Phithagoras

My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.

In a high stakes, challenging environment, every human weakness possible becomes a huge, career impeding liability. Very few people are truly all-around talented. If you are a Stanford level scientist, it doesn't take a lot of anxiety to make it difficult to compete with other Stanford level scientists who don't have any anxiety. Without accommodations, you could still be a very successful scientist after going to a slightly less competitive university.

Rising disability rates are not limited to the Ivy League.

A close friend of mine is faculty at a medium sized university and specializes in disability accommodations. She is also deaf. Despite being very bright and articulate, she had a tough time in university, especially lecture-heavy undergrad. In my eyes, most of the students she deals with are "young and disorganized" rather than crippled. Their experience of university is wildly different from hers. Being diagnosed doesn't immediately mean you should be accommodated.

The majority of student cases receive extra time on exams and/or attendance exemptions. But the sheer volume of these cases take away a lot of badly needed time and funding for students who are talented, but are also blind or wheelchair bound. Accommodating this can require many months of planning to arrange appropriate lab materials, electronic equipment, or textbooks.

As the article mentions, a deeply distorted idea of normal is being advanced by the DSM (changing ADHD criteria) as well as social media (enjoying doodling, wearing headphones a lot, putting water on the toothbrush before toothpaste. These and many other everyday things are suggested signs of ADHD/autism/OCD/whatever). This is a huge problem of its own. Though it is closely related to over-prescribing education accommodations, it is still distinct.

Unfortunately, psychological-education assessments are not particularly sensitive. They aren't good at catching pretenders and cannot distinguish between a 19 year old who genuinely cannot develop time management skills despite years of effort & support, and one who is still developing them fully. Especially after moving out and moving to a new area with new (sub)cultures.

Occasionally, she sees documents saying "achievement is consistent with intelligence", a polite way of saying that a student isn't very smart, and poor grades are not related to any recognized learning disability. Really and truly, not everyone needs to get an undergrad degree.

Sounds like fun! Do you remember the name of the software?

QGIS is great, I use it daily and I hugely prefer it (and it's mobile equivalent Qfield) to ArcGIS and FieldMaps.

The educational world is pretty split between ArcGIS and QGIS. Students don't want to pay over $100 for a yearly ArGIS student license, but more advanced geostatistical analysis isn't supported yet on QGIS. Progress is slower in industry, especially in larger companies. Other critical software like Autodesk, Vulcan, DESWICK, MODFLOW, and Leapfrog already work (somewhat) smoothly with ArcGIS.

QGIS is just another thing to go wrong in managers minds, and there is zero opensource progress in developing applications as powerful as QGIS in geomatics adjacent fields.

Look to Google Earth and Caltopo.

These two already dominate more casual mapping

Are there many bioluminescent creatures in North-Central South Africa?

I love nature documentaries, I'll have a look at that one!

I agree, lots of animals use tools in one way or another. Starting or even just controlling a chemical reaction does seem like a big step above mechanical methods though. I wouldn't really be that surprised overall if we eventually discover that H. Naledi or other hominids had some control of fire. I will be surprised if the Dinaledi site turns out to be the first evidence of it