Left Brain Right Brain

I’ve been in email communication with David Kirby over the last week or so. You may remember that I wrote awhile ago about how a New York Times interview quoted Kirby as saying that if the amount of cases of autism didn’t decrease before the end of 2005 then that would be a severe blow to the autism/thiomersal hypothesis.

The confusion stemmed from Kirby claiming 2 months later in an email conversation with blogger Citizen Cain the exact same thing but this time with a date of 2007. I wondered why Kirby had moved the goalposts.

At the time I was predisposed to put it down to trying to wriggle out of a stated position but the more I thought about it, the less likely that seemed so I mailed David Kirby to ask him. He responded:

Many thanks for your note. The Times misquoted me. I actually asked for a correction, but did not receive one. What I told the reporter is that “we should know in the next few years.” I believe this is also what I said on Meet the Press.

Which is true. The transcription shows that thats exactly what happened. Kirby went on to say:

The Times wrote: *Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child’s third and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year, he said.* When I said “the next few years,” I meant by around 2007. I would never say “this year,” and that is why I requested the correction.

All in all then, I think I have to apologies to David Kirby in this instance. Its pretty bad of a prestigious newspaper like the NYT to actively mislead people like this and its very perplexing as to why they wouldn’t issue a retraction or correction in such a vitally important matter but thats not Kirby’s fault any more than it is mine so I think we have to take Kirby at his word here and go by what he wrote in Evidence of Harm and repeated on Meet the Press.

What we can do is take Rick Rollens to task though. He actually _did_ state that the first fall off would come last year. David Kirby again:

I did, however, quote Rick Rollens as saying “the first impacted birth cohort should start showing up in 2005.” But that is Rick’s opinion, not mine.

So – confusion alleviated. We can all go back to watching 2007.

Its that time of year when we all look back at the year from the perspective of your own blogs/ideas/thoughts etc. I’ll have some more to say about that in a bit but firstly some incredibly dull fascinating visitor statistics for this site this year (excludes Bots,spiders and feed-readers):

This site has received *112,412 unique visitors* this year.
It has received *272,008 total visits* this year.
It has served up *2,609,187 pages* this year.
It has received *5,292,786 hits* this year.
This sites most popular day is a Thursday.
More *Americans* visit this site than any other nation.
This site has been visited by people from *152 countries*.
This site has *approximately 220 subscribers via Feed Readers* (most from Bloglines but an increasing amount from Rojo).
The most popular browser is *IE 6.0* with Firefox 1.0.? coming a very close second.
The site has been indexed by *45 Search Engines and Directories*.
The site’s most popular referrer is *http://cssvault.com* with nearly 20,000 unique referrers this year.
The site’s been found by searchers utilising *15,111 unique keyphrases*.
The most popular phrase to find me is ‘autism blog’ which brought 429 people to the site.
*52 people* have added this site to del.icio.us
I currently rank: 13,387 (285 links from 110 sites) on Technorati.
The site has a PR that fluctuates between 6 and 8 on Google.

Thats all very interesting and confirms my theory that my amount of readers vastly outnumbers my active commenters. As an aside, I’m very curious as to who all these lurkers are – if you fancy dropping a ‘hi’ to the comments of this post that’d be great – you can do it anonymously if you so desire :o)

This year saw me start blogging more about autism as a social/medical issue and less about it as it relates to my daughter. This is something of a shame as I know many people enjoyed reading posts about her. There are a few reasons why I stopped which I’ve discussed in other places.

Also this year saw the launch of Project: New which was an attempt to provide a starting point for new web designers and web designers new to web standards to get a good start in the field. It didn’t end up quite how I expected but I was very pleased with both the response it received and the end product itself. I plan on starting Project: New Part II at some point next Spring. Part II will concentrate on client and serverside scripting.

More recently, I came to the conclusion that whilst the blog was good for provoking discussion that that discussion frequently become bogged down in side issues (I’m as bad as everyone else in that respect) so I started up a forum to deal with autism from a scientific point of view to create a calmer and more rational place – the blog is more heat than light. I’m hoping the reverse will be true for the forum.

As for next year, I have plans. As I say, Project: New Part II is crying out to be written and I’m planning a ‘from the ground up’ revamp of the blog and forum. I want to present a more accessible environment and besides, I’m getting bored with this design ;o)

I’ve set up a new resource.

Its a forum which I intend to use solely for the discussion of the science that supports/refutes various things under discussion that are alledged about autism.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of where one stands on the issue and all science is allowed to be discussed – whether its peer reviewed or not, I would imagine though that science that is not peer reviewed should be questioned by those who disagree with its conclusions.

Forum rules:

The forum rules are very simple. These forums will only be used to discuss the science that is used to support/refute certain allegations about autism. No discussion on any other topic will be entered into. As this will be a science based environment, the atmosphere should remain polite, with no profanity, abuse, short-temperedness, sarcasm etc. Polite disagreement is encouraged but you must be prepared to back up any quotes you provide with a scientific source. Journalists don’t fall under this category.

I’m doing this for a number of reasons.

Firstly, blogging software isn’t really up to the the task of ongoing discussions. Forum software is perfectly suited to that task. Secondly, it seemed to me that whatever subject I start to talk about lately always falls back to a discussion on the state of the science underpinning autism – providing this forum will hopefully mean a lessening of the inevitable dilution of the subject.

The forum is easy to use – create a username and password and then go and post or read.

Now, the thorny issue of my own beliefs come up and how impartial I can hope to be in allowing some things to be discussed. I hope I’ve shown that I don’t edit or delete anything unless its plain old abuse, illegal or if I’ve asked people not to. However, if the forum takes off then I _may_ need a few moderators to help with crowd control etc. In the interests of impartiality I’ll try and get mods from both the neurodiversity *and* biomedical belief systems. Thats for the future though.

Every so often I amuse myself by trawling through the search terms people use on Google, yahoo etc to find their way here. Some of them are fairly obvious – I rank pretty well on autism and web related terms.

However I occasionally find some downright bizarre or otherwise funny terms. Some of them are so odd I simply can’t figure how any engine returned my site as a match. I thought what I’d so was to share some of the more odd phrase that turn up in my web logs on occasion.

can ingesting mice urine make humans sick?

Pure genius. This is one of those great questions that answers themselves. Simply remove the ‘Can’ and the ‘?’.

quack jeff bradstreet quack

OK, I agree but the funniest thing about this is the mental image of someone shouting “Quack Jeff Bradstreet, quack!” in some sort of demented orgy of duck-related flagellation.

ipods cause autism

I must admit that a mouthful of tea very nearly hit my monitor when I first read this. I feel sure that in the coming months we will see a rise of parent-lef groups campaigning to rid the world of evil MP3 playing devices. ITS THE MUSIC PLAYERS, STUPD!!

stop the pigeon

I loved that cartoon. Second only to Pinky and the Brain. I have no idea how it ended up in my web logs though.

play extremist deth

??? Are ‘extremist deth’ a group? Some kind of sick board game? It sounds like some sort of Metallica/Napalm Deth offshoot to me.

theres a voice keeps on calling me! down the road thats where i ll always be!!!

I frigging hated the Littlest Hobo. Sorry America. But this was such a surreal phrase to turn up in my web logs that it kept me giggling for hours.

naughty policewoman

Er…OK. There’s only one guy I know of who hangs about with Strippers and lap dancers (its his job the lucky git). I promise I don’t keep any ‘naughty policewomen’ related imagery.

Not on my web server anyway.

nicest ass in the internet

Heeyyyy…..thanks unknown searcher. Seriously though? I really doubt it. I’m large, shambling, hairy with wild eyes etc. And _in_ the internet?

how to say subjcts in french

I love irony as much as the next man.

powerpoint noise induced hearing loss

One of my personal favourites. Is there a support group for people who’ve lost their hearing due to Powerpoint related noise? If not, there really should be. The suits I know love to put swishy noises on there terminally dull presentations. Possibly someone got carried away in an apocolyptic cacophony of MS-plinky action noises.

how do i speak to my dead husband

OK now, I try not to be cruel but I defy anyone not to think wicked thoughts. Its not so much that this person wants to speak to their dead husband so much as she _searched the internet_ looking for sites to tell her how to do it.

And thats it for my web logs – got anything amusing, odd or downright peculiar lurking in your search terms?

As this site gets busier and busier I’m finding it increasingly difficult to answer everything that comes up. If I don’t answer immediately please be patient.

I’ve had to ramp up my spam control. This may result in your comment getting moderated. Please don’t worry if this happens to your comment. If its genuine I’ll release it as soon as I can.

I try and avoid moderation and deletion as much as I can. I don’t care if you swear as long as its not abusively directed at someone. I also don’t care if you agree with what I have to say or not. Feel free to disagree but please try to keep a certain level of politeness going.

This site is not a democracy. It belongs to me. Its not an open forum for you to preach. If you flood the comments with duplicate posts or abusive posts or posts that are exactly the same as what somone else has said or are simply meaningless then I’ll remove them. Server space costs money and I need to optimise it as much as I can.

I’ve sadly had to ban 2 people in the last week or so. One of them was attempting to flood the comments with the same message over and over resulting in over 10 identical posts I had to waste time removing. Prior to this he’d had 2 warnings about abusive language.

The other person was openly aggressive and confrontational. He also flauted warnings.

Be passionate, be angry or happy or sad or whatever. I’d expect no less from anyone – this is a contraversial subject – but if you step out of line you’ll get warned then banned. I’ll also report you to your ISP which may well result in the suspension or removal of your internet access. Such things are not uncommon. This is ‘last resort’ tactics but I will do it if pushed.

Thank you for listening. We now return you to your regularly scheduled arguing.

Kev
Not as good as AutismDiva at this

I remember when John blogged about how much traffic he’d gone through since he got listed at StyleGala, CSSBeauty/Vault etc.

Well in like fashion, already my bandwidth report this month has prompted a flurry of panicked emails from me to my host – we’re only 5 days into this new month and I’ve already shifted nearly 2GB in traffic. Just to put that in perspective, I normally do around 1.5 – 1.8 GB per month!.

Just for your interest – here’s what that looks like on a graph.

Anyway, my hosts being exceptionally great chaps have promised me nothing nasty will happen to the site or my bank balance and in return I feel I should definitely let you know what a bloody good bunch of geezers Martin and Khalid at SiteHQ are.

This is a great month for me – John choosing June to be my turn ‘in the barrel’ so to speak has meant a lot more people than usual will get to hear about Autistic Pride Day and my hosts being all round good sorts means they’ll be able to carry on being exposed to it. A lot of people who’ve come across from John’s place have mailed me privately to say how much they’ve liked reading the autism related stuff as well as the design related stuff and that to me is brilliant. So, next time you hear about what a shitty world we live in, remember that people are also generous and kind.

Well, almost.

As I said in the recent past, the last redesign before this one was created during a bad down spiral – I was very tired and in bad physical shape. Above all else this new redesign I hope is a bit more upbeat.

Its a fairly comprehensive overhaul. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1 and had a think about ways to add value to the site and make it easier for people to find what they need. To that end I’ve totally re-jigged the archives to offer breakdown by date and subject. I’ve also added a (controversial!) Flash RSS Parser that I modified a fair bit from Sam Wan’s RSS Factory. I’m an old-skool Actionscripter so this suited me fine. I’ve also used sIFR for the first time. It was a bit of a fiddle getting the sizes right and its still a bit weird in IE but it works.

Also added is a sidebar of links to relevant articles in the manner of John’s side salad feature. I’ve been daringly naughty here and used a transparent PNG as the div background for this area and (gasp!) used ‘the bad code’ to get it to work in IE – but never fear, all the IE specific code is in a separate CSS file called in conditionally.

For commenter’s I’ve added a spell-checker which isn’t quite functional yet but it just needs a minor tweak from my host works really well.

The big change of course is the fixed | fixed | streeeeetch layout which I have to be honest was a bit intimidating at first but its incredibly liberating – the amount of CSS resizing hacks have plummeted just by utilising this style of layout.

As to the design, I wanted something friendly (hence the vector styles and nice curvy typeface – Vag in case you were wondering). However, I didn’t want to shy away from the fact autism == difference, hence the (overly literal?) stickmen family.

I’m happy with it overall. It feels much more complete and unified than either of my past two designs. It also feels much more ‘mine’. I learnt a lot doing it and thats the biggest payback I guess.

Stats:

• IE5.* support dropped
• 800px width support dropped

I threatened promised a redesign of this blog and thats whats coming. I’m not ready to launch just yet but I’m not far off. In fact I’m not far off the ‘90% finished ennui‘ stage.

I’m quite pleased with how its turning out so far and, most importantly its allowed me to learn and implement some new skills and revisit some old ones in a new way. A few things the new design will carry:

• An actual colour scheme instead of brown sludge
• At least one stretchy column (an idea I nearly ditched after I found out Andy Clarke had launched with it. Then I thought ‘what the hell – its a good system, who cares if its been done?’)
• A vastly improved Archive system
• Some Flash – not necessarily sIFR – that I think is functionally very good
• No support for IE5.* as it only makes up 0.7% of my audience

I’ve toyed with Dean’s IE7 but must admit I’m having a few issues with it – its not running very well in combination with WordPress I think and I’m still mulling over sIFR which I’ve had limited success with in the past but these are side issues. Essentially things are progressing nicely.

Call me flighty, call me unsettled but as of next week I’ll be redesigning this blog. Again. Again again. For the third time in a month.

Why? Lots of reasons.

Firstly, I realised that the last 2 incarnations of this blog suffered from something that the previous pink one – which got me nods from CSSVault and CSS Beauty – did not, they were designed by a very tired and approaching burnt out designer.

Truth be told, I never realised until I signed up for the CSSReboot just how much of a physical activity design was. Thats when I realised that being permanantely tired thanks to a daughter that thrives on lack of sleep and being overweight and being in the middle of a major design and content overhaul at my workplace had had an effect on both my ability to be creative and my ability to execute good design.

I don’t hate this design but boy is it drab. Its tired and reflects how I felt designing it. However in the last 4 weeks Megans sleep pattern is more stable, the work website is just about done and I’ve lost nearly a stone and a half in weight and switched to a high fruit/protein diet and feel much better for it.

I’m also totally knocked out by the sheer quality of recent redesigns from various others and want to bring this site up to scratch with a more vibrant design.

So – redesign number 3 will be underway in a little over a week!