Matt is incredibly articulate about explaining what life is like for him as a teenager with both autism and ADD.  This would be a great one to watch if you have a kid on the spectrum in your life.  Listen to the pain in his voice when he discusses the bullying he has experienced and how he was afraid to go to school when he was in middle school.  Watch the pride in his face at the end.

The spectrum-adjacent person  of the year

Time has named Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, subject of The Social Network, and possible Aspie, its Person of the Year:

What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.

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Catholic Online published an extremely problematic article about the new mitochondria study out of UC Davis. Even after they changed the offensive lead, it still gave rise to some fairly confused comments.  Lisa Jo Rudy at About.com tried to clear up some of the confusion caused by the Catholic Online article, but her post generated its own series of misinformed replies.

Kim Wombles then wrote this to try to clear up some of the About.com confusion.

But that does not end our bad science section!

Left Brain/Right Brain directs us to an excellent piece by Seth Mnookin called The Huffington Post: Featuring bad science, facile reasoning since 2005.

Seth Mnookin took a look at unscientific thinking that can lead to dangerous results. Not surprisingly, he found that the anti-vaccine movement and the autism-vaccine discussion in particular made an excellent core for his book. In his first blog piece related to Panic Virus, Mr. Mnookin takes a look at how the Huffington Post reported a recent study on mitochondrial dysfunction and autism. The Huffington Post piece, authored by Mark Hyman, made claims well beyond those supported by the paper itself.

And just to prove that the science on the right side of the political spectrum can be just as bad as on the left, here's an article contemplating the split between scientists and the Republican party.

C. S. Wyatt at The Autistic Me offers a grim reflection on these tough times that many of us (myself included) can certainly relate to.

Finally, Autism's Gadfly asks some tough questions about Adam Koumoutseas.

Click here to see a trailer for Autism: The Musical.

The Marion Country School Board will decide today whether or not to fire teacher Rhoda Richardson and aide Deborah Adams.  The women were recorded verbally abusing a 7-year-old girl with autism: On the recording, the child was called "a hippo," "a beached whale sleeping" and "a hippo in a ballerina suit." The tape also revealed that the child, who rarely speaks and has the mental capacity of a 2-year-old, was verbally berated for wetting herself and forced to clean her own urine. The teacher and aide also made disparaging remarks about the child's mother.

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