where the vast majority of donated books are sold very cheaply for fundraising (only a few are suitable for adding to the library's collection). She recently snagged two SF anthologies for a total of forty US cents.
...and can vouch for the "dumpster diving" approach. For a while, physical mockups (without the electronics) were just tossed in the dumpster; I saw neighborhood kids brandishing their "prizes". Later on, one of the guys took to hanging them in a tree outside our 2nd-floor office window; that didn't go over well when our VP found out...
If the battery got too low while my Rio One was playing, the firmware would sometimes become corrupted. I got proficient at running the "firmware restore" utility...
In about that same time period I was working on a homebuilt power supply for a ham transmitter. I had temporarily bridged in more filter capacity and shortly thereafter absentmindedly picked up the still-charged electrolytic by both leads - *one in each hand*. The PS was about 350 volts. Fortunately the muscle contractions flung the thing out of my hands. They say a learning experience is anything we survive...
Sounds too good to be true. Hope I'm wrong...
An engineer I knew in the early '70s had a metal circular slide rule. Occasionally he would carry it around in both hands, with a matzoh cracker held against its underside with his thumbs. In the midst of a conversation, he would feign taking a bite of the slide rule, pushing the cracker forward at the last instant and crunching into it instead. The effect was startling...
Mother Jones ran an article about the use of electric shock to manage severe self-injurious behavior. It'd be a Good Thing if deep brain stimulation could do this in a more humane way...
...featuring lots of her own blood.
"Not anymore hipocritical than than the enviromentalist's darling Al Gore living in a house that sucks enough energy..."
Um, that was an old mansion which is undergoing renovation and energy efficiency fixes. This work was delayed by the need to get local ordinances brought up to date regarding solar panel retrofits. It also has numerous offices in it, so calling it a "house" is misleading.
But don't let any of that stop you...
Working hard for something seems likely to lead to that "something" being more appreciated and taken better care of. OTOH when communication and social interaction are very easy, they could just as easily be taken for granted, toyed with, deliberately broken for the hell of it, and just generally trivialized.
Seems awfully easy to lose track of what is really meaningful in life if the basics aren't even worth thinking about. As an autistic person, I'm grateful for having to pay attention to interactions - I'm much more apt to value them that way; to take care with them.
I guess some folks actually enjoy living the social equivalent of an Obfuscated Code Contest. But if seeking to understand and meaningfully interact with others isn't important, why are we here?
- Dave - lots of presentations/research notes at my URL
Turned out one of our contract software guys had made a simple change to the file retention period - so trivial, he said, there was no need to test it. He was rather chagrined the next day.
Yeah, this was a long time ago - 1973 or so. But some cherished principles hold up pretty well, such as: Test the damn "trivial" changes!
...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.
I see a few dubious assumptions in that. One is that an "independent" life is more desirable - I have an official HFA/AS diagnosis (and the DSM code is the basis of my username, and see my site for several conference presentations I've given) and am dependent on a good-sized support system despite living without onsite staff (well, aside from my wife :-) ). So setting "independence" as a goal can get murky - the whole point of socialization is to develop interdependence.
Another is that having speech inherently means having good communicative skills. Mine tend to vanish under stress, which is when they'd be the most useful. "Functioning level" is not a constant, and is highly situational. Claiming that "high-functioning" and "low-functioning" autistic folks are very different is very misleading. It also tends to marginalize those autistic folks who can, inconveniently, speak for ourselves rather than giving others the authority to speak for us (and thereby press their agenda on us).
Another is that one's internal state can be deduced from one's external appearance/behavior. How can you judge the quality-of-life of an autistic person? Saying "Their life doesn't look like I think it should so it's not any good" may be tempting but that doesn't mean it's accurate.
I'd also suggest taking another look at what might constitute an "identity". It seems from what sociology I've taken that the very humanity of we autistic folks may be in some doubt - but IMO that points to an inadequacy of the definition. Because we don't behave/interface like the "standard model" we are therefore deficient? Make the damn effort to understand us, keeping in mind that behavior is communication too. In the process you will learn a great deal about yourself, and have the opportunity to reconsider what quality-of-life really is.
Elsewhere in this discussion "Charly" was brought up (well, the story the movie was based on). See the movie, and pay close attention to his response at a conference when he is asked, "What do you see?" What passes for "quality-of-life" among many nonautistic people would be funny were it not so sad.
...try feeding invalid parameters to Something Much Bigger, as described here.