The ATOMS Project

The Assistive Technology Outcomes Measurement System (ATOMS) Project was launched by a five year assistive technology (AT) outcomes and impacts project funded in part by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) under the Disability and Rehabilitation Research Projects (DRRP) program.

Wheelchair Controlled by Thought

A motorised wheelchair that moves when the operator thinks of particular words has been demonstrated by a US company (see video, right). The wheelchair works by intercepting signals sent from their brain to their voice box, even when no sound is actually produced.

This is pretty nifty and the video is a nice demo but I could not help but wonder what would happen if an ADD wheelchair user got distracted while in mid motion --- humorous or frightening?

Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years

Greetings from the AHEAD 2007 conference. I guess it is time to get back to the blog after a lengthy hiatus recovering from a combination of work + school burnout, general lethargy and camping with my new pop-up camper in places without Wi-Fi (on purpose). The following is courtesy of ArsTechnica.

It's easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn't stop Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the "optimal level for copyright" at only 14 years.

Pollock's work is based on the promise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.

According to Pollock's calculations (and his paper [PDF] is full of calculations), this is exactly the opposite result that one would expect from a rational copyright system. Of course, there's no guarantee that copyright law has anything to do with rationality; as Pollock puts it, "the level of protection is not usually determined by a benevolent and rational policy-maker but rather by lobbying." The predictable result has been a steady increase in the period of copyright protection during the twentieth century.

Because Pollock's "optimal level for copyright" falls over time (as production and reproduction costs fall), policy makers need to be especially careful when contemplating increased copyright terms. It's difficult to scale back rights that have once been granted, so "it is prudent for policy-makers to err on the low side rather than the high side when setting the strength of copyright."

Neither the US nor the UK are in any danger of rethinking copyright law from scratch, but if they were looking for guidance in how to set up their systems, Pollock has it. He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain.

Disk Drive Failures Worse Than You Realize ...

Speaking of Carnegie Mellon --

"A Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that customers are replacing disk drives more frequently than vendor estimates of mean time to failure (MTTF) would require. The study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for the drives indicated MTTF between 1 and 1.5 million hours. That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88%, annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%. The study also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel drives are any more reliable than SATA drives."

What does this mean the ATHEN membership --- back up , Back Up!, BACK UP!!. Not only that -- but invest in the best that your dollar can buy. The higher the quality, the better the survival rate. How much do we rely upon internal and external disck drives for E-Text production, DNS voice files, server based AT, student files, and more? Think about it.

The study (presented at 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies) does note that the spike in failure rates occurs early in drive life. If a drive does not fail withn the first 6-9 months of operation it is quite likely you will get a good 5+ years out of it - but there are no guarantees. Any drive older than 7 years is likely going to fail and just like anything else in life - you get what you pay for. the cheap drive your Dean makes you buy today may end up costing you much more in time, money and lost productivity in the nearer rather than later future.

Ceiling Height Alters How You Think

From Live Science.com comes a story that should be of interest to anyone running (or developing) an E-Text production facility or computer labs of any sort.

A recent study at the University of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain
processing.

Typically such back room production is quite literally assigned to a back room (should you be lucky enough to have such luxurious extra space) and typically not enough thought is given to ergonomics and worker comfort.

A related story on the Intelligent Workplace provides a look at research (experiments?) being conducted at Carnegie Mellon University Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. Housed (quite literally as it is the 'house') at the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace, with the mission "to research and demonstrate advanced building systems and their integration for total building performance." This may be a bit much for a simple AT or E-Text production lab, but there is always something to be learned. For example, within the IW all workers are within a certain distance of natural light and ventilation. In my E-Text lab one of the things my staff appreciates is windows that actually open and the fact that on a sunny day there is no need for the overhead fluorescents.

Announcing the OCRopus Open Source OCR System (Google Research)

From the good people of /. [Slashdot]

Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies". The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use."

Google is "hoping for contributions by the open source community in areas such as adapting the system to additional languages, creating a Gnome desktop application, integration with Gnome desktop search, web-based tools for proofing and training, language modeling, additional character recognition engines, and other useful tools and add-ons."

Late last year Google announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR, an obscure open-source program apparently familiar to only the most ardent Linux developer.

BBC NEWS | Technology | IBM helps blind 'see' web video

From BBC News - Technology

Big Blue will soon launch a multimedia browser designed to make audio and video content accessible to people with vision impairments. Codenamed the Accessibility Browser, the tool is designed to provide computer users with visual impairments the same control over multimedia content that sighted people have when using a mouse.

The new browser is the creation of Dr. Chieko Asakawa, a blind employee at IBM's research laboratory in Tokyo. Dr Asakawa was becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of web content that she was unable to access. For the time being, she and her team are concentrating on content that is compatible with Real Player and Windows Media Player.

• WebAIM has good information on the current state of Media Player Accessibility.
• The National Center for Accessible Media [NCAM] has Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the WebDesign Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web.
• NCAM is also home to MagPIE - an authoring tool for making Web- and CD-ROM-based multimedia materials accessible.
  

An Alternative to the Computer Mouse

A user interface, being developed at Stanford University, that tracks eye movement may provide an alternate way to use a computer. Originally developed for individuals with disabilities, the Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design (GUIDe) is designed to be more useful for able-bodied computer users. Since nondisabled users tend to have a higher standard for easy-to-use interfaces and thus eye-tracking technology that designed for the disabled hasn't appealed to them. Read more at the MIT Technology Review.

YouTube - Eye To Eye: An Online Library For The Blind

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Fruchterman talks with Byron Pitts in a YouTube - Eye To Eye interview. Jim is the CEO of Benetech, an Associate Member of the DAISY Consortium.
In the interview Jim says that his mission is "to use technology to help humanity." And, in the spirit of those who participate in DAISY developments, he announced "It is a badge of honor to be a geek."

This also appears as a story on the CBS Evening News - "Tech Entrepreneur Helps Blind To Read". If you visit the site, be sure to check out the related video.

If you have ever met Jim you know what an approachable down to earth nice guy he is. Don't let the MacArthur genius award get in the way of getting to know him. I especially like that he has taken on the mission of trying to convince the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurs to be socially conscious.

MIT's "seeing machine" for the legally blind

From Engadget:

MIT's got a new machine in the works that will offer some discrete seeing abilities to the 1.3 million legally blind in the US without the need for invasive retinal implants. Though it's not portable and doesn't (yet) support video feeds, the 12 x 6 x 6-inch "seeing machine" developed by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, enables users to control virtual 3D environments, view images, or read documents by way of an LED eyepiece that projects images directly onto the retinas of those with limited vision. We assume the consumer application of such a device is only eventual, but for now it remains with at MIT for development, so, um, keep an eye out.

Coming of Age: an introduction to the new world wide web

This book - Coming of Age (.pdf - 1.9MB) - is a nice UK introduction to Web 2.0 for individuals, teachers, school and Local Authority managers (Superintendents and Administrators), school libraries, Professional Development coordinators, students and parents.

The book provides a set of stories, describing the ways in which Web 2.0 technology can be used in schools, particularly as a way of supporting social, collaborative learning, and a more individualised curriculum.

I downloaded it and have read through much of it and though I know there is some really good information out there on the web, it is hard to find such a comprehensive listing of ideas and information from professionals in the field actually using and training on this stuff. If you get the chance, I very much recommend taking a look for yourself - go ahead - don't cost nothin'...

Font Size Roundup

I was going to post a bit on this 18 Monospace fonts comparison screenshot post and it triggered in my mind a memory of similar items long ignored in the drafts folder here at the ATHEN blog. So here are The Anatomy of Web Fonts an article on Favorite Fonts of 2005 and something on Font Size Variations with Point Measurements.

Personally I cannot make heads or tails out of this stuff but I know it arouses the interest of web-heads like fellow ATHEN member and webmaster Sean Keegan.