Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 17h

My 5 year old, a linguist who has no time for Grice and his implicatures: “I’m ahead of you. And the reason I’m ahead is because I’m better than you.”

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Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social · 1d

Special education isn't a "nice thing to have." It isn't "charity" or doing something to make us feel better. It is a right. The right to a Free Appropriate Public Education is codified in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, signed by a Republican president.

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 1d

U.S. Department of Education fired nearly everyone in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in a wave of new layoffs that began Friday, according to the union representing the agency's employees. www.usatoday.com/story/news/e...

Education Department wipes out special ed office in shutdown layoffs, union says

The Education Department laid off nearly everyone at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

www.usatoday.com

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 2d

We’re staying in a rental and I just found this in the closet. My 14 year old is about to have the best night of her life.

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Sara Partridge, PhD @sarapartridge.bsky.social · 3d

There are reports that the *entire* office of special education at the US Dept of Education has been cut. These hardworking folks ensure kids with disabilities get equal access to a quality education.

America’s children deserve better than this.

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Mike W @gekido.bsky.social · 3d

so Google just added a bunch (more) AI bullshit to Chrome

Go through these steps to disable it:

opus.ing/posts/how-to...

#chrome #aibullshit

How to Remove AI From Your Google Chrome Experience - Opus

Follow these steps to resist the AI-pocalypse in your everyday web browsing.

opus.ing

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 13d

I will be accepting a PhD student for Fall 2026 in our Curriculum and Instruction program. If you are interested in autistic sociality, caregiver influence on their autistic children's development, and neurodiversity in school contexts, please get in touch!

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction - Lynch School of Education and Human Development - Boston College

The Lynch School's hybrid doctoral program in Curriculum & Instruction is designed to develop professionals who have the knowledge, intellectual disposition, professional skills, ethical sensibilities...

www.bc.edu

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Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore @sjblakemore.bsky.social · 5d

Applications now open for an international PhD program investigating child and adolescent health and wellbeing.

This provides funding for 4 students to do PhDs in Australia and Singapore, starting Jan 2026

comms.mcri.edu.au/v/110977/100...

MCRI & A*STAR Singapore PhD Placement Opportunity - Apply Now!

Having trouble viewing this email? View Online Applications now open for an international PhD program investigating child and adolescent health & wellbeing!

comms.mcri.edu.au

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Thinking Person's Guide to Autism @thinkingautism.com · 7d

“As a neurodiversity advocate and as an autistic person, I’m really grateful for so much of the work that’s been done that allows me to be myself and to be successful being myself.” Link, who has been *banned*!?!? from this platform?

thinkingautismguide.com/2025/06/spac... #AutisticWhileBlack

Space Law, Race, and Neurodiversity: Autistic Advocate AJ Link

We live in a country & society that is built on racism. The neurodivergent community isn't free of that racism—per Autistic advocate AJ Link.

thinkingautismguide.com

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Thinking Person's Guide to Autism @thinkingautism.com · 10d

"The often referenced moral test of the measure of a civilization being based on how it treats its most vulnerable members is not one that the United States would pass today." Shoumita Dasgupta on our ableist administration, @statnews.com:

www.statnews.com/2025/10/03/a... #autism #neurodiversity

The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism

“The current political establishment and their supporters have consistently pathologized difference,” particularly when it comes to autism, a professor of medicine writes.

www.statnews.com

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10d

Third, the peculiar idea that somehow we don't need to read, write, or perform literature reviews anymore; popping up like a satanic mushroom in almost all so-called OK uses of LLMs.

Companies writing our papers via their chatbots is not scientific at all. See section 5: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

7/

table 1 extract from Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

In addition, who is held accountable if nobody with intent
authored the text? Because while the original data fed into the
system is certainly written with goals, messages, and audiences in
mind jumbling this into ad-libbed word salad removes authorial
intent (Bender et al., 2021). So do the companies who own the
chatbot own the text or do the original authors? These questions
denote legal battles, which are being currently fought in the public eye and which affect all of us in all roles, not just as academics
(Creamer, 2025; Knibbs, 2024; Reuters, 2025). Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

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Reposted by Kristen Bottema-Beutel

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10d

🫡

How to Turn Off AI Tools Like Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Copilot, and More - Consumer Reports

AI features are crowding into Google search, Gmail, iPhones, Windows laptops, and other products. If you're suffering from AI overload, these settings can help.

www.consumerreports.org

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 12d

Right?!

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Thinking Person's Guide to Autism @thinkingautism.com · 12d

"Anti-ableism vs. scientific accuracy is a false dichotomy," plus "autism science has a history of false leads in part because of unexamined ableist ideologies that undergird researcher framings & interpretations of evidence." @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social et al:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Anti-ableism and scientific accuracy in autism research: a false dichotomy

It was recently argued that autism researchers committed to rejecting ableist frameworks in their research may sacrifice “scientifically accurate” conceptualizations of autism. In this perspective pie...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 12d

My yearly reading of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, in which Remi Yergeau eviscerates the logics of autism interventions.

The recovery of ABA has all the trappings of rhetorical discovery: excavating the human from the prison of autism; remapping the autistic brain to forge plastic and flexible neuronal territories; affecting the queer by refusing to acknowledge its presence; making the known the deviant by rendering it non-deviant. In book club, we autistics recover from “fuck you” as a social worker whips out a volume chart, hastily points to “TOO LOUD!”, and then leads us in the communal practice of indoor voicing.

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Prof Rosa Hoekstra @rosahoekstra.bsky.social · 13d

Are you interested in studying longitudinal developmental trajectories of children with developmental disabilities in Ethiopia and Kenya? Please consider applying for a PhD! More information about the project is here: kcl-mrcdtp.com/project/2026... #AutRes

Longitudinal developmental trajectories of children with developmental disabilities in Ethiopia and Kenya - MRC DTP

Ethiopian and Kenyan children with developmental disabilities (including intellectual disability and autism) and their caregivers experience severe challenges including financial difficulties, stigma,...

kcl-mrcdtp.com

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 13d

And the division of “parents” on the one hand and “autistic people” on the other hand is of course false because many parents of autistic children (including autistic children with high support needs) are themselves autistic.

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 13d

I will be accepting a PhD student for Fall 2026 in our Curriculum and Instruction program. If you are interested in autistic sociality, caregiver influence on their autistic children's development, and neurodiversity in school contexts, please get in touch!

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction - Lynch School of Education and Human Development - Boston College

The Lynch School's hybrid doctoral program in Curriculum & Instruction is designed to develop professionals who have the knowledge, intellectual disposition, professional skills, ethical sensibilities...

www.bc.edu

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Reposted by Kristen Bottema-Beutel

Al Jazeera English @aljazeera.com · 16d

Abeer Hassan, looking after her autistic son, Abdallah, faces peril amid Israeli bombardment and displacement.

For autistic children, Israel’s war on Gaza brings acute suffering

Abeer Hassan, looking after her autistic son, Abdallah, faces peril amid Israeli bombardment and displacement.

bit.ly

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 17d

There is absolutely no good faith reason to use the term “AI” for any technology one is selling.

It serves only for dazzling people into thinking the technology has capabilities that it doesn’t.

If one wants a technology to be trustworthy, just use a transparent, informative term without hype.

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Kristen Bottema-Beutel @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social · 17d

Ah, another productive workday listening to my neighbor leaf- blow six leaves back and forth across her lawn for three hours

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 19d

For their first project, my Kids and Society students have to create an infographic clarifying a common misconception about "kids these days." I'd prefer that they not use AI to create their projects, so I made my own infographic explaining why : )

Infographic titled "AI Isn't a Ticket To an A," explaining how chatbots work, what the data show about the prevalence of these technologies and how they're used, what we know about the quality of their output, and what we know about the impact that frequent use of these technologies has on their users and on content creators, low-wage workers, and the environment.

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Dr. Allison G. Harvey @allisonharvey.bsky.social · 20d

Are you applying to a PhD in Clinical or Counseling Psychology? Here is a list of mentors who are taking students. Please circulate widely (and on X) so all applicants can benefit 😀. If you are mentoring please do add your name!
#clinicalpsychology @abctnow.bsky.social

Accepting Clinical or Counselling Psychology Grad Student?

docs.google.com

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Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social · 20d

If my writing about autism does anything, whether it be in my books, my columns or my reported stories, I hope it advances the idea that autistic people are whole human beings as they are with legitimate needs and inner lives that deserve to be told the same as other stories.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 21d

Nothing says “land of the free” like armed agents of the state saying “show me your papers if you want your daughter back” bsky.app/profile/nbcb...

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EerilyPhD 👻 @ejwillingham.bsky.social · 22d

Stands on rooftops: 📣 🗣️

🗣️THERE IS NO LINK BTW ACETAMINOPHEN & AUTISM. IT HAS BEEN STUDIED FOR MANY YEARS IN MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

🗣️THE ONLY REASON THEY ARE TALKING ABT THIS IS THAT THEY DO NOT WANT AUTISTIC PEOPLE TO EXIST.

🗣️IT IS EUGENICS.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION IN THIS MATTER. -EmilyPhD

EerilyPhD 👻 @ejwillingham.bsky.social · 22d

+follow $ trail on Tylenol claims, too! Look at who authored latest "study" this admin will trot out as their "evidence"! Look at that author's COI! Note that 2024 JAMA study found no link& attributed prev, v weak findings to confounding! Ask a science journalist!

buttondown.com/TPGA/archive...

Pregnancy pain relief blamed, again | Autistic DJ makes Coldplay interesting

Is exposure to acetaminophen in utero linked to being autistic? How many autistic people care about this question?

buttondown.com

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