Asperger's Conversations

Got Ethics? Who's writing these journal articles anyway?

Astonishing piece in the NY Times about top academic medicine researchers letting drug companies write their articles.   An example is Merck using hired guns to write up published reports on Vioxx, but lapses have been linked to other areas, including psychiatry.  I need to read more, but heck, down here in small "college land" we try hard to teach our students about something called "ethics."  Our students are getting so cynical they yawn when we bring this stuff up. 

More on Speechmatch Study

In my previous post I wrote about my student, Dana Githmark, presenting pilot data on our speechmatch project.  I have attached the poster she presented at the Keene State College Academic Excellence Conference which highlights student work across all areas of study:

Download danaPoster.ppt

I am wondering if other academic bloggers have posted their students' conference posters?  Some time back I blogged about the pros and cons of academic blogging versus formal journal publication, and of course I still think there's room for both.  The problem with formal publication routes is the delay in getting information out.  Also, as blogger Jon Udell points out, it's a good thing to get our "half baked" ideas out there, so others can contribute and help create more "fully baked" ones.

We've been using audacity to train individuals on the autism spectrum to match the speech patterns of their conversational patterns.  Audacity provides visual feedback of the non-content aspects of speech (not "what you say" but rather "how you say it") including pauses, vocal intensity,  and lengths of speech:

Dana has completed trials with 4 individuals (see the poster for more info); gathered independent ratings of "degree of match" between the person with ASD and the student experimenter, and found preliminary support for the idea that this method improves the match:

This graph represents collapsed ratings of match across subjects and lots of questions remain.  Is the effect "clinically meaningful" as opposed to "statistically meaningful?"  Will results generalize to "real life" situations?  Is the feedback specific enough to matter?  We will move forward, test more subjects, improve our data analysis methods and, hopefully, get helpful feedback from friends and colleagues, and those who read this.

Academic Excellence Conference: Speechmatch Poster

I attended the Academic Excellence Conference last week at Keene State College to support my student, Dana Githmark, who has done an excellent pilot study of my Speechmatch program for training individuals with Autism and Asperger's in matching the speech patterns of their conversational partners.  I forgot to bring my digital camera, but that doesn't matter, does it?  Scores of other people did remember, including my colleague, Kristen Porter-Utley from Biology.  I used to compulsively carry my camera everywhere...but now I know someone will always have one...same with a cell if you need to make a call.  What's next?  Who's got a Garmin GPS?  Satellite phone?  Provigil?