MindSpinner

I love smart uses of technology. AquaMinds NoteTaker is like a Moleskine notebook for the Mac, only better, except that it can’t fit in your pocket or your purse, which is why I’m smitten with Moleskines, too. (Windows users should look at Microsoft’s OneNote instead. The look is different, but the concept is similar.) NoteTaker generates as many notebooks as you like. Notebooks are lined or unlined, with sections and pages quickly accessed via a table of contents you can view in an exandable panel to the left of your notebook pages. In your notebooks, you can enter and organize simply everything from A to Z, including text, hyperlinks, images, film and audio clips, and more. There are multiple ways to share your notebooks, including publishing them to the Web.

The applications in education are endless, as are the applications in anybody’s daily life. I have started a notebook for school, a notebook for my friend’s Web project, and I’m going to start a household notebook, too, with all the information I need to keep up with and currently have to scrounge for. If I ever take/find time to write in a serious way, NoteTaker will be my writer’s notebook. My sixteen-year-old son is now an avid NoteTaker fan, and before school starts, my daughter will know how to use it, too. (No doubt I can interest her in learning all about it by showing her how she can create a catalog of all the outfits she’d like to buy, with pictures and links - an appalling but infallible strategy.)

The debate about the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in vaccines and its possible connection to autism among children leaves me unsure of what the facts are or aren’t. This week’s New York Times article, On autism’s cause, it’s parents vs. research, cites experts who view parents’ fears about thimerosal as a case of mass hysteria. But a recent Salon article, Deadly immunity, purports to expose a conspiracy to silence the truth about thimerosal. Like many people nowadays, I have more than a passing interest in the controversy. My nephew has Asperger’s. Last month, for the first time in his life, he let me hug him. He still can’t quite look me in the eye, which is the price we pay for his having Asperger’s and my being able to see him only twice a year.

Whether or not thimerosal is actually the culprit many parents fear it is, one course of action makes sense: find an alternative known to be safe. Both the safety and the knowing are important. (Why, after all, would we choose to put mercury into our children’s vaccines in the first place?) Even if it turns out that thimerosal has nothing to do with autism, we must contend with the fact that, as our nation’s recent history has proven, a perceived threat can lead to choices of monumental consequence just as surely as as a real threat can. If we do not want to see children succumbing to preventable childhood diseases because fearful parents have opted not to have them vaccinated, we’ll get thimerosal out of our vaccines even as we continue to investigate the causes of autism.

Update: July 5, 2006

From Science Blog:

Pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) like autism and Asperger Syndrome have been on the rise for years. Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccines and thimerosal–containing vaccines (which are approximately 50 percent ethylmercury) have been suggested as possible causes. A new MUHC study published in the scientific journal Pediatrics tomorrow, assesses the link between childhood immunizations and PDD in 28,000 Quebec children and finally clears MMR vaccines and thimerosal–containing immunizations as risk factors.

“There is no relationship between the level of exposure to MMR vaccines and thimerosal–containing vaccines and rates of autism,” says Dr. Eric Fombonne, Director of Pediatric Psychiatry at The Montreal Children’s Hospital of the MUHC and lead investigator of the new study. Thimerosal was used to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in the manufacture of various vaccines until its elimination from vaccine formulas in 1996 in Quebec. “According to our data, the incidence of autism was higher in children who were vaccinated after thimerosal was eliminated from vaccines,” says Dr. Fombonne.

“In the past, concern about a potential link between MMR vaccinations and autism led some parents to take the drastic step of refusing to inoculate their children against dangerous childhood diseases like measles,” says Dr. Fombonne. “This action resulted in resurgence of the measles, which caused the deaths of several young children in Europe.” Dr. Fombonne’s study indicates that autism rates continued to increase even with reductions in the use of MMR vaccinations. “We hopes this study will finally put to rest the pervasive belief linking vaccines with developmental diseases like autism,” says Dr. Fombonne.

Autism is a neuropsychiatry disorder that impairs a child’s ability to communicate and interact with others. The prevalence is about 65 cases per 10,000 people (about 1 child in 155) making autism one of the most common childhood disorders. The Psychiatry Department at The Montreal Children’s Hospital sees about 350 new cases of autism each year. However, Dr. Fombonne stresses that there is no demonstrated autism epidemic. He attributes the rise in autism rates to a broader definition of autism and greater awareness of the disorder.

My teenager is grounded from his computer until 7:00 a.m. tomorrow - major trauma. His infraction aside, what interests me is the difficulty he found in letting go of what would have been his plan for his day. Everything he could think of to do revolved around that computer. He wanted to burn two new songs to a CD; he wanted to read today’s news and research the Cold War; he wanted to play a favorite computer game and make some modifications to it. I tried to help him regroup and think of other things to do, but nothing else would satisfy. I encouraged him to tackle some tasks he’d rather not have to do later, when privileges are restored, but that suggestion (oh, shock) did not appeal.

It strikes me that letting go of Plan A is an essential skill for a successful, resilient life, as is the ability to formulate and move on to Plan B, C, or D. I think I’m on Plan G myself. Plan G is moving forward; I’m making the most of it; it’s nowhere near Plan A, but I’ve learned how to shift gears, to find purposes and aspirations that can be achieved and find a measure of meaning and satisfaction in them. After all, the alternative would be pouting everlastingly about the demise of Plan A, and that just doesn’t sound like much fun. Question is, can I teach an impulsive kid the art of letting go of Plan A and devising Plan B?

One hour later. I have an answer. Plan B has sprung forth as armed and resourceful as Athena from the head of Zeus: “We can go shopping, Mom. For my clothes.”

This blog came to be simply because I needed a blog so that I could test trackback on a blog I was setting up for a friend. It’s not as if I’d spent a lot of time reading blogs. It’s not as if I’d planned to write one. I’m not expecting a following, but I’m not treating this as private journal space either, because it’s potentially public, a message in a bottle. I’d be happy if it occasionally opened out into interesting conversations. I am writing simply because once the blog came into being, the idea of writing something here intrigued me, invited me, challenged me. That’s reason enough, I suppose, if one needs reasons at all.

It’s a fine thing to have the opportunity to do something challenging and completely different. It’s a sort of safari, an Everest expedition without the unthinkable cold. (Climbing Everest wouldn’t be my choice of challenges. I eschew unthinkable cold.)

The challenge that came to me this summer, courtesy of a friend and former client, was to dive into Web design after a five-year hiatus and to set up a blog. Simple stuff, if you know what you are doing. But I would have to learn and re-learn. This was good, the stuff of safaris, a crash course in everything I’d been falling behind in for half a decade.

To date, only the blog is nearing completion. The accompanying Web site still lies before us. After installing WordPress, we didn’t love any of the visual themes posted at WordPress.org; we liked instead a WordPress theme developed by a smart, friendly fellow in the UK, at www. phrixus.co.uk, who knows lots about blogs, photography, sailing, creating the illusion that he can build a shed in thirty seconds, and no telling what else. Graciously, he shared his design work - thank you, Shane! - and the theme implemented beautifully, except for one word in a sidebar, which displayed in the wrong style. I dug through the index page and the css style sheet all day before I found a way to fix the problem last night, and I made a dozen or so other small changes besides. I can read basic html, but I’m only getting to know php and css (with no intention of handcoding either ever), so what would have been somebody else’s quick fix was my safari into unknown lands. It wasn’t knowledge or intelligence that led to the solution, frankly; I credit sheer tenacity instead. I’m a real fan of sheer tenacity.

I went to bed last night with a sense of accomplishment; I was even prouder of this new success than I was three weeks ago when I fixed the upstairs toilet, which had been running for weeks while I told myself I really didn’t have time to deal with figuring out the problem and the fix. The lesson there was different: take a few minutes and just do it!