Community Newsletter: Autism Training for Black Parents, Google’s Embedded Gender Bias | Spectrum

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Illustration by Laurene Boglio

This week’s newsletter is the story of two tweets, one marking significant progress and the other a lack of progress.

Monday, the newspaper Autism highlighted an article on a new parent training program, Spectrum of Care, developed by the black community for the black community. Michele Villalobos, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the research team, wrote the review thread about the work.

The team wanted to build on the success of training programs for parents of children with autism and design an intervention that incorporates “the heritage and cultural assets of Black families,” the thread explains. “Few studies have included Black families or acknowledged ongoing historical trauma and engagement in medical research.”

They worked with 147 black parents for three years and followed up with surveys and semi-structured interviews. After the training, parents generally reported higher ratings of empowerment, effectiveness, and confidence.

“The racial trauma that black people experience remains unseen, unaddressed, and unacknowledged in autism research,” the thread concludes. “The voices of black parents in Spectrum of Care have made it clear we need to acknowledge their history and their process in our work moving forward.”

“Look at this amazing papertweeted Iheoma U. Iruka, founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition, faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and research team member.

Meghan Miller, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis, also retweeted the article, commenting that it was “really important job.”

Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, caused a stir on Twitter on Tuesday – International Women’s Day – when he tweeted an interesting finding on how Google ranks famous neuroscientists.

Spectrum readers might recognize several names from the feed, including such luminaries as Marlene Behrmann, Carla Shatz and Patricia Goldman-Rakic ​​— classified by Google as “college professors,” not scientists.

Lorna Quandt, assistant professor of educational neuroscience at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, called Google dubious distinction between “college professor” and “professor” with a sad/frustrated face emoji.

Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, responded that after Googling around 50 academics, his “eye meter indicates that the problem seems to often occur when women have complicated titles. that the AI ​​is trying to round up to something simpler.”

The rounding down is not always wrong, he continued, although it would be better to add “very influential” or perhaps “par excellence”. But sometimes, “it’s really like WTF.”

That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you’ve seen, feel free to email [email protected]

Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/OTIE4972