February
2009
For Valentine's Day,
Some Favorite Quotes About Love
"The Eskimoes had 52 names for snow because it was important to them. There ought to be as many for love."
Margaret Atwood
"I have loved, and I have been loved, and all the rest is just background music."
Estelle Raimi
"In this life, we cannot do great things - we can only do small things with great love."
Mother Theresa
"Love never ends, And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love."
St. Paul
"The man who fears nothing, loves nothing, and if you love nothing, what joy is there in your life?"
King Arthur, "First Knight"
"Once you have loved one person deeply and intimately, it's easier to love others because you know how."
"For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult task of all... the work for which all other work is but preparation. It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen... a great exacting claim upon us, something that chooses us out and calls us to vast things."
R. M. Rilke
"Love increases the mystery of the self and the other. In love, we learn to respect and adore what is beyond understanding, grasping, or explanation."
Sam Keen, "Fire in the Belly"
"The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen, or even touched - they must be felt with the heart."
Helen Keller
"When you work, you are a flute, through whose harp the whispering of the hours turns to music. And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth."
Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet"
Eartha Kitt
The wonderful performer Eartha Kitt has died at 81. She truly was one of a kind. My husband and I were fortunate enough to attend one of her performances in February of last year. I was awed by her vocal control when she sang, and my husband told me about her lithe and athletic dance movements. We would have been impressed by such a performance from someone 30 years younger. She was an inspiration.
Santa Baby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7T0IK99ELs
I Want To Be Evil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ5VaBgXzuM
Tidbits
During the last week of January, it snowed in Dubai in the Arabian peninsula - they don't even have a word for it.
During hard economic times, many people tend to gain weight, called "recession pounds," because they're taking comfort in fatty foods. Inadequate sleep can contribute to overeating.
There are 16 muscles in your tongue.
Share the Love - Weekday Special
Refer a friend, get a free session.
A lot of people are feeling stressed in these volatile economic times, and many of us are feeling conservative about spending money. So here's a great value to share with your family, friends, and co-workers who may want some relaxation and healing.
Refer a new client, and I'll give you a free half-hour session or $30 off your next session of an hour or more. This works in one of two ways:
- Refer a new client, and after she or he comes in for a session, I'll give you a free or discounted session.
- Or buy a gift certificate for a new client, and receive a free or discounted session.
Save $10 - $25 /30min.
Save $20 - $45 /60min., $69 /90min., $89 /120min.
Offer good for appointments 11AM-4PM Tue., Thu., Fri. Good for a session of any bodywork modality - massage, energy work, private yoga lessons, spiritual healing. Cannot be combined with any other offer or discount. Offer good till 5/1/09.
"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
- Albert Kamu.
From "William Safire's Rules for Writers":
"Remember to never split an infinitive."
"The passive voice should never be used."
"Avoid clichés like the plague."
Musician Jokes
"Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused."
Q: How are a banjo player and a blind javelin thrower alike?
A: Both command immediate attention and alarm, and force everyone to move out of range.
Q: What do you call a guitar player that only knows two chords?
A: A music critic.
Q: What is the dynamic range of a bass trombone?
A: On or off.
Q: How do you keep your violin from being stolen?
A: Put it in a viola case.
Q: What's the difference between an oboe and a bassoon?
A: You can hit a baseball further with a bassoon.
Q: What's the difference between an opera singer and a pit bull?
A: Lipstick.
Q: "Did you hear my last recital?"
A: Friend: "I hope so."
For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can't
New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.
T. V. RAMAN was a bookish child who developed a love of math and puzzles at an early age.
That passion didn't change after glaucoma took his eyesight at the age of 14. What changed is the role that technology - and his own innovations - played in helping him pursue his interests.
A native of India, Mr. Raman went from relying on volunteers to read him textbooks at a top technical university there to leading a largely autonomous life in Silicon Valley, where he is a highly respected computer scientist and an engineer at Google.
Along the way, Mr. Raman built a series of tools to help him take advantage of objects or technologies that were not designed with blind users in mind. They ranged from a Rubik's Cube covered in Braille to a software program that can take complex mathematical formulas and read them aloud, which became the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell. He also built a version of Google's search service tailored for blind users.
Mr. Raman, 43, is now working to modify the latest technological gadget that he says could make life easier for blind people: a touch-screen phone.
"What Raman does is amazing," said Paul Schroeder, vice president for programs and policy at the American Foundation for the Blind, which conducts research on technology that can help visually impaired people. "He is a leading thinker on accessibility issues, and his capacity to design and alter technology to meet his needs is unique."
Some of Mr. Raman's innovations may help make electronic gadgets and Web services more user-friendly for everyone. Instead of asking how something should work if a person cannot see, he says he prefers to ask, "How should something work when the user is not looking at the screen?"
Such systems could prove useful for drivers or anyone else who could benefit from eyes-free access to a phone. They could also appeal to aging baby boomers with fading vision who want to keep using technology they've come to depend on.
Mr. Raman's approach reflects a recognition that many innovations designed primarily for people with disabilities have benefited the broader public, said Larry Goldberg, who oversees the National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. They include curb cuts for wheelchairs, captions for television broadcasts and optical character-recognition technology, which was fine-tuned to create software that could read printed books aloud and is now used in many computer applications, he said.
With no buttons to guide the fingers on its glassy surface, the touch-screen cellphone may seem a particularly daunting challenge. But Mr. Raman said that with the right tweaks, touch-screen phones - many of which already come equipped with GPS technology and a compass - could help blind people navigate the world.
"How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realize that your phone could say, 'Walk straight and within 200 feet you'll get to the intersection of X and Y,' " Mr. Raman said. "This is entirely doable."
ADVOCATES for the blind have long complained that technology companies have done a generally poor job of making their products accessible. The Web, while opening many opportunities for blind people, is still riddled with obstacles. And sophisticated screen-reader software, which turns documents and Web pages into synthesized speech, can cost more than $1,000. Even with a screen reader, many sites are hard to navigate.
Last year, the National Federation of the Blind reached a settlement of a landmark class-action lawsuit against one company whose site advocates found unusable, Target. In the settlement, the retailer agreed to make its Web site accessible to blind people. The federation assesses the usability of Web sites and currently certifies only a handful as being fully accessible.
One challenge is that technology often evolves much faster than the guidelines that ensure Web sites work well with screen readers. In December, the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards group, released Version 2.0 of its accessibility guidelines for Web sites. The previous version dated back to 1999, when the Web consisted largely of static Web pages rather than interactive applications.
Obstacles on the Web take many forms. A common one is the Captcha, a security feature consisting of a string of distorted letters and numbers that users are supposed to read and retype before they register for a new service or send e-mail. Few Web sites offer audio Captchas.
Some pages are just poorly designed, like e-commerce sites where the "checkout" button is an image that isn't labeled so screen readers can find it.
"The overwhelming percentage of the industry really hasn't stepped up to the plate to provide the blindness community with equal access to their products," said Eric Bridges, director of advocacy and governmental affairs at the American Council of the Blind. Mr. Bridges and other advocates argue that accessibility should be built into new technologies, not added as an afterthought.
People with other disabilities face similar challenges on the Internet. "On the deafness side, the frustration is huge because of all of the video out there without captions," Mr. Goldberg said.
MR. RAMAN, who before joining Google in 2005 worked at Adobe Systems and as a researcher at I.B.M., is intimately familiar with accessibility problems, both personally and professionally. In 2006, he developed a version of Google's search engine that gives a slight preference to Web sites that work well with screen readers. The system had to test millions of Web pages.
"You wouldn't have found a single page that fully complied with the accessibility guidelines," Mr. Raman said. Still, the system could detect which pages worked reasonably well with screen readers.
The service is not being used as widely as he had hoped. Still, it has had an impact. Several Web site operators whose sites weren't showing up prominently in Google search results asked Mr. Raman how they could fix their sites so they would rank better.
The service includes a screen magnifier that enlarges individual search results. Mr. Raman says the feature is intended to help low-vision users, but it could also prove useful to a much larger population, especially on cellphones and other devices with small screens.
For his own use, he has built a highly customized system that allows him efficient access to much of what he needs on his PC and on the Web, stripping out anything that could slow him down. For instance, the system goes directly to the article text on the news sites he reads regularly, bypassing navigational links and other features found on most Web pages.
On a recent day, Mr. Raman was working on a research paper about the future structure of the Web. A monitor hung above the desk. It is usually turned off, unless he wants to show a colleague or visitor what he is working on. He typed at his keyboard, his head slightly tilted to one side, listening to his screen reader through a pair of wireless headphones.
The screen reader is calibrated to speak at roughly triple the speed of a normal voice. To the untrained ear, the output is incomprehensible, but it allows Mr. Raman to "read" at roughly the same speed as a sighted person.
Processing information quickly is a skill he has developed over the years: a video on YouTube shows him solving his Braille Rubik's Cube in 23 seconds. When he is not typing, Mr. Raman, who wears large sunglasses, is often folding and unfolding pieces of paper into tiny, origami-like geometrical shapes at prodigious speed.
He shares a work area at Google with Charles Chen, a 25-year-old engineer, and Hubbell, Mr. Raman's guide dog. (Hubbell has his own Web site.)
Mr. Chen, who is sighted, developed a free screen reader for Web pages that works with the Firefox browser. Working together, the two recently added keyboard shortcuts that help blind and low-vision users navigate quickly through Google's search results. They've also developed tools to make sophisticated Web applications, like e-mail and blog readers, suitable for screen-reading software.
Now, much of their effort is focused on touch-screen phones.
"The thing I am most interested in is all of the stuff moving to the mobile world, because it is a big life-changer," Mr. Raman said.
To show their progress, Mr. Raman pulled his T-Mobile G1, a touch-screen phone with Google's Android software, from a pocket of his jeans. He and Mr. Chen have already outfitted it with software that speaks much like a screen reader on a PC. Now they are working on ways to allow blind people, or anyone who is not looking at the screen, to enter text, numbers and commands.
That development would complement voice-recognition systems, which are not always reliable and don't work well in noisy environments.
Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction - up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.
He and Mr. Chen are testing several other input methods. None of these technologies have been rolled out, but Mr. Raman, who is already using the G1 as his primary cellphone, hopes to make them freely available soon.
(Few screen readers are available for smartphones today, and they can often cost as much as a phone itself.)
What may become the most life-changing mobile technology - a phone that can recognize and read signs through its camera - may still be a few years away, Mr. Raman said. Already, some devices can read text this way. But because blind users don't know where signs are, they can't point the camera at them or align it properly, Mr. Raman said. Once chips become powerful enough, they will be able to detect a sign's location and read skewed type, he said.
"Those things will happen," he said. When they do, sighted users will benefit, too.
"If you have the technology that can recognize a street sign as you drive by it, that is helpful for everyone," he said. "In a foreign country, it will translate it."
Mr. Raman's innovations have already made their way onto millions of PCs. At Adobe in the 1990s, he helped to adapt the PDF format so it could be read by screen readers. That was required for PDF to be used by the federal government, and it eventually led to the technology's being embraced as a global standard for electronic documents.
"It was incredibly important to us as a business, and to the blind," said John Warnock, the chairman and founder of Adobe.
Mr. Raman says he thinks he has the largest impact when he can persuade other engineers to make their products accessible - or, better yet, when he can convince them that there are interesting problems to be solved in this area. "If I can get another 10 engineers motivated to work on accessibility," he said, "it is a huge win."
This New York Times article is located at: http://tinyurl.com/dfcsd6
* * * Disclaimer: Information in this newsletter is offered as interesting information and is not intended to be medical advice. Please consult your physician.
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