.farnham .speech

It’s too late for me to join in this year, but our friendly neighbors in America’s Hat have a testosterone-based fundraising event a la Movember, but for head and neck cancer (the US site by the same name has a different focus, however). So, next year stop pretending that electric razor is an electrolarynx in the morning (you know you do), and see if we can get Manuary to pick up in the States, too. Ladies are also encouraged to let their beards grow in solidarity.

{MANUARY}{via OliviaSLP}

Gizmodo:

But it’s much, much worse today—he sounds like he sprinted to the earnings call, forced to take short breaths between words, depleted and unwell.

This has been going on since last fall. Shame that the editors at Gizmodo were their usual tactful selves when writing that headline, but the “sounds very sick and bad” is a testament to how much voice quality affects our perception of ourselves, and how others perceive us.

{Gizmodo}{.farnham .speech}

Lorraine on Adult SLP Talk:

Undateables is a British TV documentary which looks at the world of dating from the perspective of people living with challenging conditions … In series 2, episode 1, we meet 22 year old Sarah Scott. When Sarah was 18, her life changed forever. She suffered a stroke which left her with a condition known as expressive aphasia (difficulty speaking). Sarah’s physical appearance would not make you suspect any form of disability. Sarah’s aphasia is a hidden disability.

Female. 18 years old. Stroke. A good reminder that “risk factors” aren’t minimum requirements, and certainly don’t mean much to anyone but statisticians after the damage is done.

{Adult SLP Talk}

We turn to doctors to save our lives — to heal us, repair us, and keep us healthy. But when it comes to the critical question of what to do when death is at hand, there seems to be a gap between what we want doctors to do for us, and what doctors want done for themselves.

Radiolab has been killing it (pun honeslty not intended) in the things-tangentially-related-to-speech-pathology category lately. I had a rehab patient asking questions related to DNRs and advance directives just this week, and have had to counsel a number of families regarding feeding tubes since starting my CF a few months back.

{Radiolab}

Richard Kenny’s mom:

I haven’t had a need to shoot any of you!

I’ve noticed this sort of gallows humor in a lot of my patients with dementia lately, too. Makes you wonder whether it’s symptomatic, age-related, generational, or just coincidental.

{Richard A Kenny’s Blog}

Radiolab a couple weeks ago had an extended story about the man behind Blissymbols. I wasn’t aware that they had ever been intended as something other than a stepping stone to more complex language.

If you have any interest in using Blissymbols for… therapy stuff? I guess? (I’ve yet to encounter a kid or adult that presented a good use case)… or if you’d like to add it to your linguistic repertoire right there next to Esperanto, Blyssim is a bare-bones, no-nonsense palce to start. They’ve even got some Blissymbolic fonts.

{Radiolab}{Blyssim}

The developers of the Speech Jammer—a long-range delayed auditory feedback device—have won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in acoustics.

{List of Ig Nobel winners}

For those of you wondering what the app was in the background of a couple of the screenshots in my write-up of Guided Access in iOS 6, it’s Scribblenauts Remix. Scribblenauts was a highly popular and inventive game for Nintendo DS, and Remix brought it to iOS. Not only is this game just tons of fun to play, it can be an excellent therapy tool for higher-functioning children and adults who need to work on semantics: utterance-expansion, generative naming and adjective usage can be particularly targeted. The sheer number of nouns, adjectives and adverbs that Scribblenauts Remix has in its database is astounding, and the game itself is just plain fun. Give it a look if you have patients or students with these needs.

{Scribblenauts Remix on the App Store}

Speaking of accessibility, for those of you who aren’t using Instapaper—the best read-it-later service/app around—first of all, shame on you. Second of all, its most recent update adds the Open-Dyslexic font as a font choice for reading. It’s my belief that because Apple takes accessibility so seriously in iOS and OS X, its developers are more prone to take it seriously, too. This update to Instapaper is evidence of that.

{Instapaper blog}{Instapaper}{Instapaper on the App Store}

To supplement my piece on Guided Access in iOS 6, here’s Insanely Great Mac with a video walk-through.

{IGM}{via @mrgan}