My list of sources is far from extensive yet I find it staggering that in the roughly 5 days the site has been aggregating content their are over 1100 posts! I actually find it hard to synthesize all that information and I had not expected the number of stories to be so prolific. I am sure that if I removed blogs from the aggregator the numbers would be reduced but I think they are an integral part of the autism discourse and demonstrate the depth and breadth of the discussion on this subject.

I will likely be continuing to add more sources as I continue to work on the site and fine tune some aspects but jump on over and have a look and sign up for the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything

Enter Regain! It is a personal search engine and you control what gets indexed; documents of various formats and webpages that you can then search just like you would using the more familiar search engines. I have used both the server version and the personal version and must say that I think they are great! No more looking through a long list of documents trying to recall which one(s) has the information I’m looking for. Just fire up regain’s web-interface and punch in my search criteria and Voila! instant access to all the relevant information with links back to the original documents.

I have installed the windows personal version on our PC and pointed it at our document repository which it happily indexed very quickly so now all those documents are even more useful. Regain updates its index regularly so any new content gets added to the index for searching and I can mix in other good resources to be indexed as well. One can build their very own purpose built tightly focussed search engine on your own computer. Nerdy I know but how great is that. I highly recommend it to anyone that has a significant amount of material that it would be useful to search through or if you want to build your own custom, subject specific search engine- all for free no less.

PS: I did try other products as well and will include some links below.

• Zilverline
• Red Piranha
• Search Blox
• Nutch

Funny wiring. The author describes the book as follows:

My personal experience in living and working with a child with autism (my daughter) from diagnosis through adolescence up to adulthood. The book presents and delves into all aspects of the syndrome, focusing on the strategies and methodologies I found helpful in coping with and addressing the language, learning and behavioral challenges that children with autism present to parents and teachers. I also discuss at length what is going on neurologically in the autistic brain…

It is worth noting that google can be a great resource for books. They index a large number of books and provide large portions of the text for reading online. Some searches I found useful besides just searching for autism are:

Works by Simon Baron-Cohen

My personal experience in living and working with a child with autism (my daughter) from diagnosis through adolescence up to adulthood. The book presents and delves into all aspects of the syndrome, focusing on the strategies and methodologies I found helpful in coping with and addressing the language, learning and behavioral challenges that children with autism present to parents and teachers. I also discuss at length what is going on neurologically in the autistic brain…

This has lead me to want to use this post, or this blog atleast, to keep track of some of these available online resources. As I mention on our homepage many relevant and useful resources are available online but they can be found in very scattered places. This is one thing that I have aimed to do with our website is to consolidate information into one location, or atleast try to concentrate links to information in one place. This is, I’ll admit, a very self serving pursuit, but I hope to be able to have others benefit from my online exploration by making my findings available to the larger population. It is not my intent to actively filter the content of what I find, though this will likely be a natural phenomenon anyway as I will link to and post about things that I am researching or stumble upon by accident (much like the source of this post).

I recently had the pleasure of exchanging some thoughts on the autism-vaccine issue with the author of a blog I like to read and he mentioned that he did not necessarily agree with some of the content in our document storage. This made me think more critically about what we want to achieve with that portion of our web presence. As we state in the caveat on our mainpage, our goal is to help consolidate information and have it in one location. I do not presume to know if everything that is there is fact, I do think that it is information (I hope that there is no dysinformation – though some may view it as such and that is there right) and information is very valuable. Reading and exploring broadly within any topic is the key to understanding and forming a well rounded opinion. That is my personal goal and therefore we provide these documents so that others can do likewise and perhaps fuel some healthy discourse where opinions vary, as they undoubtedly will.
So, now I can go on about my exploration of the internet and adding things that I find interesting and hopefully useful as we continue to learn about autism and its many facets. I think an important key to finding success in anything is to be well informed and keeping an open-, and critical, mind. I hope that is what we are doing.

NB: In keeping with my goal I have included a copy of Funny wiring in our repository should the link go stale or no longer be available.

I have been doing some brief reading of some of the subject matter and hope to look into it further, but in the mean time I have been collecting research papers on various topics within genetics that relate to autism. Many of the articles I have found I got from the American Journal of Human Genetics website. I have also copied many, but not all, of the research documents to our local repository that you can browse here.

Here is a link I found to Scientific American that discusses some of the current research in this area.

Feb. 13/08 UPDATE:
I am going to incorporate my google reader feed into this post once I get some other issues sorted out first and I get the blog back filled with old posts from the old site.