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.
Open Society
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.”
#AltTextPalestine: Showing Solidarity By Creating Access
#AltTextPalestine: Showing Solidarity By Creating Access Sarah Blahovec Images and videos coming out of Gaza show the horror of the genocide every single day. Bombs rain down on the d…
creating access is a tool for collective action.
Over the years, I’ve learned that creating access is a critical way of showing up in solidarity. Accessibility work can be done from anywhere, and that’s particularly important for disabled people, as we can’t always be physically present.
Being physically present and visible is more highly valued by our capitalist society. We see this with the push to end remote work, school, events, and conferences. People who show up in person are regularly viewed as making more of an effort, and people who show up remotely are viewed as disengaged and lazy. Unfortunately, this attitude is present even in organizing spaces. Even more radical spaces often fail at accessibility, from using physically inaccessible spaces, to not offering hybrid options, to refusing to implement COVID safety protocols.
Ad Execs Speak Out: Musk’s Lawsuit Makes ExTwitter Even Less Appealing
Would you believe that Elon suing former advertisers for no longer advertising on ExTwitter isn’t magically making advertisers want to come back and is, instead, driving them further away? A quick …
Alice Wong and Advocacy Groups Demand Systemic Changes in UCSF Healthcare - Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund
March 15, 2024 DREDF, CommunicationFIRST, and the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco sent a letter to UCSF leaders regarding Alice Wong's recent experience at the Moffitt/Long Hospital for an urgent medical need. During her stay, Alice was denied effective communication and was subjected to the constant risk of infection from unmasked or improperly masked staff.
Access Above All
Disabled people know the health care system is hostile. But it doesn’t have to be.
Laws like the ADA require only the bare minimum of care, and there is no enforcement. Compliance cannot be forced, even on people who do not see you as fully human or deserving of the right to access the same space.
Disabled people constantly navigate hostile environments, especially health care settings. Here people in positions of power can say whatever they want while patients have to give citations, articulate clearly and effectively, and have the presence of mind to push back during acute, potentially fast-moving situations. I have been advocating for my health with doctors since I was a child, but this latest experience shook me. They gaslit me about my valid concerns of mistreatment. Even with all my social capital and resources, I was reduced to nothing. I thought of all the patients on the same floor who were alone, scared, and suffering.
Disabled advocate Sarah Blahovec wrote that “creating access is a critical way of showing up in solidarity.” If we lived in a world that placed access above all, creating access would be a collective responsibility. In this world, cultures of care would ensure that carceral institutions like nursing homes are abolished; people, not profits, would be the priority; care would flow generously without restrictions from the state; and people like me would be secure knowing we are valued and wanted not for what we can produce but for who we are. This world—an accessible one centered on justice—would be ruled by a simple phrase always put into practice: “None of us are free until we all are free.”
Medicare drug price negotiations: 10 list prices drop between 38% to 79%
If the prices were set in 2023, Medicare would have saved $6 billion.
Can We Finally Stop Pretending Elon Musk Is A “Free Speech Absolutist”? He’s Not
A challenge for the mainstream media: can you stop saying that Elon Musk is a free speech absolutist? Over the past few years, we’ve had a number of posts highlighting just how laughable it is that…
Texas School Thinks It Can Solve Student Mental Health Issues By Banning Black Clothing
I, for one, would welcome an opportunity for the inmates to run the asylum. It can’t possibly be any stupider than this bit of news, which emanates from what I consider to be my hometown (I s…
Son insists on sweet greeting whenever he sees dad: "This is masculinity"
The sisters told Newsweek that the professional fighter is also the "best big brother in the world."
Tim Walz, the Kelce brothers and a new era of "positive masculinity"
Masculinity isn't just leading or playing sports. But don't take our word for it, here's what experts think.
What these men have in common is that they aren't scared of strong or successful females, and they don't shy away from their vulnerabilities. A staple of positive masculinity is being able to share power, which is for the best.
10 Ways to Improve Accessibility on Websites and Social Media - Lireo Designs
My 10 tips for making your website and social media more accessible, whether you're a blogger, photographer, writer, designer, or developer.
Experiences of and treatment preferences for insomnia in autistic adults: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Insomnia and insomnia symptoms are frequent experiences of autistic people resulting in pronounced daytime effects and poor quality of life. This stud…
Broken Time - Believer Magazine
I. It was supposed to be the best day of Richard “Blue” Mitchell’s life, but June 30, 1958, turned out to be one of the worst. The trumpeter had been summoned to New York City from Miami for a recording session with Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, an old friend who was being hailed as the hottest […]
The Great Big ABA Opposition Resource List
This is a list of every English language article opposing ABA. We continue to curate this list periodically to ensure that it is a resource that …The Great Big ABA Opposition Resource List
Neurodiversity | Student Access and Accommodation Services | Illinois State
Teaching Machines (for Bodies, Not Brains)
Many histories of education technology start with the hornbook, a fifteenth century invention that, according to Bill Ferster, "married pedagogy and content knowledge into a physical device" — a device that allowed students to learn their letters (without tearing up or writing in an actual book, I guess).
Of course, where
Education technology tends to dismiss embodiment. Even when folks tout "learning by doing," it's often reduced nowadays to "learning by clicking." You'd think that having just lived through several years of Zoom school, we'd be more willing to prioritize the importance of teaching and learning with our bodies in physical spaces with other bodies. (Or even have more nuanced conversations about the effect on bodies of teaching and learning in digital and non-digital spaces.) Alas.