What BoingBoing taught me today

• There's now a database with service records of soldiers from the Hundred Years' War. Robert Fogel did awesome work using data from the US Civil War showing just how much economic growth has improved our lives since the 1850s; I wonder what will come of this new dataset.


• You may have heard of the experiment from the 30s where the researcher raised a chimp infant alongside his own son. You may not have heard the "what happened next".

  The real reason he abruptly halted the study, then, was likely because of results that Kellogg never anticipated: his son Donald started imitating the chimp.
  
  For example, though Donald had learned to walk before Gua joined the Kellogg family, he regressed and started crawling more, in tune with Gua. He'd bite people, fetch small objects with his mouth, and chewed up a shoe. More importantly, his language skills were delayed. At 19 months, Donald's vocabulary consisted of three words. Instead of talking he would grunt and make chimp sounds.
  
  Gua got sent back to the Yerkes center in Florida, where she promptly died. And Donald? Not much is known of his life, but, at 43, he committed suicide.
  
  This study got a lot of press when it was published, but Kellogg ended up deeply regreting it -- not because of what it did to his son, but because it prevented him from being taken seriously as a scientist.

• Another dodgy use of copyright: this time, to keep folks from fighting their traffic tickets in the UK. Are speed camera photos really what folks had in mind when trying to protect the returns to intellectual innovation? I hope not.


• Bat shark repellent exists and is effective

Embrace Neurodiversity

From Tyler Cowen's discussion of autism:

In many areas of human neurodiversity, including autism, we still don't know the answers to many basic questions. There is still not even agreement on the basic definitions of autism, Asperger's, and related concepts. In the meantime we are applying lots of stereotypes and negative descriptions to autistics that we would not dream of using to describe racial or ethnic groups. It's high time that colleges and universities got out in the lead to fight these common prejudices. The rhetoric coming out of higher education needs to match up to the reality of higher education as a common avocation for autistic people.

...
It's a little tricky to talk or write about the autistics who may work in your institution. If you work at a college or university, there is a good chance you are interacting with people on the autism spectrum on a very regular basis. Maybe the reaction of the reader is to draw up a mental list of people in the workplace and start applying various stereotypes to them. Maybe you'll be on the lookout at the next dean's meeting for people who exhibit "autistic traits" and then gossip about those perceptions to your friends.

That's human nature, but I'm suggesting an alternative tack. Embrace individualism. Question your stereotypes. Maybe even look in the mirror. When you're done, it's likely that you'll see far more talent, in far more unorthodox varieties, than you expected.

HT: Arts & Letters Daily