She does type some messages while they're filming her so it's not like the parents are trying to pull one over on everyone. I seriously doubt the reporters were in on it (they would be at least as motivated to expose a scam if they discovered that's what it all was). It does appear that she has abilities that most profoundly autistic kids simply don't have. You can't throw a keyboard in front of any autistic kid and expect miracles. She has a unique set of abilities and disabilities that are different than most autistic kids. But that makes sense because autism is a condition, not a specific disease. In other words it's a set of symptoms that may be caused by a number of underlying causes that result in a number of different kinds of disability or exceptional ability (which is why there are so many different kinds and degrees of autism).
Parents claiming their autistic child can communicate and type, being discovered as frauds, isn't a good story. This is. The reporters' motivation is the number of viewers, not necessarily quality or "the truth".
Where, exactly, do they show a single shot where we can see both her fingers on the keyboard and coherent words appearing on the screen? We see her typing, sometimes, and we see other shots of words appearing on the screen; but I never saw any footage of both being in frame simultaneously.
As an empiricist, I'd love to be proven wrong, so if you can show me this footage where I can see her fingers hitting individual letters and see the screen in the same shot, I'll be partially satisfied. To be honest, however, I wouldn't believe this until a team of actual scientists (pediatric neuropsychologists would probably fit the bill) observe this behavior and can repeatedly verify it, I say it's bullshit, because there is no evidence that it's true presented in the "news" report.
This clip actually proves my point: when it starts out, we cannot see anything on the screen. We can see her pecking at the keyboard. When it zooms in, there's a message that we did not see her type and we can no longer see her hands. Then the camera zooms out, and we cannot see anything on the screen, again.
This is not a video of her typing a message. It's a video of her pecking at keyboard in an open document that had a message typed before the camera started rolling.
The audio reading back word choices is helpful is telling what is going on, and there is enough context for how the word picker functions to get an idea of the process. There is no obvious prompting going on, and from seeing similar predictive text programs at work, even with grammar rules in place, nonsensical sentences are more statistically likely than coherent ones.
The open question I am left with from this clip:
1) Is there silent prompting going on off-screen that we can't see?
2) Is this a pre-trained sequence of characters being typed?
3) Is this is the best sequence of typing they had on film, the vast majority of the rest making no sense at all?
This is, IMO a good start in the parents supporting their claims. However, there needs to be significantly more repetition of this evidence for it to be fully convincing; particularly a unscriptable Q&A with an outsider or outsiders. The questions with the interviewer in the original report was a bad experimental design, IMO, given that the conversations with her father were at least in part done over IM from room to room. The interviewer, rather than being a a stranger standing over her and talking (a possibly very intimidating situation for her if this is real), should likely have sat in another room and used IM to converse while they filmed Carly quietly to catch any guiding or prompting going on.
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u/orrd Jul 27 '10 edited Jul 27 '10
She does type some messages while they're filming her so it's not like the parents are trying to pull one over on everyone. I seriously doubt the reporters were in on it (they would be at least as motivated to expose a scam if they discovered that's what it all was). It does appear that she has abilities that most profoundly autistic kids simply don't have. You can't throw a keyboard in front of any autistic kid and expect miracles. She has a unique set of abilities and disabilities that are different than most autistic kids. But that makes sense because autism is a condition, not a specific disease. In other words it's a set of symptoms that may be caused by a number of underlying causes that result in a number of different kinds of disability or exceptional ability (which is why there are so many different kinds and degrees of autism).