The pundits weigh in on a burning national crisis — making YouTube videos of your baby singing Lady GaGa. The Daily Beast. XXFactor.
Andrew talks about a new blog, How I Met Your Motherboard. True story. I asked my parents for a Texas Instruments calculator for my eighth birthday. Not a Barbie. And put a few beers in me and I'll tell you about our Apple IIE.
Rosie O'Donnell and her son's A.P.D. Sounds a lot like autism to me.
Mugshot Hall of Fame.
Apt. 11d 
We had an Apple IIc. 128k was the standard RAM.
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I suspect that all our classifications for the autism spectrum are going to be upended/revised at some point as we increase our understanding of it. I was thinking about my family (sisters, father) and our anxiety issues and other stuff that is so related to Asperger’s. Were we all Aspies? Does it matter? I don’t know. I do find that these classifications are becoming slightly meaningless to me.
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“I don’t know. I do find that these classifications are becoming slightly meaningless to me.”
At least auditory processing disorder describes an underlying phenomenon. The labels that I really wonder about are the ones like oppositional defiant disorder, where the label seems much mostly a description of a symptom.
http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for_families/children_with_oppositional_defiant_disorder
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Ooh, we had a heathkit. We didn’t put it together ourselves, though. We played Adventure on it, and the floppy disk would break if the computer crashed while we were playing. So, we had to have lots of floppies and used them as disposable items.
APD tries to define an underlying processing disorder, but I don’t think it succeeds (on the preponderance of evidence standard). For a long time now, there’s been a desire to attribute cognitive atypicalities (autism, reading disabilities, learning disabilities) to sensory disabilities. I believe that’s (sometimes subconsciously, sometimes explicitly) psychologically/politically motivated. People are more comfortable with a disability like blindness or deafness than they are with a disability than a thinking disability. So, we have the visual processing disorders and the auditory processing disorders.
Sometimes folks find measurable deficits, say, in auditory or visual latencies, or in eye movement patterns, . . . . But, all of those measurements could be a result, rather than a cause of the learning/cognitive disability that folks are associating with it.
I was not impressed with the ADP article. Interesting, actually, because the NYT did a more substantial article about CVP disorders (central visual processing). The scientific debates around the two are very similar.
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