Sunday, April 14, 2019
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Explosion Downtown
The explosion downtown came from a gas leak that started about about 6:20. The gas wasn't completely shut off until 9:30. Why?
The man tasked with turning it off was caught in the explosion. Word on the street is that he has a severe concussion and no hearing.
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Herbert Wilkins
Initial story: 13-Aug-2017
Herbert Wilkins blocked the sidewalk and grabbed people.
A Madison man causing a disturbance Tuesday evening Downtown tried to run from police but his pants fell down, causing him to run into a parked car while police made the arrest.Herbert Wilkins was obstructing the sidewalk on the 300 block of West Dayton Street by refusing to allow pedestrians to walk past him without grabbing them. Another newspaper with the same storyThe incident wasn't over, however, as Herbert Wilkins, 54, allegedly spit at police and EMTs while being taken into custody, Madison police said.
Previous stories
28-Mar-2016 Herbert Wilkins and Eric Wink got into a fight.
It started when Wilkins, a black man, allegedly pushed and choked a 19-year-old white woman, with Wink, a white man, coming to help the woman."His assistance actually contributed to escalating matters, with his use of a contemptuous word to describe an African American," said police spokesman Howard Payne. Officers moved in to break up the fight while Wink allegedly kept yelling "White power", besides other racial epithets.
Officers tried to get Wilkins to calm down as he was being arrested, which allegedly changed his focus from Wink to the police.
"He thrashed around while being handcuffed and spit more than two dozen times at officers," Payne said. "Fortunately the officers had protective shields."
5-June-2014 Herbert Wilkins licked the face of a 59-year old woman and knocked her to the ground
(in Appleton) Wilkins has criminal convictions in Green Bay, Chicago and Minneapolis that include multiple sexual assaults of minor and adult females. He was civilly committed to a mental health institution in 2006 and was released in October 2012 and was ordered to comply with lifetime GPS monitoring.
13-April-2017: Dane County Jail is a mess
Herbert Wilkins, 54, has cumulatively spent over a year inside the City County Building jail since 2013. While incarcerated there in 2016, he recalls staff commenting on the water the inmates are forced to drink.Wilkins’ lawsuit alleges that black inmates are being disportionately assigned to the oldest of Dane County’s three jail facilities, violating their civil rights. “Most of the staff still doesn’t look like me,” says Wilkins, who is black.
“I did asbestos abatement in Minnesota. I was certified to remove it so I know what I’m talking about. You can see fiber coming out of the concrete at the jail. That’s asbestos,” says Wilkins. “The ventilation system is recirculating all those fibers to every part of the jail.”
Comments
What became of the lifetime GPS monitoring?Saturday, August 19, 2017
Korean autism rate
Initial
In 2011 The American Journal of Psychiatry published a study done in Seoul, Korea, which estimated a rate of 1 in 38 for autism. The US estimate at the same time was 1 in 110. The wayback machine references report on the study. (It does mention skeptics of their methodology.)
To explain, let’s first take a closer look at the study, published online by the American Journal of Psychiatry. It examined the entire 7- to 12-year-old population of a socioeconomically diverse region of Seoul, which included about 55,000 children. Instead of only evaluating children who were already receiving services for autism, the researchers gave questionnaires to teachers and parents of every child in special education programs and two-thirds of the "regular" schools. They followed up with in-person assessments of many of the kids flagged by the survey, and concluded that about .75 percent of the kids who received government services and 2.6 percent of the previously unidentified children were on the autism spectrum....
Why did the study find so many kids in "mainstream" classrooms, not receiving special support? One explanation may be the Korean school system. Children go to school six days a week, 12 hours a day. They don’t have much recess time, have fewer transitions between classes, and spend more time on rote learning.
Roy Richard Grinker, a cultural anthropologist at George Washington University who worked on the study, said his own child with autism would probably function very well in such a system.
"Many kids with autism who are doing well can adapt to that highly structured situation," he said.
Followup 2015
New study exposes flows in estimates of autism prevelance finds that the estimate may be wrong.
The 2011 study garnered attention for its two-phase design, in which researchers screened more than 20,000 children for autism and then clinically assessed a small proportion2. They extrapolated these findings to South Korea’s population to arrive at their estimate.Three-quarters of the children the study tagged as having autism did not have a prior diagnosis and were attending mainstream schools. Flagging children based on signs noted in medical and school records — the standard method in the U.S. — may have missed these children.
But the two-stage design is also flawed. The screening method the researchers used is not perfectly accurate, and the results can be skewed by which parents choose to participate. Taking these limitations into account, the analysis, published 29 June in Autism, says the 2011 study’s range for autism prevalence could have been at least 2 to 5.4 percent.
Or in other words, their estimate should have ranged from 1 in 50 to 1 in 18. The 1 in 50 is better than 1 in 38 reported, but still higher than the 1 in 68 which was the US estimate from CDC in 2016. The 1 in 18 is worse--so much worse that you have to wonder how elastic their definitions of autism were.
Comments
There is a philosophical question about whether something is a feature vs a bug, or a trait vs a disability. If the child gets along fine, maybe it is better to consider them on the normal spectrum than on a disability spectrum. Similarly if they worry along OK with only occasional help.
Draft 1.01: 22-Aug-2017
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