New Horizons and a New Way for Autism Awareness

I'd like to thank my friends and family for helping raise autism awareness through fundraising last year. It was the first time i've gathered a personable approach to raise money for the autism walk now a-thon. Through my friends and family altogether, we raised over $1700 and I want to thank them all for their contributions.

Next year opens new horizons. There's a lot of confusing outlooks on how celebrities have taken on autism to how autism is caused by wi-fi networking radiation spillovers. The truth is nobody still knows the origin and quite frankly, there's a growing number of autistic people who just want acceptance to the real world.

This year in the past few months, I've actually gone to an Applied Behavioral Analysis Conference at San Diego, CA. I was surprised to find the techniques of rewarding and teaching to toddlers and school-grade children is still being applied today and not much has changed since the behavioral patterns of Dr. B.F. Skinner. What shocked me there were some professors who want to resort to shock therapy if a pupil gets extreme. But it's not a barbaric approach to the punishment like those in the past, it's more of mindmolding the pupil to shape through isolation. Absolutely Absurd I thought, but it's taught with videos there.

I remembered undergoing through Applied Behavioral Analysis from pre-school and kindergarten at UCLA by Dr. B.J. Freeman. I couldn't remember what I did as a kid, but it is where i was diagnosed with autism. Knowing I could have been an early subject of isolationism and measurement was just mindblowing to recall. The ABA benchmarks and processes of 1984 to 2004 may have improved, the fundamental ABA principles from B.F. Skinner and other behavioralists are still intact to autistic children throughout the world.

At the ABA Conference, I was surprised to hear Dr. B.J. Freeman retired from her studies and I'd really like to thank her for helping me as a child and my mom for understanding Autism when it was very very rare in the 80s.

This year, More and more families are begging for a financial need of aid for assistance to help their children through autism. And while there's a few autism organizations that are successfully raising monies, none would disclose how they distribute their money to aid them. AutismSpeaks is notorious for spending more money on autism research to find a cure than to help aid families from facing bankruptcies and foreclosures. The cost to aid an autistic child is more than $50,000. Good luck if you can find that amount of money today. A check and aid from AutismSpeaks will be a blessing to you and I'd have to move on to other groups who can help spread the message of aid and need of families and children now than attempting to find a pharmecutical patent for treatments and cure of Autism. Something AutismSpeaks would love to get their hands on.

Which leads me back to the ABA conference I went to on May. I went there coming from the recieving end of the ABA analysis and it's more of the same. It's measuring behavior patterns from three to seven year olds who respond by gestures, shapes, colors or objects and they get rewarded a treat. While this helps the kids understand phonetics, language and building commuication skills, this also left me wondering if there's any new techniques they can use to accelerate their progress of basic math and reading. The result as i've found by many workshops to be varied and less customizeable per student.

It actually gets more interesting to find in their exhibit halls at the San Diego Manchester Hyatt (the location of ToorCon 7 last I went there). There are software programs for autistic spectrum treatments for kids to respond on video game systems to play on the visual fixations of the kids. The minimum cost of these services Is beyond $1500 and for ABA Software to visual pulsing machines. It is big business there at these ABA conventions. From Private School programs to software apps to even ABA schooling at major universities, The exhibition hall at the ABA convetion was far bigger than what I remembered at ToorCon. Autism isn't just about understanding the disability, it's also about understanding the treatments for money.

There's a lot of goodies I took. I'd like to thank the Kinark Centre of Ontario for passing out the led light with a compass and hook. I'm using it to navigate my way when i'm commuting on my bicycle.

My missions for the coming months for Autism Awareness before April 08 are as follows:

• Continue to raise money for autism research and at best, better the amount I raised this coming year than last year.
• Finding more methods to raise funds for familes in need of help.
• Raising to specific groups that have helped me in the past. Specifically the Harbor Regional Center and the Jay Nolan Center.
• Help other Autism Adovcacy Groups besides AutismSpeaks, like The Autism Acceptance Project.
  
• Besides Bowling, I'd like to start a Bike for Autism and maybe a few shows hopefully for other Autism groups.
• Finally, constant updated blogs. I apologize for the lack of updates. I've been busy. Such as travelling to Europe.
  

I'm very excited about the new ideas and new methods to help the families and children with autism overcome it. It's something that can't be cured, but it is something that can be accepted and adapted to the world.

- Al