A Taste for Ideas

AVT, ASL, and definitions
A Taste for Ideas Musings on this -- AVT seems to forbid the use of ASL. ASL-using D/deaf people are annoyed at this. People whose kids use AVT are insisting that their kids are fine without ASL, so it's not needed; this is very different from saying that ASL damaged kids and so should be forbidden.It all seems to come down to the fact that ASL either does or does not damage kids. I...
Wed, Aug 30 2017

Speaking, signing, and the relative advantages of these...
A Taste for Ideas Since the SW, I've been doing a bit of a mental compare/contrast between signed and spoken languages occasioned by learning that one of the instructors there, a man who works at the CSD in Riverside (I believe) grew up using SEE and took to ASL like a duck to water when he was exposed to it.I began mulling the relative uses of different modes of communicating, and ran...
Wed, Aug 30 2017

Deaf culture, men, music, CIs
A Taste for Ideas Just a few observations from the Silent Weekend at the Rennie's this past weekend:1) It's continually interesting to me how these things overwhelmingly consist of Deaf men and hearing women. Deaf culture is the only one so far that I've seen where a good chunk of the cultural outreach is done by men. I'm not saying that Deaf women don't, and I've seen many online th...
Wed, Aug 30 2017

AVT, ASL, and definitions
A Taste for Ideas Musings on this -- AVT seems to forbid the use of ASL. ASL-using D/deaf people are annoyed at this. People whose kids use AVT are insisting that their kids are fine without ASL, so it's not needed; this is very different from saying that ASL damaged kids and so should be forbidden.It all seems to come down to the fact that ASL either does or does not damage kids. I...
Fri, Jun 06 2008

Speaking, signing, and the relative advantages of these...
A Taste for Ideas Since the SW, I've been doing a bit of a mental compare/contrast between signed and spoken languages occasioned by learning that one of the instructors there, a man who works at the CSD in Riverside (I believe) grew up using SEE and took to ASL like a duck to water when he was exposed to it.I began mulling the relative uses of different modes of communicating, and ran...
Wed, May 28 2008

Deaf culture, men, music, CIs
A Taste for Ideas Just a few observations from the Silent Weekend at the Rennie's this past weekend:1) It's continually interesting to me how these things overwhelmingly consist of Deaf men and hearing women. Deaf culture is the only one so far that I've seen where a good chunk of the cultural outreach is done by men. I'm not saying that Deaf women don't, and I've seen many online th...
Tue, May 27 2008

Now, THIS is interesting.
A Taste for Ideas [link] I still do feel that the whole issue lies in "the mouth speaks because the hands are occupied" thing. But this is a lot richer vein than the "Koko the gorilla" end of things, which I have to say I discount almost entirely.This seems like a richer source of genuine information only because the animals appear to be generating this behavior themselves, and [...]
Fri, Aug 03 2007

Combination hearing aid and CI
A Taste for Ideas Found out about this at Michael Chorost's blog: [link] think I may explode if I don't learn more about these RIGHT NOW.
Fri, Jul 27 2007

General comments on the misuse of logic and science by...
A Taste for Ideas Just some quick comments on this, occasioned by my previous post.It really bothers me when people (like the oralists, but they are only one of a very widely scattered, numerous type) grotesquely misuse scientific conclusions and methods. It bothers me because, when considered carefully, science will just about always help to illuminate damned near anything.But when [...]
Thu, Jul 26 2007

More on the misuse of Darwinism and natural selection
A Taste for Ideas am rereading bits of
Thu, Jul 26 2007

Interesting link from UCLA about mirror neurons
A Taste for Ideas They examined non-linguistic "gestures," if there can be said to be such a thing, and I may rethink that phrasing: [link] reason why I'm linking this here is related to what I've said before about perception of accents; I don't know if I'm overgeneralizing from myself here, but this study may actually not be demonstrating what the researchers [...]
Mon, Jul 23 2007

There will always be deafness; there will always be signed...
A Taste for Ideas Still thinking about this -- and I keep coming around to the inescapable conclusion that there will always be deafness and signed languages. I just can't avoid it. Maybe it's easy for me since I don't really want to; I dislike the idea of any minority language vanishing with a whole-body shudder. But I just cannot avoid coming to that [...]
Mon, Jul 23 2007

Yet another excellent silent weekend w/BEG
A Taste for Ideas Read more here.Some general observations:1) Again, the gender imbalance was in force -- more women than men, but definitely some men, most of whom with a few exceptions were deaf themselves.2) Silicone earplugs == excellent idea. I hate reading a Welsh newspaper when I'm listening to English-lyrics music, and hearing even small amounts of chatter in English in [...]
Sun, Jul 22 2007

Origami to Help Teach Math to Deaf Students
A Taste for Ideas [link] not entirely convinced of how useful this is to deaf students as opposed to all students. I suspect that if deaf kids have more trouble picking up math, it's because it's hard to pick up anything when you can't understand your teacher. o_ONevertheless, possibly interesting ...
Thu, Jul 12 2007

Misunderstood Darwinism and languages
A Taste for Ideas First, a quote from "Through Deaf Eyes":If speech is better for hearing people that barbaric signs, it is better for the deaf; being the 'fittest, it has survived.'A quote from "A History of Wales":Although Darwin's theory of evolution caused much distress to the orthodox, Darwinianism was rapidly adapted to the world of the social sciences. [...]
Wed, Jul 04 2007

So apparently, it's not working anymore.
A Taste for Ideas AutoGK -- it's stopped working.It insists on putting the same subtitles as the first thing I rendered on a new file. Yes, I choose the correct sub file.I'm no longer amused by this.Interestingly enough, after having done a bit of digging, I see that it wasn't working the first time, either. Not really.Lovely. Just lovely.
Sun, Jun 24 2007

Captions vs. Subtitling
A Taste for Ideas There appears to be some question as to what the difference is between them, with some people saying "not much" and others saying "they're totally different." There are also websites that say that they are utterly different from one another, and then describe the difference in terms of "captions tend to" and "subtitles are more likely to," which doesn't [...]
Fri, Jun 22 2007

Success! AutoGK rocks for subtitles ...
A Taste for Ideas I owe Jared Evans a case of whatever his favorite beer is.AutoGK works a treat for burning handmade subs into an AVI file, and the xvid codec it uses isn't bad, although it'd be nice to be able to choose that sort of thing. But it's realyl quite good and looks nice when fullscreened.Next up: Playing around with the different types of subtitle formats I [...]
Fri, Jun 22 2007

More on the Saga of Subtitling
A Taste for Ideas Potentially Useful: [link] Ignore the "BTW, if you're doing something technical you must obviously be male!" screencap halfway down the page. My online lessons for this sort of thing will involve slightly different screencaps, viz. type "jamie bamber" into the images.google.com search box. :->Random Observation: Subtitling David Tennant's Doctor is a [...]
Thu, Jun 21 2007

Subtitling software *grits teeth*
A Taste for Ideas Do you know what would be very, very nice?Subtitling software that does the following:1) Imports transcripts so that I can use the mouse to set in and out points for each subtitle.2) Documentation that actually tells me how the hell to do this. Does no one understand the concept of software documentation, even for free/shareware?!3) Documentation that doesn't [...]
Tue, Jun 19 2007

Rhetorical questions and ASL
A Taste for Ideas BEG has an excellent book that I still have to buy; I'm going to order it this weekend from a local bookstore, the ASL Phrasebook. I paged through it when we went to that Silent Weekend a while back (the one where we almost got snowed in *ARGH*).That book went over one of the most common devices in ASL: rhetorical questions. And it's occurring to me how [...]
Fri, Jun 15 2007

European country signs
A Taste for Ideas European Country Signs, with native signs included when he knew them.He was fingerspelling slowly enough for me to get every single country, and I did!And he made the sign for Wales! Everyone always forgets Wales exists, but he included them! *does little happy dance*Asian countries as well ...
Wed, Jun 13 2007

Why it took me a while to realize what "deaf" meant
A Taste for Ideas I've brought this up in the past, but the recent discussions on Deafread are making me think more about this as well. I'll refer to the sentimet as JSDD, or "Just say deaf, damnit."It took me a while to realize what the word meant -- and that "blind" wasn't the right analogy.Take me, for example. I've got dismal vision. Without my glasses, I [...]
Tue, Jun 12 2007

Redefining terms: Deaf and Mute
A Taste for Ideas I've been thinking about this a bit too, and Lantana's use of the term "deafmute" on my previous entry brought it to the forefront of my mind again, so I'm going to think out loud for a little bit about this.I admit that my first reaction upon hearing the term "mute" is "no way." Yall aren't MUTE; you talk just fine. You do it with your hands, [...]
Mon, Jun 11 2007

More on the "Crab Theory" discussion ...
A Taste for Ideas Time for another discussion of Crab Theory ... Here at ASL Pride as well.The term used for this behavior among women is "tall poppy syndrome." It comes from Australia initially, but it has been adopted by the women's movement to describe EXACTLY the same behavior that women use on one another, even within feminism -- and worst of all, within our own heads. [...]
Sun, Jun 10 2007

Hawl gweld cyfartal/Equal access
A Taste for Ideas Per ADP's entry:Equal access for deaf peopleI used Premiere to do the subtitles -- I did each one as a separate title card, but I could place them exactly, at least. If there isn't a plug-in for subtitles in Premiere, there should be.
Wed, Jun 06 2007

What the DPN protest looked like from the outside
A Taste for Ideas I very distinctly recall learning about it on the news, I can tell you that. It was definitely newsworthy to hearing people, most of whom hadn't even known that Gallaudet existed before then.What I can tell you as a hearie is that most of us were surprised to learn that the place didn't already have a deaf president. :-) At least, I was surprised and the [...]
Wed, Jun 06 2007

Another odd realization from "Through Deaf Eyes"
A Taste for Ideas I'm watching it again after converting it for my iPod. :-)I was dumbfounded to learn that even many Deaf people did not realize that ASL was a language.In retrospect, I suppose it makes sense for people in that situation. (Hey, in retrospect, everything makes sense.) But that blew me away. It absolutely astonished me that people could speak and not know they [...]
Wed, Jun 06 2007

Smorgasbrød
A Taste for Ideas Watching a bit of "Through Deaf Eyes" again ... and again,that scene with the little girl in the classroom makes me want to spit. "Our class has learned 50 nouns in a few months!" *argh* I could kill that teacher.Just sign "bike," you nitwit. Just sign "bike" to her. Just sign the damned word! *headdesk* All this endless back-and-forth, this ridiculous, [...]
Tue, Jun 05 2007

Grargh. I need Stokoe's publications.
A Taste for Ideas I mean, if I'm going to go on about this like I am. I need to get hold of Stokoe's publications and see what he did, how he denoted it, what general rules he discovered -- as well as continuing to learn this language.As a commenter in a previous post stated (and I need to go back and address that when I get home), the classifiers are the bear when it comes [...]
Tue, May 29 2007

General guidelines for a written form of ASL
A Taste for Ideas Not only is this a persistent topic, but it's also an interesting one, and one in which many people have some serious misconceptions of what any language's written form is supposed to record and achieve. I've entertained many of these misconceptions myself, so I'd like to try to address some of them to give people an idea of the topic.I'd [...]
Fri, May 25 2007

More on audism and when it rears its butt-ugly little head...
A Taste for Ideas Still thinking about the blink (defined in my previous post) ...I just realized soemthing about it -- I do not blink when I see Deaf people using ASL. Not that I can detect, anyhow. When I blink is when a Deaf person for whom English is not a native language speaks. The "Deaf" accent, as it's been referred to.And I've noticed that I also blink at other [...]
Tue, May 22 2007

What is audism?
A Taste for Ideas On Ben's blog, he addresses a question that's been flying around the vlogosphere for a while. What is audism? What use is that word? People are saying all sorts of things, and people are disagreeing about things where I think that no disagreement exists, really. It's a matter of semantics.Basically, I think it's just a matter of using multiple [...]
Tue, May 22 2007

Cool hearing aid design!
A Taste for Ideas [link] it certainly looks nice. :-) Don't know how well it works, though.
Sat, May 19 2007

"Would you take the pill that made you hearing?"
A Taste for Ideas First off, before I chew on this for a bit, I should apologize for being absent for so long. My job entails a lot of statewide travel lately, and I've been somewhat exhausted by it. Am working from home at the moment, which means that little posts like this can fill the breaks.I've also recently seen a rather good movie on DVD lately -- the 2003 version of [...]
Thu, May 17 2007

Translation breaks all languages.
A Taste for Ideas Just reading an interesting post titled ASL is not broken English.It occurs to me that all languages are "broken" when you translate them. Hearing people, or people with English as a primary language, see signing, assume it must be English on the hands (partly, I think, because Americans are using it), try to transliterate or "translate" it into English, and since it [...]
Sun, May 06 2007

The supposed "iconicity" of ASL -- nope!
A Taste for Ideas Just thinking about this after poking around on deafpundit's blog and running into this comment from JPR.I personally see no problem with trying to "explain away" the supposed iconicity of ASL. So first off, what is iconicity? What does it mean to say that a language must be "arbitrary" in the symbols it uses?Okay. Now, there is nothing particularly canine [...]
Sat, May 05 2007

Prepositions in ASL
A Taste for Ideas I'm thinking about this a bit, given my recent post about ASL and parts of speech. (Still haven't seen Toby's vlog, and I'm dying to -- but I'm at work and can't watch videos as a result. Toby's discussion of ASL parts of speech will have to wait until I get home tonight.)So.I started thinking about why verbs and nouns, even [...]
Fri, May 04 2007

Weird little ASL tics I seem to have accumulated
A Taste for Ideas I seem to use the sign "true" to stand in for " ... right?" That little tag you put at the end of a sentence. I have no clue if this is even vaguely grammatical.Last time I studied this in a class, about 20 years ago, the instructor told us that while the lifted "a" hand was often used educationally for "-er" and "-est," that using "more" and "worse" for these was [...]
Thu, May 03 2007

More on my opinions on CIs and CI surgery
A Taste for Ideas Just a bit more in response to Dianrez's calling more attention to my post on this topic:Quick note: I do think that CI surgery can be an informed, intelligent, and reasonable choice for a person. If I were to lose my hearing I'd probably bite the bullet and get one in my left ear so I could continue to use the phone. I would rather not get a bi-lat, [...]
Thu, May 03 2007

ATFI: Washington, IKJ, and what makes a leader succeed or...
A Taste for Ideas "ATFI: Washington, IKJ, and what makes a leader succeed or fail" on Google Video Are you more important than the rules, or the other way around? Transcript:Tonight I'd like to discuss two revolutionary(*) leaders -- IKJ and George Washington. A weird topic, but I believe looking at Washington's success will help show why Jordan [...]
Wed, May 02 2007

Teaching ASL language structure to Deaf kids in school
A Taste for Ideas How many Deaf/ASL-fluent people out there have taken ASL linguistics classes?A staple of hearing schools (which any mainstreamed deaf kids would have experienced as well) are English classes, where you memorize prepositions, study spelling, and diagram sentences and so forth. (Despite this, most hearing high school students exit their school with all the literacy of [...]
Tue, May 01 2007

ATFI's First Vlog -- Welsh, ASL, and oralism
A Taste for Ideas "ATFI's First Vlog -- Welsh, ASL, and oralism" on Google Video A comparison of Welsh language history and oralism Okay, My name's Janis -- I'm BEG's friend. We went together to the Silent Weekend camp two weeks ago.Okay, I'm studying ASL currently. But I love all languages, and I'm also studying Welsh. [...]
Mon, Apr 30 2007

Gallaudet and deafness
A Taste for Ideas I'm going to be very clear here:Gallaudet must not close or lose its accreditation. If it does, it must immediately pursue it again. If the university cannot regain it, another university must be established immediately, or at least as soon as humanly possible.When it comes to minority language survival, there is nothing more important than an educational [...]
Mon, Apr 30 2007

A few things to explain ...
A Taste for Ideas Since I'd like to start putting vlogs up, and since this may entail people actually reading this blog, I figured it might behoove me to discuss a few things ahead of time.1) If you read the userinfo associated with this blog, you will learn that, after 41 years on this earth, I was very recently diagnosed with a wee miswiring in my brain that explans a lot of [...]
Mon, Apr 30 2007