Archive News
Disney clips teach autistic Galway twins how to talk
Date Published: 29-Nov-2012
BY MICHELLE MCDONAGH
When twins Eoin and Conor Dodd were diagnosed with severe autism and cognitive problems as toddlers, their future appeared bleak. Their condition was so severe that their parents were told the boys would likely need institutionalised care by their early teens.
However, Enda and Valerie Dodd were not prepared to give up so easily on the children they had waited eleven long years for.
“Although we were aware of their diagnosis, the boys appeared to be quite intelligent to us,” Enda explains. They were well able to hide and find things, unlock doors and get out of the house. There appeared to be something inside, we just had to figure out a way of accessing their minds.”
The Dodds relocated from Galway to the San Francisco Bay area in an attempt to find some way of lifting the twins out of the isolation of autism.
With Enda’s experience in applied medical research and Valerie’s as a school teacher, they worked with researchers at the University of California to unravel the mysteries of their children’s language deficits. The result is Animated Language Learning (ALL), a state-of-the-art visually based language learning programme that uses clips from popular Disney Pixar movies like Toy Story to help autistic kids learn how to speak.
“While the boys had difficulties communicating, they were very intelligent visually and had substantial problem solving capabilities. My thinking was that if they could think visually, then we could grow them visually. When I asked myself what was the most powerful image for six year old children, straight away I thought of Disney Pixar,” Enda says.
Dodd, who has full access to the entire Disney Pixar archive for his research, found he could take the images from such well-loved movies as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars and Monsters Inc and attach a language or method of communication to them.
The boys went from having no language at all until the age of nine or ten to suddenly learning how to attach concepts to the images they were looking at and learning how to speak. They then developed the ability to hear and understand language — the opposite of the normal path of learning language in children.
“The boys are now 15 years old. For a child who did not speak for his first nine or ten years, Eoin would now talk the hind legs off a donkey and is at peer level in terms of his language abilities. Conor now has the literacy of an eight or nine year old child and we are focusing on continuing to develop his speech and listening skills over the next year.”
Once a pilot study is complete and Dodd is absolutely satisfied it works as an effective learning intervention in the homes of children with autism and learning disorders, he will release the software commercially and come to a royalty arrangement with Disney Pixar.
“We believe we have found the right mechanism to access the minds of these children. We have the ability to deliver something at a fraction of the cost of existing interventions, but on a hugely more powerful level. I credit the technology, you just click on the desktop to open the software and let the programme run.”
For further information, go to www.animatedlanguagelearning.com
For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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