Neurotribes review6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() The subtitle of Steve Silberman’s new book, NeuroTribes, is “the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity.” But Silberman also delineates the legacy of our collective acts of humanity and inhumanity toward those who are different, tracing in exquisite and engaging detail a narrative that is as much about how we treat each other as it is about autism. ![]() “Not everything that steps out of the line, and is thus ‘abnormal,’ must necessarily be ‘inferior.’” –Hans Asperger ![]() NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman on a haunting history and new hope for autistic people By Emily Willingham, PhD Victoria Costello, PLOS Senior Social Media & Communities Editor. Willingham’s review and interview follow, with her full bio at the bottom of this post. ![]() To mark the publication of the book NeuroTribes (Avery/Penguin Random House) by Steve Silberman, whose blog of the same name has been hosted on the PLOS BLOGS Network since 2010, we invited independent science writer Emily Willingham, PhD to review the book and conduct an in-depth interview with the author. ![]()
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These deadly games6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() But if she refuses to play, the kidnapper will kill her sister. At first, they make her complete bizarre tasks: steal a test and stuff it in a locker, bake brownies, make a prank call.īut then Crystal realizes each task is meant to hurt-and kill-her friends, one by one. ![]() When Crystal Donavan gets a message on a mysterious app with a video of her little sister gagged and bound, she agrees to play the kidnapper’s game. If you tell your parents or anyone else, she dies. ![]() Hinton that was then this is now6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() But we should put equal effort into mitigating or preventing the possible bad consequences.” ![]() “First of all, I don't think that's possible, and I think we should continue to develop it because it could do wonderful things. “A lot of the headlines have been saying that I think it should be stopped now-and I've never said that,” he says. But since leaving Google, Hinton feels his views on whether the development of AI should continue have been misconstrued. Last month, a number of prominent AI researchers and others signed an open letter calling for a pause on the development of anything more powerful than currently exists. Hinton isn’t the only person to have been shaken by the new capabilities that large language models such as PaLM or GPT-4 have begun demonstrating. “Now I think it's more likely to be five to 20.” “I used to think it would be 30 to 50 years from now,” he says. Hinton concluded that as AI algorithms become larger, they might outstrip their human creators within a few years. PaLM is a large program, but its complexity pales in comparison to the brain’s, and yet it could perform the kind of reasoning that humans take a lifetime to attain. Hinton’s second sobering realization was that his previous belief that software needed to become much more complex-akin to the human brain-to become significantly more capable was probably wrong. ![]() Fear street lights out6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Snakes continuously pop up in the book and movie, with Holly and Ziggy not being big fans. Prior to the events at Camp Nightwing, Cindy had a falling out with her best friend Alice, like Holly fell out with Geri. Cindy and Holly are both counselors who want to keep everyone safe, while Holly and Ziggy want to be anywhere else but Camp Nightwing, where they're hated by sh*tty counselors and campers alike who ultimately try to kill them. Holly has a lot in common with both Cindy and Ziggy Berman in the movie. Told it's an "accident," Holly has to watch her back lest the killer comes back for her. ![]() With increasingly frightening acts of vandalism plaguing Camp Nightwing, junior counselor Holly Flynn is determined to solve a fellow counselor's murder. It seems like Lights Out is the only mention of Camp Nightwing in the entirety of the Fear Street franchise, so I feel comfortable saying that's where Part 2 gets its camp name. ![]() Bukowski factotum6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.īukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. ![]() At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty booksĬharles Bukowski was the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. ![]() His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles.It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Henry Charles Bukowski (born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. ![]() The dark is rising book 16/9/2023 ![]() The sequels were published 1973 to 1977, almost simultaneously in the U.K. publication by Jonathan Cape of Over Sea, Under Stone. Both magical and ordinary children are prominent throughout the series. The books depict a struggle between forces of good and evil called "The Light" and "The Dark", and draw upon Arthurian legends, Celtic mythology, Norse mythology and English folklore. The Dark Is Rising Sequence is used as an over-arching title in several omnibus, boxed-set, and coordinated editions but the title of The Dark is Rising is also used for the whole series. The first book in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, was originally conceived as a stand-alone novel, and the sequence gets its name from the second novel in the series, The Dark Is Rising. ![]() ![]() The Dark Is Rising Sequence is a series of five contemporary fantasy novels for older children and young adults that were written by the British author Susan Cooper and published from 1965 to 1977. ![]() Vanishing Act by John Feinstein6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When Stevie and Susan Carol negotiate an arrangement to have them cover the tennis U.S. The two thirteen-year-old sportswriters improbably leveraged their wits and pluck to break wide open a story of major corruption in college basketball after winning a contest allowing them special access to the Final Four NCAA tournament, but that's the way luck works sometimes. This book is where Stevie Thomas and Susan Carol Anderson's legacy as journalists is defined. But they don't even come close to the shocking truth. Was she kidnapped? Did she run? Is she even still alive? The rumors are growing wilder by the hour. Everyone is looking for Natalia-including Stevie and Susan Carol. Somewhere between the locker rooms and the Louis Armstrong Court, one of the most-watched players of the tournament simply vanishes. ![]() The behind-the-scenes action in the world of professional tennis is overwhelming and occasionally bewildering, but it turns downright inconceivable when a young Russian phenom, Natalia Makarova, disappears right before her second-round match. The two hopeful sports reporters have kept in touch after their wild time at the Final Four, and when Susan Carol manages to score a press pass to cover the first week of the US Open Tennis Tournament in New York, Stevie works out a way to be there as well. Stevie Thomas and Susan Carol Anderson return in another fast-paced, action-packed sports mystery from bestselling sports writer John Feinstein. ![]() Figuring maria6/9/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe.Īmong them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement and the poet Emily Dickinson. Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalysed the environmental movement. ![]() ![]() It gives a highly detailed account of her life and while it is focused on her wartime experience, Purnell takes the time to build up Hall’s account both before and after the war, creating more context for her time as a spy and, notably, connecting her wartime experiences to the events she faced once the war ended. Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II is a biography of Virginia Hall, an American woman who became one of the first female spies to operate in the field for the Special Operations Executive, a British intelligence agency. Reviewed by Danielle Wirsansky (Florida State University)Ĭommissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University) ![]() ![]() A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II. ![]() ![]() ![]() In so doing, Stoppard seems to offer a kind of inside-out view of the original play, where the stars have become mere supporting characters and the supporting characters have become stars. Stoppard's play takes two characters from Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who, in Hamlet, have a fairly limited role, and turns those characters into this play's protagonists Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ![]() The play articulates a wide range of views on the theater, from a harsh critique of theater's artifice and inability to represent death (articulated by Guildenstern) to an unreflective willingness to embrace dramatic entertainment as diversion from life (exemplified by Rosencrantz) to a cynical conviction that humanity's entire notion of truth is made up by the stage and that humans have no frameworks to understand death apart from those the theater gives them (articulated by the Player).Īpart from using characters to articulate perspectives on the nature of drama, the play's very structure explores theater's possibilities and potential similarities to human life. ![]() As a play written within the structure of another play (Shakespeare's Hamlet), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead offers a complex meditation on the nature of the theater and the relationship between drama and lived human life. ![]() |