I called our local accessible taxi number 45 minutes ahead of my hoped-for trip. The cab came 45 minutes late; I scheduled in buffer time, but not *that* much buffer time. Drove up to the back; waited for the driver to unfold his ramp. No joy - it was missing! He had the part that folds out of the trunk, but the 'last 5 inches' wedge wasn't there, and he didn't know where it was. I'm still not sure how that happens ...

And this is for the 10-week ASL class that illness already forced me to miss 3 sessions of. Current mood: gnyargh.

For future reference:

mutt can send attachments to a standard unix pipe, which is convenient if you are SSHing into it, and the host machine doesn't support that file type. Sadly, scp can't take input from stdin, but you can acheive the same effect with ssh user@host "cat >output_file_and_path". Sweet.

I was told last week by a research audiologist that lip reading is far more prevalent in the hearing population than we would expect, to the point that it is questionable whether deaf individuals are really any better at it than hearing individuals. Instead, apparently we're simply more comfortable relying on lip reading. I'm still somewhat skeptical of this - the McGurk Effect notwithstanding, I think I communicate far better with just a visual signal than most hearing people can. Still, I suppose the argument that it's just a different set of communicative strategies can't be immediately dismissed; we see similar phenomena in spoken language, in that two second-language speakers may perform similarly in a classroom environment, yet be perceived (and perceive themselves) as having widely varying abilities in a real world situation.

The theory would go, then, that those of us who are fluent lip readers (if you'll pardon the misuse of the word 'fluent') aren't necessarily picking up more phonemes than anyone else; our apparent superior abilities are simply the result of lots of practice at relying on contextual analysis, pragmatics, and the "Smile and Nod" method (which actually can have the paradoxical effect of reducing isolation in social situations ... though I suppose that's a topic for another time). Speakers for whom lip reading is a secondary channel aren't used to relying on these strategies, and furthermore may feel uncomfortable, realizing that their access to language is very different than it usually is. However, they will prioritize visual stimuli more heavily when auditory stimuli are unreliable (say, in a high-noise environment).

Between my conversation with the audiologist mentioned above, and the Googling I just did, it looks like a lot of this research is being done at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. I haven't found the specific paper(s) I was looking for - the ones that try to find a correlation between lip reading abilities and some more fundamental trait - but there's some interesting stuff out there.

There's not one, but two, major street improvement projects happening on campus, and on both of the streets that I use to get to class.

The project done by the university has so far not been an issue - pain in the ass, yes, but not a big deal. The one by the city (and I'm not suggesting this is a difference between the university and the city, BTW) recently became nasty: they took away the curb cuts. Some of them, anyway.

These aren't 'real' curb cuts - they're not built into the sidewalk. Instead, they're asphalt ramps that poke out into the street a bit. They're actually nice and smooth, although I'm not sure how old they are, or how well they might age. Thing is, because they stick out in the street, they have to be removed in order to repave the street.

So far, all of this is fine - like the changes on the university's project, a pain in the ass, but not a big deal, because there are enough curb cuts left that it's possible to reroute. However, they're completely unmarked. The first I knew of this change was when I was coming out of the street in the dark - fortunately, I was coming out of the street, not going down into it, or I might have flipped into the street rather than just added another item to the list of things I hit that day. This morning, I made a similar mistake on a different ex-curb-cut (and going down, so I almost did flip). That was partly my own fault, in that I was running on autopilot, but there were a lot of people around cutting down on visibility at the curb cut a bit. And it's not like you expect a major route of travel to just disappear.

I sent an email to the Disabled Student's Office and to the city's project manager, asking that they put up construction markers just like they would for a detour or a hole in the street. The DSO responded immediately (see why I'm a fan?); now we just hae to wait for the city to get back to us. The repaving in question is supposed to happen tomorrow; in theory, the curb cuts should be back by Friday, but who knows how that'll work out in practice. And the city needs to know in the future that this is a hazard to navigation for a lot of its residents - not just the wheelchair users.

My life is a bit messy right now, what with having gotten sick right around midterms, but two exciting (potential) events are coming up.

One: Ben Bahan is coming to Boston to show a film called "Audism Unveiled", and then do some sort of related lecture and performance. Dude! Ben Bahan! From my book!

Two: I have no idea how I missed this, but Finn just IM'd me to tell me about a movie called "Music Within" about Richard Pimentel. I've seen some criticism of the movie for ignoring the efforts of others to get the ADA passed, but I'll reserve judgment on that until I see it. Historical accuracy aside, it's always good to get the idea out there that this struggle has been going on for years, and that it is a struggle for civil rights.