dinah murray

London, United Kingdom

Other political orientation=libertarian socialist: a UK tradition that may seem contradictory to anyone confused between regulating corporations and controlling individuals.

http://www.autismandcomputing.org.uk

dinah signed the petition | 9 months ago

Tell Walmart: Intervene Before Labor Activists Are Sentenced to Death
dinah signed the petition | about 2 years ago

Tell Chevron to Clean Up Its Toxic Mess in Ecuador
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

Leverage

Well, I've been meaning to post something here about the National Audit Office report re autistic adults in the UK which Dora rightly acclaimed. In many ways its authors showed very good recognition of the real world issues. I referred one of the senior civil servants involved in that report to this blog part way through their consultation period and she responded with keen enthusiasm for its relevance.

So I'm not sure where the leverage is in that, but it sounds potent to me. Generally over here, identifying key people involved in formulating legislation has been a strategic aim of much activism, and seems to have had some real impact over the years.
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

What is Sally Anne Thinking?

By coincidence, Michelle Dawson has just posted about eye gaze on her message board so I am going to copy a bit of that and paste it here:

If you follow the links from this blog post
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/eye-contact-look-away-to-think-and.html [sorry, link is broken] you can find a lot of interesting
information, including a preprint version (here
http://www.le.ac.uk/pc/kbp3/Markson&Paterson08.pdf ) of a paper that's just been published (here
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19021925 ).

The conclusion of the paper is lovely to read: "We conclude that gaze aversion benefits cognitive performance, not just by disengaging visual attention from irrelevant visual information, but also by interrupting social interaction processes involved in face-to-face communication."

There's an introduction to gaze aversion research here
http://www.psychology.stir.ac.uk/staff/lcalderwood/GazeAversionR
esearch.htm

Thank you Dora and Michelle both for drawing attention to these issues.
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

Laugh and Be Happy

http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

is a link to Michelle Dawson's excellent summary and discussion of this research. In a piece I wrote for jypsy's Wrong Planet Symposium a few years back, I identified "theatrical imagination" as the route to competent approved falsity in typical children - and I think that's what's going on in the laughter research.

When I was bringing my children up I did not praise them for lying, but that seems unfashionable at best - these days the earlier you learn to be false the more Normal you are seen to be. Hooray?
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

Fight Club Atrocity Update

the victims need mobile phones with cameras built in...
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

CIL Budget Cuts Reversed--Victory in NJ!

fantastic to get a bit of good news! and ditto congrats to all involved in rallying.

re isolation of autistic community from other disability activists, that is something we are highly aware of over here in Britain, and trying to build links to get over it. There does seem good recognition from some key disability activists here that you don't have to be physically impaired to have a disability and need a different range of support from most people. DAN (Direct Action Network) and RADAR are two organisations which are aware of autistic disabilities, largely because of efforts from individual activists.
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

Making Communication Easy

@ Dora re ease of communication, in a short presentation called "Autism & Computing, the argument", which I just showed AutreachIT's newly introduced mentors today, is this under the slide heading "Effort" •human beings like to use their resources effectively•they don’t like hard work that doesn’t get results •if they don’t understand a person first time, they are likely to give up •this applies to autistic and non-autistic alike

& (slightly edited here) a slide headed "In typically developing children"

Before speech, interests are expressed in individual sounds and movements. This makes Other people do most of the work of sharing. People willingly do this for young babies.

After speech , interests are expressed in socialised sounds and movements. This reduces and re-balances the work-load of understanding – it makes it much easier for other people.

I won't reproduce the whole thing here but it leads me on to using keyboards... I hope it makes some kind of sense out of context, I couldn't help being struck by the coincidence with what you happened to post today.
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

Two Autistics on Autism

re concrete trigonometry - www.oolong.co.uk has interactive graphic trig: maybe it would not have all been completely meaningless to me at school (along with algebra, but not geometry which I excelled at)
dinah commented on the article | over 2 years ago

The Process Is the Thing

http://news.guelphmercury.com/News/article/495227links to a story which is all about The Process being the thing.... an autistic young man who makes extraordinary paper models which he then chucks in the bin