Beware the Sponge and Protect Your Reputation!

Are you happy with “The Cloud?” Do you even know what “The Cloud” is? And are you aware that even if you don’t know what “The Cloud ” is, you’re already drifting around inside it!

Love that cloud?

For those who like definitions, here’s one you can add to your personal dictionary:

The Cloud is a collection of data-storing computers scattered all over the globe and capable of collecting, sharing, and storing every piece of information that travels via the internet from one computer to another.

“The Cloud” is simply a simple phrase used to describe the notion of cloud computing. And cloud computing covers everything from Amazon downloads to Zynga games. So in truth, the internet is the cloud, and the cloud is the internet.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single computer user in possession of a good WiFi connection must be in want of the Cloud. Our world is now so connected that for many people the idea that you cannot send a message to someone almost instantaneously is unthinkable. Our “baby geniuses” who apparently,at the age of 2 months, can use an iPad to play Angry Birds, order a pizza with double pepperoni, and take down a foreign power all within 20 minutes, are destined to grow up in a world where the concept of “being alone” will be very different from what it used to be [1].

But here are two very, very important things to bear in mind about the cloud. First, it is public, in the sense that even if you have some “security” measures in place, the stuff that is out there is really “out there” and not written down on a single sheet of paper in a locked filing cabinet. Second, the cloud never forgets. Never! You might think an elephant has a phenomenal memory but the cloud is smarter that an entire herd of pachyderms and certainly contains a lot more shit.

In this sense, the cloud is not a cloud but a huge data sponge, soaking up every last drop of information that gets tweeted, posted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, blogged, plurked, googled, uploaded, pinterested, or simply emailed. And it’s a living sponge that grows and grows as new servers come on line on a daily basis, and as hard drives go from megabytes to terabytes and up to zettabytes and geopbytes [2]. Short of an apocalyptic destruction of all technology on the earth, the reality is that the sponge is here to stay and destined to be as much a part of our lives as electricity. Resistance is futile and we will be absorbed.

Beware the Sponge!

The world-wide web, as it was called back in the day, started life as a project to link documents via links, where you clicked on a word or phrase in a piece of text and that would whisk you away to another location – or even a different document! Although this seems transparent to use today, back in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and his pals created the first “web browser” at the CERN laboratories in Geneva, it was a breakthrough concept. It is, in fact, the most fundamental concept that underlies the entire cloud of today – hypertextual linking.

Since then, the web has become much more sophisticated and ubiquitous. For many of us in the Western world, information is literally at our fingertips as we tap our smart phones and type in “Which animal has the largest penis?” or “Show me a video of Gangnam style” and whoosh… we’re looking at a picture of a barnacle (its penis is 40 times as long as its body!) and Psy riding imaginary horses and slapping his booty while wearing a selection of clothes that look like they were stolen from a Vegas Elvis impersonator’s wardrobe [3].

On a more worrisome note, information from the cloud isn’t just restricted to well-hung sea-dwellers and Korean pop stars, but you and I are up there to. Really, we are. If you have never googled yourself before (and I can’t believe you haven’t) give it a try right now. Stop reading and type in your name.

If you are lucky, you’ll find links to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any of the social network sites to which you subscribe. If you are unlucky, you’ll find links to embarrassing YouTube videos you’d forgotten about or old posts that you regret making. But if you are extremely unlucky, you’ll find comments about you that are irritating, hurtful, and even not true. And as I said, this is all public.

So let’s look at some of the things you need to be aware of with regard to the cloud. According to the Swiss consultancy firm, KBSD, here are some statistics that make you think:

• 48% of recruiters and employers check your personal website prior to making a hiring decision
• 78% of recruiters use a search engine to check you out
• 63% of recruiters check social media sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
• 8% of companies have fired employees for comments on social media

So here is the Speech Dudes 10 Step Plan for protecting your online reputation.

1. Think Before You Post – TBYP. This is the most powerful tool you have against “foot-in-mouth” syndrome. It doesn’t prevent others from posting misinformation about you but the majority of internet blunders are caused by human error – that human being you.

2. Avoid “Enthusiasm Spam.” We are all excited about what we do and want share that. However, there is a point at which you enthusiasm can become irritating and annoying. A conversation in social media that’s “buy my stuff” is not a conversation – it’s a monologue or a sales pitch. As with point 1, you can control yourself and must avoid becoming that “infomercial saleperson” that makes you change the channel!

3. Set up a Google Alert to automatically tell you when you are mentioned as a result of a Google search. You need to have a Google account (in the cloud!) but the service is free and you can sign up for it at Google Alerts.

4. Respond quickly to a new mention and, if necessary, correct errors. Give the critic a “PAT on the back” – Personalise the discussion; Apologise for errors or confusions; Take Action to fix what went wrong.

5. Tag images before posting. If you create an image, you can usually tag it in some way to include ownership details – a minimum of “Copyright Speech Dudes, 2012.”  In the case of a disputed image (where someone has used you graphic without permission) a simple “Properties” click on the file will reveal that it is yours.

6. Regularly change passwords to email and social media accounts. This can be tedious depending on how often you want “regular” to be, but it can avoid hijacking of your media channels. When was the last time you saw a tweet from a “friend” you follow with “Hey, I just found out how to make $10,000 at this address!!! http://www.spamspamspam.com.”;

7. Avoid giving geographical information. Nothing says “come rob my house” better than “Mmh, loving this mojito in Aruba.” Your patterns of travel can be valuable information to marketeers who want to sell you place fares, but they an also tell less scrupulous people about your routines.

8. Learn to live with what “Freedom of Speech” really means or just stay out of the argument. For example, if you are a passionate atheist and regularly blog about it, make comments on Facebook, or tweet the Richard Dawkins website address to all your followers every week, do not be surprised if your god-fearing clients decide to go elsewhere. You are free to say what you like but so are your critics.

9. “Be Excellent to Each Other.” Your reputation is only as good as you are to other people. Trite as it may seem, the “Golden Rule” still applies in the world of the cloud – even if the majority of the folks who comment on news websites seem to be belligerent, venom-spitting zealots with all the appeal of a weeping wound on a canker-infested rhino’s backside. And that’s being unkind to rhinos.

10. Consider a Reputation Management company. The larger your business, the more likely you are to suffer some reputation attacks, and it may make financial sense to employ a company that specialises in Reputation Management. Sure it costs money but so does lost business. No matter how nice, patient, and diplomatic you may be, sometimes you have to use a 3rd-party to help, be that a Reputation Management group or an attorney.

If you take reasonable precautions, such as the 10 listed above, you can minimize the harm that can come from the unpredictable and skittish inhabitants of the cloud.

And we are, after all, a reputable source!

Notes
[1] I can remember when a vacation meant being out of contact for two weeks, and the world apparently went on quite happily during that time. In fact, that was pretty standard for most people. Now it’s rare for anyone to have any time when they are incommunicado unless they proactively arrange it that way. I am as guilty as anyone since I used to scoff and sneer at “workaholics” who couldn’t put their phones down, and now I have mt Droid pinging, peeping, and buzzing from getting out of bed in the morning to getting back in at night. I worry that the loss of “being alone” will have tragic effects on our psyches and that we are all the worse for being always connected.

[2] The geopbyte is 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 bytes – which is pretty big. For those who love numbers – and we try always to be educational, even if we don’t win awards – here’s a chart you can copy and paste:

1 Bit  = Binary Digit

4 Bits =1 Nibble

8 Bits = 1 Byte

1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 

1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
1024 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte 

[3] For the Dudes out there who are more interested in Psy’s co-star in the video – and who wouldn’t be – she’s also a Korean K-pop star called Hyuna who sings with the group, 4Minute. K-pop is a genre of music from Korea that is basically a dance-rap blend with a little techno thrown in for good measure. Prior to Psy’s mega-hit, Gangnam Style, K-pop was pretty much a specialist genre for folks in the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries.

Why Scarves are important to Speech Pathologists

In a recent poll of Speech and Language Pathologists  (The #SLPeeps Top 10 SLP Gifts) held by the folks at LessonPix, the number one object of infinite desire was… the scarf! Talk about stereotypes fulfilled. Tragically, this Dude was one of those who voted for the scarf, and readily admits to having a small collection of the things (you have to match with your coats and jackets – duh!) so perhaps it’s not necessarily surprising.

My new scarf

Of course, the other factor that may be biasing the results is that the poll is taking place just as the weather is becoming peppered with snow and the temperatures are falling faster than Mitt Romney’s post-election popularity [1]. So the stores are currently filled with more scarves than Santa has elves.

And so speaking of scarves and elves…

One of the standard areas of concern for SLPs is teaching plurals. To be more accurate, teaching the phonological realizations of a morphological process that creates plural forms from a singular morpheme base. I toss that in because some folks seem to think that the Dudes are trivial, unprofessional, and simply out for a good time. That may have some veracity about it, but we are very aware that not everyone who reads this blog is, in fact, an SLP. So our role is to entertain and educate a broad church, and to promote the idea that SLPs are more than middle-class gentile ladies who wear scarves with twin-sets and pearls. Well, OK, so we do wear scarves…

Therapeutically speaking, we can use the scarf as a way of teaching a rather limited set of weird plural forms, namely those nouns that end in an /f/ sound when singular but turn into a /vz/ when plural. Here’s the list;

calf – calves
life – lives
thief – thieves
elf – elves
loaf – loaves
wife – wives
half – halves
self – selves
wolf – wolves
knife-knives
sheaf-sheaves
leaf – leaves
shelf – shelves

There are ongoing discussions about dwarf – dwarfs/dwarves, with linguists typically coming down on the side of dwarves but Disney still insisting on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” – and you don’t mess with the Mouse unless you want a law suit in the mail [2].

Historically, these “irregular” plurals come from a “regular” source – Old English. You see, one of the common plurals in OE was the ending “-as,” and so you would talk about one wulf or wif (wolf and wife [3]) but two or more wulfas or wifas. But there was also a rule in existence that said that all fricatives (such as /f/ or /s/) would become voiced (change to /v/ or /z/) when they were stuffed between two other voiced sounds, which includes vowels. So seeing as the /f/ in wulfas and wifas sat between vowels, they were pronounced as /’wulvæz/ and /’waɪvæz/. Finally, over time, the final unstressed vowel was dropped leaving /’wulvz/ and /’waɪvz/.

Tada!!

But the fun doesn’t stop here, oh no! Just to keep the excitement going, the word scarf doesn’t come from the Old English and wasn’t around with the wolves, wives, elves, leaves, or sheaves, and didn’t make an appearance in the English lexicon until the middle of the 16th century. It’s not absolutely certain, but odds are that scarf comes from Old Northern French escarpe meaning “a sash” or “a sling for a wounded arm.” At that time, folks did talk about wearing scarfs but in the 18th century, it became mor fashionable to wear scarves, the plural swap being influenced by those old Old English “irregulars.”

Using my old friend, the Corpus of Historical American, I was able to produce the following graphs that show how scarfs declined as scarves ascended.

“Scarfs” over time

“Scarves” over time

As a confirmatory check, I also did a Google N-gram search:

“Scarfs” and “scarves” over time

We could stop here and say “so that’s why you should teach scarves and not scarfs” and be done with it, but there’s just one more wonderful little quirk of English I’d like to point out.

“My dog is a hungry wee beastie. Whenever I give him some food, he scarfs it down as if he’d never eaten before.” So why doesn’t he *scarve it down?

Well, when the word scarf appears as a verb, it comes from a completely different place. It is, in fact, a variation of the word scoff, which is in turn a slang word for “to eat voraciously” or “to devour hungrily.” This word made its appearance at the beginning of the 19th century and so it’s subject to the rules of Modern English grammar, not Old English. When you add the third-person verb ending of “s” to scoff, it becomes plain old scoffs, and in Modern English, the final sound takes on the voicing of the preceding sound, hence /’skɒfs/.

So there you have it! SLPs love scarves because they remind us about phonological processes that change words over time, processes that changed the pronunciation of plural and verb morphology, and even about the history of the English language.

Or maybe we just like the colors…

Notes
[1] I’m not given to engaging in political discussions but yesterday I drove past a gas station here in Ohio where the price of a gallon was $2.98, and less than a month ago I was listening to Republican pundits prophesying how gas prices would rocket if Obama were elected. They were so sure, certain, positive, and adamant about the truth of the assertion that there are only two conclusions to draw from their pontificating; either there were wrong (in which case they are no smarter than anyone who can scrawl an “X” on a ballot so not worth listening to) or they were lying (in which case they are lying bastards and will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.) If there’s a third alternative, let me know.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, a linguistics scholar, argued for the use of dwarves, and all his works use that. But the venerable Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges the words dwarfs as a plural, thus queering the pitch even further. Way back in 1862, Ernest Adams wrote The Elements of the English Language and noted that the forms dwarf/dwarves seemed to be in free variation, but that “in modern English the form in f is preferred” (p.39).

[3] Before someone smacks me over the head with very heavy copies of Beowulf or Caedmon’s Hymn, I am aware that since Old English was first spoken, there has been a Great Vowel Shift that changed the pronunciation of many words. So in my example of /’waɪf/ should really have had the long “eee” vowel, /i/ and been /’wif/ if we’re going to be more accurate. However, whether the vowel is /aɪ/ or /i/, the rule that changed /f/ and /s/ to /v/ and /z/ would still have applied.

The Dudes Do ASHA 2012: Day 4 11/17/12

It was the last day of ASHA and I had the special honor of closing the AAC strand for the convention. In short, I was last on the list of AAC presenters. In a curious twist of fate, my colleague from Germany opened the AAC strand at the first session of Thursday so between us we’d bracketed the field!

ASHA at GWCC

A less charitable viewpoint might be that I had to present after lunch on the last day, when many folks were leaving to catch planes home or taking the opportunity to spend one last day in the wonderful city of Atlanta. So the fact that folks turned up, including one of my #slpeeps from the Twitterverse was quite a relief. [2]

The topic was on how to use the data generated by an AAC device to plan therapy sessions. A number of AAC technologies have the facility to track data but few people seem to use it. The purpose of the presentation was to show folks that there is immense value in using such logging in order to help clients improve their communication skills.

Basically, automated data logging tracks events over time; you can see what someone is saying and when they are saying it. And with just these two pieces of information, you can provide a much better service to your clients. [1] You can gather information about;

• Vocabulary – the words your client uses
• Morphology – the way your client uses morphemes to indicate tense, number, intensity etc.
• Syntax – how your client uses words in a systemic way along with other words
• Function – how is your client’s language used (questions, imperatives, requests etc.)

To facilitate this, you can use the QUAD Profile, a paper-based checklist that provides guidelines on what to look for. Developed in 2005 as a quick and dirty evaluation tool, the QUAD is simple enough that you don’t have to be a specialist in AAC to use it [3]. You can click on the graphic below to download a copy.

QUAD Profile

You can also take user-generated text data and analyze it using either Concordance or WordSmith, two pieces of software that you can input large amounts of text and then measure word frequencies, type/token ratios, or find keywords – those words in a sample that occur more frequently than you would expect by chance. I’ve covered both these – and discussed core versus fringe versus keywords in The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 4 – Of Corpora and Concordances, so take a look there for more details.

What I failed to spend any time talking about was the excellent BYU Corpora created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. If you’re wanting to find out how a particular word is used in contemporary American English – or slightly less contemporary British English – you can do no worse than using these corpora than the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA [4]. As an example, I previously talked about the difference between “taking a bath/shower” and “having a bath/shower,” arguing that in British English you’d teach “having” whereas in American English you’d focus on “taking.” The key point is that you can use the COCA to quantify this difference. And quantifying is a step towards evidence-based practice.

Here’s another example of where using the COCA can help you decide on which words to teach: which should you teach first – look or see? Well, if you want to focus on bigger semantic bang-for-buck, you should go for see, which is used in speech twice as often as look. Or how about need and want? It turns out that want is three times more likely to be used than need, so want is much more useful.

Another thing the COCA does is to show how words are used in context. This turns out to be very valuable knowledge to have when teaching language because you can’t just teach a word in isolation. For example, if we go back to the example of the word look, the COCA shows that is very frequently appears immediately before a preposition. Here are specifics:

“look” and PREP

So if you are going to teach look, think about look at followed by look for as contextual phrases because that’s how the word is used in real life! Here’s a link to download my slides and notes as a PDF handout.

DOWNLOAD: Using AAC device-generated client data to develop therapy sessions

By 2:30, I was done. My target was to be in my room at 3:00 with my shoes off, feet up, and a coffee in my hand. And this turned out to be a success!

At 5:00, I left for an early dinner with friend at the Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint at 200 Peachtree Street. Being in the South, I plumped for fried chicken with collard greens, a peach cobbler for dessert, and a delicious Millionaires Mojito. To make the night breeze along, we were entertained by Nat George and the Nat George Players, a band so smooth you could spread ‘em on toast.

The video doesn’t really do the band justice but that’s all the more reason for you to put a trip to see them on your list of “Things to do in Atlanta” on you next trip out.

Another memorable night, and yet another example of why I guess I could spend much more time exploring the city. But tomorrow it’s back home. Ah well. C’est la vie.

Downtown Atlanta

Notes
[1] At this point, you might wonder why I don’t leap into the discussion about privacy, security, and ethics. Well, that’s because if I need to do that, I’d rather spend an entire post on it. But the short answer is that in all the years I’ve worked with clients who have data logging capabilities I have yet to have ONE tell me that I can’t see their data. After I have a short conversation about why I want to track their data and what I intend to do with it, they’ve been happy to allow me to have access. It’s important to have this discussion prior to turning on monitoring, and critical to explain the value, but once you do that, there’s no problem. Informed consent is a wonderful thing.

[2] OK, so it was @MeganPanatier – Thanks for stopping by and for tweeting some of my comments during the presentation!

[3] Cross, R.T. (2010). Developing Evidence-Based Clinical Resources, in Embedding Evidence-Based Practice in Speech and Language Therapy: International Examples (eds H. Roddam and J. Skeat), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, UK.

[4] The site  includes the Corpus of Contemporary American English (450 million words), the British National Corpus (100 million words), the Corpus of Historical American (400 million words), the Time Magazine corpus (100 million words) and the new Corpus of American Soap Operas (100 million words), which I have yet to test run!

The Dudes Do ASHA 2012: Day 3 – 11/16/12

The Church of the Lost Souls

At 828 North Highland Road, a main street some four miles north and east of downtown Atlanta, is a small bar by the name of Blind Willie’s. I call it a “bar” only because that’s the word my friend used to describe it before he took a small group of us there. But it turns out to be more than that. Much more.

Blind Willie’s, Atlanta

As a teenager growing up in the poor industrial north of England, where coal fires were still the main way to stay warm, and walking to school in the winter was accompanied by the smell of soot and frost, I had dreams. I dare say my dreams were no different than those of many working-class kids but mine distinctly included visions of American life. Sure, all I knew about the country was what I’d seen on our four-channel black-and-white TV, or heard under the bedclothes at night on my treasured transistor radio that brought in music from Radio Luxemburg, a faraway crackly station somewhere on “the Continent” as we used to call Europe.

There were beaches and blondes in California; hippies in San Francisco; cowboys in Texas; gangsters in Chicago; hustlers in New York; and blues and jazz in New Orleans. It was an America of the Mind, constructed from the media images I could see and hear, and that probably bore little resemblance to the truth. Yet it was as real to me as London or Liverpool or Edinburgh, or any of the cities within the UK that I’d never been to.

I picked up a guitar at 13 and discovered that playing the basics of the Blues was easier than I had thought. Three chords, twelve bars, and a simple progression that, once practiced, could have you jamming with your friends for hours on end. And the neat thing was that you could make it up as you want without the need to learn to read music or copy other people.

With the mechanics of the Blues under your belt, you soon discover that it’s not about the notes themselves but how you phrase them, bend them, slide them, extend them, and move effortlessly up and down the frets to express a feeling and not a tune. And it’s this that is difficult and that makes the difference between a mechanic and a player.

Along with the actual music, there was always an image that went along with the notion of a “Blues Band.” They players would be rough around the edges, drinkers, smokers, and womanizers. They’d be eking a living by playing in dark dirty bars for free food, free drinks, and a few dollars that would be just enough to keep a roof over their heads and their instruments up and running. There’d were no Shea or Wembley stadium gigs for them, just another round of booze and blues in front of a crowd of folks who, if the band did their job right, would end the night cheering and hollering in appreciation.

By the time I moved to the US in my late thirties, music had become more corporate, smoking was on the way out, drinking was in family-style pubs where kids were allowed to wander around the “family-friendly” environment, and the AIDs epidemic of the 80′s had made womanizing a much deadlier pastime for everyone. The America I came to wasn’t the America of my teenage dreams; except for the blondes in California – still one of my favorite places to be.

But there are still some magical places still left in America, and Blind Willie’s in one of those. As I said, it’s not a bar but a cross between a church and a time machine. It’s also something of a reverse of Dr. Who’s Tardis – it looks bigger on the outside than it is within!

The first thing you notice is that you don’t notice much because the walls are red and the lights are low. Real low. Your eyes have to adjust from a well-lit street to a gloomy interior. And when you start to see things, you see the wooden bar, the wooden walls, and the wooden floor. It feels old. In actuality, it was opened in 1986, the same year as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant ruptured and killed thousands of people; when the US was dropping bombs in Libya in response to alleged government-sponsored terrorism from Colonel Gaddafi; and when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded killing its crew of seven. But it feels older. Much older.

Inside the bar

And oh, how the band play! The house band, the Shadows, look as if they belong there. The space in which they play is as tight as their musicianship, which appears to be effortless but is really a reflection of years of experience coupled with an innate sense of how the Blues should be. The guitarist’s fingers spider their way up and down the neck, sliding and bending each note with just the right pressure to fill the room with the fat, rounded sustained notes from his worn Stratocaster. The bass player, in his small black hat and shades (shades!) provides that subtle yet essential deep throbbing background to fill in the lower registers. The singer plays harmonica and saxophone as if he’d been clutching them at birth, and provides the driving sounds that kept everyone’s feet tapping and hands clapping. And the drummer, often an unsung hero in a band, keeps it all together in an understated yet vital way.

House band The Shadows

These guys are bluesmen and know their craft. The tunes they play are as timeless as the bar, and the execution of the music is flawless. And when Luther “Houserocker” Johnson joins them on stage, it’s as if we are all living 60 years ago in a time when folks like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters were teaching us about electric guitars and making those small plastic disks called “records,” which would go on to influence folks like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and many other blues-tinged 60′s and 70′s bands.

“Houserocker” looks the part, with his black fedora, black leather waistcoat, dark glasses, and a red Gibson ES335. Before taking the stage, he provides us with another Americana moment – he sits, legs apart, watching the band, nodding his head, and drinking a bottle of Budweiser – the King of Beers. A marketing man’s dream!

Luthor “Houserocker” Johnson

For the next couple of hours, we listen, we sing, we clap, we hoot; folks get up and dance in any available space, bumping and grinding with grins on their faces, enjoying every minute of this bar-room bacchanal. On a couple of occasions, “Houserocker” gives in to a little showmanship by playing the guitar with his teeth, a ritualistic display that new visitors expect to see. The place is just so alive!

In an America sometimes lost in the rhetoric of party politics and the narcissistic self-absorption of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – where “me” is the only pronoun you need to know – this smoky bar in Atlanta provides an island for those adrift and looking for something they thought had gone forever. Here, no-one is telling you not to smoke, not to drink, and not to eat as much of the “Feelin’ the Blues” chips that are fried and smothered in blue cheese. There’s nobody suggesting you “keep the volume down” in case your sensitive ears are damaged, for this is the Church of the Lost Souls; a place of redemption; a religious experience for the unapologetically profane; a godless, pagan ritual that reconnects you with something you thought no longer existed. No siree, for just a few hours you can be just a little wicked and sinful, safe in the knowledge that your soul will be saved by the healing power of Brother Luther and his Ministers of Music.

This is not just a band playing in a bar but a huge dollop of pure Americana, served up with a side of attitude, sprinkles of swagger, and an all-you-can-eat buffet of solid musicianship and craft.

Like it says on the can of one of Atlanta’s other iconic offerings, this IS the Real Thing.

The Dudes Do ASHA 2012: Day 2 – 11/15/12

Maya Angelou

There were two very active strands of conversation on the ASHA twitter feed today. The first was about unswerving love and praise for the convention’s keynote speaker, Maya Angelou, who is described as a poet, novelist, playwright, activist, feminist et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a wonder she actually has time to do a keynote or write six (yes, six) autobiographies. I suppose the seventh autobiography will concentrate on her time writing the previous six. Her own website modestly describes herself as a “global renaissance woman;” nothing like a little modesty, eh?

Still, lots of people seem to like her and by all accounts, she was inspirational and comforting to the attendees at her morning session. The top tweets included such one-liners as “ ”A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song” and “Be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud.” People love these little snippets of home-spun, folksy wisdom, and the fact they can be used as sound bites or tweets makes them all the more popular [1].

However, I’m betting that Maya didn’t get caught up in the second great tweet discussion of the morning – the length of the lines for the bathrooms. You see, the builders of the Georgia World Conference Center, in a spirit of equality, made the same number of bathrooms for women as they did for men. Unfortunately, this has consequences when you have a convention of several thousand people, 90% of whom are of one gender. So while the dudes were able to walk into a bathroom, take care of business, and exit within three minutes, the average dudette was looking at a 10-minute wait.

In an effort to promote goodwill between the sexes, after using the facilities, I came outside and encouraged my colleagues to use the men’s room simply by going inside and turning right to get to the stalls. Turning left might have caused a little embarrassment but hardly enough to leave a poor chap scarred for life. And unsurprisingly, folks began to drop out of the line for the ladies and popped into the gents. Problem solved. Well, except perhaps for the guys who were still inside and who I hadn’t told I was going to invite everyone in!

The line for the toilets was matched by the line for the Starbucks. At one point, the store by close to the entrance to the center had a double line snaking up and down like Monday morning at the methadone clinic. It was actually faster to leave the building, go across the road to the CNN Center, and use the Starbucks there, where the line was nowhere near as long.

CNN Center Starbucks

So where, you ask, did the Dudes spend the evening? Well, we started in the bar of the Omni Hotel and ended up at the Legal Sea Foods restaurant with a group of drunken SLPs. I suppose “drunk” is a relative term, but I suspect none of them would have been in a fit state to work with a client or ride a bicycle. I did learn a new word though; a whale tail. This is where a woman has low-waisted jeans that let the top of her thong show above the back of the pants – it looks like a whale’s tail.

Whale tails and a whale’s tail

Slang, as we know, is a vital and vibrant part of our language, although it can be fleeting and ephemeral, often disappearing after a few years [2]. The Urban Dictionary first mentions the whale tail in 2003, and by 2005 it was on the radar of the American Dialect Society as one of its “most creative words of the year.”

For folks who are interested enough in words to visit a library or subscribe to a publication, the American Dialect Society (ADS) publishes a journal called American Speech, which has been in existence since 1925. It was founded by H.L. Mencken and Professor Louise Pound. The ADS is also responsible for the annual Words of the Year list that is revealed at the society’s annual conference in January [3].

We left the restaurant before midnight and while one of the Dudes headed off to spend a couple of hours at another bar with three of our colleagues, the other went to bed. I must be getting old.

Notes
[1] No, I’m not a big fan and though I can appreciate her popularity, I’ve tried to read her poetry and books but found them put-downable. Sorry.

[2] And slang, as a word, is one of those that has a mysterious, unknown etymology. It first appeared in print in the mid-18th century but prior to that appears to have no mentions. There has been speculation in the past that it relates to the Norwegian slengja, meaning to throw (in the sense of throwing out words), and thus back to Old Norse slongav, also meaning throw, but there’s no definite correlation and many etymologists stick with the unsatisfying “unknown origin” rather than dash off on a linguistic flights of fancy.

[3] For the curious, here’s a list of the past winners: occupy (2011); app (2010); tweet (2009); bailout (2008); subprime (2007); plutoed (2006); truthiness (2005); red, purple, blue state (2004); metrosexual (2003); weapons of mass destruction (2002); 9-11 (2001); and chad (2000).

The Dudes Do ASHA 2012: Day 1 – 11/14/12

tale, (n). A story or narrative, true or fictitious, drawn up so as to interest or amuse, or to preserve the history of a fact or incident. (OED)

Another year, another ASHA Convention, and the Dudes are as committed as ever to support the event. This includes another round of unofficial blog posts that offer tales rather than truths. That’s not so say we’ll be telling any pork pies [1] but the good folks over at the official ASHA blog will be offering a possibly more sober set of postings with a more professional slant. We, on the other hand, are pretty much open to telling stories that we think are interesting and related to the convention only insofar as they are based on our experience of the whole event.

Which is why my first comment is to rail against an entire community of people; cab drivers [2]. Readers of a sensitive nature, who may be worried about “cabist” comments or “cabby stereotyping” might want to pop on over to the ASHAsphere right now. Folks with stronger stomachs and a wry sense of humor should feel free to move on to the next paragraph.

Having grown up in the UK where a London taxi driver had to spend months of learning “the knowledge” [3] before being allowed to hold a license to transport fares, I’ve always assumed that the minimum skill a cab driver needs is to know how to get from point A to point B. Apparently not. One of my first reality checks about the American cab system took place some 15 years ago when I naively got into a cab at the Hilton LAX in Los Angeles and asked to be taken to an address some 10 miles away. I then learned about a special piece of Los Angeles culture – the Thomas Guide; a detailed street atlas for LA. And the reason I learned about it was that about 10 seconds after telling the driver where I wanted to go, he dropped one in my lap, tapped on the cover, and said “Where?” The ride then consisted of our jointly navigating the outskirts of the city trying to find my target location. When we eventually found it, I was then expected to pay the fare regardless of my contribution to the journey.

The modern day equivalent is at least a little more hi-tech: the cabbie calls a friend on his mobile phone and gets turn-by-turn directions. There is, of course, just a chance that the driver might have splashed out $100 to buy a GPS but that’s not guaranteed. What continues to irritate me is that not knowing where to go is still a problem! Apparently as long as I can turn a steering wheel and not kill a passenger in a ball of flame after hitting a gas station I didn’t know was on my route, I too could become a cab driver.

Another gripe is that any stickers to the effect that “this cab takes credit cards” are only there for decoration, possibly because they can’t fit a “my other cab’s another cab” sticker on there. On more than one occasion, I have ended up at an airport having to leave my bags as hostage while I find an ATM because “the credit machine isn’t working” or “we only take cards between 1:00 pm and 1:15 pm when there’s a full moon and my brother-in-law’s wife is pregnant.” Hey, and then try NOT giving a tip and see what creative language a cabbie can use!

OK, so maybe there are a few decent, skilled, and helpful cab drivers out there, and yes, I have had other rides where I’ve ended up where I wanted to be. But the problem is that the memory of the bad experiences ultimately drowns out those of the good. And because the frequency of occurrence of bad experiences is higher than that of, say, taking a plane or bad service at a restaurant, my attitude toward the cab as a mode of transport is now overwhelmingly negative [4]. These days, I will consider every other option before I choose a cab.

Inside the Omni Hotel

This is why when I arrived at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International airport I booked a ride on the Atlanta Airport Shuttle bus (www.taass.com) for the downtown trip to the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center. On the downside, the $29 return ticket also included a stop at every other hotel in downtown Atlanta before mine, but with shuttle buses, I have never had a problem getting to a destination, and I’ve yet to have a bus driver toss an atlas at me.

By the time I’d dropped my bags off in the room, it was after 7:00 pm and Speech Dude 2 was sending me texts to the effect that he was so weak with hunger that he couldn’t actually speak on the phone. So we headed for the first place where we could get food; McCormick and Schmick’s at the CNN Center. Tragically there were no tables available, due to the fact that thousands of SLPs and Audiologists had descended on Atlanta like a plague of locust and were rapidly devouring all and any food in a two-mile radius of the World Convention Center. However, the starving Speech Dude 2 seemed to have developed the visual acumen of an owl in heat, and spotted a couple of locust just about to leave the bar. We swooped in and slammed our butts on the still-warm seats faster than Simon Cowell can shut down a karaoke singer.
As we’re not a foodie blog, all you need know is that we ate mussels, steak, and shrimp, and drank beer.

Hardly original but then we are Dudes and not Gourmands, and Dudes are fine with the simple things in life – which include cooked dead animals [5] and alcohol. All we need say is that the food was excellent, the beer was cold and delicious, and we left the restaurant very satisfied.

Tomorrow the sessions start and the local Starbucks stores will be severely tested. Let’s see how well they respond to the coming onslaught. Cry “Havoc,” and let slip the dogs of war!

Notes
[1] Pork Pies is Cockney rhyming slang for “lies.” What’s more interesting about Cockney slang is that many rhymed words have actually lost their rhyming component and taken on a solo life. You’re more likely to hear someone say porkies, where the second element is deleted and the plural form added to the first. Other examples include the word barnett meaning “hair,” which comes from Barnett Fair; butcher’s meaning “look” from Butcher’s Hook; and plates for “feet,” from plates of meat.

[2] The word cab as used for a passenger vehicle for hire is actually a shortened form of the word taxi-cab, and the word taxi is a colloquialism for taximeter. A taximeter is a device fitted on a vehicle that indicates the distance it has traveled and the fare associated with it. The device was patented in Germany in 1890 and began to be used in passenger cabs. By 1907, the word was being shortened to taxi in reference to them being used in motorized vehicles. Clearly the more accurate word “taximeter-cab” was too much of a mouthful and the shift to taxi-cab then taxi was inevitable.

[3] “The Knowledge” is the knowledge of detailed knowledge of London within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. It’s based on learning 320 routes (or runs) and requires learning the 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest in that six mile radius.

[4] This is simply another example of the general phenomenon whereby the intensity of a single event can counter any number of contrary but less-emotive experiences. One plane crash can turn someone off flying forever, yet statistically you have more chance of dying from crossing the road or a heart attack. Emotion trumps statistics every time.

[5] Regular readers may already be aware of the religious persuasion of this Dude; evangelical atheist. But if there were a god and we were made on the basis of some plan, then there has to be a good reason why he/she gave us those four canine fangs that are designed to rip and tear flesh. If we’d been supposed to eat grass, we’d have just had large flat teeth for grinding up fiber. But no, the canines are a bit of a giveaway, and so when you chow down on a soft, juicy steak, or gently nibble the tender pork from a barbecued rib, you are doing the Lord’s work. Why, it would be almost sinful not to eat meat!

You might, of course, disagree

Talk Like a Pirate and Be More Efficient

Ahoy, mateys! In case ye not be knowing, the 19th day of September be Talk Like A Pirate day, and ye be encouraged to bedazzle yer sentences with “avast ye” and “yo ho ho.”

From the linguistic point of view – and I am, of course, a Speech Pathologist so these things matter – talking like a pirate is a really good example of how we could make English easier by one simple change; remove all the morphological variants from the verb, to be, in a single stoke – or a single slash of the cutlass – we can consign these linguistic fossils to the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the conjugation table below for English versus Pirate English (PE):

By replacing am/are/is with the single word be, we’ve both made the lexicon smaller and helped everyone learning the English language by removing all the complexities surrounding which form of to to use with which pronoun. [1]

For the negative forms, you have two choices – and both of them are equally simple!

1. NOT-insertion: PRON + “be” -> PRON + “not” + “be”

Example: He is drinking -> He not be drinking
You are not helping -> You not be helping

 2. AIN’T insertion: PRON + “be” -> PRON + “aint” + (“be”)

Example: He is leaving -> He ain’t be leaving

The question forms of the AIN’T insertion are also spectacularly easy:

Example: Ain’t we be needing to leave?
I ain’t be hungry now.

You’ll notice that I have marked the word be as optional in the AIN’T insertion rule because I think there are times that a pirate can get away with omitting it altogether – I may have to watch the Pirates of the Caribbean series of movies a few more times and take more notes for some “field data.” So if Captain Jack Sparrow were to say, “You ain’t stealing my ship, ye scury knave,” that’d be perfectly OK.

“No more Disney cruises for me!”

Another construction popular with pirates is the future. English, as we know, doesn’t actually have a future tense as such but marks future events by using the verb will, the phrase “be going to,” or conditional verbs (shall, could, would, might etc.) But in Pirate English, it’s standard to use the contacted form of will, as in “You’ll be wanting to come aboard, will ye?” or “Ah, he’ll be swabbing the deck now.”

Note that the general form is as follows:

PRON + ‘ll + “be” + VERB+ing

The negative simply requires the insertion of not before the be; “You’ll not be coming aboard” or “We’ll not be dropping anchor here, me hearties.”

These basic syntactic forms – and there be others [2] – can be augmented by learning a simple phonological rules:

Final /ŋ/ -> /n/: Velar fronting

OK, so this can happen in other forms of English but it appears to be particularly marked in PE. The sentence “He’ll be drowning” would be pronounced;

/ˌhil bɪ ˈdɹɑʊnɪn/

Or “They’ll be swimming with the sharks” would be /ˌðeɪl bɪ ˈswɪmɪn wɪ ðə ˈʃaɹks/, which is typically written in pirate literature as “They’ll be swimmin’ wi’ the sharks.” Notice how “with” also undergoes a final consonant deletion to /wɪ/.

But enough of the theory; how about some mindless practice For all of us with a Facebook account, here’s how to change your Facebook page to use Pirate English:

1. Click on the drop-down arrow at the top right of your page next to Home and find “Account Settings.”

2. Click on the Edit button for the Language settings.

3. From the drop-down button select English (Pirate).

4. Choose the Save Changes  button.

Ye now be sailin’ as a pirate!

There are some “useful” resources to help you become more linguistically proficient on Talk Like a Pirate Day, and here’s a selection.

(a) Post Like a Pirate
Lets you type in text and have it coverted to Pirate English. Not 100% accurate but a good start!

(b) Website PE Converter
Turn any website into its Pirate English equivalent. Funny stuff indeed!

(c) The Five A’s of Piratese
Th’ Pirate Guys offer a video on Piratese.

(d) A Pirate Dictionary
What it says… a list of piratey words.

(e) Teaching With Pirates
UK resources for pirate-based teaching activities.

Notes
[1] This phenomenon is the basis for “The Case for Ain’t” or “Why Using ‘Ain’t’ Ain’t So Bad.” When someone use ain’t instead of “am not,” “are not,” or “is not,” they are not being lazy but efficient! Just as using be instead of am/are/is simplifies the system, so does using ain’t. This view ain’t going to score me any points with the grammatical prescriptivists but that doesn’t stop my point from being accurate.

[2] One obvious example is that the first person singular possessive determiner, my, and the first person singular object pronoun, me, become one morphological form, /mɪ/. That’s apparent in sentences such as, “Avast ye, me hearties” or “Pass me me grog.” In the case of “you” becoming “ye” (/ji/) that’s just a phonetic change of the /u/ sound to an /i/.

Great Read You May Have Missed: “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo

In his 1994 book, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages [1], the American literary critic Harold Bloom makes an impassioned case for the reading of what he promotes as the canonical works of Western literature. As a response to the criticism that the canon is simply a collection of “dead white men” and reflects a biased, patriarchal, and euro-centric viewpoint that fails to include the “real” world. Bloom basically says “poppycock” and sets out to explain why the canon [2] is important for everyone.

Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon”

Specifically, he focuses on the works of 26 writers [3] who he sees as being core to the canon, and whose works are well-worth the time spent reading. Shakespeare is the central figure of the canon, but even Willy was influenced by what had gone before him and so it’s hard to find a single person to epitomize the canon [4].

So what makes a work “canonical?” How does Bloom decide what should be included? Here’s a critical paragraph:

I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty…when you read a canonical work for the first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectation. (What they) have in common (is) their uncanniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home. (p. 3.)

 Missing from the list is a small treasure of Mexican literature call Pedro Páramo by the author Juan Rulfo. What makes it also remarkable is that it is Rulfo’s only novel, with his only other work being a collection of short stories El Llano en llamas, or The Burning Plain and Other Stories as it is translated for the English market.

Juan Rulfo’s ”Pedro Paramo”

The book certainly fulfils the criteria of having “an uncanny startlement.” The story shifts in a dreamlike fashion from narrator-to-narrator, and from past to present, with little or no help along the way to let the reader know. Although it is often cited by critics as belonging to that strand of fiction known as “magical realism,” it strays much more into simply surrealism and seems to be a work on its own, making it difficult to say something along the lines of “well, it’s sort of like…” [5]

The story starts with one of the characters, Juan Preciado, promising his dying mother that he will go back to the town of his birth, Comela, to find his father, Pedro Paramo. What follows is an Orphic descent into not so much the underworld as a purgatory. But unlike Orpheus, he is not seeking the love of a Eurydice but the truth about his long-lost father, who turns out to be less than saintly. [6]

The book is short – probably better labeled a novella than a novel – but intense. It isn’t an easy read but that’s not a bad thing. It demands your time and concentration, for which you will be rewarded. The shifts in person, tense, and time can be daunting yet if you keep your wits about you, you’ll find yourself caught up in a world filled with ghosts and memories.

Ultimately it’s a tale of love – lost and unrequited. It’s also a story of folly, decay, and cruelty set in rural Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century. In short, it’s human – even if the characters are spectres. The book is strange, powerful atmospheric, and destined to become one of your favorites if you’ve never come across it before.

Sadly for those folks who are tied to the world of technology and eBooks, it isn’t yet available in any electronic format. So you will need to get it in what’s called “book” format – a bound collection of pieces of paper with words printed on them. But if you can make it to a local bookstore, there’s a fair chance you can pick a copy up (Barnes & Noble always seem to have one on a shelf) or order it from your favorite online distributor.

Notes
[1] Bloom, H. (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

 

[2] The word canon originally meant “A rule, law, or decree of the Church; esp. a rule laid down by an ecclesiastical Council” but by extension came to refer to “(t)he collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired. Also transf., any set of sacred books; also, those writings of a secular author accepted as authentic.” The word derives fron the Latin canon meaning “rule,” and before that from the Greek kanon (κανών), also meaning “rule.”

 

[3] For the curious, here’s the list of the authors. Cervantes, Dickens, Chaucer, Dante, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Franz Kafka, Freud, George Eliot, Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Milton, Jorge Luis Borges, Molière, Montaigne, Pablo Neruda, Proust, Samuel Beckett, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman,  and Wordsworth. These are not the entire canon but the 26 that Bloom uses as exemplars. Here is a link to his full canon.

 

[4] I am unapologetic in asserting that I believe Ovid to have had a singularly huge impact on Western literature, and I’d recommend to everyone that if you had to decide which book to take with you to a desert island, go for Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. Yes, above the Bible (which is really not a book but many books) and Shakespeare, who was clearly influenced by Ovid. Hey, Romeo and Juliet is just a modern version of Ovid’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the essential themes of human experience such as sex, death, love, sacrifice, and so on as explored in Shakespeare are there in spades in The Metamorphoses.

 

[5] Nevertheless, I will take a stab by saying that Rulfo is something like Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he is a contemporary. Reading Pedro Paramo is also a little like reading Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler in that this, too, has a narrative that plays fast and lose with time.

 

[6] The other literary comparison that has been made with Pedro Paramo is Dante’s Inferno, where Dante travels through Hell to find his love, Beatrice. His guide is the Roman poet, Virgil. However, Juan Preciado’s descent into Comala is taken alone, not with a guide, so although the story certainly follows the mythic trope of a journey of discovery, there are differences, with the lack of a “psychopomp” as a distinctive one.

 

First Baby Step to Thinking of Evidence-Based Practice: Be Skeptical

At the recent 2012 conference of the International Society for AAC (ISAAC) there was some robust discussion about the technique know as facilitated communication. It’s a controversial technique and surprisingly one on which ISAAC does not have a position paper – which is an endeavor currently underway with a view to something being published soon. I say “surprisingly” because many other professional organizations have had position papers for many years, from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1993) through to the Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability [1]. ASHA has had a statement since 1994, so it does seem a little tardy for the group whose raison d’être is AAC to be publishing a statement on an AAC technique. But never mind, at least there is action being taken, which is better than continuing to say nothing.

But this isn’t about the pros and cons of FC. It’s about the development of a mindset that allows people to think about FC – and Non-Oral Motor Speech Exercises, Equine Therapy, Canine Therapy, Sensory Integration, and other such debatable practices. The reason I started with the reference to FC was simply because during the discussion, one person actually said, “But there’s more to this than Science.”

Is there? Is there really? I can appreciate that things in the world can be difficult to measure, and that there are times when measurement seems unfeasible and even intractable, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying.

Evidence-based practice can be tough. When you get into the nitty-gritty of the scientific method – which is a big chunk of what EBP is about - it’s easy to get overwhelmed by talk of variables, pre-tests, post-tests, levels of confidence, skewed distributions, ANOVA, one- versus two-tailed hypothesis, Bayesian, Cartesian, and the whole catastrophe that is experimental design. Even the most readable of books, such as the excellent The Handbook for Evidence-Based Practice in Communication Disorders by Christine Dollaghan [2], can be hard to read and even more challenging to digest. The potential complexity of designing ways to measure clinical practice is, to put it bluntly, off-putting. When you have a caseload of 200 clients and only 24 hours in a day, the idea of setting up formal measurement procedures is about as welcome as a bacon sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah.

Nil desperandum! Like any other skill in life, becoming a more effective practitioner of EBP doesn’t require you to be an expert all at once. You can improve your practice simply by sharpening your mindset to be more in tune with the concepts of EBP. And the first thing you can learn to do is become a Skeptic.

First, let me shovel out of the way that huge mound of steaming objection that being a skeptic is just an excuse for rejecting everything and believing in nothing. That’s a cynic, or a nihilist. In a 2010 interview with Skeptically Thinking, philosopher and author Massimo Pigliucci [3] said;

I think that a crucial aspect of being skeptical, of engaging in critical thinking, is not the idea that you reject claims because they seem absurd. That’s not being a skeptic, that’s just being a cynic. It’s just denying things for the sake of denying it. The idea of skepticism is that you inquire — that you do the work.

“Doing the work” is obviously a tough one because in our world of Wikipedia and endless cable shows about ghost hunters, psychics, celebrity hauntings, and quick-fix psychology, it’s easy to let someone else do the work for you – and that work may be of stunningly poor quality and accuracy. However, a little “critical thinking” is not that hard.

So here are my Top Three Critical Questions to help you become a baby Skeptic. And feel free to be skeptical about whether my three are a good three!

1. If someone claims X causes Y because they did Z, can the claim be tested independently? If I tell you that I can stop an interdental lisp by pushing the tip of a client’s tongue with a wooden spoon, while simultaneously saying “go back, tongue, go back,” you’d be right to ask if anyone else can do it, and you may even try it yourself. But if I claim that the reason no-one else can do it is because they don’t have the same spoon, or that my intonation pattern is very specific, you’d also be right to call bullshit on me.

2. If someone claims X causes Y because they did Z, are there any other simpler explanations as to why Y may have happened? When TV ghost hunters use a drop in temperature to “prove” the presence of a ghost, could something simpler have caused it? When a child appears to speak more after an hour with a dolphin, was it actually the dolphin’s presence causing it or just that the kids was happy?

3. If someone claims X causes Y because they did Z, what change was actually measured and how? ”My kid talks more to my therapy dog, so therapy dogs work.” More than what? More than if there was a cat? More than 6 months ago? More than when he walked in the door? I had a client many years ago who swore blind that his stammer was much better after a few pints of beer and he wondered if he could get a prescription! Although I never took the opportunity to spend a night out at the bar with him, his measure of “better” was that he felt he was more fluent. But after a few pints of ale, I’m not sure my client was particularly accurate in his measurement techniques.

Oddly enough, I’m not going to suggest you use your common sense because this can be less “common” and “sensible” than you might believe. A recent book by Duncan Watts takes the notion of common sense to task. In Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us, he argues that;

Common sense is “common” only to the extent that two people share sufficiently similar social and cultural experiences. Common sense, in other words, depends on what the sociologist Harry Collins calls collective tacit knowledge, meaning that it is encoded in the social norms, customs, and practices of the world.

Anyone who feels that common sense is in some sense the truth may want to spend at least 30 minutes listening to the discussions that go on in your country’s government, with folks in the US now facing 2 months of pre-election “common sense” being thrust down their throats. If sense were really that common, all parties in the political divides would cease to exist because their would only be one truth.

So common sense is less helpful in making evidence-based judgements than the basic science of testing and measuring. Even minimal measurement is better than no measurement because it gets you ever closer to an improved metric. You don’t have to subscribe to the “all or nothing” fallacy that some folks promote. Remember that there are different levels of measurement you can use, and each one has its pros and cons.

So let’s invent an example based on Dolphin Therapy. I can ask my client to tell me as much as possible about a picture of a busy street and record what is said, then repeat the task 5 minutes after spending a half-hour with a dolphin. If I simple count the number of words before and after the swim, then find the post-dolphin condition has twice as many words, is that a “good” measure? Well, the safest answers is “it’s a measure” but the notion of “goodness” is more complex. But here’s the valuable thing; you’ve at least created for yourself a methodology that you can use with the rest of your swimming clients. You can also do it again next time you client has another dolphin session. And the next.

Of course, don’t be surprised if someone else comes along and pokes holes in your methodology and results. The good news is you actually have some results to talk about, rather than a blanket statement about how “good for the kids” this dolphin fun is. Nor should you be surprised if someone uses the second question in my list to suggest an alternative explanation such as “the kid was just relaxed and would have done just as well if you’d given him a massage, or a bowl of ice-cream, or a flight in a helicopter.” This will help you go back and think of a better way to measure and test (or try to get a grant for “Helicopter Therapy” sponsored by folks who like flying in helicopters!) [3]

Enough for now. Once an article passes the 1500-word mark, it ceases to qualify as “baby steps.” So take those three critical questions and start trying them out. If you want some homework, try them out while watching a TV show about UFO’s or Bigfoot – it’s kinda fun.

Notes
[1] No, the “Victorian League” is not a group of steam-punk enthusiasts who yearn for a return to the values of the 19th century but an organization (VALID) based in the Australian state of Victoria, the capital of which is Melbourne.

[2] Dollaghan, C. A. (2007). A Handook of Evidence-Based Practice for Communication Disorders. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. This is great book and if you wanted to buy just one reference for EBP, I’d go for thisl But be warned; it is so full of excellent one-liners and summaries that if you use a yellow highlighter, there’s a fair chance you’ll end up with a banana-colored book. I use sticky tags and I think I went though three packs of them! And if you don’t want to spend the money – and time – on the book, you can read Christine’s 2004 ASHA Leader article entitled Evidence-Based Practice: Myths and Realities.

[3] Often the people promoting the benefits of animal therapy are animal lovers who appear to want to somehow “prove” that there’s something special about their dog/cat/dolphin/horse/lizard/three-toed sloth/whippet etc. I have no doubt that research shows how stroking a cat can reduce your blood pressure temporarily, but I can get the same effect from drinking beer, riding my motorcycle, or having sex. However, unlike the animal therapy folks, I am not promoting Drunken Biker Orgy therapy, or DBO as it would be referred to in the academic literature. Which may turn out to be a spectacular loss of revenue for me as a future project…

The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 5 – Of Language and Linguists

I’ve been an SLP for almost 30 years but my first degree is  in Psychology and Linguistics. I fully intended to become a Psychologist [1] but strayed from the path and ended up in Speech Therapy. Needless to say, my fascination with our profession has always been viewed through a linguistics lens and regular readers will already have detected that. In fact, one of the luminaries of AAC, Sarah Blackstone, for many years believed I was a linguist and not an SLP, and I have been introduced as a linguist at more than one conference.

This is probably why I still like to hang out with real linguists, who are much smarter than I and from whom I continue to learn lots of new stuff. So it’s no surprise that I went along to Wednesday afternooon session entitled Natural Language processing and AAC: Current advances at the interface between technology and communication.

NLP

 The presenters were more like a panel, bringing different perspectives on how the application of NLP could help the development of AAC [2]. NLP is a cross-over field of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science that deals with analyzing, understanding and generating the languages that humans use naturally in order to interface with computers in both written and spoken contexts using natural human languages instead of computer languages. The main professional body that exemplifies the scope of NLP is the Association of Computational Linguistics, which publishes the journal, Computational Linguistics, on a quarterly basis. With the latest edition including articles with titles such as A Context-Theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics, and Learning Entailment Relations by Global Graph Structure Optimization, it’s not a field that SLPs are falling over themselves to join. It’s also not a journal I read regularly but then there are so many journals out there it’s impossible to keep track.

SLPAT logo

The folks were also there to promote awareness of a new special interest group called the SIG for Speech and Language Processing in Assistive Technologies, or SLPAT for short. And yes, if you misread it as “splat,” you’re OK because its members also affectionately call it “splat” as well [3].

For those who wonder what Natural Language Processing might offer to AAC, it’s worth bearing in mind that NLP is already being used in a number of areas that we use daily. If you’ve ever used a web-based translation system to read foreign text, then you’ve made use of NLP. If you’ve ever used a speech recognition system such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking or Microsoft Sync in your car, then you’ve benefited from NLP. And if you’ve scanned a document and had a piece of software convert it to text, you’re seeing NLP in action.

In relation to AAC, a number of research initiatives are already underway. Jeff Higginbotham from the University of New York at Buffalo is working on a “just-in-time” message system that will work with AAC devices to provide web-sourced topic-based content using internet (and intranet) natural language processing techniques. Annalu Waller from the University of Dundee is working on prediction-based phonemic AAC systems  (the PhonicStick®) where NLP algorithms are used to determine which sounds are most likely to follow others. Karl Wiegard and Rupal Patel have been investigating non-syntactic word prediction to create systems that can correct user-generated utterences that have flawed syntax. And at the Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon, Melanie Fried-Oken and her colleagues are working with brain-controlled interfaces and spelling systems, the operation of which can be optimized by using special NLP-based software to improve accuracy and speed of selection.

All of these are currently still in the research phase so you needn’t be asking how much you’ll need to buy one, but it’s research like this that will ultimately lead to products, even if 90% of university projects simply end up as articles in journals or a paper that ends with the immortal lines “much more research is needed.”

And if you’re looking for questions, quite a few turned up at the session, most coming from Melanie Fried-Oken who, as a clinician, really wants to see some practical, hands-on solutions. Here are some – of several –  that interested me;

• Can NLP help us design systems that can adapt to the actual language used by an individual with an AAC device, and maybe even reconfigure the device as a result of this?
• Can NLP help in the tracking of the vocabulary, representation, and navigation elements of an AAC system?
• Can NLP help design systems that identify and end-user’s language level?

These resonate because they are the very same questions my collegues and I have been asking for a couple of years now, and have been slowly working towards. In the field of AAC in general, the notion of automatic data logging is not new and has been available for some time on a number of AAC devices. The fun bit is deciding where next to go with this, and how best to leverage the current data collection methodologies. As soon as there’s something to present to the world, we’ll be happy to share!

Meanwhile, for those interested in finding out more on SIG SLPAT, or even if you want to join, you can go to their web site at www.slpat.org and read about the aims of the group [4]. There’s a special edition of the Computer Speech and Language journal out before the end of the year that will be about NLP and Assistive Technology, and the next SIG-SLPAT conference will be in 2013 in France – somewhere. There will be a call for papers later in the year so get your NLP thinking caps on and dust off that passport…

Notes
[1] Just a few weeks before I left for University, a friend of my sister was talking to my local newsagent about my moving and asked what I was going to study. Apparently she told him I was studying to be a psychopath. I sometimes wonder how un-wrong she may have been…

[2] The presenters were Kathy McCoy, University of Delaware; Annalu Waller and Alan McGregor, University of Dundee; and Melanie Fried-Oken and Brian Rourk, Oregon Health & Science University. I apologise if I missed someone.

[3] It’s pretty well impossible not to read SLPAT as “splat,” in the same way that fashion store French Connection: UK used the acronym FCUK on all their advertising, knowing full well that folks word read it otherwise! The company voluntarily stopped using the acronym in 2005, but not before stores such as Bloomingdales refused to handle FCUK branded items.

[4] I did see what would happen if I made an error and typed “splat.org” instead of “slpat.org” and found myself at a rather boring “parking site” with links to paintball activities. More fascinating was the “splat.com,” which took me to the home of the Sizzling Platter restaurant group, whose products include Little Caesars Pizza, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Sizzler Steak House.