William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) was an amputee who persevered despite his disability. He was the physical inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous amputee character Long John Silver. His daughter was said to have inspired, and coined the name of, J.M. Barrie’s character Wendy.

Probably his greatest contribution to humanity was this poem about resilience, written shortly after his leg was surgically removed (by none other than Joseph Lister, inventor of sterile surgery) to prevent the spread of a tuberculosis infection.
Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Some definitions:

Game: Play with rules.

Rule: A constraint upon behavior that is imposed by social convention.

Play: Good luck with that one.Better scholars than me have tried and failed to define play.

Examples:

Suck on this Thing I Found

This is a popular play activity performed by infants everywhere with all manner of intended and accidental toys. Is it play? I would say, yes. Does it have rules? No, it does not. It is play, but not a game.

Peek-a-boo (novice player)

Player 1 initiates play by hiding and abruptly returning while vocalizing. Player 2 is startled by Player 1 and reacts. Player 2 realizes that Player 1 is not a real threat and that his or her startle reaction was unwarranted. Comedic irony ensues. (The foundation of all things that are funny is, “I’m in distress; oh, wait, no I’m not!” and it starts right here.)

In this play, Player 1 is using rules, but Player 2 is reacting only with basic physiological/emotional responses. I suppose it counts as a game for Player 1, but not for Player 2.

Peek-a-boo (expert player)

Player 1 initiates play by hiding. Player 2 recalls this from earlier and anticipates the forthcoming abrupt return. Player 1 returns, Player 2 pretends to be startled, reenacting the novice game, and comedy ensues. Or players skip that step altogether and jump straight to the giggling. At this point, the startle effect is assumed, but not obligatory.

A symbolic transformation has occurred! This is a social convention, and thus it is a rule. Player 2 has joined in the game.

Gravity

Player 1 drops Cheerios from high chair tray. They fall on the floor as opposed to hovering in space of falling to the ceiling. (Not a rule, natural principle of the universe).

Dog eats Cheerios. (Not a rule. More of a natural consequence. Although this does have some qualities of agency, in that the dog’s motivations and behaviors are its own, unlike gravity, which has no agency.)

Player 1 drops spoon. It makes a different sound upon landing than the Cheerios. Dog licks, but does not eat spoon. (I’m beginning to sense a pattern here in that objects tend to fall toward the floor consistently. More data are required to confirm)

Player 1 drops sippy-cup. A third unique sound occurs, perhaps accompanied by more bouncing and rolling than the previous objects.

Unwitting Player 2 returns cup, but not the Cheerios or the spoon. (Okay, now we have a socially established rule. How consistent is this rule? Gravity is pretty persistent, but how many times will Mom give back the cup before the pattern changes? What else will she give back?)

New definition:

Goals: Goals are motivations that are established before the play activity begins. Much play involves behavior directed toward an intended outcome, but there is a difference between intentions that arise as a reaction to things inside the play frame versus intentions that come from outside the play frame.

Examples: Chase each other around in circles

Any number of player run around in imitation of one another in an attempt to catch one another. (This game has pretty simple rules, but it doesn’t really impose a goal.)

Tag

Like above, but players run away from a specific player who is intending to catch them. Who the chaser and chasees are change depending on some criteria, most commonly a touch indicating one player has caught the other. (While it looks on the surface similar to the above game, Tag one is much more goal-oriented than the Chase. Tag is much more sophisticated and played by older children.)

Notice that a goal is not the same as a win-condition. Tag is not a game one can “win,” although one could be quite competitive in pursuit of the game’s goal.

Sadly, I’ve started to realize that most of this is not contributing to my dissertation at all, even though it is important and useful to my thinking. I don’t really need this model to make the Pentad work as an AAC intervention. It may be a separate paper at some point.

Ghost in the Shell &

Ghost in the Shell—Stand Alone Complex

The Japanese manga/animé series Ghost in the Shell actually is (at its deepest levels) mostly about people with super-disabilities—although ostensibly the theme is about humans’ relationship with the machines they build and how that relationship changes us.

What is a “super-disability” you ask? Consider South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius.

Oscar, a double amputee, created a stir in 2007 because he came within 0.75s of qualifying for the South African Olympic Team. Not the Paralympics—the Abled Olympics. There was some debate as to whether he should be permitted to compete because his prosthetic limbs give him an unfair advantage.

We’re not quite there yet, but what happens when the artificial becomes better than the real thing?

This is a key question in Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Agent Batou

Episode 16 of the TV series concerns a retired boxer. A key plot point was that he had been in the Paralympics, but they never refer to it as that, they just assume “Olympics.” In this future, the regular Olympics are a fringe thing that no one pays attention to because of the low quality of the athleticism. In this future abled people have perfectly good limbs, eyes and even brain tissue removed so they can have superior mechanical replacements installed. In fact, the character above, Agent Batou, has no biological parts remaining at all. He is all prosthetic.

There is an ongoing story thread in Season 1 concerning “The Laughing Man,” a hacker-thief whose identity is unknown because he can hack the ubiquitous cameras (including the ones implanted in place of people’s eyes) to conceal his identity; replacing his face with a smiling face icon that reads “I thought what I’d do was I’d pretend I was one of those deaf mutes.”

Police sketch of the Laughing Man

Major spoiler warnings here. This hacker was living among the residents of a special school for children with an autism-like impairment caused by a partial rejection of neural implants. He didn’t have the disorder, but could fake it and used his computer hacking skills to conceal the fact that he wasn’t actually registered as a student/resident. He was also protecting them from abuses by the staff. Lots of moral gray areas here (although the good-guys in Stand Alone Complex are always perfectly good, the bad-guys are rarely one-dimensionally bad).

This is some seriously great television. Add it to your Netflix if you like hard science fiction.

I often think that some of the remediation possible as assistive technologies feel a little like science fiction. We are blurring the boundaries between our biological selves and our tools in ways that were never possible before. And we are bringing people into the mainstream of our society who have never been included in any society before. Science fiction, although it deals in fantasy on the surface, is always ahead of the curve in exploring what advances in technology mean to us as a society.

It has always astonished me how long it takes kids to get powered mobility. Not being able to move around has profound effects on cognitive and language development. Check out these robots:

(However, please don’t read the YouTube comments. YouTube comments are probably the most cognitively impaired language output on the planet. )

Reuters reports the following story:

No thumbprint, no money, bank tells armless man

MIAMI (Reuters) – A bank in Florida refused to cash a check for an armless man because he could not provide a thumbprint.

“They looked at my prosthetic hands and the teller said, ‘Well, obviously you can’t give us a thumbprint’,” Steve Valdez told CNN on Wednesday.

But he said the Bank of America Corp branch in downtown Tampa, Florida, still insisted on a thumbprint identification for him to cash a check drawn on his wife’s account at the bank, even though he showed them two photo IDs.

In the incident last week, a bank supervisor told Valdez he could only cash the check without a thumbprint if he brought his wife in with him or he opened an account with them.

“I told them I neither wanted an account with them and couldn’t bring my wife in because she was nowhere close by,” Valdez told CNN.

Bank of America said in a statement cited by CNN: “While the thumbprint is a requirement for those who don’t have accounts, the bank should have made accommodations.”

Valdez said his treatment by the bank violated the U.S. Americans with Disability Act requiring institutions to provide reasonable accommodation to disabled persons.

(Writing by Pascal Fletcher; editing by Todd Eastham)

It would be funny it it weren’t so disturbingly stupid.

Cory Doctorow is my hero.

I’ve lost count of how many times he has shown himself more than worthy of adoration.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/13/young-adult-writers.html

http://craphound.com/?p=2329

Back in August, I got a surprise in the mail: a long Braille computer printout and a letter. The letter was from Patti Smith, who teaches visually impaired middle-schoolers in Detroit’s public school system. She explained that almost all the Braille kids’ books she had access to were for really little kids — kindergartners, basically — and how discouraging this was for her kids.The reason she was writing to me was to thank me for releasing my young adult novel Little Brother under a Creative Commons license, which meant that she could download the ebook version and run it through her school’s Braille embosser (US copyright law makes it legal to convert any book to Braille or audiobook for blind people, but it is technically challenging and expensive to do this without the electronic text).

I wrote about this on my personal blog, and it inspired my colleague, the sf/f writer Paula Johansen, to write to Patti to offer up her own YA titles as ebooks for Patti’s students.

Well, this got me thinking that there might be lots of YA writers who’d be glad to see their books get into the hands of visually impaired, literature-hungry students, so I worked with Patti to put together the pitch below. Please pass it along to all the YA writers you know. I would love to see Patti’s class start the school year with a magnificent library of hundreds and hundreds of fantastic YA books to choose from, so that they can start a lifelong love-affair with literature.

Sang-Mook Lee is a very widely cited/published marine geophysicist from South Korea who sustained a severe spinal cord injury. He is paralyzed from the neck down.

Sang-Mook Lee, PhD

Here is a blog about his assistive technology (which does not seem to be updated anymore). He was recently profiled on Nova Science Now.

What makes his situation notable is that people with disabilities in South Korea rarely engage in society, but Dr. Sang-Mook Lee has returned to his research and teaching at the Seoul National University. They call him “the Korean Stephen Hawking” there (which I don’t particularly think is appropriate; why not just be Dr. Lee, scholar in a wheelchair?) He wrote a book about his struggle and also blogs and makes public appearances to advocate for individuals with disabilities. There are some progressive laws in place (see links after the jump), but the society as a whole is lagging behind on the issue.

Having total paralysis is bad enough, but to face widespread discrimination and a public environment lacking in accommodations would be worse. Such an environment needs civil rights leaders such as Dr. Lee.

Some more links about disability law and issues in Republic of Korea:

http://www.dredf.org/international/Korea1.html

http://www.dredf.org/international/korea2.html

http://humanrights.go.kr/english/about_nhrck/president_view.jsp?board_id=Activities&seqid=884

http://humanrights.go.kr/english/activities/view_01.jsp

From the New England Journal of Medicine: (edited for brevity).

Among surviving soldiers wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, TBI appears to account for a larger proportion of casualties than it has in other recent U.S. wars. [...]22 percent of the wounded soldiers from these conflicts [...] had injuries to the head, face, or neck. This percentage can serve as a rough estimate of the fraction who have TBI [T]he true proportion is probably higher, since some cases of closed brain injury are not diagnosed promptly.

In the Vietnam War, by contrast, 12 to 14 percent of all combat casualties had a brain injury, and an additional 2 to 4 percent had a brain injury plus a lethal wound to the chest or abdomen. [B]ecause mortality from brain injuries among U.S. combatants in Vietnam was 75 percent or greater, soldiers with brain injuries made up only a small fraction of the casualties treated in hospitals.

Kevlar body armor and helmets are one reason for the high proportion of TBIs among soldiers wounded in the current conflicts. By effectively shielding the wearer from bullets and shrapnel, the protective gear has improved overall survival rates, and Kevlar helmets have reduced the frequency of penetrating head injuries. However, the helmets cannot completely protect the face, head, and neck, nor do they prevent the kind of closed brain injuries often produced by blasts. As insurgents continue to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, most brain injuries are being caused by IEDs, and closed brain injuries outnumber penetrating ones among patients seen at Walter Reed[...] All admitted patients who have been exposed to a blast are routinely evaluated for brain injury; 59 percent of them have been given a diagnosis of TBI[...]. Of these injuries, 56 percent are considered moderate or severe, and 44 percent are mild.

So the design and engineering of armor has changed the nature of the injuries that happen on the battlefield.

the MKU Instavest prototype

Design. Engineering. Acquired disabilities. That sounds like this blog.

Some physicists have looked at the current armor anew and determined that there are some serious problems.
Here is a preprint of a journal paper on the mechanics of traumatic brain injury caused by explosives.
Since we know that TBI is a major threat, these authors recommend adjusting the design of helmets so that they can better withstand the pressure waves that occur in explosions (without, of course, compromising their ability to also deflect bullets and shrapnel, which they currently do quite well).

The Army knows that this is an important issue and have made adjustments for it. (A quick shoutout to my former employer, who runs a facility that specializes in this area.) But how quickly can we engineer and manufacture a better helmet and deploy it to the troops who need it in Iraq and Afghanistan? Probably not quickly enough, and the military procurement process is famously biased by politics and restrained by bureaucracy— so in a classic case of “fighting the last war” our troops in ten years will probably be much better prepared than our troops on the ground today.

Snow Leopard, the development nickname for Macintosh OSX version 10.6, is available for sale today.
It has new accessibility features.

PCWorld article on these.

I’m particularly interested in the mirroring the screen with the trackpad feature. The trackpads on the new unibody laptops are huge. And I recall that Apple has patents on some haptic feedback touchscreen ideas. Could a built-in braille reader in the Macbook be possible?

Must remember to do a blog post about Windows 7 when it comes out.