Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood writes:

As part of our ongoing effort to counter commercialism in schools, CCFC is encouraging parents and educators to stop schools from using Pizza Hut BOOK IT! programs.  BOOK IT! is one of corporate America’s most insidious school-based brand promotions. It reaches 22 million school children in 900,000 classrooms each year. Through the BOOK IT! Beginners program (which runs this year from March 5- April 27), Pizza Hut is even able to target preschools.

Students enrolled in BOOK IT! are rewarded with a certificate for a free Pizza Hut personal pizza. Yet there is no evidence that the program actually promotes literacy – it has never been formally evaluated.  And there are plenty of reasons for concern:

• In the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, BOOK IT! promotes Pizza Hut pizza as an integral part of required school curriculum for millions of young children. Pizza Hut’s personal pizzas contain as many as 770 calories and 39 grams of fat.
• BOOK IT! inserts a commercial brand into daily classroom routines, continually promoting Pizza Hut to a captive audience of students.
• BOOK IT! bypasses parents by targeting children directly in schools and promotes  family conflict if parents don’t want to bring children to Pizza Hut to claim their reward.
• BOOK IT! presents earning a reward as the goal of reading rather than its inherent pleasures – and may actually negatively affect children’s interest in books.

“Any one of these issues is a serious concern,” said CCFC’s co-founder Susan Linn. “Taken all together, it’s clear that Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT!  has no place in schools.”

To find out if your elementary school participates in the BOOK IT! program, please visit http://www.bookitprogram.com/participants/. To find if your child’s preschool participates in BOOK IT! Beginners, please visit http://www.bookitprogram.com/participants/beginner.asp.

If your school is enrolled in one of these programs, we encourage you to download our  Pizza Hut BOOK IT! fact sheet and share it with your school’s administrators, your PTA, and other parents.  Let us know if you start working to stop BOOK IT! (ccfc@jbcc.harvard.edu). We may be able to put you in touch with other CCFC members in your area and we’d like to hear how it’s going.

Working together, we can reclaim our schools from corporate marketers.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
www.commercialfreechildhood.org

For more on CCFC’s concerns about BOOK IT, please visit www.commercialfreechildhood.org/pressreleases/pizzahutbookit.htm

Amanda Bragg is a young woman with autism who’s found an amazing way to express for us how she thinks. She’s posted a video on YouTube and has been featured on CNN. Definitely worth reading the story and viewing her video and the CNN report about her.

“My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for
people to interpret,” she says in the video. “It is about being in a
constant conversation with every aspect of my environment.”

The article below makes one pause…

MIKE STOBBE

Associated Press

ATLANTA – The largest U.S. study of autism has found that the troubling condition is more common than previously understood.

About one in 150 American children has autism, U.S. health officials said Thursday, calling the troubling disorder an urgent public health concern that is more common than they once thought.

The new numbers are based on the largest, most convincing study done so far in the United States, and trump previous estimates that placed the prevalence at 1 in 166.

The difference means roughly 50,000 more children and young adults may have autism and related disorders than was previously thought.

Government scientists declined to call the results a complete surprise: The new estimate is on the high end of a prevalence range identified in other recent studies, they said.

But one advocate said the study should cause policy-makers and the public to revise how they think of autism.

“This is a greater national health care crisis than we thought even yesterday,” said Alison Singer, spokeswoman for Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest organization advocating services for autistic children.

The study should fuel efforts to get the government to spend hundreds of millions of additional dollars for autism research and services.

“This data today show we’re going to need more early intervention services and more therapists, and we’re going to need federal and state legislators to stand up for these families,” Singer said.

The study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was based on 2002 data from 14 states. It calculated an average autism rate 6.6 per 1,000, compared to an estimate last year of 5.5 in 1,000.

The new research involved an intense review of medical and school records for children and gives the clearest picture yet of how common autism is in some parts of the country, CDC officials said.

The results suggest 560,000 children and young adults have the condition.

However, the study population is not demographically representative of the nation as a whole, so officials cautioned against using the results as a national average. The study doesn’t include some of the most populous states, like California, Texas and Florida.

Also, the study does not answer whether autism has recently been on the rise – a controversial topic, driven in part by the contention of some parents and advocates that it is linked to a vaccine preservative. The best scientific studies have not borne out that claim.

“We can’t make conclusions about trends yet,” because the study’s database is too new, said Catherine Rice, a CDC behavioral scientist who was the study’s lead author.

Autism is a complex disorder usually not diagnosed in children until after age 3. It is characterized by a range of behaviors, including difficulty in expressing needs and inability to socialize. The cause is not known.

Scientists have been revising how common they think the disorder is. Past lower estimates were based on smaller studies. The study released Thursday is one of the first scientific papers to come out of a more authoritative way of measuring it.

“This is a more accurate rate because of the methods they used,” said Dr. Eric Hollander, an autism expert at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The study involved 2002 data from parts or all of 14 states – Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Researchers looked specifically at children who were 8 years old because most autistic kids are diagnosed by that age. The researchers checked health records in each area and school records when available, looking for children who met diagnostic criteria for autism. They used those numbers to calculate a prevalence rate for each study area.

Included were autism-linked conditions like Asperger disorder, which some experts say might partly account for a higher rate.

Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at Yale University, said the educational records researchers relied on in some states may be misleading. Sometimes, if a child has problems that seem like autism, parents will push for an autism label to get additional educational services, he said.

Rates varied dramatically among states, in some cases. The rate was 3.3 per 1,000 in the northeastern Alabama study area and 10.6 per 1,000 in the Newark, N.J., metro area.

Researchers say they don’t know why the rate was so high in New Jersey. They think the Alabama rate was low partly because of limited access to special education records.

The study was not an effort to find the cause of autism, still a point of debate. While many advocacy groups blame the vaccine preservative thimerosal, scientists are putting more focus on possible genetic causes, according to a recent Stanford University study.

Sounds like an oxymoron, but these photographers have done something fascinating and worth looking at. www.theblindphotographer.com

I just signed up for a Technorati Profile which makes it easier to connect with other blogs with similar topics. This will hopefully widen my world and that of others who drop in for a visit. To all of you who were with me at TRLD, let’s keep in touch and grow this community.