Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Autism and celebrity, in reply to David Cohen,
ABA certainly is a case in point. While some limited studies have suggested that it leads to social improvement here and there, this appears to be in relation to kids who were “high functioning” to begin with. But many, perhaps most, autists are not “high functioning,” so that only gets us so far. What’s more, such studies can never be fully controlled, for the very good reason that we don’t know what the same kids would be like WITHOUT having experienced the ABA method.
Thanks for commenting David. When I was writing the post I actually had your family in mind as an ABA success story story. Would that be overstating the case?
Yet all the evidence seems to suggest that some kind of intensive intervention therapy in the early years is desirable. New Zealand does rather badly on this front, as much so as it does in providing respite care for affected families, in comparison with other rich-world countries.
Yes. Although for those of us whose children are more able but have different needs, the utter absence of support in adolescence and young adulthood is a real problem too.
If the Sewells helped publicise this drab state of affairs, all power to them. Why should anyone care if it was in the course of him promoting a new album? We’ve all got to make a buck.
Sort of. In the Newstalk ZB interview Geoff Sewell endorsed “treatments” which are, on the face of it, not only unproven but actually dangerous. There are no “heavy metals” left in children’s bodies as a result of vaccinations, and seeking to “detoxify” them with chelation therapy is borderline abusive.
At best, bombarding children with whatever supplements are deemed curative (and that changes all the time in the biomed scene) is likely to be a waste of a family’s limited resources – at worst, it could be dangerous. With diets, potentially there may be some gain – but excluding so many things at once, as the Sewells did, is poor practice. Even if you think it’s worked, you don’t know what has worked. Speaking to Jim Mora on Friday, Sewell described gluten and casein as “drugs” in children’s food. That’s just loopy.
Declaring a connection between his daughter’s autism and home wi-fi is, as I noted above, simply absurd.
So the problem is less that the Sewells champion causes than that Geoff Sewell uses his profile to preach “solutions” that may very well be damaging.
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As is sometimes the case, a bunch of tracks landed on Soundcloud in the 12 hours following publication of the Friday post. They seem worth including and they're all free downloads:
Malia & Boris Blank - Tears Run Dry (The Dimitri From Paris Dub)
https://soundcloud.com/dfp/malia-tears-run-dry-the-dimitri-from-paris-dubMoby - Natural Blues (Deepend Rework)
https://soundcloud.com/deependmusic/moby-natural-blues-deepend-reworkPharrell - Happy (Cousin Cole's Reggae Mix)
https://soundcloud.com/cousin-cole/pharrell-happy-cousin-coles-reggae-mixThat last one is a stupidly large bushel of sunshine.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Just the Tunes, in reply to Tim Michie,
Kim Hill Preview: 10:05 Playing Favourites with Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow …
Oh! A heads-up from the producer would have been good on that one ...
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Hard News: Friday Music: Just the Tunes, in reply to bob daktari,
And for them that like a little acid (non synthetic aural goodness) the Lord Of The Isles fact mix is great, at around 40mins in oh my *smiley face* https://soundcloud.com/factmag/lord-of-the-isles-may-14
choice
Yep, that's pretty choice.
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Hard News: Autism and celebrity, in reply to graeme muir,
I accept your points about the tweet and headline online. ABA is not new and it’s not a miracle cure. All of which we were careful to point out in the on-air programme but, in this case, our left hand didn’t talk to the right hand and I’m sorry we got it wrong. The online headlines have been changed to correct this – so hat tip to you for that
Thanks for engaging on this, Graeme, and for the correction.
I perhaps could have covered the other family’s experience too, but to be honest what I wrote took me three hours this morning and there’s a burden both in the research and in going over all this stuff, again. It is quite wearying after a while.
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Hard News: Autism and celebrity, in reply to Shaun Lott,
So I guess Seven Sharp turns out not to be journalism. Oh, wait… that’s not news.
Actually, Seven Sharp was by far the best of the three. The Newstalk interview with Hosking was insane.
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Access: Walking Is Overrated, in reply to ,
Your analogy that not being able to walk is like not being able to fly is obvious, but it opens my eyes to your experience, brilliantly.
Same.
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Hard News: Humour with heart, in reply to The Ruminator,
Without wishing to linkwhore I’m going to post another review I did of Reginald D Hunter. Which in many ways was actually more troubling than Lovegrove’s.
Yes, I read that earlier in the day. Yikes.
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Access: Walking Is Overrated, in reply to Chelle Hope,
I think it’s an important distinction to make. People with physical disabilities who have to deal with chronic illness can be isolated in a way that healthy individuals might not be. Particularly when it comes to recreation, we can feel really quite limited.
I get how alienating it can be when disability is presented as gorgeous, fit Paralympians. For me, it's that my boys face the more subtle, more pervasive challenge of having a very different experience of the world from the people who design the world.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Matthew Poole,
In this advert it doesn’t. The reality portrayed in this advert would not be altered by the through driver doing the speed limit instead of 8% above it.
But I don’t think being 8km/h above the speed limit is actually the point of the ad. It’s that the through-driver is all good, driving around the speed limit, handling it etc – but that speed is risky when there’s a possibility that the turning car is going to make a mistake.
This is what the NZTA backgrounder says:
Previous campaigns have shown that the faster you go the less time you have to react, the longer it takes to stop and the bigger the mess when you do stop. But people still deny this truth or think it doesn’t apply to them. Their speed may be over the limit but it is minimal, e.g. 107 km/h in a 100 km/h area. In their minds they’re not ‘speeding’, but driving comfortably, and they feel in control.
This campaign aims to reframe the way that people look at their speed when they’re driving. A person may be a good driver but they can’t deny that people do make mistakes – after all, to err is only human. And in life, mistakes are made often. We usually get to learn from our mistakes; but not when driving – the road is an exception. Even the smallest of mistakes on the road can cost us our life, or someone else’s.
In a Safe System no one should pay for a mistake with their life. When we drive, we share the road with others so the speed a person chooses to travel at needs to leave room for any potential error – whether it is theirs or someone else’s. At speed, there is less opportunity for a driver to react to a mistake and recover, and this is the key message for this campaign.