Month: December 2019

Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. And accordingly, platforms are the underlying trend that ties together popular narratives about technology and the economy in general. Platforms provide the substructure for the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy”; they’re the economic engine of social media; they’re the architecture of the “attention economy” and the inspiration for claims about the “end of ownership.”

Source: Platform Companies Are Becoming More Powerful — but What Exactly Do They Want? – The New York Times

Via: The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

Sensory Flooding and the Roundabout Hypothesis

“New research finds that #autism isn’t just about the brain. If you dampen the overexcitement of tactile sensors outside the brain, suddenly the brain doesn’t have to deal with that flood of incoming signals. It helps anxiety & social too.

Source: AspergersAutismNews on Twitter

What’s even more interesting is that once this over-ramping of incoming signals happened, it directly led to an increase in anxiety. That makes sense. If your brain is dealing with lots of additional input, it’s being stressed. Second, that over-ramping of incoming signals also lead to social issues. Again, it makes sense if the brain is already swamped with sensory signals that it doesn’t have extra time to deal with facial expressions and relationships. So everything here is related.

Source: Tactile Sensitivity Autism and Neurons – Aspergers Autism News

But, what about if your brain takes in too much information at once?  The second photo shows a roundabout where there’s too much traffic happening from all directions.  Gridlock.  Now, nothing can get through.  (Well, maybe cyclists.  They can always get through somehow.)  But the rest of us, stuck, overheating, beeping horns or collapsed in a heap of despair, going nowhere.  Some autistic brains take in so much information that they can’t get any of it processed and sent on its way.

When it happens, our brains simply have to wait for the ‘traffic’ to clear.  Just adding more traffic to it won’t work.  More ‘traffic’ might be chatting with us, or trying to put a hand on a shoulder without our consent.  Or shouting at us.  Or making us stay in a busy, noisy place where the queue of ‘traffic’ waiting for our brains to process it just gets longer, and longer.  It might be more ‘traffic’ from our brain trying to work out how to speak, or how to understand non-literal language.

We need the traffic to stop arriving. Noise cancelling headphones help me. Sunglasses help, too. A quiet room without bright artificial lighting also helps. Wearing comfortable clothes so that there’s isn’t a constant traffic jam from the, for example, ‘Your socks are hurting you’ lane.

Find out what helps us reduce the ‘traffic’.

Source: Ann’s Autism Blog: Roundabout Hypothesis – a Guest Blog by Chris Memmott

People with ASD commonly experience aberrant tactile sensitivity: a seemingly innocuous touch, such as a gentle breeze or a hug, can be unpleasant or even painful (1, 2). In fact, sensory overreactivity is so common that it is now a diagnostic factor for ASD (2).

We therefore sought to determine whether somatosensory circuits were affected in ASD, and whether altered tactile sensitivity might contribute to other ASD traits. Our goal was to focus on tractable symptoms-somatosensory abnormalities-as an entry into these complex, heterogeneous disorders.

Together with a growing body of other research (_3_, _4_, _16_-_18_), our work highlights that peripheral sensory neurons have a major role in ASD and that selective treatment of these neurons has the potential to improve some developmental and behavioral abnormalities associated with ASD. We are moving toward measuring touch overreactivity in humans with ASD and pursuing modulation of peripheral neuron excitability as a potential clinical therapy.

Via:

One thing that short vote to impeach the president makes visible: the degree to which impeachment pits a diverse America of women, people of color, and immigrants trying to uphold democracy against a white, largely male past trying to use corrupt means to cling to power.

Source: emptywheel on Twitter

The Republicans who voted against were all white. Just two were women.  These Republicans voted to permit a racist white male President to cheat to get reelected in violation of the rule of law.

This is about a clash between the rising America and the past.

Source: A Diverse America Votes to Uphold the Constitution; A Largely Male White America Votes to Abrogate It | emptywheel

For that white male past to retain power, this impeachment makes clear, they need to abrogate the Constitution and join Trump in his fondness for authoritarianism.

Source: emptywheel on Twitter

Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation.

Source: Opinion | Democracy Grief Is Real – The New York Times