"Naughty Auties" Virtual Resource Center My mom just sent me a thing from CNN.com apparently one of their staff has been DX'ed with AS at the age of 40 somethin and she was discussing how she feels about life, i lost the article otherwise I would post it. this article is also interesting, I know nothing about second life other then like in the real world land in this cyber world actually has a real life value, just like real estate. Its a facinating concept, to have a market for cyber estate, and have to pay for it using real currency, it just goes to prove that dispite a real life market system, all currency and the value of whatever it does not matter is all just made up. We assign value to anything, land, currency, gold, or at least the market does that for us. Woodsman -- Is this the article your mother sent you? http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/03/28/autism.e ssay/index.html CNN currently has several autism topics featured and even has the clickable topic of AUTISM right on the top of the front page. Check it out! [QUOTE=NorwayMom] Woodsman -- Is this the article your mother sent you? http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/03/28/autism.e ssay/index.html [/QUOTE] YEP I saw this article today and thought it was interesting.  "Naughty Auties" is a virtual resource center for people with autism.  The site was created by a 22 year-old man with autism named David Savill.  From the article: Savill, who represents himself in the virtual world using an avatar named Dave Sparrow, said one benefit is that visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others, he said. Also: Bignell, known in-world as Milton Broome, said Second Life is an uncharted but promising area for new applied psychological research. Virtual reality can be used to simulate new environments for people on the autistic spectrum, he said. "For people with autism, we've found it's a very nice way of setting up situations they might come across in their everyday lives," Bignell said. "For people who have social, emotional, communicational problems ... we can get them familiar with an environment before they actually try it out in real life." You can read the whole article here: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/03/28/sl.autism.ir pt/index.html Thanks for the tip.  I was disappointed with the video, though.  The first link to you to the wrong video, and the second link showed Second Life with Bignell talking in the background about stuff that wasn't directly related to what was on screen. But it's great that CNN is putting autism/Aspergers on the agenda.   Here's a link to CNN's autism page that MamaKat mentioned: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/news/autism/ I found the article and video on poet Tito fascinating, and the article on "Getting help for a child with autism" was a concise summary with high-quality links.
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