JANUARY 2006

Athlete With Down's Syndrome Scores 99-Yard Touchdown
Coach Arranges Play For Special Athlete

KELLER, Texas -- For two years, senior Lyndon LaPlante had only been getting a rep or two at football practice for the Keller Indians and had never seen action in a real game.

The upbeat student with Down's syndrome seemed content to just be part of head coach Kevin Atkinson's football team.

"I could see the passion in his eyes about how he really loved football and loved being around those guys," said Atkinson.

But Atkinson had other plans for the dedicated athlete and wanted LaPlante to take the field in a game.

"He wanted to play more than anything. Watching him compete in the Special Olympics ... I thought at that time, four years ago, that if he sticks with it and keeps having the attitude that he's having, then his senior year I'm going to give him the biggest surprise that we possibly can here," said Atkinson.

The surprise came last Friday night on the Indians home field as Keller took on the Richland High School Rebels. With the help of Richland's head coach Gene Wier and the crew officiating the game, LaPlante was to take the field and run the ball all the way to the end zone.

While the touchdown didn't count in the official recordbooks, that didn't matter to LaPlante.

"He was real excited about it. His words were 'I'm goin in ... I'm goin in'," said LaPlante's father, Don.

So the plan was set: Lyndon would get the ball on the first play of the fourth quarter. What no one could predict was Keller's field position.

The Indians were slated to start their fourth-quarter drive on their own one-yard line, giving Lyndon 99 yards to reach the Richland end zone.

"Everybody was behind me in the stands ... the crowd. They said 'Lyndon, Lyndon ... we want Lyndon, we want Lyndon" said LaPlante.

The crowd pushed LaPlante on to the field with cheers and a standing ovation.

"When he started trotting out on the field I thought, 'I wonder what's going through his mind ... he has to just be so excited,'" said LaPlante's mom, Genni.

At first and 10 from the one, Lyndon got the call he was waiting for and answered with an unbelievable run off the hip of his left tackle. LaPlante ran all the way, 99 yards, into Richland's end zone.

LaPlante's parents were understandably emotional watching their son streak down the field.

"I teared up and then I realized I had to not tear up or I wouldn't be able to see," said LaPlante's mother.

"It was just undescribable really ... it was just a neat feeling," said LaPlante's father.

LaPlante's teammates followed him all the way to the endzone, capping a momentus moment in a young man's life, scoring his first touchdown.

"I carried a 99-yard touchdown. I looked like Emmitt Smith out there," LaPlante said.

LaPlante certainly felt like a Hall of Famer with his one run, one chance to shine and his one moment that will last a lifetime.

October 19, 2005
http://www.nbc5i.com/sports/5126283/detail.html


Teachers to get legal right to restrain pupils

Teachers will be given the clear legal right to discipline unruly pupils and restrain them through the use of "reasonable force", ministers announced today.

The education secretary, Ruth Kelly, backed recommendations from the government's school discipline taskforce for new measures to force parents to take responsibility for their children's behaviour.

Teachers' leaders welcomed the new legal rights proposed by the taskforce, chaired by headteacher Sir Alan Steer, which they said would stop pupils disrupting lessons, but insisted they must be backed with action and not left to gather dust like previous discipline initiatives.

The plans include:
· a new law setting out teachers' "clear and unambiguous right" to discipline pupils and restrain them through reasonable force
· a national charter of rights and responsibilities for teachers, pupils and parents
· a new offence of "allowing a child to be found in a public place during school hours without good cause" to be introduced to make sure parents keep track of their children when they are excluded from school
· possible fixed fines for parents who are guilty of this new offence
· wider use of parenting contracts to be imposed before a child is thrown out of school.

Ms Kelly welcomed the report and promised to implement the key recommendations "as soon as possible". Some of the reforms are expected to be contained in a white paper later this month.

She said: "The government has made tackling poor behaviour a major priority, providing increased powers and resources. But some schools still face real discipline challenges because there is too little consistency in dealing with poor behaviour.

"There is still too much low-level disruption to lessons - backchat, rudeness, calling out in class - that makes teaching and learning more difficult. These proposals can help bring change not just to the rules, but to the culture, reaffirming respect in classrooms and putting teachers firmly in charge."

Ms Kelly added that poor behaviour would not simply disappear if there was legislation. "Heads and teachers must use these new powers with the backing of parents - only then can we make good behaviour the norm in every classroom," she said.

The taskforce wants pupils excluded for more than five days to be interviewed when they return to school to help them settle back in. The controversial right of parents to appeal against exclusions is backed, but there is a call for the independent appeals panels to be more representative and for guidance to avoid cases being overturned on technicalities.
By 2008, all secondaries, including academies and foundation schools, should be forced to belong to local partnerships working together to share "hard to place" pupils, the report states.

The taskforce rejects a code of rules for pupils, but recommends a national charter of rights and responsibilities for youngsters, parents and teachers, to be included in home-school agreements.
Some members of the taskforce were tempted to ban mobile phones in schools because of text bullying. But the report recommends that all schools have a policy on their possession and use.

The general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, Mary Bousted, said she was particularly pleased the report clearly recommended legislation to establish beyond doubt that schools have the right to discipline pupils.

"The Steer report is an essential first step in rebalancing the equation between the individual rights of each pupil and the collective rights of the school community. It is essential that parents, carers, and society in general support schools in achieving good behaviour so that all pupils can benefit from their education. We are particularly pleased the report clearly recommends schools have the right to discipline pupils when their behaviour is unacceptable," she said.

The general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, John Dunford, said "more clarity" in the law would be helpful, but cautioned that the law would be interpreted in the courts.

Meanwhile, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said: "Within the school community, it is the attitude of parents that is a key element essential for the maintenance of good behaviour.

"It is reprehensible that a minority of parents condone negative and loutish behaviour which causes distress in the school environment."

Donald MacLeod, Matthew Taylor and agencies
October 21, 2005
http://education.guardian.co.uk/classroomviolence/story/0,12388,1597781,00.html


Online phys ed takes hold in Minneapolis

Jacob Miller's gym class isn't about push-ups or running laps or dodgeball. It's about computers and Frisbee.

Last year, as the tall, cheerful South High School senior neared graduation, he was finding it hard to complete his physical education requirement while balancing studies, sports and a social life. Then Miller discovered that through a new online class he could fulfill his phys-ed credit after school by playing on the Ultimate Frisbee team.

"I would've had to go to gym class and take up an hour every day," the 17-year-old said during a break from tossing a Frisbee with a few teammates. "I would've had to give up orchestra. If I'd taken it last year, I'd have had to give up German."

The Minneapolis school system's online physical education allows kids to choose a physical activity they enjoy, do it for 30 minutes three times a week -- on their own time -- while keeping an online journal. A parent or coach must confirm the student did the activities, and a fitness test at semester's end will turn up any cheaters.

Course choices have ranged from weight-lifting to swimming to horseback riding.

The course is proving phenomenally popular in Minneapolis, and teachers and administrators who developed the course believe they've hit on a way to help kids grow into adults with lifelong healthy fitness habits.

"You're always going to have kids who, phys ed is not their favorite thing or their priority," said Frank Goodrich, a longtime PE teacher who supervises an online gym class. "We want kids to be physically active and fit their whole life. If there's a percentage that we were missing and we're reaching them now -- that's pretty cool."

Online classes have grown increasingly common in high schools in recent years. But phys ed has been sort of the last frontier. While available at some online-only schools nationwide, it's been less common at traditional high schools.

"I was a big skeptic at first. It didn't make sense to me," said Brenda Corbin, a longtime phys ed teacher who ultimately helped write the curriculum for the new course.

Teachers said they had to embrace a shift in physical education that was already under way: Less emphasis on team sports, and more on personal fitness, health and wellness.

Josh Boucher, a 15-year-old sophomore, has a hip condition that makes it difficult for him to run. But he also has a black belt in karate, and last summer was able to turn his training into his phys ed class.

"I was doing so much physical activity -- more than most gym classes," Boucher said. "Now I can get credit for it."

He also rejects the idea that the online classes are easier than traditional gym. Students must study the health benefits of their activities and get assignments on related topics like healthy eating.

"It's time-consuming," Boucher said. "We had hours of written work where we were learning about fitness and how to better our lives. More than I'd ever had in gym class."

The teachers are in contact through e-mail and by phone, meeting face-to-face at least twice -- once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end, for baseline fitness testing.

The students "have to do better physically at the end of the semester compared to the beginning," said online PE teacher Tammy Cowan. "If they don't, I wouldn't pass them, to be honest."

It's not hard to spot cheaters, the teachers say.

"You're in contact with them constantly," said Goodrich, a gym teacher right out of central casting -- trim and fit with buzz cut and intense stare. "You're going to get a sense pretty quick if they're fudging it."

Minneapolis school officials said they're hearing from school districts around the country who are interested in the program. In Minneapolis, student waiting lists are filling up fast.

"It's like we started the ball rolling, and it started rolling so fast and now we're trying to catch up," said Jan Braaten, content specialist in physical education for Minneapolis schools.

Braaten is making a presentation on the program in January to a national conference of PE teachers.

"It's not appropriate for all students, but for the ones it works for it's good practice for the rest of their lives," said Dolly Lambdin, a health education professor at the University of Texas and past president of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. "The issue here is if students can take it into their lives and move toward self-responsibility."

On the Net: Minneapolis Public Schools: http://www.mpls.k12.mn.us/

Patrick Condon, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press
October 20, 2005
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2005/10/20/
online_phys_ed_takes_hold_in_minneapolis/


Honors for a Principal Whose Impact
Extends Even to the Cafeteria
Head of Fairfax School Wins National Award

Late one morning, Principal Mel Riddile was standing in the cafeteria in J.E.B. Stuart High School and looking proudly at a scene quite unlike what is typical for American high schoolers at lunch.

About 600 students were sitting close together and chattering happily -- nothing unusual about that. The surprise was that there did not seem to be even a scrap of trash or leftover sandwich on any of the tables, at a school where food fights used to be common. Several hundred more students were about to descend on the cafeteria for the second lunch period, and Riddile and his staff at the Fairfax County school had trained students and janitors to get the garbage out of the way before they arrived.

There are several reasons the National Association of Secondary School Principals and MetLife have named the tall, muscular Riddile, a 55-year-old former linebacker at the University of North Carolina, the national high school principal of the year. Test scores at Stuart have gone up. College-level courses are abundant. Absenteeism has been sharply reduced.

But Riddile's admirers say the clean and mischief-free lunch period, the result of persistent reminders and a new system for wheeling trash barrels past the tables, is one of the more visible symbols of his ingenuity, energy and commitment to teamwork. The experts say he has turned Stuart into one of the highest-performing and best-functioning high schools in the country, the academic results particularly impressive because 54 percent of Stuart students come from low-income homes.

When Riddile arrived in 1997, the typical Stuart student was absent nearly 23 days every year, but that number is now down to six. He discovered in his first year that 76 percent of his students were at least two years below grade level in reading; today, almost none of the students who have been at the school at least two years score that low. About 40 percent of students are enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program.

Daniel A. Domenech, a senior vice president of McGraw-Hill Education, was superintendent of Fairfax County schools during most of Riddile's time at Stuart. He said the principal "has been able to demonstrate that a multiethnic student population with high percentages of English language learners and students from low socioeconomic background can achieve when placed in an environment where diversity is celebrated and students are given every opportunity to learn."

The school has 1,450 students in grades 9 through 12. Ethnically, the student body is about 31 percent white, 31 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African American and 24 percent Asian and "other," including many students from the Middle East and North Africa. In five years, its average SAT score has increased 104 points, from 951 to 1055, according to a report from the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Kathleen McBride, president of Stuart's Parent Teacher Student Association, said Riddile collected reams of data on each problem he faced and then encouraged different and sometimes daring solutions from a staff that came to realize he was going to listen to them and back up their efforts.

The auto-dialing program that had been used to inform parents about school events was turned into a wake-up call system for students who were persistently absent or tardy. Each morning at 6 o'clock, the telephone rings in the homes of those students and a recorded voice says: "Good morning. This is Stuart High School. Breakfast starts at 7:05, and school begins at 7:20."

Some central office administrators balked when Riddile insisted on testing the reading abilities of all his incoming ninth-graders, but the appalling results were necessary to persuade everyone that all students who were below grade level had to take a reading course their freshman year. Different methods were used for different students, including mandatory after-school tutoring, with sports and other after-school activities beginning after the tutoring was done.

The emphasis, experts who have studied the school say, has been on finding new ways to solve problems and having the patience to stick with them while teachers and students adjust to the changes. An analysis of the Stuart literacy program on the National Association of Secondary School Principals' Web site acknowledged that Riddile's strong focus on reading did not immediately catch fire.

"The greatest resistance was among the teaching staff," the Principals.org account says. "First, teachers could not understand how they could cover course content and teach literacy strategies. Second, the teachers had no training in teaching literacy strategies. However, the data became key to convincing the staff that there was a need to make a dramatic change from the traditional way of teaching to a more explicit form of teaching to meet the learning needs of students."

Riddile found a job coaching and teaching social studies at Lee High School in Fairfax County right out of college, and he was recruited to be an administrator three years later. He worked at three county high schools and was a substance-abuse prevention coordinator at school headquarters before becoming principal at Stuart. His wife, Marianne, recently retired as a county teacher, and their children, Meredith and Mike, both graduated from Robinson Secondary School before going to the University of Florida.

At the beginning of his career as an administrator, Riddile said, he thought he would miss the daily contact with students in the classroom. But he grew to love the fact that he was now responsible for helping solve the most difficult problems in the school. "When you are an administrator, you are dealing with the kids who need you most," he said.

What other educators say they have noticed about Riddile is his unerring, and sometimes astonishing, focus on student achievement. "One day I was told he was on the roof of the school, fixing the air-conditioning system," said Paul Regnier, the Fairfax County schools spokesman.

"When I asked him about it, he said that they could not get a technician to the school until the next day but that he had done so much to get extra instructional time for students that he was not about to let kids be unable to learn algebra for two hours because it was too hot to learn.

"Behind everything is Mel's strong and practical belief that education is the key to a better life," Regnier said, "and he is proving every day that it is true for people all over the world who come to this country looking for that life."

Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer
October 23, 2005
The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102201221.html


Overworked doc turns to the Web

A local physician is turning to cyberspace to help him manage an overwhelming-- and ever-increasing-- number of patients.

Dr. Kenneth Handelman, a child psychiatrist at Peel Memorial Hospital, spends at least 40 per cent of his time helping children and teens with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Though statistics show approximately four per cent of Canadian children have the disorder, Handelman is one of only two full-time child psychiatrists in Brampton. His young patients wait an average of four to six months to see him, he said.

"There is a huge demand," said Handelman, who gets approximately 10 new patients every week. "There's just not enough time and not enough resources."

In addition to assessing a child with ADHD's medical needs, Handelman is also responsible for teaching patients, parents and other caregivers about the disorder. Education takes time, which he has precious little of, he said.

"I spend one hour on a new consult, which is kind of bare minimum," he said. "There are times when I'd like to take more time, but my practice would grind to a halt."

Struggling to find a way to do more with less, Handelman tuned in to his inner technophile and created a Web site and weekly audio newsletter dedicated to ADHD questions and concerns.

"It just hit me," he said. "My goal is to raise the knowledge of evidence-based, scientific information in the community about ADHD so we can improve the quality of life for those with ADHD."

Each week, subscribers to the free newsletter get Handelman's audio answer to a real question delivered right to their inbox. There are already 200 people on the mailing list-- each of whom submitted a question at registration. Dictating the answer saves Handelman the time of writing an appropriate response, he said.

"If I had to type up articles every week, it would feel like a burden to me," said Handelman.

There are a lot of misconceptions about ADHD out there, he said, and you don't have to be one of Handelman's patients to subscribe to the newsletter.

"There are still a lot of people who believe that this it's a parent's fault or video games that cause ADHD, and it's not," said Handelman. "With the new school year started, I've had parents, teachers, adults with ADHD, behaviour therapists and special education teachers sign up."

Handelman usually sees the most complicated cases of ADHD, with busy family doctors shouldering the burden of more mild situations. Those patients could benefit from the newsletter as well, he said.

Handelman also has an eye on expanding the services available on his Web site.
"This is just an introduction," he said.

For information or to subscribe to the newsletter, visit ">www.theadhd doctor.com/a>

HEATHER ENNIS
The Brampton Guardian
October 23, 2005
http://www.northpeel.com/br/news/story/3112315p-3609623c.html


Genetic Cause of Speech Defect Discovered

Researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T), Capital Health's Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and their international collaborators have discovered a genetic abnormality that causes a type of language impairment in children -- a discovery that could lead to isolating genes important for the development of expressive language.

A study published in the Oct. 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine outlines the discovery of a genetic abnormality in a nine-year-old boy with learning difficulties and speech problems from northern Alberta. By using some of the latest genetic screening methods designed to look for differences in the amount of DNA in particular chromosomes, the researchers discovered that the boy carries additional copies (termed duplication) of around 27 genes on chromosome 7. This is only the second instance of the identification of a single chromosome region linked to specific language impairment.

The boy can understand what is said to him at the level of a seven-year-old but his expressive language and speech are at the level of a two-and-a-half-year-old. "Our results show that changes in the copy number of specific genes can dramatically influence human language abilities," says senior author Lucy Osborne, a U of T professor of medicine. "Based on our findings, we are expanding the study to assess the frequency of this DNA duplication in children with expressive language delay."

The chromosome 7 region that is duplicated in this boy is exactly the same as that which is deleted in Williams-Beuren syndrome (WBS), a neurodevelopmental disorder. While patients with WBS exhibit mild mental retardation, they also have strength in expressive language, alongside very poor performance in tasks involving spatial construction, such as drawing. In striking contrast, this patient could form virtually no complete words but showed normal spatial ability. "For example, if asked to tell us what animal has long ears and eats carrots, he could only pronounce the r, of the word rabbit but was able to draw the letter on the blackboard and add features such as whiskers," Osborne says.

This mutation -- an addition of 1.5 million DNA base pairs -- was predicted several years ago to exist by Osborne and her collaborator Stephen Scherer of The Hospital for Sick Children and U of T. "While estimated to be present in more than a half million people worldwide, the duplication has evaded detection since the disease was unknown until now, but also because finding this type of mutation is technically challenging," explains Martin Somerville, director of the Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory at the Stollery Children's Hospital. Uncovering the duplication sheds light on which genes are necessary for normal expressive language. "Language impairment was thought to be caused by the interaction of multiple genes on different chromosomes, but in this case our discovery implicates a specific location on chromosome 7," Somerville says. "In order to know how to treat a disease you have to know its cause, so this is a significant step in the right direction."

Other authors on the study are Edwin Young and Wayne Loo, Institute of Medical Science and Department of Molecular & Medical Genetics, University of Toronto; Stephen Bamforth and Margaret Lilley, Department of Medical Genetics, University of Alberta; Carolyn Mervis and Ella Peregrine, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville; Miguel del Campo and Luis Pérez-Jurado, Unitat de Genética, Departament Ciències Experimentals i de la Salut, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona; and Colleen Morris, Department of Pediatrics, University of Nevada School of Medicine; and Eul-Ju Seo and Stephen Scherer, Program in Genetics & Genomic Biology, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto and U of T.

This study was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Sick Kids Foundation, the Spanish ministries of health and science and technology, Genome Canada/Ontario Genomics Institute, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Scherer is a CIHR investigator and an international scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Osborne is a CIHR research scholar.

University of Toronto
October 22, 2005
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051022234552.htm


Keep on keeping up

ONE year has passed since the re-election of the Howard Government.

Brendan Nelson has embarked on a series of initiatives that have few precedents in a nation where constitutional powers for education lie with the states.

In Victoria, the Bracks Government has undertaken the first major revision of the School Act since the historic legislation of 1872 signalled an era of "free, compulsory and secular education".
It is timely to assess the state of public education in Australia.

There is immediate need to make such an assessment because there has been a quickening of the pace. At the federal level, the first round of Australian Technology Colleges was announced. In one sense, this is the first time in the history of the Federation that the Commonwealth has set up its own system of schools.

The inquiry into literacy has concluded its deliberations and findings can be expected shortly. An inquiry into teacher education is under way.

The minister has received a report highly critical of curriculum at the state level. Options for a national certificate of education are being explored.

While the minister has rejected the approach, there is a call among some backbenchers for the introduction of vouchers that would enable low-achieving students in government schools to be funded for enrolment in non-government schools.

In Victoria, history will be made with recognition of a private contribution to the funding of state schools, although tuition will remain free. It will also be the first time that non-government schools will be subject to the same accountability requirements as government schools.

Any objective reading of trends suggests that the era of public education defined as a system of schools built, owned and operated by the state, free of a private contribution except where it is voluntary, is over. Moreover, a broad consensus is emerging that the system of schools supported from the public purse will be comprised of those owned by the state and those owned in the private sector, either profit or for the most part non-profit.

Those who maintain the view that "public" is synonymous with "state" will be defending a position that has no counterpart among countries with which Australia is traditionally compared. There is still little awareness that high-performing countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Britain and some parts of Canada have integrated their systems of state and non-state schools, leaving a small rump of truly private independent schools.

Henceforth, "public" should be defined in terms of a set of public values that include quality, access and choice, with a commitment to high levels of achievement for all students in all settings, with all schools together, regardless of ownership, contributing to the public good in terms of the wellbeing of the individual and the nation.

None of the foregoing is to deny the achievements of government schools. Despite Brendan Nelson's broad acceptance of the criticism of curriculum, government schools must take some of the credit for Australia's high ranking in international tests of achievement - the Global Talent Index (fourth), the Global Creativity Index (ninth) and in the proportion of the workforce that belongs to the "creative class" (second).

Apart from increasing performance across the board, our schools need to address problems of disparity between urban and rural, high and low socio-economic status, and non-indigenous and indigenous settings.

Getting the pedagogy right in literacy is a high priority. Bellfield Primary School, in the challenging environment of West Heidelberg, has done just that, moving from well below to well above statewide standards in less than five years. Debates about state or national curriculum will rapidly give way to consideration of international standards. The three programs of the International Baccalaureate are offered in more than 100 countries, in government or state schools in most instances.

There is the remarkable example of the 3e International Kindergarten in Beijing, built on state land, funded by the Sun Wah Education Foundation, offering the Reggio Emilia program now implemented worldwide but pioneered in Italy, taught by recent graduates from Michigan State University in the US, with a teacher-centred program in the Confucian tradition taught by Chinese teachers in the afternoon.

Public-private partnerships in rebuilding the rundown stock of government schools across the country will follow the lead of the Blair Government. It can be done within the existing framework, as evidenced in the remarkable achievements of Port Phillip Specialist School in Port Melbourne, whose principal, Bella Irlicht, recently received the Equity Trust Award for CEO of the Year in the non-profit sector. She has built social capital on a previously unimagined scale and combined generous government support with large grants from the private sector, notably the Pratt Foundation, to convert the school from a two-room, ant-infested building to a world-class facility.

While some students will learn in other settings in a web-enabled world, there will still be a place called school but distinctions cast in a legislative straitjacket in the late 19th century will give way to a new view of public education. The new values for public education set out above are the right ones but, as Tony Blair declared at the recent conference of the British Labour Party: "The challenge we face is not in our values, it is how we put those values into practice in a world fast-forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed."

Brian Caldwell is managing director of Educational Transformations and former dean of education at the University of Melbourne. This article is an edited version of his address to the national conference of the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) in Canberra on October 18.

Brian Caldwell, The Age
October 24, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/keep-on-keeping-up/2005/10/21/1129775959341.html#


Speaker allows deaf to feel music

A new device is helping deaf people to "hear" music through vibrations, 200 years after the technique was used by Beethoven as he lost his hearing.

Different instruments, rhythms and notes can be felt through five finger pads attached to the "Vibrato" speaker.

Brunel University design graduate Shane Kerwin is working on a prototype which he hopes will allow deaf children to join in mainstream music lessons.

If connected to a computer, the device allows deaf people to compose music.

Mr Kerwin said: "Vibrato will mean deaf children can join in with music classes in a way that would previously have been impossible.

"I hope that Vibrato will help us to integrate deaf students into mainstream musical education and enable schools to encourage deaf children to take up music as much as hearing children."

Earlier this month, it was reported that scientists are developing a cochlear implant, which could allow deaf people to hear music as well as speech, by using a wider frequency range.

And there have been several "deaf raves" in London, with an emphasis on bass and heavy rhythmic tracks, allowing clubbers to feel the music through their bodies.

But the idea of hearing music through vibrations dates back much further. Ludwig van Beethoven was completely deaf by 1818, but continued to compose for another 10 years.

He is said to have cut the legs off his piano and played while sitting on the floor so he could feel the vibrations better.

Paul Whittaker, artistic director at the UK charity Music and the Deaf, said many deaf people were able to enjoy music - but much of the technology was not available to them.

"The lack of tactile sensation means deaf people cannot easily perceive the sounds being produced, so Vibrato is a very welcome resource indeed," he said.

BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4377428.stm


Kim Thomas discusses the impact of paperless technologies on the classroom

Ever since school pupils stopped using slates and pieces of chalk, paper has been an integral part of school life. Pupils take notes on paper, they write essays on paper, they draw diagrams on paper. The handouts they receive from teachers are on paper, and at the end of a school year, they write their examination scripts on paper.

But what happens when paperless technology is introduced into education? Does it just mean a reduction in the height of the paper mountains that afflict most schools? Or can it mean a transformation in teaching and learning?

A recent report by Becta, entitled Tablet PCs in Schools, cautiously suggests that one such paperless technology, the Tablet PC, could dramatically change the way children learn. As the report puts it, "Tablet PCs were being used in ways that supported, extended and transformed the curriculum. The pace of lessons was improved, as was the richness and variety of the content examined."

The Tablet PC, which uses the Windows XP operating system, resembles a lightweight laptop. What makes it different is that users operate it with a digital pen rather than a mouse or keyboard (though some Tablets, known as 'convertibles', come with keyboards too). Students use the digital pen to write or draw, as they would with an ordinary pen. They can save their handwritten text as it is, or convert it to typed text. Teachers can use the pen to mark and annotate the work in a different colour. Students can search the saved files for particular words or phrases, just as they could with a laptop.

At the end of last year, there were 90 or so schools in England using Tablets. The Becta report looked at 12 of them, and found that in most cases the Tablets had had a significant impact. "There was a strong feeling amongst the schools, which was shared by the researchers, that there was definitely something different about Tablet PCs compared with laptops or desktops. Children related to them differently - they seemed to bond with them in a very personal way," says Peter Twining, the Open University lecturer who managed the Becta research.

The most successful schools were those that used the Tablets in conjunction with a wireless network or data projector to create a more collaborative learning environment. Children's individual notes, for example, could be shared by connecting their Tablet PC to a data projector in order, the report says, "to move towards a record that represented a class consensus." Stephen Uden, Educational Relations Manager at Microsoft, agrees that Tablets are best used collaboratively, and cites a music lesson he observed in which pupils using specialist software were able to write scores directly onto their Tablets and then play the music back to the rest of the class.

Cornwallis Technology College in Kent has been using Tablet PCs since November 2002, mostly with Year 7 children. It now has 200 Tablets, with 290 more due to arrive in the autumn. The Tablets have enabled students to personalise their learning, says Caroline Barber, first deputy at the school: "We've got some wonderful examples of students' work where they've got Flash animation, where they have inserted sound files into PowerPoint presentations, where they've produced electronic workbooks on topics." At the end of the first year, the academic performance of those pupils who had used Tablets was significantly higher than that of those who hadn't - a difference that was particularly marked for the lower ability students.

The students themselves are much better at taking control of their own learning, says Caroline; when the teacher marks a piece of work and returns it with comments electronically, students are much more likely now to re-edit the work and persevere with it to improve it. The success of the Tablets has enabled the school to rethink its approach to learning: currently, the science, English and humanities curricula are being redesigned so that pupils have longer learner periods of 100 minutes in which they work through a project-based curriculum.

Although technology is changing classroom learning, most pupils still expect to sit examinations using the traditional pen and reams of paper. Yet it doesn't have to be that way, according to software company PaperFree. PaperFree, which currently has 100,000 users in the UK, has made an impact in both the private and FE sectors with an e-portfolio software product that allows students on vocational courses to be assessed entirely without paper.

Instead of writing essays or sitting a written examination - which many vocational students dislike - the student hairdresser, engineer or carpenter is filmed both doing their job and answering questions about it with a video camera. The video and audio files are then held on a laptop along with other assessment information about the student. According to managing director Robert Smart, use of PaperFree has improved retention rates in vocational courses in FE from 63% to nearly 100%, and cut the length of time it takes to get an NVQ by two thirds.

The approach can also be used in schools. Last year, some Year 11 pupils at St Augustine's School in Trowbridge took part in a successful pilot project using PaperFree. The pupils were following an alternative curriculum from the OCR examination board, which included a 'preparation for work' module. Normally, these pupils, having carried out work experience, would be expected to submit written work or sit a written test.

Instead, they were visited in their workplace by careers coordinator Christine Hanlon, who asked them questions that they could then answer orally. The answers were recorded either on video or audio tape, and later uploaded to a laptop. Christine was able to cross-reference her assessment of the student with the video or audio evidence. "If they'd been given a piece of paper and asked, 'What were the main points you had to observe with regards to health and safety?' they'd have struggled," says Christine. "But out in the work environment, I could say, 'I see there's a knife on the table. Tell me about the health and safety rules for handling the knife.'"

What the two technologies have in common is that they are student-centred rather than teacher- or assessor-centred. Students learn, and are examined, in a way that feels natural and comfortable to them. Truly personalised learning may still be a distant goal, but these technologies could represent an important first step in that direction.

Kim Thomas
October 24, 2005
http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/3218


Ritalin Patch Awaiting Approval

Kids who are prescribed ADHD drugs may soon have a choice: the patch or the pill.

A new patch system delivers methylphenidate — the main ingredient in Ritalin, Concerta, and Methylin — throughout the day. Made by Noven and Shire pharmaceutical companies, the patch is the first ADHD drug that does not have to be taken orally. Pending FDA approval, the companies plan to call the patch Daytrana.

Studies reported at this week's joint meeting of the American and Canadian Academies of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry find the patch works at least as well as the popular once-a-day ADHD drug. Sharon B. Wigal, Ph.D., director of clinical trials at the Child Development Center at the University of California, Irvine, led one of the studies.

"The patch is different from oral stimulant medications, where the longest action is up to 10 or 12 hours. It looks like the patch goes beyond that," Wigal tells WebMD. "This is a plus, because this may really allow you to formulate a dose for individual patients. Even though we were removing the patch after nine hours, once parents administer it themselves they may determine to remove it earlier or later. That may give them more options, knowing there was continuing efficacy beyond that 12-hour time point."

Better Behavior, Attention, Math Scores

Wigal led a research team that gave the patch to 80 ADHD kids aged 6 to 12. Half the kids got an inert placebo patch and later switched to a real patch; the other half started with a real patch and later switched to a placebo.

When getting the real patch, the children's ADHD was significantly better than when they got the fake patch. Their behavior and attention, tested throughout the day, improved. They also did better on age-adjusted math tests.

The patch does have side effects.

"It is pretty comparable to what we see with other stimulant drugs," Wigal says. "We do see effects on sleep onset and decreased appetite. And then, because this is a transdermal system, you may see a skin response. That would be something to look at if a child is more sensitive in terms of skin type."

Children in the study are continuing to use the patch for a full year. So far, the patches aren't much of a problem.

"We see continued maintenance in terms of the patch continuing to work and safety not being a concern," Wigal says.

Better Than Extended-Release Pills?

In a second study, Robert L. Findling, MD, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at University Hospital in Cleveland, led a team that compared the patch with placebo as well as with methylphenidate pills.

Compared with placebo, both the patch and methylphenidate pills improved 6- to 12-year-old kids' ADHD. Interestingly, ADHD scores improved more with the patch than with the pills, although the difference was not large enough to be considered scientific proof of superiority.

"In general, there was a trend toward a greater positive effect of treatment with [the patch] than [oral medication]," Findling and colleagues write in their presentation abstract.

Who Would Use the Patch?

Since the patch contains the same drug as other long-lasting ADHD drugs, why would a parent choose it? WebMD asked Leslie Rubin, MD, director of developmental pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine.

Rubin remembers the sea change in ADHD treatment that methylphenidate brought about some 10 years ago.

"That was a revolution, because a child would get Ritalin and go to school, and by 11 a.m. it is not working any more," Rubin tells WebMD. "So we would have to prescribe another dose at school, and there would be long lines at the nurse's station. It was disruptive — and the kids would get embarrassed."

Concerta, Rubin says, also solved some of the problems that haunted early extended-release versions of ADHD drugs. So why go to the patch?

"Well, some kids don't like to take pills or even liquids. And you can't break up extended-release pills and put them in applesauce — you destroy the release mechanisms," Rubin says. "If approved by the FDA, the patch will offer an opportunity to give an ADHD medicine without the child having to swallow it."

Perhaps more importantly, the patch offers more control over how long a parent wants the stimulant medication to last.

"If you give a child a pill, it is in the body and you can't do anything about it," Rubin says. "But if you put the patch on, and the child needs, say, six hours today, you can leave it on for a corresponding amount of time."

Wigal agrees. She says the patch may release methylphenidate for as long as 16 hours. Her team is also studying what happens when the patch is removed at times shorter and longer than those used in the this study. So far, she says, it looks as though the patch must be removed for three hours before its effects wear off.

Sources:
2005 joint meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Toronto, Oct. 18-23, 2005. Sharon B. Wigal, PhD, associate clinical professor of pediatrics and director of clinical trials, Child Development Center, University of California, Irvine. Leslie Rubin, MD, director of developmental pediatrics and associate professor, Emory University School of Medicine.

Daniel J. DeNoon
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MDWebMD Inc.
October 25, 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/25/health/webmd/main980224.shtml


High-schoolers logging on for gym class

Forget pushups, running the mile and the ugly uniform.

High school students at a handful of Arizona schools are now taking physical education courses online.

Take Primavera Online High School in Chandler. P.E. students there can jog, dance or go on a bike ride, then file heart-monitor readings to their teacher online as proof.

Mesa Public Schools and the Marana Unified School District near Tucson offer courses in which students study bowling online and then bowl 18 games at an alley.

Peoria Unified School District also began offering online P.E. last year as an alternate way for busy students to earn fitness credits.

Web-based P.E. courses have been popping up sporadically across the country over the past decade, from Florida to Minnesota, drawing both praise and criticism from physical education teachers. It's part of a general trend to make more high school courses available online so students can catch up on credits or work ahead.

Educators say the online P.E. courses can be good for motivated, independent students. But some teachers question how schools can monitor a student's fitness without seeing him or her in gym class.

"For most of the kids, independent stuff doesn't work. They don't do it," said Curt Jablin, a P.E. teacher in Paradise Valley Unified School District and the 2002 Southwest Physical Education Teacher of the Year.

Many Arizona school districts require high school students to take two semesters of physical education.

Questions arise

Sam Richardson, who teaches online phys-ed for Primavera, gets lots of curious questions about the course, and admits that at first even he was confused about how it would work.

"People will laugh and say, 'What is the deal with that?' " Richardson said. "Their idea is I set up a Web cam and show how to do pushups. It really isn't about that at all."

The six-week class at Primavera shows how the courses rely on a mix of honors system, computer tracking and events.

Students first get a fitness assessment and then choose their fitness activities, with walking, dancing and biking being popular choices. They must wear a heart-rate monitor during the activities and download the results by computer to their teacher twice a week. The course requires students to be active for about an hour a day, five days a week.

Students also must attend at least four school-organized events that have ranged from fishing, indoor rock climbing and bowling to an Arizona Diamondbacks game and a theater production of The Lion King.

Online textbook

The textbook is online, and the quizzes are similar to a regular gym class.

State Schools Chief Tom Horne said he sees benefits to online courses.

"The important thing is the kids get physical activity, and it's always important some of their physical activity should be in a social setting," he said.

That said, the required activities should be "aerobically challenging," he said, "not going to the Diamondbacks game or The Lion King."

High school junior Zachary Heyne, 16, recently took a six-week online course through Primavera. About 160 students have taken the course since it began a year ago.

"My favorite activity was when we got to go fishing and then rock climbing and bowling," said the Glendale teen. "We went to the zoo, my family and I, and they counted that as an event for me."

Heyne said he wore his heart-rate monitor when he mowed the lawn, ran a few times and brought in groceries. His mother, Karen, said her son also worked out on an elliptical machine and treadmill.

Mother and son loved the program.

"Instead of running around playing dodge ball, I was getting to bowl and fish, and do indoor rock climbing, which I felt was more fun," Zachary said.

Karen liked the school-sponsored events, such as the fishing trip to Lake Pleasant, because families could tag along."We were all making jokes: 'We're going to P.E. class with Zachary,' " she said.

Lifelong activities

While some students may not take the online course seriously, it's no different from a regular gym class where some students refuse to participate, she said.

Online activities may not sound as rigorous as the old-fashioned standbys of the 50-yard dash, but teachers say the new online courses fit with the philosophy being taught in today's phys-ed classes. The new philosophy downplays competitive team sports and emphasizes fitness activities that students can do the rest of their lives.

Rep. Mark Anderson, R-Mesa, who has pushed for more fitness in the schools, calls online phys-ed an interesting concept.

Solution to a problem

Some schools have cut back on fitness in recent years, he said, so online courses would be one solution.

"How it works is actually the key question," he said. "If kids can somehow 'game' the system and figure out how to get around it without doing anything, that's not going to fly."

Primavera school officials say they monitor students through the twice-weekly downloads of their heart-rate monitors. The teacher admits a sneaky student could convince a friend to take their heart monitor and work out.

"We haven't had any trouble with that so far," said Richardson, the teacher. "No one has attempted to put it on a kitty cat."

Mesa Public Schools require students to get the signature of a bowling alley official each time they bowl, and their final exam is supervised.

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education based in Reston, Va., takes no position on online courses, said Dolly Lambdin, the group's past president.

Lambdin sees pros and cons.

Online phys-ed is great for students who live in rural areas or have packed schedules and find it hard to fit in all their academic requirements. But certain activities such as gymnastics are inappropriate for online because of the supervision needed, she said.

Hope High School Online, a Phoenix-based charter school, offers online fitness courses that allow student athletes to count their practice time toward their physical education credit.

The school's marketing director, Marmy Kodras, said many of the larger school districts won't accept the online P.E. credits, preferring the student take the course at a district high school.

But Richardson, the Primavera teacher, said he's now a believer in online P.E.

"It's really about students choosing a richer, more healthy lifestyle and keeping them away from the TV," he said.

Anne Ryman, The Arizona Republic
October 28, 2005
Reach the reporter at anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8072.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1028onlinephysed.html


Mayo Clinic researchers find math learning disorder is common

In a recently published study, Mayo Clinic researchers determined Math Learning Disorder (LD) is common among school-age children. Results show that boys are more likely to have Math LD than girls. The research also indicates that although a child can have a Math LD and a reading LD, a substantial percentage of children have Math LD alone. In fact, the cumulative incidence of Math LD through age 19 ranges from 6% to as high as 14%, depending on the Math LD definition. LD is used to describe the seemingly unexplained difficulty a person of at least average intelligence has in acquiring basic academic skills -- skills that are essential for success at school, work and for coping with life in general. The results appear in the September-October issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics.

"Our research on the incidence of Math LD indicates that Math LD is common, affecting many children at some time during their school years," says William Barbaresi, M.D., a Mayo Clinic developmental and behavioral pediatrician and an author of the study. "Our results support the notion that Math LD is an important problem that deserves attention from both researchers and educators."

Despite the recognized importance of mathematics, the majority of learning disability research has focused on reading. The prevalence of Math LD has been estimated at anywhere from one percent to six percent of school-age children. Research on Math LD has been hampered by differing definitions of Math LD and poorly defined criteria for identifying it. Most studies have looked at the prevalence of Math LD, ignoring changes in the group of students being studied, and making it difficult to determine the precise number of children affected by Math LD.

In the current study, Mayo Clinic researchers used different definitions of Math LD, analyzed school records of boys and girls enrolled in public and private schools in Rochester, Minn., and examined information from the students’ medical records. They also looked at the extent to which Math LD occurs as an isolated learning disorder versus the extent to which it occurs simultaneously with Reading LD. This study is the first to measure the incidence -- the occurrence of new cases -- of Math LD by applying consistent criteria to a specific population over a long time. By considering the coexistence of Math LD and Reading LD across the students’ entire educational experience (i.e., from grades K-12), the research presents a more comprehensive description of this association.

Knowing that children are as likely to have Math LD as have Reading LD makes it critical for school staff to be aware that, regardless of how LD is defined, a significant number of children with Math LD do not exhibit associated reading problems. Given the educational focus on reading achievement, strategies that focus exclusively on identifying children with poor reading achievement will fail to identify and provide educational services for many children with Math LD.

http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/statistiken/bericht-50901.htm


The Age of Autism: The Amish Elephant

A specter is haunting the medical and journalism establishments of the United States: Where are the unvaccinated people with autism?

That is just about the only way to explain what now appears to be a collective resistance to considering that question. And like all unanswered questions, this raises another one: Why?

What is the problem with quickly and firmly establishing that the autism rate is about the same everywhere and for everybody in the United States, vaccinated or unvaccinated? Wouldn't that stop all the scientifically illiterate chatter by parents who believe vaccinations made their children autistic? Wouldn't it put to rest concerns that -- despite the removal of a mercury-containing preservative in most U.S. vaccines -- hundreds of millions of children in the developing world are possibly at risk if that preservative is in fact linked to autism?

Calling this issue The Amish Elephant reflects reporting earlier this year in Age of Autism that the largely unvaccinated Amish may have a relatively low rate of autism. That apparent dissimilarity is, in effect, a proverbial elephant in the living room -- studiously ignored by people who don't want to deal with it and don't believe they will have to.

Here are a few cases in point.

Earlier this month the National Consumers League conference in Washington held a session on communicating issues around vaccine safety. I was on the panel and talked about the Amish and autism. In the Q&A session that followed, the first question was for me.

"Is this a proper role for a journalist, or is this just a straw dog set up there with a preliminary answer? It not only showed up where you wrote it. It was all over the place. You did very, very well for UPI (at which point I said, 'Thank you -- please tell my bosses that!') but the question is, did you do very, very well for America?

"Is it appropriate for a journalist -- you weren't reporting, you were investigating. And I just wonder if you think it's an appropriate role for you to play."

My answer: "There's different roles for the press. That's certainly a reasonable question. That is investigative reporting. This idea is something that's already been discarded -- that there's any reason why you would want to look in an unvaccinated population.

"One of my favorite comments about journalism is that it's the wild card of American democracy. The First Amendment says we can do (in the sense of reporting about) whatever we want. So one of our privileges is to get an idea in our head and go look at it."

My questioner was not finished. "I wasn't questioning whether you have a First Amendment right to do it. I think this is more of a question of the ethics, of what value we are bringing to the debate."

My response: "That's probably not a good one for me to answer. Obviously I thought it was ethical."

At that point a fellow panelist, Dr. Louis Cooper, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a staunch vaccine defender, spoke up. "I would jump in and say I thought it was ethical and I think it was useful," said Cooper, a courtly and unfailingly courteous Manhattan pediatrician.

"As you've learned, it was annoying to many people. I wasn't annoyed by it because I thought you kept the process and the debate and the discussion going forward. And we have to do that for one another."

That did not end the discussion. A few minutes later a public-health professor from -- where else? Harvard -- did her own version of Jeopardy!, offering the correct "answer" in the form of a question.

"This question is for Dan. Did you mention the outbreak of polio that happened in the Amish community in the Netherlands that caused widespread problems there, and also the fact that there'd been some context with respect to history in our country in trying to reach out to the Amish to actually encourage them to try to benefit from some of the vaccine technology to the extent that we could?

"So there's been a long history in this country of the CDC trying to reach out to them to the extent that they could. Also with respect to polio, I think what's really amazing is it's such a great story, this is such an exciting time, in the sense that we are very close to global eradication. What that means is we've gone from 1988 when we had 350,000 estimated paralytic polio cases in the world every year to roughly a thousand. It's very exciting that in fact we don't have the terror or the hysteria and all of the fear that surrounded disease.

"I just want to remind everyone that one thing that's very important in the context of reporting these stories is making sure that people do remember and also realize with infectious disease is these things can come back, and until they are eradicated they can come back and devastate us just as much as they did before, except now there are a lot more people.

"There's some related news that people might find interesting. A headline in the Washington Post today, 'Polio outbreak occurs among Amish families.' So I thought people might be interested in that."

At that point the moderator, Dr. Roger Bernier of the Centers for Disease Control, said time was getting short -- why was I not surprised? -- and asked for the next "question."
One thing I've noticed is the more that people want to lecture instead of learn, the more they speak in breathless run-on sentences that are hard to stop, slow down or even diagram. They leave one with the unspoken idea that dialogue -- opening the door to new information -- is somehow dangerous.

These exchanges reminded me of the response I got from Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC director, when I asked her this summer, verbatim: "Has the government ever looked at the autism rate in an unvaccinated U.S. population, and if not, why not?"
Her answer, verbatim:

--
In this country, we have very high levels of vaccination as you probably know, and I think this year we have record immunization levels among all of our children, so to (select an unvaccinated group) that on a population basis would be representative to look at incidence in that population compared to the other population would be something that could be done.

But as we're learning, just trying to look at autism in a community the size of Atlanta, it's very, very difficult to get an effective numerator and denominator to get a reliable diagnosis.

I think those kind of studies could be done and should be done. You'd have to adjust for the strong genetic component that also distinguishes, for example, people in Amish communities who may elect not to be immunized (and) also have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the United States. So drawing some conclusions from them would be very difficult.

I think with reference to the timing of all of this, good science does take time, and it's part of one of the messages I feel like I've learned from the feedback that we've gotten from parents groups this summer (in) struggling with developing a more robust and a faster research agenda, is let's speed this up. Let's look for the early studies that could give us at least some hypotheses to test and evaluate and get information flowing through the research pipeline as quickly as we can.

So we are committed to doing that, and as I mentioned, in terms of just measuring the frequency of autism in the population some pretty big steps have been taken. We're careful not to jump ahead of our data, but we think we will be able to provide more accurate information in the next year or so than we've been able to do up to this point. And I know that is our responsibility.

We've also benefited from some increased investments in these areas that have allowed us to do this, and so we thank Congress and we thank the administration for supporting those investments, not just at CDC but also at NIH and FDA.
--

The latest response to my pesky persistence comes not from academia or government but from my own profession. Last week the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review published an article whose main thrust -- with which I concur -- was that a vigorous debate over a possible link between vaccines and autism was being thwarted by the self-induced timidity of the press.

Some reporters told the author, Daniel Schulman, that they have basically given up on the story because the criticism -- some of it from their own editors -- was so fierce, and the story was so complicated.

Schulman described Age of Autism's efforts to come at the issue "sideways," looking for possible clues to the cause of the disorder in the natural history of autism. And he mentioned our reporting on the Amish:

"Privately, two reporters told me that, while intriguing, Olmsted's reporting on the Amish is misguided, since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool. ... Both reporters believed that Olmsted has made up his mind on the question and is reporting the facts that support his conclusions."

Ouch. Being slammed by one's peers is never enjoyable, although reporters need to have thick skins and realize they dish this kind of thing out every day. (And those anonymous sources really are annoying, especially when I am happy to be quoted by name about everything.)

What's interesting about the reporters' "private" remarks is the degree of presumed expertise they suggest -- that looking at the Amish is misguided "since it may simply reflect genetic differences among an isolated gene pool." Really? Where did these guys get their doctorate in genetics, Harvard?

This assertion -- that the Amish gene pool could explain everything, based on no data that I'm aware of -- is the kind of self-interested speculation masquerading as expertise that has beset the autism-vaccines discussion for far too long. The term I learned for it long ago is "convenient reasoning," and it does not always have to be conscious.

The Amish have all kinds of standard genetic mental and developmental disorders -- from bipolar to retardation -- and a lot more genetic issues to boot from this supposedly protective "isolated gene pool." The doctors who actually know something about the Amish have never suggested to me that genes have anything to do with a low rate of autism. They seem perplexed.
In upcoming columns, we'll put that question to the right people -- geneticists -- and tell you what we find. It's called reporting.
--
This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes reader response.
E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com

DAN OLMSTED, UPI Senior Editor
United Press International, Inc.
http://www.upi.com/ConsumerHealthDaily/view.php?StoryID=20051024-095736-4490r


Researchers May Have Discovered Dyslexia Gene

Researchers have identified a variation in a gene that appears to account for about 17 percent of cases of the reading disability dyslexia.

Experts hailed the finding as a potential milestone in the understanding of the widespread disorder.

"This is highly significant," said Jeffrey W. Gilger, associate dean for discovery and faculty development at Purdue University. "It is the first really good study that combines molecular genetics with brain imaging research, as well as actually testing whether these genes they think they found are really active in the brain."

Frank Wood, professor of neurology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, added: "This study is the first one to make a connection between a gene that is known to be associated with dyslexia and an anomaly in brain development. The authors have persuasive evidence that this particular gene variant causes altered migration of neurons and therefore alters the structure of the brain. That's a very important step in the evolution of our understanding of the neurogenetics of dyslexia and it will lead to further steps."

Neither Gilger nor Wood were involved in the research, which appears in next week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings were to be released Friday to coincide with a presentation at the meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics in Salt Lake City.

The study's senior author, Dr. Jeffrey Gruen, an associate professor of pediatrics at Yale University's Child Health Research Center, said genetic tests for the variant could start right away that might steer people to the appropriate educational treatments.

Other experts disagreed.

"The tendency is to want to jump on this, but tests aren't complex enough to find this blip, and they're also expensive," Gilger said.

"We don't yet know what factors determine whether people with this genetic variation do or don't end up with dyslexia," Wood added. "A host of environmental and genetic influences likely influences or determines whether somebody with this particular genetic variation ends up being dyslexic or not. And until the nature of some of those other influences is fully specified, we won't know what it means to say to somebody that their 5-year-old child has this particular genetic endowment."

In the future, however, this information may be useful in identifying people with this variant and administer some form of gene therapy, perhaps by giving pills or vitamins to compensate for the deficiency, Gilger said.

Dyslexia is one of the most common neurobehavioral disorders, affecting up to 17 percent of the population. Sufferers have trouble processing language-based information, making it difficult to learn to read, write and spell. Early educational interventions can help compensate for some of these difficulties.

Dyslexia has a strong genetic component, probably involving several genes, although not dozens, Gruen explained.

Dyslexia is also accompanied by alterations in the structure and functioning of the brain.
Researchers had already identified a region on chromosome 6 that might house some of these errant genes. The region contains about 19 genes, most of which are expressed in the brain.

Gruen and his colleagues genotyped members of 153 families and found a deletion in the DCDC2 gene on chromosome 6 that is the likely dyslexia culprit.

When the researchers inhibited production of the gene in rat embryos, they found that doing so had influenced the development of neurons, or brain cells, causing them to migrate shorter distances.

"That fits perfectly with physiologically what we see," Gruen said. "We're seeing a disruption of the normal reading circuits, and what makes up these reading circuits are going to be neurons," Gruen said.

Since then, the researchers have found the deletion in children, as have two other research groups, one in Finland and one in Germany.

Functional MRIs conducted in humans revealed that the gene was expressed in reading centers of the brain. "Dyslexics use alternate circuits and alternate pathways, the thought being that the circuits for normal reading are disrupted and alternative pathways are less efficient," Gruen said.

Whether or not these findings translate into concrete gains for people with dyslexia, the research sends "a very important message to educators, parents and children, which is that you're not dumb. This isn't your fault. You're not a bad parent," Gruen said. "This is a transmitted difference in our gene that makes one person learn differently than another. That's all it is."

More information
Learn more about dyslexia from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter
HealthDay News
October. 28, 2005
http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/10/28/hscout528796.html


Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before'

FEARS that text messaging may have ruined the ability of teenagers to write properly have been shown to be unfounded after a two-year study revealed that youngsters are more literate than ever before.

The most comprehensive comparison made of exam papers of the past 25 years has discovered that the writing ability of 16-year-olds has never been higher.

The quality of writing has also improved, said Alf Massey, head of evaluation and validation at Cambridge Assessment, the department of Cambridge University that carried out the study.

But phrases that may not have been acceptable to examiners in 1980 have crept into regular use, even by pupils awarded A* to C grades.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.

The study used samples from thousands of English language examinations sat by 16-year-olds in 1980, 1993, 1994 and 2004. Mr Massey compared students’ general written ability to express themselves accurately and clearly through a range of grammatical structures.

Vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and grammatical adequacy were then looked at.

He said: “The quality of many features of writing by school leavers has improved over the past decade.”

Looking at the 2004 papers where improvements were substantial, he said that pupils who achieved grade C in GCSEs last year had better vocabulary than those who scored a grade B in 1980. “In this example, any tendency for vocabulary to become less impressive has been reversed with a vengeance,” said Mr Massey. “The 2004 candidates either had a better vocabulary than those a decade ago or were more likely to make a conscious effort to display their best efforts in the examination.”

Adam Fresco, The Times
October 31, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-1850922,00.html


Signs of literacy
Classes in three languages help deaf children learn to read

LAWRENCE -- Learning English is hard. That much Rosario Mendoza knew. The Nashua resident is still learning the language, and speaks mainly Spanish. An immigrant from Colima, Mexico, the 27-year-old mother just hoped her son, Jose Munguia, would pick up the language faster than she. After all, Mendoza had heard stories about the children of Spanish-speaking parents picking up English as fast as they learned to walk.

But when doctors told Mendoza her son was nearly deaf, she didn't know what to do. Not only would her son struggle with learning the language of their adopted home, but picking up basic literacy skills seemed impossible, she thought.

That was before she found out about a program at Northern Essex Community College that teaches Spanish-speaking parents how to read to their deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

At the monthly ''Shared Reading" sessions, classes are conducted in three languages -- Spanish, English and sign language.

The program, a collaboration between the local college and Gallaudet University, the world's premier university for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, gives parents tips on how they can introduce literacy to their deaf children using children's books. Each month, the school hosts classes that help parents with sign language, show them ways to improve students' reading skills, and provide a chance for deaf children and deaf adults to interact with one another.

''For me it's very important because it's the only place I can come to learn [sign language] for my son," Mendoza said in Spanish after one of the sessions.

Since it began two years ago, the free program has reached more than 20 families in the Greater Lawrence area, according to Kathy Vesey, director of the Gallaudet Regional Center in Haverhill and Northern Essex. The goal is simple: get deaf and hard-of-hearing children interested in reading at an early age so they continue later with their education.

When the program first began, only the parents and their children came to the ''Shared Reading" sessions, said Vesey. But as word spread, extended family members such as uncles, aunts, and cousins began showing up, wanting to see how they could help.

''People involved in the child's life wanted to be there, it seemed," Vesey said.

Gallaudet University offers similar workshops across the country, said Vesey. But, she said, the Northern Essex program is unique because a number of the participating families speak only Spanish.

''So really these are trilingual sessions," Vesey said. ''We have interpreters in Spanish, English, and sign language."

Mendoza said ''Shared Reading" has been helpful for her and her son. They have been attending sessions since the program's inception. ''He still is in his first year of learning how to read, but he has much to learn," said Mendoza with a slight grin. Her son is now 8 years old and attends a specialized school in Manchester, N.H., she said.

During a recent session, around 20 parents gathered to read the children's book ''Five Little Pumpkins" by Dan Yaccarino. Parents read through the story with a bilingual translation on a video projection screen while teacher Frances Conlin told the story in sign language. Two interpreters, one in Spanish and another in English, spoke through hearing devices so that all parents could understand the story. To encourage parents to convey the introduction of a friendly ghost into the story, Conlin told them to make facial expressions when reading the story to their children. Mendoza sat attentively, asking questions in Spanish and sometimes in sign language.

While Mendoza and the other parents sat in the workshop, their children were in another room playing. Placing deaf children and hearing siblings in the same room teaches both how to interact with each other, Vesey said.

After the workshop ended, parents were reunited with their children and went over the new reading techniques using the new book. When Mendoza showed her son ''Five Little Pumpkins," he flipped through the pages and pointed at the pictures as if asking questions.

''That's what this is about," Vesey said. In addition to the monthly workshops, Vesey said, Gallaudet also works with Lawrence public schools to help families of deaf children.

Organizers say participation from families has been consistent, though some have dropped out because parents' schedules have changed or the family has moved from the Lawrence area. New families have also shown up, giving the program new life.

Bob and Cathy Essex attended their first class this month so they could help their two young daughters learn to read. Everyone in the family is deaf.

During the session, Bob Essex joyfully followed the workshop along with his wife. He even announced to the other parents that he and his wife were expecting another baby.
''We think the baby's deaf," Essex said in sign language. He was smiling.

Russell Contreras, Globe Staff
The New York Times Company
October 30, 2005
Russell Contreras can be reached at rcontreras@globe.com http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/10/30/signs_of_literacy/


Arundel School Closes Achievement Gap
At North Glen, Black Students Outperform Whites in Many Areas

Todd Franklin lives in Morris Hills, a sturdy, middle-class, mostly black section of Glen Burnie, in a house around the corner from the one where he grew up. He's married to a woman from across the street. He lives there because the streets are safe, the neighbors are trustworthy and the local school is getting better. A lot better.

His son Joshua is part of the reason. At North Glen Elementary School in the spring, all but one of the 16 black students in the third grade, including Joshua Franklin, scored well enough on the statewide Maryland School Assessment test to be rated proficient. They scored higher than almost every other group of black third-graders in Maryland.

Over the past three years, this Anne Arundel school has achieved a goal that eludes most of the nation's public schools. It has closed the achievement gap between black and white students.

Among black students at North Glen, third-grade proficiency on the statewide test rose from 32 percent in 2003 to 94 percent this year, placing the campus among the top schools in Maryland for black students' performance. Across the third and fourth grades, a grand total of three black students, out of 37 tested, failed to attain proficiency. Blacks now outperform whites on several measures at the racially diverse campus, and white students perform very well.

"My children? Supreme Court judges," Franklin said, beaming at Joshua's younger brother, Joel, as he painted a construction-paper turtle in a classroom on a recent evening, part of a family reading night. "The sky's the limit."

The rise of North Glen Elementary, a school where two-fifths of students are from families poor enough to qualify for free meals, illustrates how a public school can go a very long way in a very short time with the help of a charismatic principal, an enthusiastic staff and supportive parents.

Its academic dossier -- a mixed-race, working-class, high-poverty school with test scores to rival schools in affluent suburbs -- embodies the goal of No Child Left Behind, the federal mandate created as a means to raise academic achievement across all racial and socioeconomic groups, and, most symbolically, to close the historic achievement gap between blacks and whites.

The school's ascendance began three years ago. North Glen Elementary got a new county superintendent, Eric J. Smith; a new statewide test, the Maryland School Assessment; five new teachers; and a new principal, Maurine Larkin, a giddy educator who occasionally allowed herself to be wheeled around the campus on a dolly.

The principal, who was promoted to a bigger school this fall, prepared North Glen students for the annual round of statewide testing, known by the acronym MSA, with a stuffed Chihuahua called "Ms. A," who sometimes spoke to students as Larkin's alter ego during morning announcements.

"I'm not saying we had the master plan at the beginning. The plan kept evolving," said Larkin, whose replacement at North Glen, Julie Little McVearry, is similarly well-regarded.

Throughout the 1990s and into this decade, North Glen was a modestly successful school, with test scores one might expect from a campus with substantial poverty. On statewide tests, whites usually outscored blacks.

In 2003, the first year of the MSA, North Glen ranked 575th among 839 Maryland elementary schools in third-grade reading. About one-third of black students -- and two-thirds of whites -- rated proficient.

The new principal launched a schoolwide campaign to raise the number of students enrolled for federally subsidized meals, offering popsicles to those who turned in paperwork. That kept the students fed and, perhaps more important, it triggered more funding from the federal government.

Larkin was able to double the number of staff members assigned to provide extra help to low-scoring students. She launched before- and after-school programs for low performers.

She hired teachers carefully, building an energetic young staff willing to work with the new superintendent and his countywide curriculum changes, which didn't sit well in some schools. She recalled "literally praying after every interview, hoping I'd hired the right person."

Larkin sensed that teachers and students were jittery about the all-important statewide exam, which, together with the broader federal mandates, had placed considerable stress on schools.

"If you get them all stressed out, they're not going to do well on tests," she said. "They're children."

Larkin sat down with every fourth- and fifth-grade student to go over their scores from the previous year. Then, as the spring testing date approached, Larkin trotted out "Ayap," another stuffed dog, this one named for the federal goal of adequate yearly progress.

"I would walk around with him, and Ayap would kiss people -- Ayap wants you to do just a little bit better than last year ," Larkin said, lapsing into stuffed-dog-speak.

Students who take the statewide exam are scored at one of three levels: advanced, signifying "outstanding accomplishment"; proficient, corresponding to "realistic and rigorous" achievement; or basic, indicating more work is needed. Students who score in the two higher levels are considered proficient, essentially the make-or-break standard under No Child Left Behind.

In 2003, eight of 25 black students in North Glen's third grade rated proficient in reading. The next year, 11 of 18 showed proficiency; and this year, 15 of 16.

Today, North Glen's teachers, most of them hired by Larkin, enjoy the sort of bond that comes from singing karaoke, kidnapping the principal's stuffed dog and plotting academic strategy together in a school with just 250 students.

The parents typify the changing face of this town, once strictly a Baltimore suburb, now a part of the Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis sprawl.

Glen Burnie is home to a mix of state government and utility workers, mid-level professionals and the self-employed, longtime residents and new arrivals, living in tiny ranch homes and townhouses and apartments in communities called Cromwell Fountain and Pleasantville.

Brian McElroy, working his BlackBerry at the family night, is a member of Glen Burnie's burgeoning black professional class. The corporate consultant moved his family from Howard County four years ago for "a two-car-garage townhome, convenient to the airport, convenient to all the major highways."

A revamped mall on Route 2, anchored by a new Target store, attests that Glen Burnie is changing. "It has to," McElroy said.

Daughter Ameena is in the second grade at North Glen. Son Amir is in kindergarten. McElroy is already thinking about college.

He and his wife chose North Glen after reviewing its scores. "The school's made a really big turnaround," he said.

Daniel de Vise, Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post Company
October 31, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/30/AR2005103001126.html


Google restarts online books plan

Google is resuming its controversial project to digitise millions of books and make them searchable on the net.

The search giant is pressing ahead with its plans despite growing legal pressure from publishers and authors.

They object to what they say are violations of copyright.

But in an apparent attempt to reassure critics, the search giant said on its blog that it would focus on books that were out of print or in the public domain.

2015 archive

Google is pumping $200m (£110m) into creating a digital archive of millions of books from four top US libraries - the libraries of Stanford, Michigan and Harvard universities, and of the New York Public Library - by 2015.

It is also digitising out-of-copyright books from the UK's Oxford University.

But Google has been criticised for not getting explicit permission from the copyright holders before scanning the texts.

The controversy led Google to put its library project on hold in August. The pause is designed to allow publishers to tell Google which books should not be included in the scanning programme.

But the delay did little to assuage concerns. In mid-October, the Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, filed a suit in New York claiming Google is breaching copyright.

In a separate action, the Authors Guild has filed a class-action suit against Google for copyright infringement.

Despite the pending legal action, Google is pressing ahead with its plans. On its blog, the company said it was resuming the scanning of texts, but also offered some words of reassurance.

"As always, the focus of our library effort is on scanning books that are unique to libraries including many public domain books, orphaned works and out-of-print titles," said the blog.

"We're starting with library stacks that mostly contain older and out-of-circulation books, but also some newer books.

"These older books are the ones most inaccessible to users, and make up the vast majority of books - a conservative estimate would be 80%."

"Our digital card catalog will let people discover these books through Google search, see their bibliographic information, view short snippets related to their queries (never the full text), and offer them links to places where they can buy the book or find it in a local library."

However, Google still plans to scan newer books that are both in print and under copyright protection at a later date.

Competition

A rival body set up by a group of digital archivists, backed by technology giants Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as libraries and academia, is also pursuing its own digital library project.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), set up by the Internet Archive, aims to put 150,000 works online.

But it is avoiding some of the problems facing Google by initially focusing on works that are in the public domain.

Against this background, Google has hired an experienced lawyer as its vice president of global communications and public affairs.

Elliot Schrage, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, is known as an international policy activist.

"Elliot Schrage's experience and demonstrated commitment to transparency and global corporate citizenship will be an asset to Google as we continue to grow and explore new opportunities around the world," said Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt in a statement.
BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4395656.stm


Mystery of "Blindsight" Lets Some Blind People "See,"
Study Shows

An innovative research technique is providing insight into why some blind people are able to sense and describe objects they cannot see.

The phenomenon of "blindsight" occurs in some people who suffer injuries to the primary visual cortex, the region of the brain considered essential for sight.

Blindsight allows people to use visual information they get through their eyes even though they have no consciousness of the visual experience, said Christopher Mole, a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

"But that of course is quite hard to show in the lab," he said.

A team of psychologists at Rice University in Houston, Texas, may have found a way to directly study blindsight in the lab.

They are using electromagnetic stimulation on the brains of people who can see to render them partially and temporarily blind.

"The way it works is an electric current inducts into the brain via a magnetic pulse, and that causes a disruption of underlying neurons in the brain," said Tony Ro, a member of the Rice team.

"What this technique allows us to do essentially is in a safe and noninvasive way shut down a portion of the brain temporarily," he added.

Ro and colleagues report their technique and findings in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mole said the Rice team reports "compelling proof" for blindsight.

Unconscious Pathway

Blindsight is most prevalent among people who suffer damage to the primary visual cortex, such as in some stroke victims, Mole explained.

However this is never "clean" or specific damage—other parts of the brain are also impaired. Studies with these patients are therefore difficult, he said.

To study blindsight directly, researchers often purposefully and permanently disrupt the primary visual cortex in monkeys and other mammals, a method that would be unethical to use on humans, Mole said.

"What [Ro's team] has done is cleverly manage to interfere with the brain in a totally temporary way … It doesn't have any long-term lasting effects at all," he said.

The technique devised by the Rice researchers induced blindness for a fraction of a second in people who ordinarily have good vision.

During the state of temporary blindness, an object was flashed on a screen in front of the test subjects' eyes.

In one experiment the object was either a vertical or horizontal bar, and the subjects were asked to guess the bar's orientation. In the second experiment the researchers flashed a colored disc, and subjects were asked to guess the color.

In both experiments the blinded volunteers correctly guessed the characteristics of the objects at much higher levels than chance alone.

This fits the definition of blindsight and raises the question of how it is possible.

"What we believe is happening is people are able to discriminate orientation and color—as our experiments showed—by processing routes into the brain that aren't consciously accessible," Ro said.

"We believe there are pathways that go from the eyes into the brain that bypass the normal routes tied to conscious processing of information."

Ro added that the study supports the theory that these pathways go to a visual center in the brain that is more sophisticated than the visual centers common to all mammals. This suggests the pathways may be unique to higher-order species.

The test results also show that volunteers were more accurate when they were more confident in their guesses.

"It's unclear what that reflects, but what we think it reflects is that this unconscious processing system can contribute to feelings of certainty," Ro said.

In follow-up experiments the team will test why people feel varying levels of confidence in their guesses. Perhaps the unconscious processing routes are stronger in some people than others, Ro said.

John Roach
National Geographic News
November 1, 2005
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1101_051101_blindsight.html


Students to Evaluate Teachers

Forty-eight schools will allow students and their parents to help evaluate teachers under a pilot program starting next week, despite strong opposition from unionized teachers.

The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development said Friday that it will launch the new teacher evaluation system on Nov. 8 although it failed to reach an agreement with teachers.

Under the plan, 48 elementary, middle and high schools nationwide will operate the new system until next August on a trial basis.

Education Minister Kim Jin-pyo said that unionized teachers accepted the basic principles of the new system, which is designed to raise the competitiveness of teachers and schools.

The Korea Teachers’ and Workers’ Union (KTU) and the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Association (KFTA) refused to agree on detailed issues, including evaluation methods, the operation of an evaluation committee, and the application of the evaluation results.

``But I don’t think the unionized teachers will wage a strong protest against our plan for the implementation, because they agreed on major issues,’’ Kim said.

Under the system, teachers are supposed to evaluate other teachers’ performances based on educational curriculum, class preparation and contents.

Students will complete a survey to measure their satisfaction with their teachers, while their parents will take part in the evaluation of their children’s satisfaction level at schools.

However, students’ parents will not evaluate an individual teacher and the methods and the contents in the survey will be determined by an evaluation committee to be established at schools.

School principals and vice-principals will be also be assessed on their management of schools.

However, the ministry said that the evaluation results will not be used for promotion and personnel management.

Instead, the assessment results will be sent to individual teachers to be used to improve self-development and competitiveness.

To reflect the opinions of the unionized teachers and parents, the ministry will allow schools to decide on other controversial issues such as the operation of evaluation committees and notification of the assessment results under the two policies.

However, Han Jae-gap, spokesperson of the KFTU, said that the ministry did not keep its promise to implement the system based on the consensus of unionized teachers.

``We’re worried that the ministry’s plan to push ahead with the new system in such a hasty manner will trigger conflict at schools,’’ Han said.

The KTU demanded that the current performance assessment system used for promotion usually made by schools’ principals be abolished.

The KTU also called on the ministry to delay the implementation of the system until next February.

The ministry plans to expand the system to more schools next year after the trial period.

Chung Ah-young, Staff Reporter
The Korea Times
chungay@koreatimes.co.kr
November 4, 2005
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200511/kt2005110417052111950.htm


Autism nothing more than an extreme form of male brain development

A recent research conducted on the brain pattern of autistic individuals has revealed that it is nothing more than an exaggeration of the normal male brain. The study has been conducted by researchers at the Cambridge Autism Research Centre who believe that a deep insight into the above mentioned theory would help in better understanding of the disease process.

Boys' brains grow more quickly than girls'. In the brains of people with autism, this growth appears to occur to an even more extreme degree. The findings are consistent with the fact that males generally have greater early growth of certain brain regions, and less hemispheric connectivity than females. There are also specific differences seen in certain areas of the brain.

Yet another finding that substantiates that autism is an exaggeration of the typical male brain development is the abnormally large amygdala, in toddlers with autism, which plays a key role in emotional responses.

The research has also pointed out that exposure of the fetus to male sex hormones such as testosterone during pregnancy can significantly affect these brain development patterns. Male fetuses produce these hormones from their testes, and female fetuses from their adrenal glands.
The possibility of female children being affected with the disease can still not be ruled out because they too could be exposed to higher than normal level of hormones.

Further research in the same direction would help understand if autism is a disease by itself or a manifestation of children who simply develop in a different way.

Medindia on autism:
Autism is a developmental disorder that typically develops during the first three years of life. These are very special children who have difficulty in communication and social interaction. They often come across as those who remain engrossed with restricted and repetitive behavior patterns.

MedIndia.com
http://www.medindia.net/news/view_news_main.asp?x=5541


Alberta planning law to allow fetus to sue mom

EDMONTON — Groundbreaking legislation that would allow a child to sue its mother for injuries suffered in the womb is providing comfort to a northern Alberta family but raising worries for insurance providers and the pro-choice lobby.

Alberta Justice Minister Ron Stevens plans to introduce a bill later this month that would create an exception to current Canadian law. But he cautions the Alberta law will be narrowly restricted to cover children who were hurt in motor vehicle accidents, and the liability will be limited to the amount of the mother's insurance policy.

The move stems from the case of Brooklynn Rewega, who was born with brain damage, blindness and cerebral palsy after her pregnant mother lost control of her car and crashed it.

"If that accident had occurred and any other party was driving or was responsible, there would be a remedy for that child for injuries arising out of the accident," Stevens said Thursday. "What we are doing in the legislation that we will be bringing forward is providing a potential remedy for that child in those circumstances."

It's great news for Lisa and Doug Rewega, who have been lobbying the government for two years on behalf of their daughter, who's now four.

"They're just absolutely thrilled," said the family's lawyer, Rosanna Saccomani.

"They suffer every day with raising a child they love very much, who brings a lot of joy in their life, but there are significant challenges they have to deal with and there's huge significant costs to raising a child with these kinds of disabilities."

Alberta's move was also applauded in New Brunswick, where a similar case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ruled in 1999 that women should not be held liable for injuries to a fetus in most cases, but that provincial legislatures could make an exception for motor vehicle crashes because drivers are required to buy insurance precisely to cover such events.

Ryan Dobson of Moncton, N.B., was at the centre of that case. His mother, Cynthia, was pregnant 13 years ago when her car slid into a pickup truck. Ryan was born with cerebral palsy, is virtually unable to speak and has other medical problems.

After losing at the Supreme Court, Cynthia Dobson was left to pay out of pocket for costly therapies for her son.

"I really hope Brooklynn wins this one," said Dobson, who has been following the Rewega case closely. "It's her right. Why they didn't see that at the time of Ryan's case is beyond me."

Dobson said Ryan's lawyers are now looking what, if any, further avenues they can pursue for him. She hopes every province passes the kind of legislation Alberta proposes.

But Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada said the bill makes her uneasy.

"I'm just worried about the aspect of fetal personhood and how that law could somehow in some way or other be used by the anti-abortion movement to get a foothold on establishing some kind of future restrictions on abortion down the road," Arthur said from Vancouver.

Rebecca Cook, an expert in reproductive health law at the University of Toronto, said any recognition of fetal interests shouldn't be confused with a woman's right to end a pregnancy if she chooses.

"When we're thinking about the protection of prenatal life, we need to think about it in ways that are consistent with the woman's interests," Cook said. "So as long as protecting prenatal life is consistent with a woman's interest, I think it's an extremely important policy objective, and I don't think as a society that we think about it enough."

Jim Rivait, Alberta vice-president of the Insurance Bureau of Canada, said the province's drivers will now face increased premiums.

"I don't have any doubt that Brooklyn and her parents deserve the support, that she gets the care throughout her life, but I would say it's a government responsibility," Rivait said.
He also worries that the law could invite all kinds of further challenges.

"It wouldn't be that many, but like many things, when you open the door, a lot of people will try and go through," Rivait said.

"We're seeing charter challenges on everything, and why should you be treated differently if you're a disabled child just because you happened to be in a car as opposed to having it happen at home or on the softball field or whatever?"

Alberta's law will be modelled after one in the United Kingdom, and Rivait said his industry will consult with its British counterpart to see what the effect has been there. He estimated that premiums in Alberta will likely rise by at least $2.

Canadian Press
Bell Globemedia Inc.
November 4, 2005
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20051104/
alberta_wombinjury_rights_20051104/20051104?hub=Canada


Touch-screen terminals coming to all Minnesota polling places

ST. PAUL - Touch-screen voting equipment that will allow almost all disabled people to cast votes privately and independently will be ready for the 2006 elections.

Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer announced Thursday that her office has reached a contract with a Nebraska company to sell the terminals to counties for about $5,000 apiece, with a federal grant footing much of the bill.

Kiffmeyer said the $35 million grant will enable each polling place to have at least one such machine in place next fall.

Election Systems & Software of Omaha makes the terminals. Visually impaired voters can hear ballot choices through headphones or see them in enlarged type on a video screen. They can then make their choice by touching the screen, operating a keypad or, for the severely disabled, puffing on an air tube.

Ken Rodgers, president of the Minnesota chapter of the American Council of the Blind, said he hopes the equipment will encourage visually impaired residents to vote.

Kiffmeyer added that the new technology will reduce ballot errors in half of Minnesota's 4,108 precincts that have continued to use old-fashioned paper ballots counted by hand.

Associated Press
November 4, 2005
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/politics/13081572.htm


Normal noise often painful to autistic kids, study finds

Autistic and some gifted children are among the most severely affected by noise, a study in early education by Massey University has revealed.

What other children perceive as normal noise can be intense and painful to autistic children, eroding their ability to communicate and learn.

Stuart McLaren, senior lecturer in health science at the Wellington campus, says researchers will investigate strategies to help those affected.

The wide range of noises affecting autistic and gifted children include general classroom noise, school bells, machine noise from fans, vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers - and unexpected ones such as dogs barking and road works.

Along with young children in general, the study examined groups of children with special education needs, including Asperger syndrome, Down syndrome, ADHD and the hearing impaired, and while all were seriously affected by noise, the effects on autistic children were far more severe.

"We wish to highlight the serious nature of early childhood centre noise," says Mr McLaren.

"While their hearing may be normal, autistic children process auditory information differently.

"What others perceive as normal and tolerable can be extremely intense and painful to them.

"It causes them pain, distress and confusion ... and it erodes their ability to communicate and learn," he said.

Providing quiet spaces is one way to help autistic and gifted children, and researchers will investigate other strategies. "

Much of the present work is focused on these children being integrated into regular early childhood education environments.

"However, we must look more closely at the learning environment too," says Mr McLaren.

"Why is it acceptable to expect autistic children to negotiate their way around any such environment when we never expect children with physical disabilities to negotiate their way up a flight of steps?"

NZPA
November 2, 2005
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10353070