What they are showing in the video is misleading and even damaging. Why? Check out the long, sad and troubled history of "Facilitated Communication (FC)." This "technique" goes as far back as the 1970's, and numerous scientific attempts to validate it have all failed. "It is without merit and scientific evidence" says the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Study after study show that it is the facilitator who is providing the words and thoughts, sometimes unintentionally, often with the best of intentions. I have a niece with Down's Syndrome, and I pray for such breakthroughs. As a scientist I know that FC gives false hope to hurting families.
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Apple Celebrates Autism Acceptance Month With Two New Videos
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I don't think the video is showing facilitated communication. I think Dillan is doing the typing himself, isn't he?
Coming from a county with a national health system with a government regulated definition of "health" this is no surprise. Drop the NIH, free market your health care, let the population determine what is healthy instead of cloistered elites that can't win a pub fight, conditions will improve.
As Steve Jobs said, "Here is to the crazy ones ..."
It's hard to know if autism itself has spiked, or if autism diagnosis (because of the awareness) has spiked. Maybe in the past people with autism were just mislabeled or overlooked. I'm not *that* old (30s) and I don't remember autism even being a commonly used word that was used when I was a kid.
Watch the sequence in the video where Dillon is typing and the facilitator is moving the iPad. You can see that she is moving the pad around to get the letters that she wants typed. This is what is meant by facilitated.
I think the video gives you clues. He types normally, revealing that though his speech is rudimentary, he's thinking perfectly. And the iPad gives him a voice that says what he thinks. It's not totally a pitch for Apple, but a portable computer to facilitate communication. Autistic people actually tend to be smart. They have a secret life they find hard to explain. Imagine being able to, for the first time, hear what your son thinks!
When looking at the first video I don't see anything that couldn't be achieved with pretty much any smartphone, tablet or laptop that has been on the market for the past decade or so. It purely focuses on the emotional while not showing that much special on a technical level. I hate it when companies do that, but obviously it has the desired effect on a lot of people. No offence.
You missed my point. They already are accepted. Can you point me to where they are not?
Lots of journalists use ooooold typewriters because that's what suits their image. How's that better than a pen and paper? (Or using a computer with the correct template for the paper...etc for that matter).
IMO it's subjective, and it's 'whatever suits your style'. I don't think an iPad is great for typing up large documents. The screen's small, there's no feature-complete office packages and the mouse/keyboard don't work the way they do with a computer (which has a rich OS so provides more freedom).
At law school I typed up 5000wd+ essays (excluding footnotes) every week in very short periods of time. To do them I'd have like 80 tabs open in a web browser (different cases and legislative materials... many were like... 50mb+ pdfs so you needed the RAM/CPU power of a proper computer). IMO trying to do that kind of thing on an iPad (and keep deep folders full of notes/materials in the filesystem) would be a farce.
Maybe iOS is more suitable for people with autism who are doing very specific tasks? I don't have it and am no expert on it so I dunno.
To me an iPad's a toy. You can watch videos, play games, draw stuff, e-mail people, chat and use stripped-down office suites. I picture that some professionals might be able to make better use of then than me, but to me they are toys (and most people I see using them are spoiled kids who really need a Gameboy).
If you live with people on the spectrum? A hell of a lot of places it turns out. Many workplaces can be intolerant even of high functioning AS people. Even if their performance is way above average, as it sometimes is in high functioning AS (only ~15% people on the AS have full time work.) Types who are overloaded by visual or audio stimulation can have real trouble dealing with public places.. And a lot of folk can be really unhelpful or bad at helping or even just letting them deal with it.
There's a difference between acknowledging something exists and supporting or accommodating it's people. It's easy to say the world "accepts" obviously disabled people, but there's also a whole lot of AD people who're treated badly or dismissed and misunderstood as a result of it, many of whom you'd never know we're having problems as they don't need things like iPads to communicate.
Anything that gets this sort of discussion going is good. A few people here have been increasing people's knowledge of a complex set of conditions which will no doubt improve acceptance & understanding slightly.. Apple did a good job here.
Thank you so much, just had a look and it looks spot on, Will get it installed later, thanks again, Stephen
Wow jus wow! Modern Science where every scientist is quick to discredit everyone else with numerous tests and data and facts and years of research is just blind faith.... Do you even know what modern science is?
I would love to hear what you have to say. That's why I watched both of the videos. Everyone should have the chance to tell their story, after all.
The fact that you've asked the questions quoted above proves that you are unable to understand their logical answers. I spent two years at masters programmes in the UK from 2013 until 2015 attempting to combat feminine "logic", and I have learned that it is impossible. And I was ostracized by people like you, who believe to their core that they operate with noble intentions. However, they are eternally unaware that their entire cosmology is anti-male, and also, by nature, anti-White. That is the conundrum that we White males face - no one except for White males has the nature or capacity to understand us. We are cast out into our individuality just as much as our nature inspires it. That is precisely the impetus of our success, and the cause of the vitriolic hatred directed at us by everyone else.
On a side note, I fully include Japanese males in with Caucasian males as being in this same conundrum. But that's where I draw the line.
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I was raised in Berkeley, California, where black women have been on the top of the social pyramid since the 1960s. You may reject this assertion, nevertheless it is true. So I have most certainly been ostracized for my entire life.
Since you will still refuse to believe that I was mistreated - in fact, oppressed - by blacks for my entire childhood, I'll give you a good example of the way that blacks behave towards Whites in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have been behaving this way since the Civil Rights era. Here is a link to a very recent video showing an assault and hate crime committed by a black female student against an ostensibly White, Jewish student at San Francisco State University:
No. There isn't.
And it's very tidy to claim that anyone who disagrees with you is part of a conspiracy. You don't actually need to prove anything, do you? And by "prove" I dont mean that with a conclusion and work backwards.
And just remember one more thing. The same unbiased scientific method that concluded vaccinations have nothing to do with autism also brought you antibiotics. Remember that the next time you put neosporin on a cut. Or when your mom gets pneumonia.
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Rain Man is from the late 1980s, and by then it was well known; thus using it in a movie.
You believe in Chemtrail nonsense?
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My Air 1 is definitely a toy and some means of maintaining communication when im away from my desk
That's 50% agreement rate, I take that any day ^^
It also gave me antibiotic resistant super bugs, nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, phosphor and fragmentation bombs. As well as biological and chemical weapons. Science is really wonderful.
What is called science today is actually ignorance, this is because today's so-called science is based on a mechanistic world view, denying the existence of consciousness, a soul and a cause to existence.
Science is blind faith, based on the dogma that everything came from nothing. In an instant. No explanation, no evidence, no data, nothing.
It folly to be wise where ignorance is bliss.
It's cheap and easy to discredit something by blending three ingredients: truth, bias, and obfuscation. Please allow me to unravel:
1. Yes, there would be 50% agreement that vaccination causes autism if those two posts were all there were. They aren't. Please document 50% agreement among people whose careers are spent investigating it. And by the way, "50%" is a scientific term (yes, math and its rigorous proofs are quintessential science). If you're going to rail against the whole of science, you shouldn't use it. Or the device you used to post it.
2. Science didn't bring superbugs. You did. And everyone else who inappropriately uses antibiotics. We now have TDR (totally drug resistant) tuberculosis because antibiotics are available over-the-counter in India.
3. Yes, science produces all those terrible things. Does that mean science doesn't work or just that you (and I) don't like some what humans have done with it? Science has also created fractal art, organ transplants, the telephone, and a way for me to visit my grandmother before she died.
4. Even if you don't care for some of what science has produced, that doesn't discredit the scientific method. If you don't believe a conclusion, I'm fine with that. But the burden is now on you to question yourself and find truth apart from your own bias. As Ibn Al-hazen said over a thousand years ago:
"The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and... attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."
Science doesn't care what you think.5. Science is not blind faith because it accepts, even embraces, what it doesn't know. We go where the evidence leads us and never stop questioning. Ask a religious fundamentalist about questioning and see what you get.
6. Never seen anyone actually embrace the bliss of ignorance. Good luck with that.
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Maybe more, maybe less, we're only talking two issues here.
All the negative things you listed are products derived from science - not science itself. I too am not a pure mechanist in my worldview, and wish more science advocates would take this into account. All I suggest is to apply the same scepticism to those promoting alternate views. There are lesser wolves opposing the bigger ones and I believe Wakefield is one of them.
We should be careful though - this is heding into politics with the discussion of vaccines etc. We need a separate thread for this - as far as autism and the Apple ad is concerned well good for them. Just like the privacy issue Apple realises this is a good marketing point among its target clientèle so yea they're doing it for the profit. Still a good thing.
Instead of criticizing my comments for not completely understanding your view, maybe you could be constructive and bridge the gap with me. I was hoping you could describe specific examples of how you were severely ostracized and exactly the ways it has deeply demoralized you? I'm certain there are many individuals in the MacRumors forums here who have been ostracized in some form or another through their lives, so it would be interesting to understand the specific ways in which you have been. No one refuses to believe you, but to understand you better you could describe your experiences in detail.
Also, maybe you could give your own definitions of what is male and what is female?
I can't comment or give a judgement on that video because I don't know the whole context except to say there seems to be an altercation between some students and that's not good at all. I don't like seeing people interacting like this. Universities are meant to be places to learn and grow, not get caught up in arguments.
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I really don't see the necessity for a diagnosis. I probably fit the Asperger classification, I had problems developing interpersonal relationships my whole life, etc., so what? A diagnosis wouldn't change who I am, and there's really no need to. I'm perfectly fine with who I am, I really can't see the problem. For a while I thought "what's wrong with me?", "why can't I socialize like others?", but then I realized I couldn't care less. Most people are too imbecile to begin with and are really not worth talking. I'm fine with just a few good friends, and I would be even on my own. Sometimes I suspect that people with autism actually just don't want to waste breath and energy to deal with the monkey-people around.
You're not distinguishing between ability and inclination. People who are autistic physically can't, and that inability is a source of frustration to them. You won't, or can't-won't, and you're fine with that. That probably doesn't put you on the autism spectrum. It might not even put you on the antisocial personality spectrum. You might just be normal.
Not saying I disagree with your sentiments either. I often feel that way too. And you're right: a diagnosis is a label. Sometimes a useful label to help treat something, but it can't change who someone is.