موضوعات
آموزش و پرورش
ادبیات و زبان
پزشکی، دندانپزشکی و داروسازی
تاریخ و جغرافیا
داستان و رمان
دیگر
دین و فلسفه
روانشناسی
ریاضیات و آمار
سلامتی، تناسب اندام و رژیم غذایی
شیمی و پلیمر
علوم اجتماعی و حقوق
علوم زیستی و بیوتکنولوژی
فیزیک و نجوم
کامپیوتر و اینترنت
کتابهای کودکان و داستان
کسب و کار و اقتصاد
کشاورزی و دامپزشکی و غذا
معماری
مهندسی و فناوری
هنر و تئاتر
محصولات
Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: On Radical Hope in Dark Times - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: 1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Wild Things Written with my mountain home and First custodians Aki Nabalu and Odu Nabalu This is a chapter about place and Indigenous resistance. I am writing out of the politics of the two homelands I occupy in my mind as an Indigenous woman moving between two worlds. My voice is the bridge between two worlds. Places are never captured precisely in words or pictures. They are always more. Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak on Borneo island, is dotted with rock edges. Before it was damaged by an earthquake in 2015, one rockface took the shape of a donkey’s ear and was named so. It was the image that came to mind for the person who named it long ago but I have to say: What a diminutive title! I have to muse when this person looked up to that enor- mous pinnacle whether he heard a donkey’s ‘hee-haw’ braying down to him. Conservationist David Attenborough climbed Mount Kinabalu in 1975, describing a landscape of magical beauty. Granite pinnacles jutted skyward. The sky seemed to move as you climbed, as did the rockpools at the peak reflecting the stars. We learn the ascent was challenging, that nature came bearing gifts. Wild myrtle, rhododendrons, orchids, ferns. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. Guntarik, Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17295-3_1 2 Fig. 1.1 Mount Kinabalu from Kundasang. My grandfather Tumbaki, my mother Molly and my aunty Wendy. Photo credit Moffen Gondoloi Gifts that carried not just life but ominous signs. Pitcher plants shimmered with poison water, tricking insects in a dance of death. And so we learn of nature’s realities. Life and death, doom and gloom, smoldering side-by-side. Words. Pictures. A perspective from high up. Reading his words today, Attenborough’s (1975) nature walk up the mountain rumbles with sound. Frogs bleeeerrk-bleeeerrk at the lower reaches. Birds trill louder and louder farther up the trail. Birds in this part of the world do not fly away on approach; so tame, they scurry at the walker’s feet in a cheeky game of chasey. Come play with us, the birds seem to sing. At the top, where I imagine the walkers resting, perhaps stooping to drink water from mirrored rockpools, the icy wind cuts through bodies razor sharp. But oh how the top is worth the hike! The panorama magnifi- cent—even as you become more conscious of your breath, wind howling in your ears. Imagine this: terrestrial moss, lichen, liverwort, tiny trees clinging to rock icicles for dear life. Imagine the sounds and sights, sacred custodian of my homeland Aki Nabalu tells me. O. GUNTARIK 3 Let us consider this and listen, sings another custodian Oku Nabalu. Both of them are caretakers of this mountain place. My original home. Custodian ancestors help us tell the histories of place and the legacies of our survival. They are our original storytellers. They evidence the ways storytelling pioneer modes of knowing, merging animal and human, the wild and the tame, nature and machine to draw attention to the political dimensions of our existence (see Seton 1898; Cloos 1954; Carson 1962). This politics draws out the musical nature of stories to crystallize purpose and meaning. Listen to the words, for instance, of Australian poet Eileen Chong (2021, 73). ‘There is merit// in quietude, in the precise layering of sound, /image, and object. In the simple acts of walking, /waiting/and witnessing’. A precision to sound, image, object. An intention. Image and object and language come into play for me too. Words offer ways to see, to hear, to read the landscape. The world tilts like an optical illusion or like the multicoloured gems in a child’s kaleidoscope into new configurations of speech. Poets sculpt history into story. So I must pose new questions of life, nature and humankind. I am that tree clinging to bare life on the mountain. Maybe it takes more balls to survive and to talk this way. We need a new way to think about theory, to bring ideas into practice and the world. Praxis we might say. Activism working with reflection, as Paulo Freire (1968) claims. So I am reflecting with Attenborough and the First Custodians on a “sound walk” up a mountain ridge that today rises above a surrounding plateau of a disappearing jungle with a disconcerting backdrop. Dwindling rice plantations. An invasive eyesore of African palm. This is also the home- land of my ancestors: Dusun people, an Indigenous hilltribe of Borneo who were once subsistence farmers. Who share land with the governing Malay, and multiple generations of Indian and Chinese migrants, along with more than sixty Indigenous groups. It is an incisive and empowering moment in my readings of walks through the wilderness, reseeing a don- key’s ear and ‘other peaks...labelled rather unimaginatively...I could not help reflecting that local Dusun names would have been far more appro- priate and musical.’ Attenborough’s words (1975, 103).
Hope for a Heated Planet: How Americans Are Fighting Global Warming and Building a Better Future - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: am finishing this book in the final days of the George W. Bush adminis- tration. For those of us who love the environment and long for peace, it has been a dark time. Through it, I have often thought of the words of the poet Theodore Roethke that I first heard from scholar and activist Robert Jay Lifton: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” The first light of dawn is now visible as the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama, pushed by a growing grassroots movement, embraces action on climate change. To a lesser degree, though far more than President Bush, so does the Republican contender, Senator John McCain. That was far from the case when I began this project at the height of the president’s wartime popularity. This has turned out to be a book as much about hope and democracy as it is about global warming. Its central theme is that you and I can change history. What we believe, what actions we take, actually matter. It is an idea central to democracy. And it should give us hope. I disagree, strongly, with those who believe the American public has turned into a hopeless gaggle of consumers and couch potatoes who are content to let others rule their lives—or destroy the planet. At the height of President Bush’s popularity and influence it may have appeared that way. But national security and environmental degradation (especially global climate change) are complex, difficult, and abstract sub- jects. It has taken some time for us Americans to grasp the gravity of our situation, from melting ice caps to Iraq. This is especially true when our media mostly cover the White House and the Pentagon—regardless of the occupants—and report each utterance as gospel. Meanwhile, most of us are busy with jobs, families, and problems near home that we can actually see and do something about. The result has been that global warming—caused by the vast outpour- x P REFACE ings of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants from our cars, buildings, and factories—has increased and is picking up speed. But at the same time, so has a growing and revived environmental movement. It is joined now with new allies from the religious community, business, labor, medical and public health professionals, educators, and more. This new climate move- ment has deep roots in the big environmental groups, too often ignored or derided, that have been working to warn us and prevent global climate change since the elder George Bush’s administration in the 1980s. Their work is now bearing fruit. The public is becoming aroused and engaged. And, as a result, we will have a new, much more climate-friendly president and Congress in 2009. This book tells that story and also ex- plains the basics of climate change and its effects on human health and well-being—not just on polar bears and penguins. But Hope for a Heated Planet is finally about solutions to our dilemma. I’ve tried to give you the best steps you can take, both personal and political, to make a difference and to get involved. Like most authors, I like to imagine, of course, that our new president will take to heart every word I have poured out here. But even more impor- tant is that you do. My mother, Margaret Kirkland Musil, died after ninety- one wonderful years as I was writing. She taught me to love life, to love nature, to learn, to have faith, and to act on my beliefs. My first grandchild, Catherine Kirkland Unruh, was born shortly after. She will need the same lessons. So will all our children and grandchildren. Global climate change, we now know, can be prevented by building a vi- brant, healthy economy that does away with the belching furnaces, smoke- stacks, and combustion engines from the outmoded technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But in a democracy, that will depend not on our new president, or the one after that. It is up to us. And the signs now are that many, many citizens and their organizations in this great na- tion are indeed aroused. But to prevail, we will need even more. That is really why I have written. I want you and your family and friends to join with me and millions of other Americans in making history. Nobody else can, or should, do it for you
Medical Ethics A Very Short Introduction Tony Hope - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: The fox represents those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, . . . [who] lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are cen- trifugal rather than centripetal . . . seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences . . . without . . . seeking to fit them into . . . any one unchanging, all-embracing, . . . unitary inner vision. Berlin gives as examples of hedgehogs: Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Proust, amongst others. He gives as examples of foxes: Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, and Joyce. Berlin goes on to argue that Tolstoy was a fox by nature but believed in being a hedgehog. 4 Medical Ethics 2. Are you a hedgehog or a fox? I am a fox, or at least would like to be. I admire the intellectual rigour of those who try to produce a unitary vision, but I prefer the rich, contradictory, and sometimes chaotic visions of Berlin’s foxes. I do not, in this book, attempt to approach the various problems I discuss from one single moral theory. Each chapter considers an issue on which I argue for a particular position, using whatever methods of argument seem to me to be the most relevant. I have covered different areas in different chapters: genetics, modern reproductive technologies, resource allocation, mental health, medical research, and so on; and have looked at one issue in each of these areas. At the end of the book I guide the reader to other issues and further reading. The one perspective that is common to all the chapters is the central importance of reasoning and reasonableness. I believe that medical ethics is essentially a rational subject: that is, it is all about giving reasons for the view that you take, and being prepared to change your views on the basis of reasons. That is why one chapter, in the middle of the book, is a reflection on various tools of rational argument. But although I believe in the central importance of reasons and evidence, even here the fox in me sounds a note of caution. Clear thinking, and high standards of rationality, are not enough. We need to develop our hearts as well as our minds. Consistency and moral enthusiasm can lead to bad acts and wrong decisions if pursued without the right sensitivities. The novelist, Zadie Smith, has written: There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. The lesson of the comic novel is that our moral enthusiasms make us inflexible, one-dimensional, flat. This is a lesson we need to take into any area of practical ethics, including medical ethics. What better place to start this tour of medical ethics than at the end, with the thorny issue of euthanasia? 6 Medical Ethics Chapter 2 Euthanasia: good medical practice, or murder? Good deeds do not require long statements; but when evil is done the whole art of oratory is employed as a screen for it. (Thucydides) The practice of euthanasia contradicts one of the oldest and most venerated of moral injunctions: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. The practice of euthanasia, under some circumstances, is morally required by the two most widely regarded principles that guide medical practice: respect for patient autonomy and promoting patient’s best interests. In the Netherlands and Belgium active euthanasia may be carried out within the law. Outline of the requirements in order for active euthanasia to be legal in the Netherlands 1. The patient must face a future of unbearable, interminable suffering. 2. The request to die must be voluntary and well-considered. 3. The doctor and patient must be convinced there is no other solution. 4. A second medical opinion must be obtained and life must be ended in a medically appropriate way.
Adaptive Optics for Vision Science Principles Practices Design and Applications - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: The high transverse resolution of retinal imaging systems equipped with adaptive optics provides a unique opportunity to record these eye move- ments with very high accuracy. Putnam et al. showed that it is possible to record the retinal location of a fixation target on discrete trials with an error at least 5 times smaller than the diameter of the smallest foveal cones [63]. We used this capability to measure the standard deviation of fixation positions FIGURE 1.7 Images of the cone mosaics of 10 subjects with normal color vision, obtained with the combined methods of adaptive optics imaging and retinal densi- tometry. The images are false colored so that blue, green, and red are used to repre- sent the S, M, and L cones, respectively. (The true colors of these cones are yellow, purple, and bluish-purple). The mosaics illustrate the enormous variability in L/M cone ratio. The L/M cone ratios are (A) 0.37, (B) 1.11, (C) 1.14, (D) 1.24, (E) 1.77, (F) 1.88, (G) 2.32, (H) 2.36, (I) 2.46, (J) 3.67, (K) 3.90, and (L) 16.54. The proportion of S cones is relatively constant across eyes, ranging from 3.9 to 6.6% of the total population. Images were taken either 1° or 1.25° from the foveal center. For two of the 10 subjects, two different retinal locations are shown. Panels (D) and (E) show images from nasal and temporal retinas, respectively, for one subject; (J) and (K) show images from nasal and temporal retinas for another subject. Images (C), (J), and (K) are from Roorda and Williams [52]. All other images were made by Heidi Hofer. (See insert for a color representation of this figure.) (From Williams and Hofer [57]. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press.) across discrete fixation trials, obtaining values that ranged from 2.1 to 6.3 arcmin, with an average of 3.4 arcmin, in agreement with previous studies [63, 64]. Interestingly, the mean fixation location on the retina was displaced from the location of highest foveal cone density by an average of about 10 arcmin (as shown in Fig. 1.8), indicating that cone density alone does not drive the location on the retina selected for fixation. This method may have interesting future applications in studies that require the submicron registra- tion of stimuli with respect to the retina or delivering light to retinal features as small as single cells. Whereas the method developed by our group can only record eye position on discrete trials, Scott Stevenson and Austin Roorda have shown that it is possible to extract continuous eye movement records from video-rate images obtained with an adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) [66]. Eye movements cause local warping of the image within single video frames as well as translation between frames. The warping and translation information in the images can be used to recover a record of the eye move- ments that is probably as accurate as any method yet devised. This is illus- trated in Figure 1.9, which compares the eye movement record from the AOSLO with that from a Dual Purkinje Eye Tracker. The noise in the AOSLO trace is on the order of a few arc seconds compared to about a minute of arc for the Dual Purkinje Eye Tracker. Note also the greatly reduced overshoot following a saccade in the AOSLO trace. These overshoots are thought to be partly artifacts caused by lens wobble following the saccade and do not reflect the true position of the retinal image. The AOSLO is not susceptible to this artifact because it tracks the retinal position directly rather than relying on reflections from the anterior optics.
A devil's chaplain: reflections on hope, lies, science, and love - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1.1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1.2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards. At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then?' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters?' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1.3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
Atomic Habits - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Atomic Habits is a book by James Clear that outlines a process for creating and maintaining good habits and breaking bad ones. The book explains how small changes can make a big difference in life, in the form of tiny atomic habits. It also outlines the idea of building “habit stacks” that can be used to create a structure for both personal and professional development. Clear also argues that our environment and social cues have a powerful influence on our behavior and provides tips on how to use this knowledge to our advantage.
168hours : you have more time than y ou think - PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Keep track of your time, hour by hour, for a week or two so you can see how you’re actually spending your time. One woman called it “one mortifying experience” when she realized how much time she was actually spending checking Facebook while at work and how often it derailed her from getting actual things done. Figure out what your core competencies are and spend your time doing those. What are you best at? Writing? Cooking? Nurturing relationships with our significant others and children (hopefully no one is better at that than you are . . . ). Maximize your time doing those things and minimize how much time you spend doing other things. Stop doing pretend work. Lots of us spend a lot of time being busy but doing things that aren’t actually that valuable. Are you spending a lot of time doing meaningless housework, or setting up elaborate organizational systems or having long conference calls that could be finished in ten minutes if you got right on task? Whether this is in your home life or your work life, you could probably get the “have to” things done a lot faster and more efficiently than you do. I basically always spend the entire two hours of nap and quiet time at my desk, but I often end up wasting so much time trying to multi-task between screens, doing fairly unimportant busy work (spending the last $15 on a gift card or trying to clear my inbox) that I end up having to work in the evenings too and then I feel like I spend all my time “working.” Since I finished this book, I’ve made a list each day of what I needed to get done and then I just put my head down and work, not getting distracted by the other maybe-should be things that don’t matter nearly so much or could get done later at a less focused time. Decide what you can off-load. She’s an enormous fan of outsourcing as much as possible, whether it’s laundry, grocery shopping, house cleaning, lawn care, etc. She argues that Pick 2-4 hobbies or activities you want in your life. You may be saying you want to sew more or read more books or volunteer with an organization you care about or run a marathon, but then you end up squandering your free time doing really low-investment things like watching TV (which is draining and not nearly as fun as you think it is). Figure out what you want to do and then when you can fit them in and make the happen. You’ll be rejuvenated by doing the things you’ve always meant to do and the lure of the Internet and TV will be reduced. She also says one of your hobbies really should/must be exercise. When you consider doing 30 minutes, 5 days a week, that’s only 3 hours out of your entire 168 a week. You can probably (almost certainly) fit it in. I love that she doesn’t argue that it’s easy to make it happen. It takes a lot of planning and discipline to make your life look like you want it to, instead of just piddling your life away running errands, checking email, and watching TV. And she has such an engaging writing style – I think she’s somewhat similar to Gretchen Rubin, with a lot of anecdotes, discussions about what she does well herself and also where she falls short, and an ability to make all sorts of data and statistics really engaging. There are certainly things I don’t agree with her on. I’m not willing to let my housekeeping slip to barely passable to get back a small chunk of time; I’m not the world’s best housekeeper by any means and the time I spend cleaning is fairly minimal, but I don’t keep things tidy because I care what other people think – I keep the clutter to a minimum because it makes ME crazy when there are piles of things on every surface. And she doesn’t seem to enjoy cooking like I do – yes, I could probably reduce the time I spend cooking by making easier meals or doing grocery delivery, but I’m not looking to outsource those things and I like to cook. And having been in schools, I totally disagree with her hypothesis that school lunches are way improved from days of old and that it’s well-worth having your kids just buy a lunch for a few bucks (also, having just read Slim by Design, I know that people who pack their lunches tend to eat more healthily than those who buy because you pack your lunch when you’re usually not terribly hungry (after dinner or breakfast) and so you make fairly good choices, whereas if you buy lunch when you’re starving, guess what you buy? Not salad).
Family Firms and Business Families in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Bringing Anthropology Back In - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: IntroductIon Although the topics of kinship and economy are central to anthropologi- cal analysis, few scholars have brought the two fields together by introduc- ing broader concepts or large-scale comparisons. To date, the topic is gaining importance (Hann, 2018), and there is some solid research available; however, the results remain disparate and have few links to each other. Therefore, family business researchers with a strong background in management studies currently dominate the analysis of family firms and business families. A better understanding of family business, however, remains both necessary and hard to achieve under these research trajecto- ries. Therefore, the main aim of this volume is to provide a vision of how family business research and anthropology can be brought together, in order to benefit future research in both disciplines and develop a more sophisticated understanding of family businesses themselves. The study of family business has insisted that family ownership and operation distinguishes this business form from others such as non-family corporations, because of the close interaction between kinship and busi- ness interests. Such an insistence naturally demands further specification of how the family matters, and family business research has attempted to clarify the influence of the family itself on business activities by developing concepts such as familiness (Frank et al., 2010; Habbershon & Williams, 1999; Zellweger et al., 2010), entrepreneurial legacy (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015) or socio-emotional wealth (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2007). As a result, the kinship group behind the family firm has received increasing attention in family business research in the last decade or so (Caspary, 2018; Combs et al., 2020; Jaskiewicz et al., 2017, 2020; Kleve et al., 2020; Kleve & Koellner, 2019; Koellner et al., 2022; Stamm, 2013). Nevertheless, it still is the case that some obstacles to a better under- standing of the kinship group behind the family firm remain. A first con- sideration about the direction of future research concerns the fact that family business research largely focuses its analysis on single persons and not on broader networks of kin or whole families (Jaskiewicz et al., 2017: 313). Therefore, the composition, structure and organization of the kin- ship group still remain largely neglected, as do the form and quality of these relationships (Kushins & Behounek, 2020). Here anthropology definitely can offer some insights with its detailed ethnographies on kin relations based on long-term research
Understanding Autistic Relationships Across the Lifespan: Family, Friends, Lovers and Others - Original PDF
نویسندگان: خلاصه: Autism, and autistic people, have been around as long as humans have. It is likely there were ancient humans with behaviours, cognitive patterns, and sensory sen- sitivities that would meet clinical diagnostic criteria (though that would be taking the game of historical diagnoses too far!). Autism, and other neurodevelopmen- tal conditions, are part of the natural range of human biodiversity. This belief is known as the neurodiversity paradigm, and it is the framework within which we are writing this book. We take the approach that autistic people (see the language note that follows) are valid in their way of being in, experiencing, and relating to the world, and hope to help them and others understand some of these differences, rather than arguing that they are somehow ‘wrong’ or need changing to be more like non-autistic people. This book is not about the definitions or evolution of neurodiversity, but if you would like some further reading on the topic, we would recommend looking at the book list we provide at the back! Throughout the book, we will be using the terms ‘autistic people’ and ‘non- autistic people’. This is known as identity-first language, and has been shown to be the preference of the majority of autistic people who take part in research on the topic (Kenny et al., 2016). This is different to the way a lot of clinicians, pro- fessionals, and researchers have historically talked about autistic people, as they have tended to use ‘people with autism’ or say someone ‘has autism’ – known as person-first language. Originally this was used because it was thought to empha- sise the person rather than the condition (Kenny et al., 2016), and in some cases it is the preferred language of people affected themselves (e.g. in eating disorder research, people are described as ‘having anorexia’). However, recent research in the autism field has shown that person-first language can increase the stigma against autistic people and has a dehumanising rather than humanising effect on how oth- ers think about them (Cage et al., 2022). Combined with the stated preference of many autistic people, therefore, we use identity-first language in our writing, INTRODUCTION DOI: 10.4324/9781003044536-1 2 Introduction whilst recognising that a proportion of autistic people prefer person-first language. We have no wish to intimidate a minority within a minority and are following majority preference for simplicity. Autism has both a very complex and a very simple history, depending on how you look at it. The simple version is that two psychologists in the 1940s, Kanner in the United States and Asperger in Austria, independently noticed that they were seeing children who had a shared set of characteristics – difficulties with social interaction (to varying degrees), a preference for routine and sameness, and chal- lenges with everyday living skills. Kanner called this ‘autism’ (a preference for one- self or being alone), and Asperger called it ‘Aspergers’ (a preference for showing off his ego). The two did not know about each other’s work, and autism became the dominant diagnosis as Kanner published in English, whereas Asperger published in German (which was not the way to make your work popular in 1940s Europe, for obvious reasons. It may also have had something to do with the fact that Asperger worked with the Nazis in highly problematic ways.). These diagnoses were unchanged over the next 40 years or so, until Lorna Wing and Judy Gould, in 1980s South London, did a large-scale population level study and realised that the children with these two diagnoses were actually part of the same spectrum, as were lots of children who had not been given a formal diagnosis of either. This is where the term ‘the autism spectrum’ comes from, and it was designed to create a broader and more inclusive sense of what being autis- tic meant and could look like. This pair of researchers also invented ‘the triad of impairments’, which, while not the terminology we use today, revolutionised how autistic people were recognised and opened up diagnosis and support for more of those who needed it. This triad was made up of difficulties with: • Imagination and executive function (things like guessing what other people were thinking, or being able to make a plan based on imagining what will happen next) • Social communication (things like being non-verbal, not following standard ‘rules’ of communication like turn taking in conversation, or struggling with eye contact) • Repetitive behaviours and restricted interests (things like repeated physical move- ments such as hand flapping, or having intense special interests) The rise in autism diagnoses following this expansion of the diagnostic criteria from the strict ones set out earlier, especially removing the need for co-occurring learning difficulties Kanner used, was significant. This coincided with the rolling out of the MMR vaccine; and a highly questionable researcher called Andrew Wakefield used this correlation to publish his idea that the vaccine was causing autism in children. What he did not publish was that he was paid by the rival vaccine company, had faked his results, and the blood samples he ‘used’ had been collected without parental consent from children at a birthday party. If you want a Introduction 3 fuller idea of just how wrong his work was, there are literally thousands of academic papers proving it – but these tend not to make such good Facebook memes, and hence we have the anti-vaxxer movement. Regardless of that particular issue, autism diagnoses have generally continued to rise. This is because we are getting better at spotting when someone is autistic, our diagnostic tools have improved, and we are starting to recognise that autism can present in an even wider variety of ways than we thought in the 1980s. It is also because there is now a recognition that we can – and should – diagnose adults who were missed in childhood, for a variety of reasons. For a long time, if someone was not diagnosed before the age of about 14, they were highly unlikely to get a diagnosis at all, because autism was thought to be a ‘childhood condition’. The fact that autistic children grow into autistic adults was somehow lost on a lot of the early researchers. In 2013, on the basis of evidence from autistic people and clinicians, sensory sensitivities (being under/hypo- or over/hyper-sensitive on one of the five senses) were added to the diagnostic criteria. Similarly, there is growing research into and awareness of how autism can look different in those who internalise a lot of their experiences and those who externalise them – which is more what is considered ‘classically autistic’. A lot of these more nuanced ideas about what autism is have come from the autism community itself, with autistic advocates and academics driving change and increasing societal awareness. There is still plenty of work to do, but the direction of movement seems positive. There is also, as we said, a much more complex story which can be told about autism and how autism research has developed over time. That isn’t the focus of this book (though it is the focus of Neurotribes, by Steve Silberman), and so we won’t try to tell it all here. What is relevant for the current book is the focus on social dif- ficulties, which have characterised autism research and stereotypes from the earliest days, back in the 1940s, and the assumptions this led people to make about autistic relationships until very recently. Most autism research, researchers, and parents of autistic people, for most of the last 80 years, have functioned based on the assumption that because autistic people had difficulties with making and maintaining friendships and relationships, had dif- ferent social interaction patterns, and did not show distress about these things in the ways they expected . . . that autistic people did not want friends or romantic relationships . . . that these were just things autistic people were hardwired not to value, or be interested in at all. Avoiding eye contact was seen as a sign of not wanting to engage with the person who was speaking; not inferring someone’s true intentions was seen as a failure to understand that other people have minds (yes, really); and not making friends at school was assumed to be because the child did not want friends and was happier on their own. A whole academic discipline of autism studies, with corresponding theories, was built upon the basis of these observations of social difficulty (along with the other two parts of the triad). A few examples of these theories followآیا کتاب مورد نظر هنوز بر روی سایت قرار نگرفته است؟ جای نگرانی نیست! کافی است بر روی گزینه سفارش کتاب کلیک کرده و درخواست خود را ثبت کنید. در کمتر از چند ساعت کتاب شما را آماده خواهیم کرد.