Disability research integration is not happening. Not like it needs too. I’ve seen the problem from several points of view now and feel justified in a little rant. Scientists generally hate mixing with business, but this is the reality. The business of keeping a lab open and publishing regularly is difficult and in direct conflict with the new buzz words: “Community Driven, practical solutions” which are ignored when the main funding sources want cures worthy of the cover of Time Magazine.

I raised money and ran for Rick Hansen back in the 80’s. The talk back then was “one day soon, they’ll be able to fix spinal cords.” My injury was in 1994 and I still hear “five, ten years guys, stay healthy because the cure is coming.” Showing the above video to a friend got this response…”but on side note they did seem genuine, and nice people (for whatever that means or is worth)”. The reason solutions take so long is simple: follow the money. Sad but true.

The SCI community requests are simple. Blader, bowel, and sex. Motor control almost always comes after these basic human functions. We want to feel normal again. There are lots of web forums where SCI communities can share information and personal experiences, but rarely will there be a real doc or even a PhD in there to bring the newly published info to the group.

What to do when community needs are ignored because the research funding goes to the “glamorous science?” Tough spot. My point is that we are getting slowed down for the wrong reasons. We should be much further along by the year 2010, but political pressure needs to be applied to science and educational organizations. The scientific community is well known to have a horrendous record for conflicts of interests so despite good intentions talk will continue to be just talk. So screw the jet pack, I’d just like to feel normal on date nights again, which if anyone cared to look it up was far above walking when you ask people living with SCI.

Thanks to @RobynPY for finding this film featuring Michael Ruppert.

http://walkthroughpuddles.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/collapse/

“An intellectual horror film that ranks as an essential work”

It plays December 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 at varying times at the VanCity Theatre for $10.00

Early days on this project, but will be testing all winter on the icord ramp.

Presenter 2: Brad Zdavinsky (VerticalChallenge.org)
•Overcoming Obstacles: The Story of a Tetraplegic’s Drive to Beat the Odds and Challenge Beliefs in His Pursuit to Climb (15:00-16:00)

(not my title)

My slides as a PDF (NOTE: is 30mb file, so “save as”)

I found this to be a very well run event (great staff really makes the difference). My slides were more of a story about living with SCI and having goals outside of the normal rehabilitation parameters. So I chopped out many charts and graphs.. and glad I did. The hour went quickly and had just enough time to take a few questions. (Thank you Candice for running my slides)

Thanks again to Dr. Warburon for the invitation to present my point of view on rehab, education and risk taking.

http://www.webcommunications.ubc.ca/ubc2010/2009/04/28/researcher-aims-to-end-paralympic-boosting/

DR ANDREI KRASSIOUKOV

Dr. Andrei Krassioukov wants the International Paralympic Committee to change how athletes are evaluated – Photo by Martin Dee

If Dr. Andrei Krassioukov gets his way, the days of some Paralympic athletes putting their lives in danger to increase their athletic performance may be over.

Despite an international ban on the practice, some Paralympic athletes with spinal cord injuries are using a dangerous technique called “boosting” to increase their blood pressure in the heat of competition.

Dr. Krassioukov, aDr. Krassioukov studies autonomic dysfunctions, which are dysfunctions in the parts of our bodies not under our conscious control. People with spinal cord injuries experience not only paralysis and loss of sensation, but often have trouble with autonomic functions such as blood pressure, heart rate and bladder and bowel control.
Consequently, during competition a wheelchair athlete’s heart rate doesn’t increase according to the body’s demands, leading to low blood pressure, fatigue, poor performance and a loss of endurance.

“That’s a big disadvantage to people with spinal cord injuries,” he says.

Yet many athletes learn they can subvert these cardiovascular dysfunctions by causing some pain or discomfort in the area below their injury. Known as autonomic dysreflexia, the process stimulates the spinal cord and boosts arterial blood pressure.

It also puts their life in jeopardy.

Some athletes will tighten or block their catheter, a tube used to drain urine from the bladder through the urethra.

Some men will break their big toe before the competition. Others will sit on their testicles during a match.

“They know if they sit on their genitalia, their blood pressure will go up,” he says.

Others use less dramatic methods: abdominal binders or pressure stockings on legs that help increase blood pressure.

Despite documented deaths and the potential for a stroke or intracranial hemorrhage, some Paralympic athletes injure themselves just to improve performance, Dr. Krassioukov says.

“Unfortunately the physiological condition of the body predisposes them to poor cardiovascular responses to exercise, but they’re trying to ameliorate or improve their exercise with these horrific measures.”

The International Paralympic Committee condemns the practice, yet it’s difficult to enforce.

Last year, Dr. Krassioukov and his colleagues submitted a proposal to the International Paralympics Committee to develop additions to Paralympic classifications that would include an evaluation of a Paralympic athlete’s autonomic functions. (Presently, the committee reviews only a person’s physical capacity, such as hand functioning, range of motion and balance in a wheelchair).

To this effort, researchers last year examined five Paralympic rugby teams, from Canada, Germany, Russia, Britain and Australia, during competitions in Burnaby, just before the Beijing Games. Basketball players are next on the agenda.

This year, Dr. Krassioukov has proposed an assessment of members of the sledge hockey and curling teams at the upcoming 2010 Winter Paralympic Games.
The findings will be used to make recommendations to the International Paralympic Committee regarding the addition of autonomic components to athlete classifications.

“If we will introduce an autonomic component to classification, maybe this will allow a more fair and safe competition for all Paralympians,” he said.

I’ve been following Boston Dynamics awhile now. They seem to be the most sable legs around.

Never has there been so much attention from Microsoft to the details for disability users. The “ease of access” configuration is really good for my fellow one finger, one hand users! Sticky keys and a track ball in the early years were pretty brutal. Try keeping up with the class in the computer lab. Even with all the input tricks, and I know them all, it is still slow going and coding speed (time) is money. There are new features to control the mouse that made my wrist very happy. It is easy to control the focus, cursor and text input all with the mouse alone. This is key for those with even less function than me. Two thumbs up here, a nice surprise.

I never even considered Vista and stayed with XP and its 3gig of RAM limitation. I saw my friends suffer with Vista and waited for Windows 7. This version not only manages 32 and 64 bit code, but added what was missing in XP (leaving 3rd parties doing these applications). Basically all the stuff built in to all Mac’s and found free in Linux communities for years:

• Backup Utilities
• Screen Sharing
• Network Monitoring tools
• Bluetooth Stack Service

Stability wise, I’ve been running Win7 on two totally different computers for few weeks now and not one crash, nope.. just a few application hangs and the OS dealt with them fine. One touch I really was surprise to see was in the audio controls. Now you can scale the max volume for each app, something I’m sure we all find really useful. Youtube plays too loud, VLC to quiet and there is a volume slider in three different locations — now you get a handle on this in one place.

OK enough gushing, it’s getting embarrassing. Don’t get me wrong, I cut my teeth on PC’s and C++ and Java. What made me change over to Mac was really just video editing and the OSX back end. After short time with Apple products I was won over because things just worked and I never had to tinker much. Apple computers also come in a pretty box that don’t make a sound — something you’d actually want to have in your living room!

Now the question is… If Microsoft is can install on any type of hardware and run like OSX… then why will people keep forking over the extra cash for a Mac? More bang for your buck on PC’s, always has been, always will.. making for an interesting time in the OS business. The new smart phones and Zune running Windows Mobile just might be stable enough to win back the developers dealing with Apple’s iron grasp on iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve personally decided not to go with the $100 iPhone just because of the restrictions on connecting to it’s USB and BlueTooth.

Now things that broke…

All my file shares broke… I was not pleased. Windows has new ways of detecting other PC’s and doing password file shares.. but I think goes out of its way NOT to see the iMac. Note that iTunes shared music over all platforms without a glitch, so seems like a finger in the eye from Microsoft! So, all you can do is connect from the Mac to the shared windows folders (windows will not find your Mac). But you need to use static IP’s and connect Samba manually as seen below. (more in file sharing issues) I don’t really mind the static IP’s, but lame to not support Samba properly.

must connect manually so best to use fixed IP addresses

… and more on snow leopard on engadget

Nokia 5800

Is Symbian going to make it on mobile devices? I’ve used java a long time now and hoped the fragmentation would be sorted out for by now. My first experience with S60 was pretty shocking. Sun’s SDK for wireless devices is actually really good, but runs on the emulator generally won’t on the actual device. It is a very slow and painful debugging process to test on emulator, then create a SIS (or jar files) and upload to the phone, run it and watch it crash. No way to know were or why, and you need to get the stack trace yourself (display on a Form, or send to a file etc). Ugly, and in many devices the standard Bluetooth API (JSR82) will fail to connect because the phone’s firmware is locked. Pretty bad news for a developer trying to sell innovative apps.

Now, The fragmentation is in both directions. More handsets and new code tools all the time. Python is better at some of the portability and debugging. It is very easy to use a Bluetooth Console to execute commands directly on the device. But not all devices are supporting Python. Flash and Brew on devices also seemed promising. Brew bundles the billing/purchase and digital signing right into each app. Seems like a good idea for developers, but has been buggy and does limit how you can deploy your application. Now don’t forget JavaScript. JavaScript has done well and is on many platforms and almost every web browser. iPhone heavily leverages JavaScript and has shunned Flash and JVM’s despite the rumors of Apple supporting both soon. So, pick a device and one or two code tools? Not an easy thing to do because you also need to consider what App Store is going to get you into the market.

(not even going to talk about C/C++ because it just needs to die. in my opinion, only the firmware for each phone should be native. Note that much of Nokia’s SDK required elaborate configuration to write even simple apps for S60)

For many of these reasons I would strongly suggest phone gap. They have an Open Source Project to try to address these problems and are going to do well just because developers need to be able to churn out apps quickly. No bluetooth support yet, but watch out for it.

Now, what about all my Java code I have thus far? Well, Nokia isn’t totally asleep at the wheel, it just seems like it. But they have updated their Java Runtime for S60 to version 2.0. It is way better and solved many of platform issues on my Nokia 5800.

Worth watching out for is an Open Source Os called MAEMO. If this project replaces all the Nokia legacy stuff and gets traction.. They might be able to get in the game. Seeing how Android does on some of the lower end phones will tell the tale. Android has a way better App Store and a great Eclipse plug in. Looks like a horse race, place your bets.