A look at how a cofounder of the Home Depot started the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Ga., which has been named an autism center of excellence by the National Institutes of Health. The center has hired a scientist from Yale who is looking at how eye-tracking technology can revolutionize autism treatment:
“Within ten months of arriving, Klin and his team competed with fifty-five other autism centers around the country for a National Institutes of Health award. Only three, including Marcus, won. Named an autism center of excellence, Marcus received an $8.3 million grant, much of which will be put toward continuing to research differences in ‘social-visual and vocal engagement’ among autistic infants. The center has built four eye-tracking labs in the last two years, where babies like Ansley Brane—who is low risk—can be tested for signs of autism. (The center’s fiscal health has improved too, though it still needs patrons: Since Children’s took over, operating losses have dropped from $3.2 million to $1.3 million per year.)
“‘It’s a very simple equation,’ says Klin. ‘You identify early, you treat early, you help these children fulfill their promise. It’s good for everybody. If you don’t do that, then we are stuck with the kinds of incredible treatment programs we have in the center, which I hope to put out of business one day.'”
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:
Everett Cook, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, profiled former Wolverine and now NBA player Trey Burke last March. There are plenty of stories about athletic phenoms, but elite athletes are not the most innovative fodder. Cook used sophisticated storytelling techniques to reveal his subject. First, he told Burke’s story through his relationship with his father. And then he framed the profile around the father and his friends watching Trey play Penn State at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. (The setting is conflict enough.) Such a sophisticated structure is a high-level writing skill.
Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…
“Monsanto’s specialty is killing stuff.” A brief, outraged history of how the biotech giant took control of the world’s food supply, from pesticides to genetically modified crops. The promise was that GM crops would mean cheaper food around the world, but patents allowed the company to muscle out competitors, fend of regulators and steer the public away from questions about the environmental consequences:
“The first crack appeared in 1970, when Congress empowered the USDA to grant exclusive marketing rights to novel strains, with two exceptions: Farmers could replant the seeds if they chose, and patented varieties had to be provided to researchers.
“But that wasn’t enough. Corporations wanted more control, and they got it with a dramatic, landmark Supreme Court decision in 1980, which allowed the patenting of living organisms. The decision was intended to increase research and innovation. But it had the opposite effect, encouraging market concentration.”
A new mother gets a glimpse into the life of another new mom—via her baby monitor. (The essay will be featured in the forthcoming Best American Essays 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed):
“For the first few months after my son was born, I called him The Baby, or sometimes just Him with a capital H, huge proper nouns to illustrate how completely he took over my life. Is he eating, not eating? Pooping, not pooping? What color is the poop, how long ago was the poop, did I mark the poop on the spreadsheet? I had spreadsheets. I had stuff—white noise CDs and magnetic blocks and this super high-tech video monitor with a remote wireless screen and night vision, which made The Baby glow electric green in the dark like he was a CIA target. It was a little unnerving, actually. It had two frequencies, an A channel and a B channel, in case you had two kids in separate rooms, and what’s interesting about this is that one of my neighbors must have owned this same monitor, because on channel A, I saw my baby, and on channel B, I saw someone else’s.”
“He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: ‘Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.’ I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community.”
Feynman on his work on the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb: “So I want you to just imagine this young graduate student that hasn’t got his degree yet but is working on his thesis, and I’ll start by saying how I got into the project, and then what happened to me.”
Last week we lost a pioneer of early computing, Doug Engelbart, and Tom Foremski has an excellent short backstory about the inventor of the mouse. It was Engelbart’s 1968 demo of computer graphical user interfaces that inspired everything we now use today—yet despite his many accomplishments Engelbart struggled in later years to get attention or funding for his work.
Now seems like an appropriate time to look back at some of the early computer demos, and for further reading, check out “Creation Myth,” Malcolm Gladwell’s 2011 New Yorker story on the work of Engelbart, Xerox PARC and Apple.
1. The Early Days of ‘Cloud Computing’ at MIT, 1963 (28 min.)
This is a 1963 interview with professor Fernando J. Corbato at the MIT Computation Center, where he explains the concept of “timesharing,” which they developed to allow teams to work on individual consoles that attach to one centralized computer.
3. Doug Engelbart, Stanford Research Institute, 1968 (1 hr., 15 min.)
This two-hour demo from Engelbart, who founded SRI’s Augmentation Research Center, not only introduces the mouse, but also everything from the graphical user interface to hyperlinking, cutting-and-pasting and collaborative editing.
4. Early Digital Teleconferencing, University of Southern California, 1978 (6 min.)
USC’s Informational Sciences Institute produced this filmed demonstration of early digital teleconferencing technology over ARPAnet, complete with guy-who-nearly-misses-the-call-because-he-was-yachting.
5. Xerox Star User Interface, 1982
It was Xerox PARC where Steve Jobs saw the future for Apple, when he visited and got a demo of the Alto personal computer. Xerox released its Star Professional Workstation in 1981, and this clip features Star designers Charles Irby and David Canfield-Smith explaining how the system worked.
For anyone who wants to run away to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, to make new, fun, friends, to live as though summer is forever: This one’s for you.
Welcome to Camp Grounded, where you’ll bring your sleeping bag but not your iPhone. Navarro, Calif. hosts this three-day adult summer camp where campers seek to understand themselves and their relationship to the screens they treasure.
Autostraddle hosted the third installation of A-Camp, a summer-y camp for queer folks, chockfull of workshops, dance parties, feelings, discussion panels, swimming, and arts and crafts. Here, counselors, interns, and campers provide heartfelt, hilarious recapitulations of their experiences and epiphanies. (This is the first of four installments.)
Author Michelle Tea explores “Camp Trans,” the campout-music festival that protests the trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.
“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995.Read more…
Restoring Howard Finster’s visual art site in Summerville, Ga. Finster died in 2001 at the age of 84 and left behind more than 46,000 pieces of artwork and a garden of attractions:
“Fueled by Coca-Cola, spoonfuls of instant coffee granules, and King B Sweet Twist tobacco, Finster started feverishly creating what would become 46,991 numbered works of art. He perfected an iconography of angels, demons, animals, spaceships, inventors, presidents, Marilyn, and Elvis—mostly painted on wooden cutouts covered over with Bible verses and sermons rendered in urgent all caps.
“Tipped off by Esquire, UGA art professor Andy Nasisse asked Finster to give a talk about his work. The Georgia State Botanical Garden in Athens also invited him to do a show. ‘He blew everyone’s mind at the university,’ recalls Nasisse. ‘Some described that one lecture as a year’s worth of education.’ Other university professors were soon visiting Pennville, from schools like Wake Forest, Lehigh, and Virginia Tech.”
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