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bonefall · 5 months

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Hearing Loss Research Dump

Heyo!! You probably reached through the footnote at the end of the Hearing Loss Guide for Warrior Cats! I often get asked questions like, "How do you make these guides?" and "Do you have sources?" So this time, I tried to keep a bit of a loose "journal."

Unfortunately it got disorganized after a few sessions (since this project ended up taking about 2 - 3 weeks to do) but, hey, hopefully it helps.

I have dumped all of my sources here and explained my thought process as I went along, so that you have a good foundation to go forth and do your own research.

I may update this post with more information and links, or remove sources if, for some reason, it is revealed that the source was harmful or not credible. SO, PLEASE feel free to recommend good educational organizations, documentaries, and blogs here on Tumblr willing to take questions.

This post is set to "no one can reblog" so that you're always seeing the most current version of this post. Just in case a source gets challenged, or one of the sensitivity readers wants their name removed, or I end up adding important corrections, etc.

This is Version 1.0, and it was updated on 1/2/2024.

The research "dump" post is messy, because it's a Bonus Thing that's supposed to go along with the very pretty and ~concise~ Herb Guide that I created.

Session 0

I had wanted to do this for a while, but this RIDICULOUS thing that was said to an Anon and then shared with me almost gave me an aneurysm. I asked if my followers wanted this boosted to the top of my priorities, they said yes, and here we are.

In the process I also looked for input, especially from deaf/HOH followers. I made a note to include tinnitus, unilateral (one ear) hearing loss, and I'm considering doing a second guide just for how to TREAT the ear infections I mentioned would lead to a lot of hearing loss in RiverClan.

An outline of the Herb Guide post was written just before I did any real research, so I had a general idea of the aspects of hearing loss I wanted to talk and learn about.

Sat down to start my research the next day.

SESSION 1: The Basics

My first step is always just a basic internet search, including a pit stop at Wikipedia to read the article, and then follow the sources or find a place that explains the concept more deeply.

Because my project's about anthropomorphic cats, I always start with humans first, then swing over to a search on felines. I'm usually alternating between them because that is how my mind works, hearing something in one and then linking that to some sort of question about how that would look in cats.

From Wikipedia, the World Health Organization, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, I learned that "Hearing Loss" is the blanket term for all lack of hearing, and "Deafness" is when it totally prevents you from understanding speech.

Like blindness, most deaf people can hear a little. Stressed that.

It's also here that I started with cat hearing. First I looked at Purina, but it wasn't a great find, besides a link to common signs of ear infections which I put in my back pocket lmao. I came across Dr. Pippa Elliot's article for Petful.com, and this one is MUCH more informative.

I started thinking critically about a lot of that info. Cats have a much higher range of hearing than humans, a feline society would actually catch hearing loss loooong before humans would catch it in a pet cat. Plus the whiskers. The article actually mentions that when you check a cat for hearing loss, you have to avoid blowing wind on the whiskers or even vibrating the ground.

Very sensitive animals, fascinating. Anyway, back on humans,

There's also FOUR TYPES of hearing loss. Conducive, Sensorineural, Mixed, and Auditory Neuropathy. I also went and found a good explanation from the CDC to double-check Wikipedia.

And it's a good thing I did! Wikipedia did not mention Type 4 at the time of my research, and the CDC's article is VERY straightforward and informative.

Types;

Conducive: Sound can't get through the canal. Usually a blockage.

Sensorineural: A problem with the hearing organs or the auditory nerve.

Mixed: Both of these at once

Auditory Neuropathy: The ear detects the sound, but doesn't send the signals to the brain properly.

From what I can tell from the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Auditory Neuropathy is less well defined and can have overlap with Sensorineural. Sometimes it has to do with damage or malformation of the inner ear hairs, other times it's completely unknown and just assumed to be a brain issue.

So according to that definition, Auditory Processing Disorder is a type of auditory neuropathic hearing loss.

Then I started watching Christmas movies and forgot I was doing research oops. Time waits for no man, nor muppet. Very important that once a year you watch movies that make you cry and also Gonzo is there.

BUT. Throughout this project, I was constantly finding new sources on "the basics" that explained things in different ways. I didn't find all of these in that one session, but I will dump them in a straight list here.

Straight statistics of prevalence of hearing loss in the UK

Two types of inner ear infections (got cut from the guide because I was trying to stay focused on the disability itself, not causes and ear ailments)

Congenital deafness (Helpful, but again, was trying to keep the guide focused on general disability writing advice, not explain every single reason why a person could be deaf. That's for one's own research!)

Degrees of hearing loss (But notably I've also seen these thresholds shift around. This one says deafness starts at 95 DB, but I did also see 81 elsewhere.)

A guide on soundproofing which put the affects of noise on your ears into perspective (helpful with comparisons to degrees of hearing loss)

REALLY GOOD GUIDE ON HERTZ AND DECIBELS (And also comparisons of different decibel levels, in relation to the thresholds of hearing loss)

Tinnitus

SESSION 2: Comparing human and cat hearing

I felt like I had a good understanding of the basics here. The four types, some considerations for cat biology, some tidbits to mention like most people with hearing loss still being able to hear a little, etc.

NOW I'm going to finish reading any sources I opened up in side tabs, and learn about the side effects of hearing loss that I've seen so far. Tinnitus was requested specifically.

But, I felt pretty confident at this point, so I started actually working on the guide itself. It's good because that's when I start getting really specific questions like, "Just how sensitive IS a cat's hearing next to a humans?"

Found this article comparing human and feline hearing, and also went for a source on common causes of ear infections in cats, and compared them to common causes of ear infections in humans. Basically everything WE get, and more. I also remembered a vet that I worked with explaining that humans don't get ear mites because our ear canals are shorter, but honestly I don't really want to hunt down a source on that.

Bottom line is that it seems that cats get ear infections significantly easier than humans.

SESSION 3: Paying attention to deaf and HOH experiences

Started loading up some videos on Youtube, and follow along with presentations from deaf speakers, awareness charities, and so on.

ADHD protip: If you're like me and often feel the need to get up and walk around when you're trying to focus on something, playing flash games on Neopets or a similar petsite while keeping a video popped out is a great way to help with executive function impulse stuff. Firefox and the program Freetube both allow for you to pop open a small window that you can move around your screen.

I absolutely adored this video from Montfort University, which collected experiences from people who were actively losing their hearing. I'm feeling that a lot of folks are probably anticipating the Herb Guide with the expectation it'll talk about fully deaf warriors like Snowkit (And BB!Whitewing, who is deaf in Better Bones), but one of the most important things I'm learning is that partial and unilateral hearing loss is both common, and important to talk about.

That section on people forgoing hearing aids is so bitter. The way that they were reluctant to even "admit" they had a disability (feeling as if it "doesn't count"), felt like hearing aids were for "old people" so they resisted getting a device that would really help, and that one woman who finally realized what her own mother must have been going through when she was in her shoes...

Jeez, man. Ableism really hits us all, doesn't it? You'll reject the small bits of help that were SHAKEN out of the pockets of an uncaring world, just so you don't have to admit you might need it.

I am vaguely aware that there's buzz within the deaf community about hearing aids, with some deaf people actually having extremely negative feelings on them. I didn't manage to find those people though, besides what I remembered from Tumblr posts explaining that cochlear implants tend to destroy what little hearing remains. I also didn't know what sorts of hearing aids exist, just basics.

In any case, it's not what my guide's about. Clan cats wouldn't be able to make devices like that-- so to compensate, I tried to stress that forcing warriors to "assimilate" to able-bodied society is bad compared to "accommodating" them. But I did make a little aside note on the guide itself as a PSA.

ANYWAY I'm keeping that pinned in my mind as I go through this. A LOT of these speakers are talking about their implants and how much they changed their lives, so I'm taking things with a teeny grain of salt, knowing I'm probably not getting the entire hearing-impaired community's feelings on this.

Rachel Kolb's Tedx talk was DEEPLY insightful, she is an absolutely fantastic presenter and her statistics are gutwrenching. I'm also paying close attention to how she described her speech therapy classes, how tactile the lessons are, how she had to hold her hand to her teacher's throat and learned that the trick to an N and an M was to speak it through the nose...

The theme of this part of my research has really been "heartbreaking," honestly. Next I watched this one from a BBC interview, where the speaker talks about how much EFFORT they have to make to listen to others. The casual cruelty of hearing people just not caring enough to reach out and make sure she can follow along in the conversation.

I know it's maybe not the same thing, but I teared up a bit at some parts, because that's something I've also felt as someone who's ADHD/Autistic. How much it hurts when people won't even take the goddamn time to clue you in. Like you're not worth it

Even if it's just for a silly cat community, I really hope the weeks of effort and hours of reading I put into this guide and journal makes someone feel seen. You're worth the time. I promise I mean it

Anyway,

Like The Basics, I kept finding more things as I went through my research, outside of this session.

Struggles of deaf people in life and the workplace

Social struggles, particularly in the digital age

Cochlear implants: Pros and Cons (It was really not relevant to my project here, BUT, I figured it was important enough to even mention in an aside on the main guide.)

Really interesting passage from a married couple losing their hearing

"What is it like to be deaf?" Mentions the link to memory loss in people who are hard of hearing due to the brain "discarding" misheard sentences.

SESSION 4: Relevant questions.

This is the point I was asking more targeted questions, as I was actively writing the bulk of the guide, because in spite of everything this remains a cat project. If I was about to write something and then realized I didn't actually know like... WHAT causes it, HOW it happens, How COMMON a thing is, I would go and find out.

For example I knew that Snowkit had a higher chance of being born deaf, but didn't exactly know why, or how it happens, or how much higher of a chance that was. So, I looked up white cats with blue eyes, and looked up the percentages associated with deafness in them.

Apparently it's rapid degeneration, instead of the inner ear just not forming properly. I could go down that rabbit hole and learn more about why, but at this point, I'm far enough along that I need to start deciding when something isn't really helpful but just interesting. It's REALLY easy to get distracted at this point in making these guides.

That lead to to look at how people tend to handle their deaf cats and make their lives better, which also lead me to a good source on how to clean a cat's ears. That's another thing I had to halt at; because this guide is about DISABILITY, not about treating ear ailments.

When you're doing research this way, I find it helpful to "limit my scope." I've mentioned this technique/skill/advice in the past with some of my cultural expansions for the Clans too. You can see how maaaaassive the guide I wrote got even while staying on topic; it easily could have gotten bloated by even MORE tangential knowledge.

But I do plan to make an ear treatment guide at some point, as well.

I then started trying to learn more about rodent squeaks. How high in hertz they are, when different animals make them, how loud in decibels, etc. I couldn't find very much, because sound/hearing in general is actually WILDLY understudied, especially in terms of non-human animals.

But I did find this article on mouse vocalizations, specifically, and this webpage on various animal hearing ranges.

(though the webpage begs ppl to be careful about making comparisons between the numbers on the page, because they come from different studies with different parameters. But like. somehow i think this is good enough for funny cat project)

Lastly on this topic, I tried to find a good source on whiskers and how well they can "replace" hearing, and ended up finding this EXCELLENT article on allllll sorts of hearing loss related things in cats. It's got it all. Whiskers, common causes, tests. It's great.

SESSION 5: Sensitivity readers

I'm trying to be extra careful with this guide, with the knowledge in mind that this one was highly requested and likely will get decent reach. So, I figured it was more important than usual to speak to disabled individuals who could advise me, to my face, instead of only relying on what I'd seen in my research and secondhand information.

(especially since my style in writing these guides tries to be "simple," trying to limit how much medical speak I use and explaining terms in-depth when I need to use them.)

I spoke to @sylsoddsandends, @s0ulfulsapph1cf, and one more. While talking to them, they brought up even more to me that I hadn't considered.

For example, I did not know that unilateral hearing loss (affects one ear more than the other) actually resulted in a loss of "distance perception," the same way that I don't have depth perception because I've got low vision in one eye. I grabbed a scientific paper to read about it and went forth.

I also got a ton of good feedback about how much I stressed that lipreading is difficult, added some advice on a unilateral HL cat would stand, brought in some notes about chronic pain, so on. I then went to preview it to a bunch of personal friends to give it a couple more once-overs for typos and flow and such.

The last thing I did was reach out to those sensitivity readers again, and ask their permission to link them here. I don't have permission from the last reader yet (which is on me, I should have asked sooner). So there will be an update here if/when they get back to me.

POSTMORTEM

Nothing here yet! I will make an attempt to collect any follow-up questions and such down here.

#bone babble #hearing loss

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naturecomics · 1 year

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I was inspired by @the-nobody-tournament's contestant 43 to write a post about selective mutism (SM). This post will include information that I have gathered through research as well as my own experiences. I will include links to some resources at the end.

SM is an anxiety disorder categorized by an inability to speak under certain (or select) circumstances, usually social settings and often when they are expected to speak. The failure to speak can appear as complete silence or whispering, and the person might use non-verbal or non-vocal methods of communication, such as signing, writing, or gesturing. Some additional symptoms of SM include fleeing from stressful social situations, crying, and physically freezing up.

SM is largely considered to be a childhood disorder, usually developing in early childhood and fading out as the child gets older, though it can develop in older persons or persist into adulthood (my own developed in my late teens). As such, most resources focus on SM in children and diagnostic guides refer to the patient as a child and focus on SM related to school.

There is no singular known cause for SM and it is considered to be multifactorial. Some theories include that it is caused by a heightened freeze response linked to social anxiety or by dissociation linked to traumatic stress.

From an exterior perspective it can appear that the person experiencing SM is choosing to be silent. In fact, it was once called elective mutism because psychologists believed that the children were choosing to be silent as a way to punish their parents. Of course, this is completely wrong - in fact, the person experiencing SM often wants to speak but is literally unable to.

When dealing with someone with SM, you should avoid putting them in highly stressful situations and be aware that their failure to speak is involuntary. The last thing you want to do is get mad at them for having SM because that can exacerbate their symptoms and lead to a total shutdown of communication.

Here are some resources on selective mutism:

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

What is Selective Mutism by the Selective Mutism Center

Complete Guide to Selective Mutism by the Child Mind Institute (you can listen to this article)

NHS

This is not an exhaustive explanation of selective mutism and I highly suggest that you do your own research into it.

#selective mutism #mental health #mental health awareness #contestant 43 #nobody tournament 2023

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autisticadvocacy · 1 year

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"…all peoples’ ways of being, including communicating, must be honored. There is absolutely no reason why someone should be denied access to robust, language-based communication, or why any communication choice should be questioned."

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months

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By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Aug 20, 2023

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge Evening Standard readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

It's a feature, not a bug.

You're not supposed to discuss, you're not allowed to consider, it's not acceptable to debate - #NoDebate. You're just supposed to believe, based on faith. "Listen and believe." If you question it or doubt it, then it's because you're a heretic with Satan in your heart who wants to lead others to their damnation. Salvation is not up for debate when souls are at risk.

#Richard Dawkins #The Poetry of Reality #censorship #gender ideology #queer theory #outrage mob #outrage culture #Orwellian #approved message #compelled speech #no debate #words are violence #words are words #violence is violence #religion is a mental illness

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docholligay · 1 year

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Reference post

OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED TO GET TO SHARE THIS WITH SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT IT!!

So, like basically all languages, except those with too small a speaker base, English has variants. That’s not a technical term, I’m sidestepping technical terms for simplicity’s sake, but it’s a really good catch-all. Basically, English is spoken in different ways in different places. This is not news to you.

In a handful of English variants, there’s a feature called the intrusive r*, where an r is inserted where a word ends in certain vowels. This is EXTREMELY EXTREMELY common in many English (as in the place, not the language) and Welsh variants of English, though you also see a slightly different form of it in some Massachusetts accents, and the Northeast, though, rapidly dying off. So, and I am about to GREATLY oversimplify for the sake of explaining it to someone who does not care about masturbatory linguistic nonsense the word ‘idea’ in this spot would be pronounced ‘idear’, and thus, rhyme with ‘cheer’

It’s one of my favorite features of English English** (lol) actually, I just think it sounds neat! Delights me whenever I hear it. But as I am American, and I come from a STRONGLY rhotic (r-pronouncing, basically--most places that do this are from places where the English spoken has a lower level of rhoticity, and my joke on doing the Montana accent is “hit the r like it owes you money”:) area of the US, I get to hear it like once a month casually, so it doesn’t come naturally to me to think of it.

I can’t do it, because truthfully, the sound isn’t QUITE “an r at the end” it’s softer and just a touch, and I can’t find an example of it I LIKE online, because it’s a lot of fucking 10 minute nerd videos instead of just an example that’s not me rudely pulling a clip from a video of a friend talking. But listen when you’re watching the BBC or something! A lot of times Hollywood movies don’t have it because we have punished the intrusive r to within an inch of it’s life here in the US, because here in the US it is STRONGLY associated with the lower classes if the rest of the accent is American.

Or, you can listen to Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, which of course has the downside of listening to Margaret Thatcher’s speeches.

*If we want to get nuts, there’s also a LINKING r, which I always joke is the one time a year English people pronounce the letter, and they are similar but not the same, and so not relevant here, and why am I even writing this asterisk I’m sorry this is really fun for me.

**In my private time I love to get nuts about the 87,292 varieties of English reportedly spoken in like 50 square kilitermetre (celcius) but I think most reasonable people can agree here that it’s not necessary in the same way me getting into the weeds about American English Variants wouldn’t be necessary to go “We use different word order in this phrase”

#it's also one of the ways I often find people tattle on themselves when doing American accents ahaha #Australians do it too #this is not a completel list by any means

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carolinaaraujo00 · 7 months

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Challenge 2

My dissertation aims to create a digital game in European Portuguese as a means of supporting language therapy for preschool children, both in session and at home. Note that the purpose of this work has been narrowed, from speech and language therapy to language therapy, as a result of further discussions with my advisors, including the therapist.

Speech and language therapy are two separate fields of study, and each subdivides itself into many different areas of intervention, meaning it would not be feasible to aim for a solution that would encompass all areas. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [1], people with a spoken language disorder (SLD) face challenges in acquiring and using language due to difficulties in comprehension and/or production in any, or multiple, of the 5 domains of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

Having little to no prior knowledge about these topics, especially scientifically supported information and data, it is of the utmost importance that preliminary research is conducted about subjects such as:

Spoken language disorders in preschool children;

Different methods used during therapy intervention sessions for preschool children;

Mechanics used in digital games to assist language/speech therapy for preschool children;

Methods used in digital games to best engage preschool children, in order to retain their attention, and enhance the potential for better results;

Methods used in digital games to include the parents of preschool children.

This information will be sourced from scientific literature, such as peer-reviewed studies, and conference papers, but also from conversations with specialists in the field of speech and language therapy for children.

The exploration and understanding of the most relevant studies and theories on these topics, as well as the current context of the problem is, indeed, invaluable. It will be a continuous component of this dissertation, with a heightened focus during the initial stages of the project. This will establish a strong, robust foundation of knowledge, allowing for a deeper understanding of the issues at hand, and, in turn, fuel me with information that can directly be applied to the conceptualization, development, testing and deployment of a possible solution.

The purpose of the game will be to immerse children in a new universe, making therapy not feel like therapy. This will be achieved by delivering intervention exercises as a means of achieving progress in the overall game, for example having to answer correctly to the identification of images to unlock a door and move on to new challenges. There are age-appropriate considerations that need to be taken into account when designing the game, such as the developmental stage of the target audience and how to appeal to them, as explored in Chapter 9 of Digital Storytelling, Tackling Projects for Children [2]. It is, however, yet to be determined if these exercises will encompass all five domains of SLD, or focus on the selection of a few. The Programa de Intervenção em Competências Linguísticas [3] is the only Portuguese-validated program for intervention in the domains of semantics, morphology and syntax, and is currently and habitually used by therapists in sessions. It provides great insight into what types of games and play are employed with preschool children, which will later serve as an inspiration, and moulded to fit a digital game format, used amongst other game mechanics directed towards this age group.

Therefore, this represents an instance of action research, more specifically interactive research, using an interpretive approach. The primary goal is to address a practical issue, specifically the absence of digital game-based resources within the context of Portuguese language therapy for preschool children. This involves taking proactive steps and developing a solution, therefore action research, commencing with a comprehensive and thorough literature review on pertinent subjects to best inform future decision-making for the product. These decisions will be shared with all stakeholders, and their experiences with the product will be assessed, to register, and subsequently analyze, all their input and feedback. If deemed necessary and feasible, adjustments will be made to the product, in order for it to best fit the requirements, perspectives, motivations and expectations of the professional practitioners and the target audience, hence an interpretive approach. This forms a cyclical process, as the product will continually undergo development and improvement phases, thus too, an interactive approach to the development of a solution.

Moreover, considering that the primary objective of this dissertation is not to validate the solution through a case study, but rather to introduce a solution validated by the stakeholders actively engaged in the process, it paves the way for potential future research with an explanatory focus, as other researchers may be interested in assessing the potential impact of my work.

References

[1] Spoken Language Disorders, Publisher: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. [Online]. Available: https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/spoken-language-disorders/ (visited on 10/20/2023). [2] C. H. Miller, Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. USA: Taylor & Francis, 2004, ISBN: 0-240-80510-0. [3] M. Lousada, M. Ramalho, and C. Marques, Programa de Intervenção em Competências Linguísticas. Universidade de Aveiro, 2015.

#gamedev #software engineering #language therapy #speech therapy #programming

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mariacallous · 8 months

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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.

Some students wept and an assistant math professor stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut, with only the student body president, the faculty senate president and another faculty representative consistently voting no.

E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president, telegraphed deep cuts during a State of the University speech in March, and the provost’s office said it was gathering data over the summer. On Aug. 11, the week before fall classes began, WVU revealed the scope of its preliminary recommendations, which started a scramble by professors, the students union, and others to raise national alarm and stop the cuts. Faculty members said they felt excluded from the process.

Attention came from national media and national groups, such as the American Association of University Professors and the Modern Language Association — one of multiple groups that called the proposed cuts “unprecedented” or “drastic.” During WVU’s official appeal process, the university withdrew some proposed faculty cuts and program eliminations, such as the suggestions to nix the master’s degrees in creative writing, acting and special education.

Attendees of the University Assembly—a rarely summoned body of all full-time WVU faculty members, with certain exceptions—also overwhelmingly approved a no confidence resolution in Gee and a request that the university immediately freeze this “Academic Transformation” process.

WVU administrators proceeded with most of their original proposals. They took them to the board Friday, and the board, after hearing three hours of opposing public comments the day before, adopted them.

The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

WVU will also eliminate all its foreign language minors, with the possible exceptions of Spanish and Chinese, the two languages in which it will still offer courses. There was one relevant change on Friday: the board saved two faculty positions in the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics.

The current minors allow for students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.

The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.

The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.

University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degree at WVU.

Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.

At one point Friday, student protesters, who swelled the small meeting room to over 100—including board members, WVU officials and others—halted the meeting with their chants of “Stop the cuts!” They continued chanting outside the meeting room windows as the meeting resumed, and board members continued to approve the cuts.

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kuramirocket · 2 years

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Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month

Intuit announced today a month of special programming and resources to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. The series begins with a roundtable conversation of Hispanic business leaders including actor, author, and philanthropist George Lopez.

In today’s economy, many Latinos in the United States are struggling with inflation – identified as the number one barrier to achieving financial goals, according to a recent survey by Intuit QuickBooks. Hispanic and Latino entrepreneurs are quick to recognize the contributions of both their families and communities to their success: 95% give credit to their family for their career success, and 75% have also benefited from the support of their local community. Despite the impact of inflation, an overwhelming majority (91%) of Latino consumers are able to achieve some or all of their long-term financial goals. This percentage is even higher among Latino business owners, with 96% saying they are able to achieve some or all of their business goals. Still, there are challenges for Latino consumers and business owners. Overall, 62% of Latinos surveyed would benefit from more help to achieve their financial goals and just 7% feel they have enough money to plan for retirement.

Arnulfo (Tuna) Tuñon-Ortiz is a Mexican American neuroscientist who advocates for making STEM accessible to underprivileged and underrepresented communities.

Genesis Arizmendi

Genesis Arizmendi is a Mexican American teacher and speech therapist, Genesis has spent the last 15 years focused on improving educational outcomes for diverse children with and without disabilities. Arizmendi earned her Ph.D. in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Arizona in 2019. Arizmendi has worked as a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist in public schools and in outpatient rehabilitation settings, specializing with pediatric Spanish-English speaking populations. Her research and clinical interests are focused on the improvement of clinical practices and educational decision-making for culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Arizmendi also is a recipient of the Distinguished Early Career Professional Certificate given by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

#🇲🇽#Arnulfo (Tuna) Tuñon-Ortiz #Genesis Arizmendi #hispanic heritage month #mexican #mexican american #latino #latina #hispanic #STEM #mexican educators #mexican speech therapists

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kammartinez · 9 months

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Jack Hanson

In a 1949 paper published in the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, the liberal philosopher Sidney Hook described a certain species of mid-century intellectual who, having long looked to the Soviet Union as a grand experiment in human emancipation, was impelled, for one reason or another, to doubt and ultimately abandon that conviction. The flight of the fellow travelers, including the likes of W.H. Auden, Edmund Wilson, André Gide, and Bertrand Russell, was born not out of mere disappointment or embarrassment but, Hook insisted, something deeper and far more troubling: a kind of religious disenchantment that upset the foundations of a shared political identity. What resulted from this “decay of faith,” as Hook termed it, was a “literature of political disillusionment,” a subgenre in the confessional style in which that failure was put on full display, examined, and ultimately transformed into maturity. The primary language in which this maturity expressed itself was liberalism.

More often than not, when we hear about political disillusionment in the polling and punditry of our moment, it is disillusionment with liberalism itself. Against all and sundry foes, from autocratic putsches at home and abroad to leftward agitation on the labor and electoral fronts, self-described centrists, realists, and liberals find themselves on their guard, in the uncomfortable position of having to defend an apparently crumbling status quo.

Though Hook, who also began his career as a Marxist, focused primarily on the implosion of the Soviet star in the eyes of left-leaning Western intellectuals, this trajectory from left to center (and beyond) as a process of realization is an important device in ideological self-narration. From Immanuel Kant’s definition of enlightenment as “man’s emancipation from self-imposed immaturity” in the forms of political and religious authoritarianism to Irving Kristol’s description of a neoconservative as a liberal (though here he meant anyone left of the American center) who has been “mugged by reality,” the ideal of much of mainstream political thought has been the gradual escape from imposed demands and Icarian fantasies into a utopia of grown-ups, making decisions not on the basis of received opinion, or even of principles, but in accordance with the transparently “rational.”

What carries us on the way to this besotted realm? For many Enlightenment and 19th-century liberal thinkers, it was Christianity—especially in its Protestant, bourgeois forms—that provided a kind of ladder to political maturity that could, eventually, be kicked away. But with the slow erosion of that faith, as well as a general skepticism about the inevitability of progress, could a literature of political disillusionment serve that role? And what do we make of this alternative, which brings us to maturity not by hope but by disappointment? Is there, in the end, a choice between the two?

In the course of his decades-long career, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has added much to this literature. His early novels, such as 1966’s The Green House and 1969’s Conversations in the Cathedral, explored the sources of decay that lead to both institutional corruption and personal despair. And in his essays, articles, and speeches, Vargas Llosa has long been among the most prominent literary defenders of the Western liberal order. Now the octogenarian Nobel laureate and newly elected member of the Academie Française (the first non-Francophone member in its history) offers a summation and justification of that effort in The Call of the Tribe, a study of seven key thinkers who helped him shed his youthful socialist idealism and oriented his soul toward the light of republican democracy and market capitalism. That list of luminaries includes the Scottish economist and “father of liberalism” Adam Smith; the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset; the Austrian American economist Friedrich Hayek; the Austrian British philosopher of science Karl Popper; the French philosopher Raymond Aron; the Russian British political theorist Isaiah Berlin; and the French public intellectual Jean-François Revel.

In the book’s introduction, Vargas Llosa offers general reflections on his own political experience and his disenchantment with leftism, as well as more pointed comments on the role of the state as a protector of individual liberty and administrator of education, both public and private. (Education, for Vargas Llosa, is an important data point in the reliability of competition as an engine for quality and progress; he’s particularly fond of voucher systems. He attributes these ideas to the Chicago economist Milton Friedman, one of the godfathers of neoliberalism.)

The story that Vargas Llosa tells of his political formation is that of a young man, born into a middle-class but well-connected family, and who spent time in Cuba in the 1960s, only to find himself increasingly alienated by what he took to be Castro’s autocratic tendencies. The breaking point was what is now known as the Padilla Affair, in which the poet and public intellectual Herberto Padilla—an initial supporter of Castro’s government, who became its increasingly strident critic—was arrested in 1971 on the grounds of making counterrevolutionary statements, as well as accusations that he was acting in the employ the CIA (an “absurd accusation,” according to Vargas Llosa).

Padilla’s link to American intelligence remains in dispute (a letter to The Guardian in response to the paper’s glowing obituary of him in 2000 suggests conflicting evidence), but, as far as I can tell, that was neither the charge that got him arrested nor what caused Vargas Llosa, along with other public intellectuals in the West, to break with Cuba. A self-evidently coerced public confession by Padilla followed his arrest, which was far too reminiscent of the Stalinist show trials that an earlier generation of intellectuals had condemned, and this led Vargas Llosa—alongside Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others—to publish an open letter denouncing Castro’s apparent authoritarian turn. Padilla himself lived in a tense détente with the regime for another decade before moving to the United States and teaching at Princeton, but for Vargas Llosa, not only the Cuban project but leftist politics as a whole were now irredeemably tainted.

It is in this context that Vargas Llosa’s principle of selection in The Call of the Tribe becomes clearer: The thinkers he examines are exclusively European and male, an indication not so much of Eurocentrism and sexism (at least not immediately) as of the kind of thinking that he finds most compelling. When drawing up a list of thinkers who took liberalism seriously as perhaps the only remaining political possibility in the 20th century, excluding the likes of Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar would be a damnable oversight. But strict theorizing is not exactly the terrain Vargas Llosa wants to cover here. Instead, as his career has shown (in addition to his literary and journalistic work, Vargas Llosa has also been a highly visible political figure, even running in Peru’s 1990 presidential election at the head of the center-right Frente Démocratico), he is most alive at the boundary of thought and action. He is therefore drawn to the thinkers who, either by intervention or influence, crossed that line and became unofficial spokesmen for world events. And though Vargas Llosa is at pains to portray liberalism as a “big tent” (his phrase), certain themes emerge to offer a rough-and-ready outline of what, for him, constitutes liberal thinking.

Liberalism’s key virtue, Vargas Llosa insists, is the primacy it grants to the individual over the collective. The title of the volume, The Call of the Tribe, comes from Popper, who is perhaps most famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies, his critical-historical account of the intellectual origins of authoritarianism. This study, which attacks Plato, Hegel, and Marx for their “historicism” (Popper’s curiously misapplied term for social theory aimed at the prediction of future events), is still taken seriously by many liberals, despite a broad consensus that Popper’s thesis is based on a profound misreading of both political and intellectual history. Vargas Llosa cites him, along with Hayek and Berlin, as having had the greatest influence on his own political development, particularly in coming to understand the role of liberal society as the protector of the individual against the ever-present dangers of primitivism and irrationality, the anti-civilizational “call of the tribe.”

For Vargas Llosa, as for all of the thinkers he explores, the history of the 20th century is the fight of the liberal West against various manifestations of that call, which, in modern societies, takes the form of the mass or crowd. Citing Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, in which the emergence of the crowd in modern times is analyzed and warned against, Vargas Llosa writes: “The ‘mass’…is a group of individuals who have become deindividualized, who have stopped being freethinking human entities and have dissolved into an amalgam that thinks and acts for them, more through conditioned reflexes—emotions, instincts, passions—than through reason.” Crucially here, the liberal ideal is not a goal to be achieved but a neutral state to be protected. It is, in this telling, the natural form of human life, as opposed to the imposed structures of any other kind of social organization. Such naturalism is not merely a tendency but a main tenet of Vargas Llosa’s liberalism, and it accounts not only for the vehemence with which he attacks the thought that he believes threatens it (above all, the leftist positions he claims once to have held), but also for the means by which he defends what is now the mainstream—not to say hegemonic—social order.

Beginning with Adam Smith—who, we are told, “emphasizes that state interventionism is an infallible recipe for economic failure because it stifles free competition”—Vargas Llosa insists on the link between unencumbered economic activity and human freedom generally, a conviction that determines his assessment of each of his key thinkers. In all, Hayek seems to win out as the greatest among them: “Nobody,” Vargas Llosa writes, “has explained better than Hayek the benefits to society, in all areas, of this system of exchanges that nobody invented, that was born and perfected by chance, above all by that historical accident called liberty.” If fascism (or related forms of despotism), in Vargas Llosa’s estimation, is a threat on the grounds of its irrationality, then leftism, from democratic socialism to Soviet communism, remains a greater threat still for its overestimation of human reason. Given liberalism’s defeat of its rival systems (this, of course, is the historical account we’re working with here, despite the crucial Soviet role in destroying the Third Reich and the subsequent absorption of former Nazis into the liberal West, from Kurt Waldheim to Klaus Barbie), the enemy to be resisted is the specter of planning.

The rejection of planning, which Vargas Llosa attributes to both Hayek and Popper, is a difficult idea to hold philosophically in your mind. After all, human affairs do not simply unfold. People respond to stimuli and instruction, however implicit, and it is governments and social institutions, among other things, that form the conditions of the lessons we learn. The critique of planning, then, seems not to be the choice of freedom over determination, but rather the preference for certain kinds of decisions over others.

But I think this is not a question of argumentative slippage, much less of hypocrisy on Vargas Llosa’s part. In keeping with his selection of thinkers, his interest is not in dissecting the arguments for liberalism but simply in defending them, by whatever means prove efficacious. The Call of the Tribe is as much a manifesto and a homage as it is a study.

Vargas Llosa’s rejection of the left, then, is largely based on the bad actions committed by some leftists, which he takes to be indicative of the rot at the heart of the entire enterprise. When he learns of Castro’s detention centers, he sees them as evidence of the regime’s fundamental nature. By contrast, the regimes of both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are praised for introducing a new dynamism into British and American life—and as for their funding of death squads from Ulster to El Salvador, the flourishing of private prisons, or the more or less constant state of crisis we have lived under since this neoliberal revolution, these are, to the extent that Vargas Llosa addresses them at all, so many broken eggs in the world-historical omelet. In less triumphant moments, the book’s message seems to be that when a liberal government commits crimes and human rights abuses, it is simply failing to understand or live up to its own ideals.

But the contents of liberalism itself are subject to similarly shifting sands, even contrary tendencies. When Ortega fails to acknowledge the superiority of free-market capitalism to central planning, Vargas Llosa deems his liberalism “partial,” whereas Hayek’s liberalism consists precisely in his transcending the merely economic. And when Hayek praises the murderous, repressive regime of Augusto Pinochet, this is simply an example of one of his “convictions [that] are difficult for an authentic democrat to share.” No more discussion is given to the matter. Perhaps Vargas Llosa is remembering who the real enemy is: When Pinochet was arrested for crimes against humanity in 1999, Vargas Llosa penned an op-ed for The New York Times asking why, if the world was willing to condemn the right-wing dictator, it was not also willing to condemn the left-wing dictators of the world, chief among them Castro.

Vargas Llosa retains much of his power as a prose stylist, and there are moments when The Call of the Tribe provokes a genuine thrill of discovery—a sense that, for good or ill, it was these men whose ideas have driven the history of the last half-century. Nevertheless, there are just as many moments when these accounts of intellectual adventure and individual liberty begin to sag, when the insistence that no system or ideal other than free-market capitalism and liberal democracy can ensure the conditions for individual and social flourishing becomes almost a mantra, an utterance unanswerable not because it is flawless, but because it doesn’t seem made with dialogue in mind.

What does such a hagiographic approach offer to anyone who is not already a believer? This question returns us to what we can learn from the literature of disillusionment. Why, when liberalism is merely the natural and rational position to hold, does it require such a defense? Vargas Llosa allows us a glimpse behind the curtain in his discussion of the argumentative style of the outwardly modest Isaiah Berlin: “Fair play,” he writes, “is only a technique that, like all narrative techniques, has just one function: to make the content more persuasive. A story that seems not to be told by anyone in particular, that purports to be creating itself, by itself, at the moment of reading, can often be more plausible and engrossing for the reader.”

So why disillusionment? It’s a narrative mode with obvious religious connotations; it is a story about the revelation of the true religion, the smashing of false idols and the embrace of pure faith, at which point “religion,” as such, becomes the enemy, or at least a danger to be wary of. This same structure played out in colonial encounters—colonists described natives first as having no religion and then, once European Christianity gave way to secular humanism, as being slaves to it. So it is perfectly consistent to point to Marxism or leftist politics generally, as Vargas Llosa does (drawing especially on Popper and Raymond Aron), as primitive, tribal, religious. “Religion,” in this tradition, is what other people do.

It is this historical double play that illuminates the real power of the narrative of disillusionment. It aids in the creation not of two sides of an argument, but of a natural (that is, a non- or even subhuman) phenomenon and a neutral observer. Such an observer may have a commitment to “flexibility,” as Varga Llosa insists that all liberals—whether individual thinkers or governments—must, but such a duality nevertheless depends on a carefully guarded wall between the wildness out there and the reason in here. It is the complexity of a world of actions and relations, decisions and consequences, congealed into a world of determined possibilities that will remain hidden unless you simply, though perhaps painfully, grow up. When the demand is made so insistently, one begins to wonder what measures might be justified in dragging the reluctant into the light.

I have to admit that by the end of The Call of the Tribe, I felt a kind of malaise, having read the litany of liberal virtue in so many iterations. Why, the question nagged, in its fourth (or, arguably, eighth) decade of nearly unchallenged global hegemony, do the representatives of Western liberalism feel the need to defend it against threats that have been for so long neutralized? And then it occurred to me that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup d’état, the death of Salvador Allende, and the beginning of a decades-long tyranny supported and praised by, among others, Hayek, Friedman, and the US government. Allende, as it happens, is one democratically elected socialist for whom Vargas Llosa, if this book is any indication, retains some sympathy, if only in retrospect. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the transition to a more fully liberal economy could have been accomplished more smoothly, less forcefully. Still, the Chicago Boys took over, the left was destroyed, and it is in the nature of stories to be retold, of rituals to be performed, of victories to be commemorated.

#the call of the tribe #mario vargas llosa #books

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solardick · 7 days

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Откуда- where from, from where.

Откуда этот человек? - where is this person from?

Из (iz, is) - is from.

Я из - i am from,

Моя мама из канады - my mom is from canada.

The peculiarity of using “is” instead of from. Changes things. And is also fun getting into the mind of a russian by simply pronouncing a few words. One feels the change in mind.

The one wouldn’t technically disagree with the statement of “my mother is the land.” From mother earth or motherland. Though i suspects this notion would ho by unnoticed by native russian speakers simply because that connection isnt drawn even though motherland and fatherland are apart of their everyday language.

One doesn’t hear that of Americans or Canadians at all. For all the disrespect people, give to their home. Littering and what not. Detaching from natural associations into somethign else. Beacsue “nature sucks”.

Aside form that. They have no word for The. But they do have one(s) for this and that. Lol fucken love it.

Finnaly eatched I am dragon. Its good. Would have enjoyed it more a couple years ago.

On towards, the subject of my recents talks have been, to better phrase. The archetypes of the collective unconscious. Or of the cultural unconscious. Or better stated yet, the archetype and the letter. A dramatic switching of languages or of alphabets seems to result in this. One can nearly, immediately feel the difference in consciousness. Simply by uttering a few words of a foreign language. Though how foreign russian is compared to english in diminishing in scale the more i learn. They are not so different. My learnings have been bringing me closernin the confirmation that there’s the power of magic within the very fabric of speech probably less so in the power of the written word for it adds so much more depth.

I have been looking for sources on this subject but they are all but non-existent to me. Save for a recent finding of an author whi has spent her time scientifically analyzing words. With a book tittles the gods of the word and a phonemic type dictionary. Which has my curiosity. Perhaps. A purchases are to be ordered. It fallows my chain in that every letter of a word has its own power. And that my current tarot layout system is a blending of languages already. For they seem to match that of the russian. Before i started a venturing into that subject.

They tried lassoing this mars/ moon aspect i have between the physical and the “spiritual”-conscientual” by bringing past manipulative bs in connections with my mother and the raping of my sex today into the self-destructive/ self estrangement. But fuck that. And fuck you. There nothing positive there. Mt decision has been made. Theres no changing that. Its done. Theres no going back. So fuck off. I have no love or compassion for that woman.

Theres a reason for the habitual things we do everyday without concession. The washing of the dishes. The brushing of the teeth. The fallowing traffic rules” the same things at the same. Time everyday. It weakens the bond of the chaotic rule. By self governing in place of allowing the outer to govern for us. To an extent that is. The belief in god is the same as the chaotic except for that theres a consistency in framing the mind which is synonymous with daily chores. It works as the same. As it does with the governing rule of political affairs for the lesser bodies of society. Whoch are the everyday person. The russians say it better with the everyday Человек.

The number 4 looking letter Ч. Is not such a far off shoot from card number 4, being by tarot and qwerty as the empress and the emperor. And we have a merging of the natural state and the rulling state. If one doesn’t solely associate these to mother and father. And i rather like letter Л (L) for it is the shape of the tongue in the motion of the letters prononciation. L is a rather curved letter compared to the sharp of the latin L.

Well dont think im going to work. No sleep. Slept poor’y yesterday. The day they stop fucken with me…. Another year gone. Will be the fay i may develop naturally. But. As a side teack of what would be. I wonder what not feeling defense feels likes….. uhm. Will never know. Always on the receiving end. Though “g’job” on bringin in the small minded narcissist teacher. To say its a personal vendetta. Based off a fucken high school prank. Which was actually pretty funny. Whole classes laughed. Was outnof character. But you know. People need to lose their entires laugh for doing a single thing out of character. Just how the worlds spins. Hypocritical since. Shems a prankster herself. Thought it was funny to stage a fake exam to waych all her student squirm over. And congratulations. Now i hate my little sister too. Guess there wont be a generational gap that connects me back to family. Oh well. Tough loss that is. …wish i was a narcissist maybe i could be like my father…. On second thought. Nope. I take join out of fucken with other people. My bad.

My spyche may be inside out now. But she loves me. Right, spyche? Yes, i do. That a girl.

Worst part about it is that i helped in saving more lives today in preventing accidents and hardship. As is ussualy the case emmidiatly proveeding my acts by other people. And the fact that i got shot in the head with a nailgun. Doesnt help your guys cause much. Harmless but it could have not been. Could’da.

Oh my goddess, tmblr isnt queer today.

Fun, fallowing the numbers of notes on all this pics. They fallow the same. Blaze! Fo sho. .. lost my script. What was i gonna say?… i forget. Was thinking about cherry and russian santa‘s daughter. And devil cards, and numberings and letterings. And, oh yeah. My ass is still a little sick but, seems at thr moment to be on the mends. Grateful for that in its own way. Looking at the silver lining. And personal motivation.

But its getting late. Im not sure about driving forklifts and using power tools in a few hours time. Considering this is the second night of poor sleep.

Though tmblr is still overly trashy.

Have t had coffee in awhiel. Hipefully she dismt put speed in it this time.

Themes of new film releases are. The cold and evil ballerinas. You got ghostbusters. And you got godzilla. Both involve defeating the cold using intense heat. Considering its gonna be plus 25 today and its not even june yet. Summer is gonna suck. Maybe theres a town in northern Ontario that needs a new denizen.

Well, ill try to enjoy the day today.

Ok work on the cards today, and make a new post. Maybe go get some weed to help with images. Its been awhile.

Other than that still havent found any meaning to the robin. Other than retreat. And even that isn’t a strong notion maybe they dint mean anything.

A robin, a redwing, a dove, a croh, and a bluejay in that order. The red wing the least significant. Which seems to work as a sign of respect and acceptance. Wait for one to move. While perched on your path. The most significant was the robin and the bluejay. But whatever.

#russian #english #language #Spotify

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speechtherapist2024 · 16 days

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Unlocking Potential: A Guide to Finding the Best Speech Therapy in Surrey

For speech therapy in Surrey, Vancouver, you might want to consider several factors to determine what's best for you or your loved one. Look for clinics or therapists with experienced professionals who specialize in the areas you need assistance with. It's essential to find a therapist who can create personalized treatment plans tailored to your specific needs and goals.

Here are a few steps to help you find the best speech therapy in Surrey, Vancouver:

Research Clinics and Therapists: Start by researching clinics and therapists in the Surrey, Vancouver area. You can do this through online searches, recommendations from healthcare professionals, or by asking friends and family for referrals.

Check Credentials and Experience: Look for therapists who are certified by recognized organizations such as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) or Speech-Language & Audiology Canada (SAC). Additionally, consider the therapist's experience and specialization in treating your specific speech concerns, whether it's stuttering, articulation disorders, voice disorders, or language delays.

Read Reviews and Testimonials: Check online reviews and testimonials from previous clients to get an idea of their experiences with the therapist or clinic. This can provide valuable insight into the quality of care and outcomes achieved.

Visit the Clinic or Schedule Consultations: If possible, visit the clinic in person or schedule consultations with potential therapists. This will give you an opportunity to see the facility, meet the staff, and discuss your concerns and goals for therapy.

Consider Accessibility and Convenience: Choose a clinic or therapist that is conveniently located and accessible to you, whether it's near your home, workplace, or child's school. Also, consider factors such as appointment availability, scheduling flexibility, and insurance coverage.

Evaluate Treatment Approaches: Inquire about the treatment approaches and techniques used by the therapist. A good therapist will tailor their approach to suit your individual needs and preferences, whether it's traditional therapy techniques, technology-assisted interventions, or a combination of approaches.

Ask About Progress Monitoring and Communication: Find out how progress will be monitored throughout the therapy process and how communication will be maintained between the therapist, client, and any other relevant stakeholders, such as parents or caregivers.

By following these steps and considering these factors, you can find the best speech therapy in Surrey, Vancouver, that meets your needs and helps you or your loved one achieve their communication goals.

Best Speech Therapy

#speech therapy

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clearaccent · 1 month

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Private Speech Therapist Near California

To find a private speech therapist near California, you can search online directories such as Psychology Today, SpeechPathology.com, or the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) website. For any further information visit: https://clearaccent.net/grammar/

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rediscoverhearing · 2 months

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The Audiologist at Rediscover Hearing

An audiologist is a professional in the field of hearing care. Their main goal is to help people with any type of hearing loss or related problem. Perth audiologist can provide a wide range of services including diagnostic testing, fitting of hearing aids and assistive technology, counselling in communication strategies and management of noise-induced hearing loss. They can also counsel patients on tinnitus and other auditory disorders.

Audiologists are qualified professionals who have earned a Masters or Doctoral degree in the field of audiology. They are fully licensed by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Board to practice audiology in their state and country. Audiologists can perform a wide variety of tests to assess the health of the patient’s hearing, such as bone conduction tone test, speech in noise test, tympanometry or acoustic exam. Depending on the results of these tests, the audiologist will advise the best course of treatment for the patient.

While some audiologists may choose to specialize in specific areas such as pediatrics, others specialise in the latest technologies such as digital hearing aids and cochlear implants. They can also offer advice and support in relation to hearing protection, tinnitus and other auditory problems like hyperacusis.

Michael is a very thorough and experienced Audiologist who takes pride in ensuring his patients are listened to, valued, respected & achieve the best results possible. He holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and Applied Math which gives him unique skills compared to other Audiologists allowing him to understand & highlight the pros and cons of new hearing aid features & technologies more clearly than most. He is also an expert in safe & gentle microsuction earwax removal so his patient’s ears are clear for more accurate hearing tests and better outcomes with their hearing aids.

At Pristine Hearing, we are proud to be an accredited member of the American Tinnitus Association & Independent Audiologists Australia which guarantees you that you will receive ETHICAL, QUALITY and EVIDENCE BASED hearing healthcare conducted with the highest standard of PROFESSIONALISM. We are also one of the few clinics in WA offering Professional Earwax Removal via Microsuction Technology which is the safest & most thorough way to remove excess earwax from your ears.

As a leading provider of government-funded hearing solutions in Western Australia, Hearing Australia focuses on connecting Australians to their loved ones and the community. They are committed to providing world-leading solutions through teleservices, online platforms, home visits and at over 166 hearing centres across the country. Their services are available to all Australians, including children and young adults under 26, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, pensioners and veterans.

Rhian graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Master of Clinical Audiology in 2015, receiving the academic prize for her cohort. She joined Perth Hearing & Tinnitus Clinic in February 2023 as working for an independent audiology service provider aligns with her core values of providing client-centred and holistic care. She enjoys educating her clients on their hearing health and empowering them to take control of their hearing rehabilitation journey. She has a particular interest in tinnitus and decreased sound tolerance assessment and management.

Rediscover Hearing the Joy of Hearing with Your local & WA owned Independent Audiologists. Your local Hearing Aid and Tinnitus Specialists. Combined experience of 38 years.

#Audiologist perth #audiology perth #perth audiologist #hearing aid types and costs

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