Matt Carey Imagine the most magical theater experience you’ve ever had. Imagine watching a beautiful girl stand up in the audience and start swaying to the music, only to move to the aisles where she pulled other kids out of their seats to dance with her. Imagine kids getting up and moving around. Some banging on empty seats. Some leaving for a while only to be welcomed to come back in when they are ready. Imagine audience members’ lights glowing with the light of some technological device. Only instead of it being someone trying to surreptitiously read his email on a smartphone, it’s a nonverbal kid using an AAC device to type out, “more music, less talking!” Imagine people leaving at the intermission, not because they don’t like the show, but because they loved it and half a show was plenty. Imagine most people staying, even though it was a…
Month: September 2012
Emily Willingham www.emilywillinghamphd.com Word on the street — well, really on a blog from a researcher — is that the writer of the autism/inflammation New York Times op-ed, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, is working on an “annotated” version of the article that will “back up” his claims.” Some annotation would have been useful to begin with; as I noted in my analysis of that op-ed, in many instances, discerning the origin of his information was difficult or impossible. I understand that something that appears originally in print can’t have hyperlinks to appropriate references, but the writer certainly could have beefed up in-text citations (author names, journal publications), at least avoiding the criticism that the piece was unsatisfactorily sourced. Sourcing was not the only issue with that piece, however. Velasquez-Manoff has a book to sell, and that book, like many popular science books, has a narrative that may not necessarily stand up to…