* Like many people with autism, 27 year old Amanda Baggs doesn't like to look you in the eye and needs help with tasks like preparing a meal and taking a shower. In conversation she'll occasionally grunt or sigh, but she stopped speaking altogether in her early twenties. Instead, she types 120 words a minute, which the DynaVox then translates into a synthesized female voice that sounds like a deadpan British schoolteacher.
The YouTube post, she says, was a political statement, designed to call attention to people's tendency to underestimate autistics. It wasn't her first video post, but this one took off. "When the number of viewers began to climb, I got scared out of my mind," Baggs says. As the hit count neared 100,000, her blog was flooded. At 200,000, scientists were inviting her to visit their labs. By 300,000, the TV people came calling, hearts warmed by the story of a young woman's fiery spirit and the rare glimpse into what has long been regarded as the solitary imprisonment of the autistic mind. "I've said a million times that I'm not trapped in my own world,'" Baggs says. "Yet what do most of these news stories lead with? Saying exactly that."
I tell her that I asked one of the world's leading authorities on autism to check out the video. The expert's opinion: Baggs must have had outside help creating it, perhaps from one of her caregivers. Her inability to talk, coupled with repetitive behaviors, lack of eye contact, and the need for assistance with everyday tasks are telltale signs of severe autism. Among all autistics, 75 percent are expected to score in the mentally retarded range on standard intelligence tests — that's an IQ of 70 or less.
People like Baggs fall at one end of an array of developmental syndromes known as autism spectrum disorders. The spectrum ranges from someone with severe disability and cognitive impairment to the socially awkward eccentric with Asperger's syndrome.
After I explain the scientist's doubts, Baggs grunts, and her mouth forms just a hint of a smirk as she lets loose a salvo on the keyboard. No one helped her shoot the video, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. She used a Sony Cybershot DSC-T1, a digital camera that can record up to 90 seconds of video (she has since upgraded). She then patched the footage together using the editing programs RAD Video Tools, VirtualDub, and DivXLand Media Subtitler. "My care provider wouldn't even know how to work the software," she says.
Baggs is part of an increasingly visible and highly networked community of autistics.*
Six out of the 13 Asian countries with elephants now have elephant populations of less than three hundred and man-animal conflict brought about by shrinking habitat and the increasing density of local human populations is endangering the survival of elephant populations in the region.
Local villagers living alongside elephant groups in countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam say they are fed up of with elephants raiding their crops . Birds do far more damage but elephant raids often result in human casualties and even fatalities but there is another side to the story, the elephants have been quite literally hemmed in to small blocks of land and so conflict with the human communities that surround them is inevitable as it is in the nature of elephants to roam.
In Africa, which has ten times more elephants than Asia, elephant caused fatalities are pretty rare and with coordinated international action taken against the illegal ivory trade populations are now sustainable but in Vietnam a combination of habitat loss and man-animal conflict related hunting has seen the countries small group of 80 elephants pushed over the edge , the male to female ratio is inviable, the group cannot be saved from extinction.
US bank Bear Stearns has received emergency funding following concerns that the investment bank, the fifth largest on Wall Street , was about to collapse. JP Morgan Chase is providing the money for 28 days but with the Federal Reserve's backing so this is in fact a state handout with US taxpayers bearing all the risk.
JP Morgan is also trying to establish long-term financing for Bear Stearns.
Over one 24 hour period Bear Stearns was taken to the brink of insolvency by a sudden collapse in confidence from its hedge fund clients. Bear Stearns shares were down 46% Friday .The bank is the latest victim of the global credit crunch which saw the UK Government ' nationalise' the Northern Rock bank in almost identical circumstances and the fear is that many other lenders may also have major funding problems. The banking industry is notorious for trying to conceal its problems from public view so if anything the Bear Stearns bail out looks set to further erode confidence rather than restore it.
Now the US Government is writing Welfare Checks for investment banks expect more lenders to come fiorward for handouts before they go bust.
This week also saw the US economy quietly lose its title of "world's biggest" to the euro zone for the first time as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets. With China in the ascendant , Americans are going to have to get used to their country regularly coming second or lagging even further behind.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States has tightened air quality standards in an effort to help improve public health. The new level is reduced from 80 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion,
It is lowering the amount of smog-forming ozone permitted in the atmosphere for the first time in more than 10 years. The EPA's clean air scientific advisory committee had unanimously recommended a limit no higher than 70 parts per billion but industry has lobbied against them.
Industry leaders say complying with the new standards will prove expensive as if the social costs of the lethal pollution and destruction to the living environment were irrelevant.
Where do these socially minded individals live? In oxygen tents located deep underground?
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