Teaching method

I found this article about a method that an American professor used in his lectures in order to get the students to pay attention. Authorities in America have found that gift token cards (in the US they seem to be called gift cards) are being used as money-laundering devices, partly because they are not counted as legal tender when it comes to border crossing, so you can carry as much as you like in gift tokens across US borders.

Temple Grandin

Horizon did a (video link) programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic American lady who gained an awareness about her condition and realised she had an affinity with animals. She's now very respected in the US meat industry because of the work she's done to reduce animal suffering, all because she can kind of understand how animals (she mostly works with cattle) experience the world. The programme suggests a metaphor for understanding how autism makes you different from non-autistic people - the parts of your brain don't have such good connections and this inhibits intuition about some very complex processes, e.g. social interaction. Temple describes her emotional life as very simple and consisting of just a few emotions, principally fear. She says a lot of her energy throughout her life has gone into avoiding situations that she would find difficult, but that other people would not think twice about. It's her insight that this is similar to the way animals live that has helped her to be so successful in her work with animals. I wrote earlier about the British autistic guy Stephen Wiltshire.

Psychopathy

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Autistic Savant Global Orgasm

The strange things kids write is a cliche, but these suppposed real high school essay quotes made me laugh out loud, so who am I to complain? Numbers 23 and 24 were really making me shake and "The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while" is short enough for me to remember. I remember a television programme about Stephen Wiltshire some years ago. He's an autistic savant. He has a particular skill, which is that he can look at a real scene for a few minutes and later draw it in great detail. This programme puts him through a (video link) huge test - they take him in a helicopter for a ride over Rome, then he draws a huge panorama of Rome from memory. The programme-makers check the details and he is amazingly accurate. Oliver Sacks wrote about the guy in his book "An Anthropologist on Mars". Here's an article in the Guardian about Daniel Tammet, another autistic savant who can also do extraordinary things, but he's unusual in that he can describe what goes on in his head when he does it (check out the descriptions of handling large numbers and remembering pi to a record number of places). If you feel a little rumble on December 22, it may be because of a worldwide campaign to add enough positive energy into the energy field of the Earth to reduce the worldwide levels of violence and agression. It is hoped that this energy will register on the monitor system of the Global Conciousness Project. Perhaps the impression will be a huge phallus (nsfw) - my first nsfw link, though you have to click on the picture to see... the... enlarged version ;-)