April 2008 Archives

"The Psychiatric Service Dog Society (PSDS) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to responsible Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD) education, advocacy, research and training facilitation. We provide essential information for persons disabled by severe mental illness, who wish to train a service dog to assist with the management of symptoms. We consult regularly with mental healthcare providers in their efforts to learn more about PSD. We also host an online community of service dog handlers veteran and new..."

http://www.psychdog.org/

WebMD cites a study from the recent issue of Molecular Psychiatry on the incidence of mental illness in American adults:

• 1.7% developed alcohol dependency
• 1.51% developed major depression
• 1.12% developed generalized anxiety disorder
• 1.02% developed alcohol abuse
• 0.62% developed any panic disorder
• 0.53% developed bipolar I disorder
• 0.44% developed a phobia
• 0.32% developed drug dependency
• 0.32% developed social phobia
• 0.28% developed drug abuse
• 0.21% developed bipolar II disorder

Although the rates seem low, the author points out that the risks are greater than those for lung cancer, stroke, or cardiovascular disease.

Read the article on WebMD.

AA sent me this tidbit:

ISEFF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM FESTIVAL 2008
TWO DAYS OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM
HOSTED BY GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Constructing Bonds
The politics of relation in ethnographic representation

The festival focuses particularly upon the difficulties entailed by anthropological film production and dissemination â?? what is the â??useâ?? of ethnographic film? How and for whom is it being produced? We consider notions of the afterlife of the anthropological product â?? is it wrong for ethnographic data to be used as market research? Can other disciplines and areas of society benefit from this material? We encourage a diverse audience of anthropologists and non-anthropologists from academia and public realms, offering a community of discussion framed around a media source. Film screenings shall be accompanied by a panel discussion.

I recently bought MacSpeech Dictate in order to help with the writing of my next book, Crazy in Japan (working title). Unfortunately, the program crashed everytime I tried to setup a new profile.

A couple of hours of googling seemed to suggest that the problem was with the English Data Disk, but various attempts to get a clean data disk revealed that that was likely not the problem.

A post on MacFixitForums by yfried helped me narrow it down:

There are several possible causes for this error:
1) having FileVault turned on
2) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the hard drive
3) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the userid used to login to the Macintosh
4) punctuation marks, symbols, foreign language characters, or high ASCII characters in the name of the voice profile (depending on when this error appears)
5) a network set up where the user's home folder is located on a server
6) having more than one hard drive installed in the Macintosh which has the same name (Apple ships multiple drive systems with all drives being the same name figuring that users will change the appropriate drive names)
from: http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum36&Number=853106&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1

In my case, I used Japanese characters in my full username in my login which screwed things up. Changing it from 中村かれん to Karen Nakamura fixed it and allowed me to set up my user profile.

This is very poor programming on MacSpeech's part, in my opinion. Mac OS X programs should be character set independent. It's 2008 for heaven's sake!

More on how MacSpeech Dictate actually is after I've used it for a while.

Last weekend, my dog and I helped with our neighborhood cleanup. We made the April 17th, 2008 issue of the New Haven Independent newspaper:

Just a small note that I upgraded this blog to MovableType 4.1. I think the process was rather smooth , but just to be sure -- try commenting on this entry to see if the comment mechanism works. If it doesn't, please e-mail me!

1:45pm Hmmm.... something is wrong with the commenting system. The previous anti-spam mechanism is incompatible w/ MT4.1.

1:52pm Now set up anonymous posting w/ reCaptchas.

1:58pm Accidentally nuked the old version 2.x stylesheets that I had been dragging around forever. Had to use a default 4.1 style to get everything working again. Boring!

I'm very pleased to be able to announce that my book Deaf in Japan (Cornell University Press) was awarded the 2008 John Whitney Hall Prize at the Association for Asian Studies 2008 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.

Below is a photo of me with my wonderful editor, Roger Haydon, of Cornell University Press at the conference.

From the mailbag:

Hello! My name is Elle Langevin, and I run a summer camp program for Deaf and HoH children in NH, at Windsor Mountain International Summer Camp. This year marks the 10th year that we will be offering this program, and we have made some significant changes, the most exciting being that we are now offering a 5 week intensive immersion program for beginning ASL interpreters. I am hoping that through your organization we can get the word out about this opportunity, possibly through your newsletter, and reach the students that would really benefit from this experience.