Due to a few factors far outside of my control, I have elected to stop my graduate school pursuits for the time being and focus on other things. I am still passionate about contributing to the burgeoning understanding of autism and neurodiversity, and I am still dedicated to developing methods of accommodation and accessibility even…
Moving Beyond Autism as a Pathology
One of the key milestones for autism begins in the earliest stages of language acquisition and cognitive structuring, manifesting as a divergence of how language is coded as part of the social script. Unfortunately, the pervasive linguistic culture has been defined by allistic standards, which means that layers of implicit meaning and subtext are normalized in social engagement, especially with language games…
Thiside of Anywhere, available May 1, 2024
As of May 1, 2024, you can get a copy of “Thiside of Anywhere” in Kindle, paperback, or hardcover on Amazon!
A Brief Aside about Watson, Skinner, Bandura, and Behaviorism
In point of fact, the ethical sins that Skinner gets popularly saddled with fall more squarely on Ivar Lovaas and John Watson. Both Lovaas and Watson presented behaviorism as a method of training (I refuse to call their version “learning”) that used positive and negative forms of reinforcement (applying or denying) and applied both rewards and punishments (pleasant or unpleasant things)…
Journalistic Integrity Versus Fake News
This post first appeared in the JRN200 course in the University of Arizona Global Campus. Fake news is broadly defined as a story presented in credible-looking media that is not just written with false information but does so with the intent to influence readers 1 . These pieces are usually written with a tiny core…
Open Access to Information Is a Democratic Imperative
This piece first appeared as a discussion post for the course JRN200 at the University of Arizona Global Campus. …a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to…
Commentary on Journalism in Democracy
This article first appeared as a discussion post for the JRN200 course at University of Arizona Global Campus. I mentioned briefly before that a democratic society is not defined by what kind of government structure or economic system it uses but rather by the principle of the collective voice of the people being the highest…
The Source of Language: A Discussion of Skinner versus Chomsky
Communication is an endemic feature of all life, and it manifests across a dizzying range of methods from pheromonal expressions of insects to canine body language to whalesong.
Meaningful Quotes
I’m not much into motivational speakers or inspirational words. They just don’t code for me the ways I think they’re intended. “Be the change (trouble) you want to be in the world,” or “Only those that attempt the absurd, achieve the impossible,” are both sayings that I’ve found some comfort in in the past, but neither of these really speak to my career goals or personal trajectory of growth.
Autism Is Not A Behavior
Autism is a neurotype, not a behavior, and applied behaviorist principles to autistic traits is dangerous and counterproductive.