Not directly, no. A range of meds are prescribed for specific manifestations of autism, such as aggression or self-injury, though none are broadly effective.
If there’s an industry making money here, it’s ABA therapy, not pharma.
"Liberal arts" is not a synonym for "humanities." I am a college professor; the majority of students at all the schools I've been affiliated get a liberal arts degree. This includes math majors, physics majors, etc. And even the historians and philosophers are generally required to take math and science courses as part of their liberal arts degrees.
"Liberal arts" refers to a tradition of education across the major disciplines. It is distinguished precisely by the fact that it includes both the sciences and the humanities.
In the US, law is a graduate degree. A significant majority of law school students already have a liberal arts degree. This is an entirely different case.
On the other point, offering CS degrees as liberal arts degrees wouldn't meant "reclassifying CS as some bullshit" (or, indeed, reclassifying CS at all). There are many fields where some colleges already choose to offer the major as a B.A. while others offer it as a B.S. It's not a difference in the field, it's a difference in what requirements a college implements for getting a degree in the field. In other words, exactly what you suggested should happen.
There's a pretty solid literature on math pedagogy, and it's clear from that research that students need some way to tell when their answers are right or wrong, so that they can learn from the mistakes. For homework, that could mean getting problem sets back with the wrong answers marked. But it sounds like these were just practice problem sets, so the students literally had not way to tell if they were doing them right or not.
I'm assuming the issue is that there isn't a math pathway for humanities students who want to take math electives. This is the closest thing she could find. This was the case at the Ivy I attended. There were classes designed to fill the one-course math requirement, but they were all below the level of the math I'd done in high school. There wasn't anything for someone who was decently good at math and genuinely interested in it, but not planning on a math-related major.
I don't know if it's true of all schools, but I had a very similar experience at another Ivy League school. Took the first semester of linear algebra, got a very respectable grade, but really didn't learn much because the class wasn't structured to do that. It was there to make STEM majors prove they were good enough. I wasn't a STEM major, so didn't need to keep going with that kind of hazing.
This particular claim is just ludicrous, though. The idea that marriage is primarily about love and emotional companionship is an extremely modern idea. See Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.
Two biggest drivers are 1) massive declines in public support (for public universities, obviously) and 2) more administrators.
Much of the growth in administration is driven by a significant rise in the costs to comply with federal regulation. Those regulations are not bad--it's the cost of complying with things like disability laws, Title IX, etc--but they require collecting and reporting significant amounts of data, and that isn't free.
There's other stuff too; some colleges do have the lazy rivers and fancy dorms, many colleges lose money on their football program, etc. But those aren't the fundamental drivers.
By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the money is definitely NOT going to faculty salaries. Salaries for full-time faculty have been stagnant for decades even though an increasing percentage of classes are taught by poorly-paid adjuncts.
This is an interesting study, but it’s far from the conclusive answer to the question of how the gut microbiome relates to neurological conditions. Given the heterogeneity and complex etiology of autism, a study of this size is not sufficiently powered to pick up all plausible correlations. If there is a causative connection between the microbiome and autism, it’s likely only true of a subset (perhaps a small one) of autistic people.
Most of the area in those places still has significant zoning restrictions on density--the cap is higher than other places, but there's still a cap. That's why there are still brownstones in Brooklyn.
Second, the economics of building dictate that skyscraper-level density will only happen in places where housing is relatively expensive. But there are plenty of examples of density leading to lower prices, in the suburbs.
You clearly don't experience this phenomenon. I'm jealous! But no, the whole problem is that I'm staying up late scrolling my phone even though sleep would be much more satisfying. And I can tell you that, in the moment! It's just hard to actually put my phone down and go to sleep.
You are correct that racism as we know it is a product of, roughly speaking, the post-1550 world. The response to homoerotic acts has varied extremely widely across time and space. "Same sex couples" were pretty uncommon in most times and places (largely because almost no one thought of marriage/cohabitation as something constituted primarily by romantic love or even sexual desire). But plenty of examples of people having same-sex sex and even long-lasting relationships.
HBOT is a widely used 'alternative' treatment for other neurological conditions. It's controversial, in part because there are very good reasons that it can cause neurological damage. This study is NOT a reason for anyone to run out and get HBOT. Even if the effect is real (and I don't think the study has enough info to draw than conclusion), you would need much larger trials to balance benefits and side effects.
This. There is basically zero chance that an ethics review would see this as a case in which a control group is unethical. I have been through plenty of IRB processes.
Resource constraints are a much more plausible explanation - running the study with a control group would cost twice as much (in time as well as money). This is either a pilot to apply for funding to run a better-controlled trial, or it's just not scientifically serious. Both are very plausible, in my experience.
Certified lawyers/accountants have ethical compliance responsibilities. They should be doing meaningful review, not just "signing off." There are savings to be realized, but they are more limited than one might think. The difference here is that there are professional associations with both the ability to discipline people who don't follow the rules, and a deep interest in doing so.
Double yikes to "these Africans." Pretty sure misplaced belief in homeopathy is not a distinctively African phenomenon.
But to the point: the major driver of the early explosion of HIV on the continent was almost certainly large-scale vaccination and medical treatment campaigns by colonial governments, which injected staggering numbers of people in rural areas without adequate disinfection of needles.
In the present, the sociological drivers of HIV spread do include rates of nonconsensual sex (particularly between teen girls and older men). More important factors, however, are historical and contemporary patterns of urban/rural migration and long-distance transit networks. The distinctive forms of cyclical migration created by the shape of the mining industry in apartheid South Africa are the largest reason that the pandemic is so much worse in that region than anywhere else on the continent.
Research is pretty clear that Africans understand that condoms work to prevent HIV transmission - there have now been decades of public education campaigns on the subject. That doesn't mean they are always used, of course, but it's not a knowledge problem.
Yikes. This is actually a field that I do research in, and this analysis just really, really doesn't hold water. Of course there are sociological contributors to the spread of HIV on the African continent. But the idea that there's a "culture of rape" is pretty far off base, if only because Africa is an incredibly diverse continent so there's not a shared culture of pretty much anything. For a much more accurate look at the development of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, I recommend Jacques Pépin, The Origin of AIDS.
It's not only not realistic, it's not good for kids. They need time that's not observed by their parents to grow and develop as autonomous individuals.
Also, I find watching my daughter's dance practice boring, and I feel zero guilt for that. I'd rather read a book while she dances, and focus on her when I can actually play with her.
The author is not a better parent than me, or than the other moms she's criticizing. She can feel smug if she wants, but I'm very confident in that.
My rule of thumb: if the choices are A) "maybe I'm just not aware of the common verbiage in [technical] circles" that I'm not a part of or B) "a little sloppy for" the multiple layers of experts involved in choosing and approving a title in a flagship science journal, it's very very likely to be A.
The risk of death from covid is low for this age group, but almost certainly much higher than the risk of death from the vaccine. The risk-benefit analysis seems to weigh pretty obviously in favor of vaccination.
It’s important to be clear here—these “severe” side effects are not life-threatening. We’re talking about a really bad headache or bout of diarrhea. Unpleasant, for sure, but not likely to have any long-term consequences.
As a parent, I’m ok with those odds even if my kids don’t get much direct benefit. Contributing to reduced community transmission is worth it.
I also think it's important to acknowledge individual differences. To give one relevant example, pairing sounds particularly challenging for people on the autism spectrum, which as a group is well-represented among software engineers. Several of the things the author sites as problems (need for sensory breaks, difficulty sustaining social engagement) are real issues for most autistic folks. It's not a coincidence that autistic people talk about "burnout" in much the same way that the author does--a total cognitive shutdown.
I'm not saying the author is autistic, although they might be, I have no idea. But enough people are that designing a work environment that won't work for them is something we want to be very careful about. And even more people aren't autistic but have some overlapping traits--the author might be in this group. That's also where I'd place myself, as someone who's not on the spectrum but has multiple close relatives who are, and sees more than a bit of myself in them, although not enough to be diagnosable. I think I could handle pair programming up to 30 or 40% of the time, but more than that, and I'm pretty sure I'd burn out fast.
I'm an academic, and I do not think it's what he's looking for. Most Ph.D. and postdoc-level research involves much less flexibility and much more tedium than it sounds like he's looking for. The overall project should be very interesting, yes, but the day-to-day work usually still requires plenty of boring bits. And while I'm sure there are some labs that would allow remote work on a flexible schedule, it's not the general culture in the places I have experience. CS might be different--it's not my field. But I'm skeptical.
The social norm these days is really different. It's not about your friends suddenly starting a new, exclusive behavior; its about a slow migration of the people in your social world to a tech platform you don't have access to. And kids do get left out because of this--not for nefarious reasons, but because they're just not going to be in the loop for a significant part of the social interactions that are taking place.