Word: normalities
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...year, Harvard provost Dr. Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, argued that most mental disorders cannot be seen as discrete all-or-nothing illnesses like leukemia (which you either have or don't). Rather, he said, they should be seen as "continuous with normal," less like leukemia and more like hypertension. Hyman seems to have won the battle here - in particular, social-interaction disorders like autism and Asperger's will now be defined along a single spectrum (autism spectrum disorders), rather than as separate conditions. The proposed change has brought controversy: many high-functioning...
...proposes to update this category by including "hypersexual disorder." Although the name sounds like something Han Solo might have had, the proposed criteria make sense: sexual fantasies take up so much time that they become repetitive, debilitating and harmful to normal functioning. Also, "sexual avoidance disorder" would be dropped and "transvestic fetishism" would become "transvestic disorder," although the diagnostic criteria themselves would not change: the DSM still seems to have a problem with cross-dressing...
...hear that attending college day-to-day feels like a chore, there are no term-time assignments (papers or problem sets in Harvard-speak), lecturers are disinterested and discrepancies in lab reports can be “fixed” by paying the friendly college peon. Skipping lectures is normal and students sometimes sign-in for their absent counterparts, a practice termed as “proxy.” I have heard horror stories of proxies being discovered resulting in the penalization or even suspension of the involved parties...
Lindsey Van holds the record - among both men and women - for the longest jump off Whistler, British Columbia's normal ski jump, built for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The 25-year-old skier trains six days a week, 11 months a year, and has been jumping for the past 19 years. But when the Games kick off on Feb. 12, the 2009 women's ski-jumping world champion will be nowhere in sight. That's because women aren't allowed to ski jump in the Olympics. (See TIME's 25 Winter Olympic athletes to watch...
...whether DSDs confer any real advantages to athletes. In the 2008 paper "Intersex and the Olympic Games," Robert Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University, noted, "There is no evidence that female athletes with DSD have displayed any sports-relevant physical attributes which have not been seen in biologically normal female athletes...