When close to a third to even half of male students at prestigious universities take illegal pills usually given to ADHD patients, my suspicions gravitated to brain damage during the lack of vitamin D provided by the mother in the growing fetus and baby due to excess use of sunscreens, especially starting in the 1980s, which prevented our body from producing vitamin D needed for both brain neurons and synaptic development after the baby is born. In California, Autism increased six-fold during the 1990s.
Just a few researchers have published articles addressing the lack of vitamin D in mothers with fetus development of adult diseases, but have not addressed brain problems yet.
Lower rates of Autism among females might be due to their ability to use both sides of their brains more efficiently and not have to rely entirely on cognitive left brain.
Jim Kawakami, August 9, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Autism correlation to wealth affirmed
Researchers say the link seems to go beyond differences in who gets diagnosed
BY TIA GHOSE
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Appeared in print: Monday, Aug 9, 2010
Upper-income parents are more likely to have children with autism, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study. The findings suggest either the genetics or lifestyles of wealthier people predispose their children to autism.
Researchers have spent decades trying to untangle the factors that cause autism. Since the 1940s, scientists noticed wealthier and more educated families had children with the disorder, said Maureen Durkin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist and lead author of the study.
Researchers have since pursued whether there were really just differences in rates of diagnosis, rather than differences in the rates of the disorder itself.
Durkin combined neighborhood census data on socioeconomic status with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. The surveillance network uses school records to identify all 8-year-old children — even those who had no formal diagnosis — with the range of social, behavioral and language problems classified as autism spectrum disorder. This tracking method, Durkin said, adjusts for the possibility that the poor are less likely to be diagnosed.
Of more than half a million children, 3,680 had the disorder. Affluent youngsters were almost twice as likely as the poorest children to have autism. The poorest neighborhoods did have lower rates of diagnosis. But even among children with no autism diagnosis, the richest children displayed the behaviors and signs of autism 39 percent more often those in poor neighborhoods.
“The findings are very significant,” said Lisa Croen, an epidemiologist with Kaiser Permanente’s Autism Research Group in California. She said it shows a difference in diagnosis rates isn’t the whole story. “Every race and ethnicity group, they saw this gradient. It suggests something else is going on.” … http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/sevendays/25143086-35/autism-durkin-diagnosis-disorder-older.csp
THE END OF MEN BY HANNA ROSIN THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE July-August 2010
… Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let this secret out in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote back then, is the elephant in the room. And today, she told me, the problem hasn’t gone away. A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members.
But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein. …
“Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.” …
Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other. And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide.
Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world. Many wives who failed to produce male heirs were abused and treated as domestic servants; some families prayed to spirits to kill off girl children.
Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, the government embraced an industrial revolution and encouraged women to enter the labor force. Women moved to the city and went to college. They advanced rapidly, from industrial jobs to clerical jobs to professional work. The traditional order began to crumble soon after.
In 1990, the country’s laws were revised so that women could keep custody of their children after a divorce and inherit property. In 2005, the court ruled that women could register children under their own names.
As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China. …
Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.” …
The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class. In recent years, male support groups have sprung up throughout the Rust Belt and in other places where the postindustrial economy has turned traditional family roles upside down. …
The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.
A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood.
Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s. …
“Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the introduction to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. …
Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let this secret out in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote back then, is the elephant in the room. And today, she told me, the problem hasn’t gone away.
A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.
To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial.
She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.” …
But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat. …
(Perhaps a penchant for more guns by men is a symptom of this gender inequality in our society. Jim) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/1/
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