Turn Down The Volume On Your IPOD
So now it’s Apple Computer’s IPOD. The London Evening Standard this week published a warning issued by the Royal National Institute of the Deaf in the U.K. that London commuters are permanently deafening themselves by turning up the volumes on their IPODs to drown out the noise in the city’s underground subway system. Read more
Cochlear Implants and Music
I went to my daughter’s piano recital last night and she was phenomenal. Because all music is horribly distorted for me, I couldn’t hear how well she played, but the response from the audience was awesome. My heart swelled. It also reminded me I’ve been meaning to point out a good article in the Bionic Beat newsletter. Read more
If You Ever Wondered Whether Early Screening Works….
Read “In This Silent World,” today’s entry in the personal weblog of British journalist Charles Arthur. It’s a beautiful, moving account of the agonizing process of discovery he and his wife went through with their newborn son. Read more
ScanSoft: Will Speech Processing Go The Way Of The Kurzweil Reader?
I frequently entertain myself with a futuristic vision of high-tech eyeglasses equipped with a tiny microphone, a tiny speech processing chip, and a tiny holographic projector that can transcribe everyday conversation in real time and project it in front of my eyes like the closed-captioning system on my TV. Believe it or not, all the technologies required to create such a product are known — it will only take another 10 or 15 (okay, maybe 20) years of development before we see such a device. Read more
Go America is Going Places
I’d heard of Go America in the go-go days of the dot-com boom, but back then it was just one of a million hot new suppliers of wireless data services for handheld computers. I never knew about its Wyndtell subsidiary, which focused exclusively on providing telecommunications services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Read more