Open Society

Tech and the liberal arts have always been at war. Don’t assume Silicon Valley will win.

Two full days after the disastrous collapse of a bridge in Baltimore, little is known about six construction workers who went missing—and are now presumed dead.

Used to operating with scarce resources, Montana Medicaid providers say gaps in state payments have left them struggling further.

“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” Scott told The Banner. “They really want to say the N-word.”

Self-determination theory (SDT) provides a framework for understanding the factors that promote motivation and healthy psychological and behavioral functioning. In this authoritative work, the codevelopers of the theory comprehensively examine SDT's conceptual underpinnings (including its six mini-theories), empirical evidence base, and practical applications across the lifespan. The volume synthesizes a vast body of research on how supporting--or thwarting--people's basic needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy affects their development and well-being. Chapters cover implications for practice and policy in education, health care, psychotherapy, sport, and the workplace.

Embodied space is the location where human experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form. After identifying the inherent difficulties in defin...

Autistic individuals can have poor outcomes from school, including high rates of unemployment. Despite a growing focus on the work experiences of autistic people, and various approaches to remediate ...

The neurodiversity movement is a social movement that emerged among autistic self-advocates. It has since spread and has been joined by many with diagnoses of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder...

Our work tests how words pertaining to neurodivergent conditions such as “autism” or “ADHD” are viewed by artificial intelligence (AI) language models. AI is involved in many decisions such as medica...

Disagreement over recent TikTok legislation reveals a deep divide about our current political moment. Should we, like many of the bill’s proponents, assume the existence of a functional…

Since all policies address problems, they necessarily include implicit or explicit constructions of these problems. This paper explores how child maltreatment has been constructed in New Zealand’s child protection policies. It questions the underlying assumptions of this problem construction and seeks to shed light on what has been omitted. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis of eight key policy documents, this study reveals the construction of child maltreatment has been dominated primarily by a child-centric, risk-focused approach. This approach assigns blame and shifts responsibilities onto parents and families. In addition, the vulnerability discourse and social investment approach underpinning this perspective have allowed important structural factors, such as poverty and inequality, to remain unaddressed. This paper also highlights the one-dimensional focus on the lower social class to control future liabilities. We suggest that the harm inflicted by corporations on children’s well-being is another form of child exploitation currently omitted from the problem construction. We suggest that child abuse should be defined and understood in policy as harm to children’s well-being and argue that the state should prevent and mitigate harm by addressing structural forces of the problem as well as protecting children against corporate harms.

Mounting scientific evidence reveals that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID — profoundly impacts brain health in many ways.

The CDC’s new “Pan-respiratory” isolation guidelines make sense to many public-health experts, but there could be some downsides, too.

Despite the right's ridiculous DEI conspiracy theories, the Baltimore bridge disaster reminded us that immigrants are what makes America great.

Abstract Over 1% of the UK population has a diagnosis of autism and, of this group, half will also have a learning disability. Studies show that people

Her papers also contain this interesting "how to guide" written for public officials. It contained practical suggestions for how to deal with right wing extremists who were trying to ratfuck public institutions like schools and municipal government.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who grew up in the South and understood the politics of racism from the inside, saw it in part as a ploy to divide and conquer.

Nature Neuroscience - The Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) Precision Brain Atlas is a resource of personalized brain network topographies (n = 9,900). It also provides...

This paper, drawing from complex systems theory (CST), advances a framework that proposes the implementation of Ambient Smart Environments (ASEs) for personalised cognitive styles. The paper begins by arguing that Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) can be described and understood as embodied misattunement with a neurotypical (sociocultural) environment. Personalising the environment is an opportunity for fitting a cognitive style, e.g. autistic interaction with the environment. High variability, noise, and rigidity can result in difficulties adapting to (neurotypical) environmental demands. This may result in rigid or repetitive behaviour, corresponding, in CST, to a “stuck state” or “local minimum”. Preventive intervention with ASE (by increasing free energy and moving out of the “stuck state” and into a new stable state) for autistic interaction with the environment can help develop patterns of flexible adjustment and attunement to the environment. ASE offers an opportunity for personalised therapeutic intervention for manipulating the environment to fit a cognitive style.

a reflection on the unknowability of everyone we love

What Does It Mean to Be Human Today?

GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Program reported the following anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads; Meta deemed all of it non-violative or did not take action on it.

The monotropism hypothesis posits that hyper-focus on interests is core to autistic cognition; moreover, hyper-focus is common in attention dysregulation hypera...

Care. We use the term all the time. Care is described in a plan and delivered in a package. Care has a start date and an end date. It comes in episodes. Time frames. Short-term. Temporary. Intermed…

The word "neurodiversity" and the idea it represents—that autistic people and other people whose minds function in atypical ways are equal, not less—has gained a tenuous foothold in the public consciousness. Still, many members of the autistic advocacy community remain skeptical and wary, suspecting that the changes are superficial.

Typically, although it’s notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, ho...

BackgroundThe Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus a school attendance crisis in many countries, although this likely pre-dates the pandemic. Child...

The creation of autism as a diagnostic category, and the societal responses to it recommended currently and, in the past, has a specific historical and

In this article, we will explain what the Saturation Model is, and how it operates in conjunction with the Low Arousal Approach.