.farnham .speech

Link: Using Your iPad in Dysphagia Therapy | ASHAsphere

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 08:54:35 -0400

Link: Using Your iPad in Dysphagia Therapy | ASHAsphere:

I’ve been going through some old tabs that I’d just left open in NetNewsWire, and rediscovered this post about apps to help in your dysphagia therapy written by Tiffany Wallace of Dysphagia Ramblings. Some great thoughts in case you missed it the first time around.

{link}

Link: Speech Gadget: How to Find Speech Therapy Apps

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:46:28 -0400

Deb at Speech Gadget has some handy tips for searching for apps, if you’re on the lookout for that sort of thing. Or, instead you could just look at her positively astounding grid of apps for some ideas and then check out the ones that might apply to you.

Link: Helen Stringer: Therapy Ideas Podcast, episode 1 — Therapy Ideas blog

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:09:00 -0400

Link: Helen Stringer: Therapy Ideas Podcast, episode 1 — Therapy Ideas blog:

Rhiannan Walton published the first episode of the TherapyIdeas.org podcast this past Monday. I gave it a listen this morning, and first impressions are good. It had an informal but professional vibe, the audio quality was totally acceptable, the length was fitting, and the ideas were good. Rhiannan’s first guest was Helen Stringer of Newcastle University. They mentioned the #slpeeps and talked about how they’ve been using social media to boost their evidence base and get ideas. They chatted about making the best use of student clinicians, and they mused on some simple practical steps you might take to increase one’s use of research and evidence when going about your work.

Give it a listen. I’ve got it in my Instacast feed, and hopefully it’s not too long before I’ve got an unplayed episode.

{iTunes link}

Link: OneVoice on TUAW

Tue, 22 May 2012 20:28:00 -0400

Link: OneVoice on TUAW:

Interesting to see AAC apps being discussed in the “mainstream” (nerdstream in this case, I suppose) media. Anybody tried this?

Link: The Onion celebrates Better Hearing and Speech Month in their usual fashion

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:50:53 -0400

Link: The Onion celebrates Better Hearing and Speech Month in their usual fashion:

“That One Kid In High School Who Had A Hearing Aid: We check and see how bad his hearing is now.”

Replicationation

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:07:22 -0400

“Admittedly, carrying out exact replications of someone else’s work is hardly the most glamorous way to spend your time as a scientist.” — Ritchie et al., 2012

A while back, I posted a link on my personal blog to the Journal of Negative Results In BioMedicine. This fantastic series of pieces from The British Psychological Society on publishing (or not publishing) an inability to replicate results is another facet to this same issue.

Journals are motivated to publish studies that show something new. In the absence of something “new” they generally try to publish research that is “interesting.” These effects are compounded by similar proclivities in the general/mainstream media when publicizing such studies. The same mindset that often inhibits scholarly journals from publishing negative results clearly also makes them disinclined to publish studies of replication. This is a problem in the hard/real sciences (I was a chemistry minor in undergrad. Face it: What we SLPs do is only science in some of the broadest definitions of the word. At least we have the economists and sociologists beat. If you work exclusively in acoustics then maybe we can have a discussion), and it’s a problem for speech pathology.

Case studies produce real, legitimate results. Single-subject and small-group designs publish real, legitimate results. But guess what. Replications and failed replications of those studies are every bit as legitimate, and they deserve recognition beyond just op-ed responses. What our field (and the world) needs is data. Data, data, and more data. Will all that data invariably result in regression to the mean? Probably. Most assuredly, if you’re a statistician. But that regression shouldn’t keep us from putting it out there.

Researchers and clinicians: Conduct your studies. Take your data.

Journals: Publish those studies. Unless you see glaring holes in validity, you have every reason to do so, and no reason (other than some subjective measure of how novel or interesting it will be) not to do so.

{PDF link}

Link: iPad helps voiceless comedian perform very first stand-up routine | The Verge

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:14:00 -0500

Link: iPad helps voiceless comedian perform very first stand-up routine | The Verge:

The laugh track makes it hard to make out a fair amount of this guy’s set, which just goes to show that proper and effective AAC can be used to kill at a comedy club in England.

Link: 'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:20:00 -0500

Link: 'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech:

I was going to link to this a while ago, but didn’t want to until I had read the study the piece referenced. However, the Journal of Voice is an Elsevier publication, so I’m just going to have to send you to The Cost of Knowledge instead.

Extreme nerdery regarding app management on iPad/iPhone/iPod touch

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:40:31 -0500

{From the proprietor: What follows is the complete text of a comment I wrote in response to this post on GeekSLP. If you’re tempted to pull a “Too Long, Did Not Read,” the take-away is this: If you’ve never worried about the apps in the app-switching tray (the thing that shows up when you double-tap the home button), don’t start worrying about it now.}

While in general I appreciate the lengths you go to in order to help keep your readers in the know about how best to use the tech that they have at their disposal, this particular vid is grossly misinformative, I’m sorry to say.

iOS does not support background tasking/multitasking in the way that it is generally understood. Instead, app developers are given a limited number of options they may implement within their apps to allow specific processes to run in the background, or to allow their app to more quickly resume once they are loaded again. Some of the specific processes that do, in fact, “stay running” in the manner that you erroneously claim the apps in the multitasking tray run, include background location services, background audio, and task completion. A user will always know if either of the first two is in use because the location or music playing status icons will be displayed in the status bar whenever they are in use. Task completion is less obvious, it _can_ have a slight performance impact, though tasks are only allotted an extremely short amount of time to complete before being automatically terminated by the system.

Another background process not mentioned above, which can have some impact on system performance (most often, battery life), is push notifications. If one receives many notifications and is noticing slowed performance when a notification arrives, or notably shorter battery life, one can turn them off as one chooses from Settings>Notifications. Push notifications are pushed to your iPhone or iPad regardless of whether that app is currently running or has recently run.

The final background-related process that 3rd-party apps are allowed to utilize is what is known as app state suspension. This allows developers to cache the state that the app was in immediately before a user switched to another app or exited to the home screen, allowing the app to more quickly resume once loaded again, and to increase the appearance of background multitasking.

So, what’s the point of all this? The point is that while apps are allowed to perform an extremely limited number of tasks in the background, the system controls all of these tasks independently, and the apps themselves _are not running in the background_. Even app state suspension, which could, no doubt, use a significant amount of RAM, has little-to-no performance impact because iOS will automatically begin terminating/deleting these cached app states to free resources as necessary. All of these steps were undertaken by Apple to ensure that background tasking had as little effect on the user experience as possible. In fact, background tasking was not available at all to 3rd-party developers until iOS 4 due to concerns over resource management.

So, why does the app switcher tray exist, then? First, it allows for easier access to apps that have recently run. This, in fact is _the only thing_ that the tray displays: apps in the reverse order from when they were most recently accessed. It DOES NOT display apps that are _currently running_. As such, the sort of neurotic, obsessive task managent that your video implies we should be engaged in (“I’m ashamed that I have this many apps open!”) is precisely what Apple had hoped to avoid by initially not including background tasking in iOS, and then by only implementing the limited background features described above when it did implement them. Not all of those apps in the tray are running. In fact, most of them aren’t. You don’t need to systematically clear out your app switching tray.

I’m going to repeat that.

You Don’t Need to Systematically Clear Out Your App Switching Tray.

Using the tray to close an app CAN be useful, however. If you notice that the location services icon is on and you have no idea why, clear out apps until it disappears (usually a rogue GPS maps app). If an app you were just using has hung, exiting to the home screen and then killing the app from the tray may fix the problem, as you suggest in the video. Those are essentially the only use cases in which your manually deleting an app from the tray accomplishes something that the system has not already done on its own.

Use the tray to switch to a recent app. Use the tray to kill an app that is obviously in need of termination. Otherwise, please, _please_, ignore the tray. You will only drive yourself crazy being “ashamed” if you feel like you need to keep the tray clear. Most of those apps have already been killed. Let the system do its work, and for the love of Steve, stop worrying about it.

Superpowers appears to be finding her kryptonite

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:58:27 -0400

Superpowers appears to be finding her kryptonite:

As I head to the OSSPEAC conference (Ohio school-based SLPs), one of the more prominent school SLP bloggers is having a really tough time. I might have to run this by the folks at the conference tomorrow.

Link: SLPChat | Where SLPs can geek out with like-minded people!

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:57:00 -0400

Link: SLPChat | Where SLPs can geek out with like-minded people!:

SLPChat is an occasional (monthly?) meeting of the speech-language pathology minds on Twitter. Whenever a chat is arranged, just start following/hashtagging tweets with #slpchat to get in on the action. The topics vary from session to session, but there seems to be a rather extensive, vibrant group of contributors, among which you could be numbered.

{SLPChat}

Link: Surviving Stroke / ideastream

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:02:00 -0400

Link: Surviving Stroke / ideastream:

WVIZ - PBS and WCPN Public Radio out of Cleveland are in the midst of an ongoing series called surviving stroke. This evening WCPN played the audio of an M.D. describing surgery to clamp off an anueurism. Here is the video of that surgery. It’s always crazy to me, to think of a brain beating.

{surviving stroke} {inside an aneurism operation}

Link: Steve Evans Blog

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:19:14 -0400

Link: Steve Evans Blog:

A number of the #slpeeps across the pond have been posting this (apparently there’s a conference going on over there). Mr. Evans makes extensive use of AAC devices, and blogs about their use, among other things.

{link} {via @darthbrush}

Empathy and patient motivation

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:04:00 -0400

The current ASHA Leader closes with a column by Laura Deer ostensibly about motivation for a student with a tough /r/ to crack. While the format inherently results in a certain level of triteness or simplicity, the theme is universal for our field, and can sometimes be easy to lose sight of, especially for those of us who are still rather green as clinicians.

I have a patient that is really having difficulty with a number of his higher-order cognitive skills and executive function, but consistently attempts to gloss over them with jokes and diversions. He’s clearly unhappy about his current predicament, but has a hard time seeing the trees for the forest. On an average day, nearly half the session is spent in goal-related counseling, showing him where the problems are, why they are going to cause him trouble when he leaves if he doesn’t address them, and reaffirming his personal goals (“I know that this is what I need to do if I want to get out of here”).

“You know,” he began one day—usually a marker signifying “I intend to digress and bemoan everything I can’t do anymore”—”you have a tough job.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, you have to deal with all these people, with all these different personalities, and you have to make yourself into whoever they are so you can be on the same page.”

He and I aren’t always on the same page, but occasionally, when we are, this results in a level of determination and productivity that I rarely see from patients of his age. It can be a long, slow trudge through the morass of “Why am I doing this?” to get to that point. Progress is slow, but what progress we do make would never be made if I just jotted down “Patient not compliant with tasks” and left it at that.

Link: Guys with Aspeger’s doing software quality assurance

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:29:00 -0400

Link: Guys with Aspeger’s doing software quality assurance:

I know a family friend on the spectrum who is a draftsman. I think this sort of strengths-aware habilitation is going to be increasingly valuable and increasingly common as social programs continue to see more of a squeeze.

{link} {via Peter Cohen at The Loop}

Link: Cheaper, shorter (usually), and apparently more marketable

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:20:00 -0400

Link: Cheaper, shorter (usually), and apparently more marketable:

The ABA Journal is not where one might usually expect to find a refernce to the fact that there are lots of SLP jobs out there. Take that, lawyers!

#slpeeps

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:37:10 -0400

#slpeeps:

If you read my blog, odds are you already follow most of the big speech names on Twitter and already know about this. If, somehow, you’ve missed it, however, #slpeeps gets appended to all sorts of interesting links, comments and questions from all walks of clinicians, researchers, and organizations. Track that hashtag. Track it now.

Link: Quality Homework - A Smart Idea - NYTimes.com

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:32:00 -0400

Link: Quality Homework - A Smart Idea - NYTimes.com:

This is something that those of us who work with kids who have trouble learning already know quite a bit about. Average kids who aspire to be better than average know it too (they teach themselves these methods that work). I suppose the challenge to implementing effective strategies in the classroom and beyond lies in finding ways to apply them en masse rather than only via special interventions.

{link} {via @SpeechTherapist}

Link: Scott Adams Blog: Systems

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:33:00 -0400

Link: Scott Adams Blog: Systems:

I’m wondering if this form of thinking can/should be applied to our clinical practice. I certainly have my doubts that things like IEPs or insurance claims would readily welcome the sort of a change that a move from goals to systems might entail, but I can see the value in this line of thinking.

Link: User Testing in the Wild: Joe’s First Computer Encounter « Boriss' Blog

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:16:00 -0400

Link: User Testing in the Wild: Joe’s First Computer Encounter « Boriss' Blog:

A man who’s never used a computer spends a long time with 3 popular web browsers. How does this affect how we look at things like AAC?

{link} {via @siracusa}