The book “Neurotribes” goes into this in great detail. The number of diagnoses have increased, primarily due to a widening of the criteria used to diagnose autism as the DSM [1] has gone from version 3 to 5. In the early days of autism research, it used to be necessary to meet multiple criteria (i.e. profound social withdrawal, language peculiarities such as echolalia, resistance to change, repetitive behaviors, etc., all occurring in very early childhood). Today, it’s possible to receive a diagnosis in adulthood, and to do so while meeting criteria across fewer of the above domains.
This widening has multiple causes, not the least of which was an attempt to help parents of autistic children access parenting resources they otherwise couldn’t without a diagnosis in-hand.
The rise in autism rates (5x over the last 25 years) is almost entirely explained by changes in how autism is defined, diagnosed, and detected. Not by an actual surge in underlying cases or any specific environmental trigger like vaccines, air pollution, heavy metals, plastics, or screen time.
I just don't believe that based purely on my personal experience. I've been around many many people and in the last 15-20 years the amount of people with autism has exploded. It was very rare 30 years ago in my area, the occasional led exposure here, farm chemicals there... But now it's seemingly every 10th house that has someone that is nonverbal.
I'm all for papers and science but only if it matches the real world.
One of the largest reasons is probably we're just looking more. It's a relatively new diagnosis, just 50 years ago it'd just be "oh yeah Uncle Joe is a little weird he only eats hotdogs and knows everything ever about trains".
I'm not 100% sure what you're saying. Yes there are obvious cases like but those instances also used to just get called other things before we figured out autism as a distinct disease and it became widespread knowledge. There's no field in the data that gives us (for lack of a better term) the level of autism for people getting that diagnosis over time and we're recognizing more and more things as being on the spectrum of autism as time goes on which really just feeds back into the "there's more because we're finding/labelling more people as autistic" hypothesis.
a system whose only time scale is life so far … is one where if you have to estimate another time scale you have no choice but to return that one time scale
Some sort of numerical analysis book that covers these topics - minimax approx, quadrature etc. I’ve read on these separately but am curious what other sorts of things would be covered in courses including that.
I would check out "An Introduction to Numerical Analysis" by Suli and Mayers or "Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice" by Trefethen. The former covers all the major intro numerical analysis topics in a format that is suitable for someone with ~undergrad math or engineering backgrounds. The latter goes deep into Chebyshev approximation (and some related topics). It is also very accessible but is much more specialized.
I'd suggest: Trefethen, Lloyd N., Approximation theory and approximation practice (Extended edition), SIAM, Philadelphia, PA (2020), ISBN 978-1-611975-93-2.
FWIW here is a case study from shopify covering a project of theirs using fine tuning on a bi-modal model to extract product features. I get that this is not the situation you care about -- they are running at such scale that they need the inferences to be cheap.
Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?
If so, what are the best theories for why?
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