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Open Society
Teaching Black History Month under Iowa's new law
A social studies teacher at Ankeny High said the new law has led to teachers practicing "self-censorship" at his building.
Autistic Care Workers: Burned Out By an Ableist System
When ableism forces autistic care workers out of the system, clients lose crucial autistic mentors, and autistic workers can be traumatized.
Robert Chapman: "One way ableism manifests in political rhetoric is the tendency for the left to be pathologosed as mad ("loony left", "lunatic fringe", etc.) and the right to be framed as cognitively disabled ("morons", "idiots", etc.). Centrism is implicitly associated with neurotypicality and hence legitimised." — Bluesky
One way ableism manifests in political rhetoric is the tendency for the left to be pathologosed as mad ("loony left", "lunatic fringe", etc.) and the right to be framed as cognitively disabled ("morons", "idiots", etc.). Centrism is implicitly associated with neurotypicality and hence legitimised.
Opinion | Why this Florida school threw LGBTQ-friendly books into a dumpster
The public university, now run by right-wing culture warriors, is continuing a tradition of taking away books for the supposed good of the people.
“Current Events Do Not Belong in History Class”
We have to ask: if we aren’t talking to kids about the impact of these deadly ideas, who is?
Distinct neural synchrony observed in social interactions involving autistic adults
Adults with autism prefer to follow rather than lead in social imitation tasks, accompanied by distinct brain synchrony patterns, indicating differences in how their brains connect with others during social interactions.
Berners-Lee: Talk at Bush Symposium: Notes
That brings us to another interesting feature of topologies, and that is their variation with scale. A few years ago, the world was fascinated (quite rightly) with fractal patterns. For those of you too young to remember the fad :-), a fractal pattern is one like the shape of a fern, which when you look at it closer and closer rewards you with a similar level of interest through many orders of magnitude. It is like the tree outside my office window, but it is not like my office block, whose interesting features are limited to a rectangle maybe 100 meters long, windows around a meter wide, and rivets a few millimeters wide.
Is society fractal? Yes, it certainly is. There is structure at the highest levels and the lowest levels. There are great big links formed by organizations which themselves are made up of smaller links. You can simplify society on a number of levels. You look at a newspaper and it will perhaps have a few sorties of domestic bliss or otherwise in the neighborhood, a story on the town, a story at state level, and (even in Boston), usually some stories about world affairs. (For those not from the area, the Boston paper's typical foreign news headline is "Boston woman has twins in China".)
People need to be part of the fractal pattern. They need to be part of organisms at each scale. We appreciate that a person needs a balance between interest in self, family, town, state and planet. A person needs connections at each scale. People who lack connections at any given scale feel frustrated. The international jet-setter and the person who always stays at home share that frustration. Could it be that human beings are programmed with some microscopic rules which induce them to act so as to form a wholesome society? Will these rules still serve us when we are "empowered" by the web, or will evolution give us no clues how to continue?
Look at web "home pages". "Home pages" are representative of people, organizations, or concepts. Good ones tend to, just like people, have connections of widely varying "length". Perhaps as the web grows we will be able to see fractal structure emerge in its interconnections. Perhaps we ought to bear this in mind as we build our own webs.
One of the reasons that the web spread was that the hypertext model does not constrain the information it represents. This has allowed people to represent topologies they need. We have found that people love to use trees, but like to have more than one, sometimes overlapping. We have found they need structure and involvement at all scales.
‘I’ve had to become my own doctor’: trans young people on life after the Cass review
With puberty blockers now banned in much of the UK, those hoping for gender treatment say they have been forced into difficult decisions
In U.S. Courts, Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias Can Be a Death Sentence
In America, judges, juries, and prosecutors can still exhibit clear signs of anti-LGBTQ+ bias when giving people a death sentence.
Research shows air filters in classrooms improves overall ventilation and air quality
A study born out of the pandemic is now expanding beyond concerns of just infectious diseases, and helping to improve air quality in schools across the state.
See Us. Hear Us. - Jordyn Zimmerman
This open-captioned short documentary film features Jordyn Zimmerman, and is the first in CommunicationFIRST's See Us, Hear Us film series, produced by award...
To My Unmasked Friend in the Fifth Year of COVID
I’m going to be honest with you, because I love you, and you deserve nothing but honesty. I’m going to try really hard not to be angry…
Bernie Sanders: America Must Confront Its Long COVID Crisis
Long COVID is real. It is negatively impacting tens of millions of people throughout the United States and the world. We can no longer ignore it, or its sufferers’ treatment needs.
My Most Dangerous ER Experience and How My Advocate Saved My Life
A story of medical gaslighting, negligence and neglect that very nearly cost me my life - and how my accidental advocate (untrained and unprepared) saved me.
How to Stay Covid Safe When in Hospital
A guide to navigating the risk of hospital acquired Covid - as well as how to manage overall risk of nosocomial infections and hospital derived complications.
Tips for Surviving a Hospital Trip When Chronically Ill
When you're disabled - the decision of whether or not to go to the hospital is incredibly complex. When you have no choice but to go - there are ways to make it easier.
"I Won't Go to the ER Unless I'm Literally Dying"
When you're disabled or chronically ill - learning when to seek medical care (and what that care will look like) is a painful and traumatic journey. It often ends in "I will never go to the ER again."
When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on plastic shopping bags and other items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
Autistic Adults Avoid Unpredictability in Decision-Making - Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
Decision-making under unpredictable conditions can cause discomfort in autistic persons due to their preference for predictability. Decision-making impairments might furthermore be associated with a dysregulation of sex and stress hormones. This prospective, cross-sectional study investigated decision-making in 32 autistic participants (AP, 14 female) and 31 non-autistic participants (NAP, 20 female) aged 18–64 years. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Cambridge Risk Task (CRT) were used to assess decision-making under ambiguity and under risk with known outcome probabilities, respectively. Cortisol, estradiol, and testosterone serum levels were related to decision-making performance. Groups did not differ in overall IGT and CRT performance, but compared with NAP, AP preferred less profitable card decks with predictable outcomes while avoiding those with unpredictable outcomes. AP required more time to reach decisions compared to NAP. Additionally, AP without comorbid depression performed significantly worse than NAP in the IGT. Estradiol and cortisol concentrations were significant predictors of CRT scores in NAP, but not in AP. The study results imply that AP are ‘risk-averse’ in decision-making under ambiguity as they avoided choice options with unpredictable losses in comparison to NAP. Our findings highlight the intolerance for uncertainty, particularly in ambiguous situations. Thus, we recommend being as transparent and precise as possible when interacting with autistic individuals. Future research should explore decision-making in social situations among individuals with ASD, factoring in person-dependent variables such as depression.
A starting point for neuroinclusivity: Essential reading and thoughts from some of the leading neurodivergent minds. — Global Equality Collective
Caroline Keep is a founding GEC expert. She speaks for us at events and helps QA our content for the GEC Platform. Here she discusses and educates us, using her lived experience as an award-winning teacher, PhD researcher and diagnosed “autistic ADHDer”.
Neurodivergent Base-Camp
A base camp is a safe space where people ‘get you’, where there is a more level playing field of shared life experiences
The Manager Instructions Manual
How to write a handbook to help your team work with you.
Paolo’s Handbook
I published this document internally at Automattic to be used by any colleague curious about how to interact with me. I am sharing it here as I want to be able to reference it publicly, and access …
FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Launches New Effort to Crack Down on Everyday Headaches and Hassles That Waste Americans’ Time and Money | The White House
New actions will take on corporate tricks and scams like excessive paperwork, long wait times, and more that pad the profits of big business at the
Free Downloads - Amplifier
Amplifier makes its artworks available for free download so you can print them and put them up in your home, place of work, school, and around your community! We encourage you to share these works far…
Let's restore humanity to education
Get started on your quest to bring humankind back into teaching: pedagogy, practice, and change.
Telling me where it is is good direction-giving. | by Jim Irion | Jul, 2024 | Medium
I'm low-energy. Low-energy means it takes stim-listening (My Most Underrated Coping Skill) on most days just to writer or tweet. I was…
I'm low-energy. Low-energy means it takes stim-listening (My Most Underrated Coping Skill) on most days just to writer or tweet.
Moon Unit Zappa on the 'emotional trauma' of her childhood: 'Is genius worth the collateral damage?'
Moon Unit Zappa's memoir is a self-portrait of an insecure and often confused child, worshipful of her absent father, Frank Zappa, and thirsty for maternal affection.
“But he was away so often that, as an adult, I weirdly have more empathy for her now. If you don’t do any work on yourself, you are going to be miserable.”
“Something I have often grappled with, which became the impetus for the book, was this idea of, is genius worth the collateral damage it can do to a family?” says Zappa. “It’s the Pharaoh Syndrome. You are working for the top of the pyramid and it will eventually come back to you.”
“Sacrifices were made by everyone so that the genius could be out in the world”: Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Unit on their difficult family life
Moon Unit Zappa has opened up about her life growing up with Frank Zappa, saying that everyone in the family had to make sacrifices.
“Sacrifices were made by everyone so that the genius could be out in the world.”