Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Blind Shall See Again, But When?

Posted by timothy on from the better-repaint-their-room dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade."

51 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by caffeinemessiah · · Score: 5, Interesting
    If they achieve VGA resolution, it's a steady road to full vision for the blind. I'm more interested in, at this point, exceeding human abilities. Think of the case of HDR imaging -- we currently don't have monitors (most of us at least) that are high dynamic range themselves, so images have to be "tone-mapped" to the dynamic range of our monitors, which often results in those ridiculously sharp but somewhat "unrealistic" pictures you see on Flickr.

    It would be cool if, say, the IR spectrum or just more dynamic range in the visible spectrum could be tone-mapped to human perception in this way, resulting in perceptually sharper images by way of a direct retinal implant.

    --
    An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
    1. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why stop at the ir spectrum, why not go full spectrum? Maybe with a remote control. Make Geordi's visor seem like a toy. How much information can we cram into the visual cortex?

    2. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Rei · · Score: 3, Funny

      the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade.

      And, if they achieve VGA resolution, you can just get the next upgrade in software!

       

      --
      sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
    3. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by natehoy · · Score: 4, Funny

      If they achieve better than VGA resolution, it's a steady road to needing HDMI cables, and I'm not convinced they will fit. ;)

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
    4. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Funny

      Make sure you include some kind of tuner, because I don't want to have to see Radio Disney nor the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. But full-body scans at the airport might be a fun channel - those x-ray glasses I ordered when I was 12 didn't work.

    5. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      those x-ray glasses I ordered when I was 12 didn't work

      You must have had a defective pair.

      The ones I had when I was living in southern France worked perfectly.

    6. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by natehoy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, quite a lot, as long as we are willing to give up accurate color perception in the spectrum we see in now. The human visual system can differentiate, say, ten million colors (guesstimate). That's across a very small band of the spectrum we could make visible if we chose to. Index the new frequencies to perceived colors and we might be able to differentiate a few hundreds of thousands of colors in our currently-visual spectrum, but we'll also be able to differentiate various frequencies of ultraviolet and infrared light. So, for example anything in shades of blue represents UV light, and anything in shades of red represents IR, and the colors we see today are perceived as little more than shades of grey with a blue or red tint.

      I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
    7. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by jellomizer · · Score: 2, Funny

      320x200 8 bits. Life would be a game of Doom.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    8. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by insufflate10mg · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I believe the opposite; that the human brain would actually create a new color for the UV/IR bands... the person with the ability to see this color would describe it as being indescribable, the same way it is impossible for a human to accurately describe the colors we have now.

    9. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by natehoy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.

      First, we have to throw out practical limitations on current technology and say we've reached a point where we can accurately reproduce the full resolution of human sight AND we have a sensor that can detect ten million discrete colors per pixel, and that we've found a way to tap into the brain's cortex and send all that data in realtime.

      So let's say a specific rod or cone received values we mapped from -5,000,000 to +5,000,000 (I realize color is a lot more complex than that, because we have multiple hues intensities, but a linear scale is a lot easier to deal with for discussion).

      Now we have to figure out how to make that receptor detect -20,000,000 to +20,000,000 to handle limited sections of the UV and IR spectra. The easiest way is to map 0-5 as 1, 6-10 as 2, etc. So we have the same actual number of possible color inputs, we're just making them less precise and spreading them out over a larger range of possible values. You'll "see" the same number of colors, but spread out over a much larger band.

      Maybe our brains can handle more colors than our visual cortex can currently send. If so, there's a lot of dormant brain cells that are going to come on-line when this data comes in, because we have a lot more data to process to make an image. Either that or our brains will do what they do anyway - interpolate.

      More likely, we'll have to map the new data to a somewhat-similar-to-current range so our brains can handle it.

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
    10. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by NotBornYesterday · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Does lack of IR/UV vision stem from a lack of proper optical reception (cones), or lack of neural ability? My guess is that the brain would try and interpret what it is shown, regardless of what our eyes have evolved to do.

      --
      I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
    11. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oh crap, the upgrade makes the world roll on my fixed frequency NHS eyes.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    12. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by pz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I work in Visual Prosthetics.

      Here's the thing with any sort of augmented vision: there's no way you can justify the risks of implantation when a fully external device that shows whatever mapped, morphed, or manipulated version of vision will work as well or better.

      If you have normal sight, or even nearly normal sight, then why have an implant that carries significant risk, will be large and potentially painful for some time to come, will require frequent recharging, will be expensive as getout, when you can put on a special pair of glasses with a heads-up-display that does more? Telescopic vision, IR, UV, macroscopic, x-ray, edge enhanced, color shifted, depth enhanced, whatever you can think of, it is easier to do it with a head-worn high-tech display that you can take off at will.

      In contrast, having an implant means -- for any kind of implant that is under current consideration -- fixed resolution, and, unless you're willing to undergo significant, expensive surgeries, many of the interface parameters will be technologically fixed. Yes, there's a lot you can do with reprogramming, but it's essentially impossible to change the stimulating electrodes and their drivers.

      Trust me, you do not want a visual prosthesis unless you need one. The normal visual system, enhanced with purely external devices, will always be better.

      Any visual implant that is currently under discussion

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    13. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Fyzzler · · Score: 3, Informative

      There are already people out there who can see more than the normal human spectrum.
      Tetrachomacy

      So I think the potential is already there.

      --
      I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
    14. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by dido · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, one could also use the imaginary colors that correspond to those particular combinations of cone cell responses in the human eye which cannot be produced by any physical source of light. The human eye has three types of color-sensitive cone cells, short-wavelength (blue), medium-wavelength (green), and long-wavelength (red). The trouble is, the spectral sensitivity of these three types of cone cells overlap, so any physical source of light would probably excite at least two, most likely all three types of cones at once, to greater or lesser degrees. The upshot of this is that are some combinations of cone cell responses that cannot be produced by any physical source of light. For example, a hypothetical light source that excited only the medium-wavelength cones would correspond to a shade of very deep green, but such a light source would require a spectral power distribution with positive power in the green area of the spectrum and impossible negative power in the red and blue areas.

      In short, with artificial color receptors it may be possible to simulate the cone cell responses that would have generated imaginary colors to mean wavelengths outside of the normal human visual spectrum. Or alternatively change color perception entirely with non-overlapping spectral-sensitivity curves that cover a much wider band of the electromagnetic spectrum. You'd perceive color quite differently from normal people in this case though, and that might cause trouble.

      We tend to forget that color doesn't really have a physical reality. It's an ongoing philosophical debate whether color is actually a feature of the world we perceive or a feature of our perception of the world. Replacing our sense organs in this fashion is sure to add more fuel to this debate.

      --
      Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
    15. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by timeOday · · Score: 2, Informative
      I am really curious what resolution you would need to simulate human vision. Not that many. Our vision is really terrible outside a tiny area (the fovea). We only have 6 or 7 million cones, and those have well under a pixel's worth of information each (they're monochromatic, for one thing, and several might have to fire together to be perceptible - I don't know).

      I'm pretty sure you don't need, for example, the 15 megapixels that a modern SLR gives you; the reason you need so many in an image or a monitor is because you can look anywhere in it, so it has to match your maximum resolution everywhere, even though you can only see a tiny bit of it at once. (This is massively wasteful, so you can achieve great compression if you know where people are looking.)

    16. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I, for one, would gladly give up the ability to differentiate eggshell from ecru if it meant I could see in the UV and IR spectra, though I strongly suspect the transition would be best done slowly. That much new unfamiliar input introduced all at once might have profoundly unfortunate effects on the human psyche...

      You actually can see very faintly in IR. If you wear visible-spectrum opaque, but IR-transparent glasses, you can maneuver through the environment just by its heat output. It's dark, but doable.

    17. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by evilWurst · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you read the linked article, though, they don't see more spectrum: their extra receptors are in between red and green. In other words, they see the difference between certain shades or color more accurately than the rest of us, but they don't see any "new" colors that the rest of us can't see.

    18. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by poopdeville · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Regardless of the spectrum your artificial eyes can pick up, in the end they must with absolutely no way around it, translate those to inputs that we already receive. Therefore, your brain will not come up with no colors.

      Nope, you are entirely wrong.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    19. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by poopdeville · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It depends on how it's implemented. Remember, we're taking the actual eye and replacing it. You've got to first reproduce the existing signal, then you've got to figure out how to map any new signals we don't already send.

      Eh, no. You just send them, and let the brain learn how to decode the signals, just like your brain did when you were an infant. You LEARNED to see in the first place.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    20. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by BananaBender · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, just dumping the extended color data onto the brain might not be enough. When a child learns to see, its brain already has the basic visual perception algorithms hard-coded, e.g. there are brain structure for color detection, edge detection, motion detection etc. Those structures are built from the DNA, the genetic material, so the brain does not start learning from scratch.
      Only those structures allow a child to pick up seeing as fast as it does (the process of learning to see in humans is necessary because of our ability for 3D vision. Depth perception depends on the distance between your left and your right eye; the hard-coded perception algorithms don't know this distance beforehand, so people have to learn seeing after being born. Animals without 3D vision are far more quickly able to see).
      Anyway, there are no brain structures for the extended color data, so how would a brain learn the new input?

    21. Re:nevermind the blind -- bring on the androids by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow, what thorough and informative rebuttal.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
  2. For the visually-impaired computer user... by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try working on a VGA/DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort/whatever input, too. Bypass monitors altogether.

    1. Re:For the visually-impaired computer user... by lwsimon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      At some point, we should be able to modify perception via EM, so no need for implants. Disrupt the optic nerve and feed it artificial stimulation via a headband or similar, and provide a full immersive view. Ditto the other nerves, and you have immersive, convincing VR complete with non-tactile sensation....

      --
      Learn about Photography Basics.
  3. Blindness Sucks by techsoldaten · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.

    All I have been thinking about the last month is how to do something like this, set up something that can do motion detection and help him avoid collisions.

    You know, I would go for low resolution versus no resolution right now.

    M

    1. Re:Blindness Sucks by hamburgler007 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Unfortunately, stroke induced brain damage is likely the result of brain damage than damage to the retina.

    2. Re:Blindness Sucks by QuoteMstr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There's actually a direct spacial mapping from steradians in the visual field to particular areas on the surface of the visual cortex. Under each "pixel" on the surface, if you will, there are several physical layers that each have a specialized function: one detects lines; another circles; another changes in perspective; and another compensates for white point balancing. These layers then send the processed signals to another portion of the brain for interpretation. (It's not a bad architecture, actually.)

      Many blind people can still "see" with their memories and their imaginations. What happens in this context is that recorded (or synthesized) sensory inputs are fed back into the same areas that process the higher-level processed signals from the eye's "live" feed. Memory, really is a process of re-perceiving.

      It seems plausible that computers could take over the function of not only the retina, but also the visual cortex and send high-level processed signals directly to the area of the brain responsible for interpreting them.

      Hell, that might be better than normal vision. Imagine knowing more colors than we are able to naturally perceive, or being able to "see" arbitrarily fine details, as if in a dream. Augmented reality would be trivial.

      All that and more might be possible if we bypass the visual cortex.

  4. Re:DoE? by binarylarry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It'll be interesting when they start offering bonuses to any military staff who opt in to a "Predator Vision" program.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. Optical nerve still needed. by St.Creed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This reminds me of a small girl we met at the swimmingpool (lessons), who had one visible cochlear implant. This girl turned out to be deaf from birth on both ears. I remarked to her mother that she could actually hear and talk amazingly well - I hadn't noticed anything in her speech. According to the doctors this was nigh impossible, but she had enough input from the 16 nerves to get perfect speech and reasonable hearing. She probably got very lucky with the connections on the nerves. So even with 16 nerves stimulated this could make a huge difference for someone who's blind, if they happen to hit the right connections.

    Yeah I know - anecdotal evidence and such. Still, I'm happy they get this far already.

    Oh, and I won't be upgrading my retina unless it matches the resolution of my computer display and comes with infrared, zoom and millimeterwave vision options. Preferably with scrolling 6502 assembly code on the left side as well :P

    --
    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
    1. Re:Optical nerve still needed. by HeckRuler · · Score: 2, Funny

      and millimeter wave vision options

      Pervert.

  6. Visual vs. Motor Prostheses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's interesting that these visual implants directly stimulate the retina to send signals to the nervous system, while even the advanced cybernetic limbs such as DARPA's "Proto 2" are still using the kludge of reading electrical signals from muscles. As I understand it, the arm research is meant to eventually hook the limbs up directly to nerves (as has been done successfully, to some extent, with biological hand transplants), but the tech isn't quite there yet.

  7. Re:DoE? by lwsimon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Agreed, this seems more like a Dept. of Defense issue.

    --
    Learn about Photography Basics.
  8. Re:This is BAD BAD BAD by lwsimon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Flip that argument - who's up for preventing blacks from purchasing skin lightening or radical plastic surgery?

    See, kids, that's called a false dichotomy.

    --
    Learn about Photography Basics.
  9. Huh? by Chameleon+Man · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...Wait, you're serious? Why would you prevent people from having the choice to hear or see just to keep your "culture" intact?

    I guess we should be upset with cars because they destroyed the horse-and-buggy culture.

  10. Whoa by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Funny

    Keanu Reeves approves of this idea.

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    1. Re:Whoa by binarylarry · · Score: 2, Informative

      [Johnny and Jane have just broken into the computer warehouse]
      Johnny Mnemonic: [swipes a pile of circuit boards and components off the desk and says to no one in particular] I need a Sino-logic 16.
      Jane: [runs around the computer warehouse finding everything he calls for]
      Johnny Mnemonic: Sogo 7 Data Gloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine intelligent translator... Thompson iPhone.

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  11. Re:This is BAD BAD BAD by SOdhner · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't see it as cultural genocide because it's not really forced - nor is there any reason to artificially maintain a culture that is falling apart on its own. If less people are blind, there may be less blind culture, but it's not being attacked, really.


    It's certainly unfortunate for the people who can't be helped by advances such as this and then have less of a culture to work within, but that's no reason to stand in the way of new technologies. Eventually - hopefully - something like this will be available to everyone who is blind or deaf no matter the original cause. Even then there will be some that refuse the treatment, but that's their choice.


    Cultures change, and sometimes they go away. It happens.

  12. You think it won't happen ... by abbynormal+brain · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... in military application? Robo-cops, emergency responders, and others of similar categories of future application will most definitely benefit from advanced imaging.
    HUD capabilities as well -- non-disruptive arrows near the peripheral regions of your vision guiding you to the nearest McDonalds when you ask for it. It won't stop there, "Aps" for your new vision capabilities will spring up -- virtual retinal compass, retinal level (yes, you only need two hands to make sure that picture frame is straight), and the list goes on. Oh, and don't forget the ever loving popular - pop-ups.

    --
    L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
  13. New brain router needed by TiggertheMad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.

    Hmmm, but this isn't really blindness resulting from eye damage is it? It sounds to me like his problem is that the signals coming out of his left eye are being mapped into damaged brain tissue. It sounds like he just needs a new 'optical data input port' installed in his brain.

    It sounds so trivial, doesn't it? Just rerouting a few electrical impulses around a damaged network node...

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
  14. Re:This is BAD BAD BAD by SOdhner · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't think so - I've met people with this opinion in person, one of whom felt so strongly about it that she flat out said if she had a child who was born deaf and knew it could be immediately fixed she would decline, even though this would be someone that was never even part of the deaf culture to begin with.

  15. Re:This is BAD BAD BAD by je+ne+sais+quoi · · Score: 4, Interesting
    That was my gut reaction too but I learned something reading the wikipedia page on cochlear implants:

    If a child is placed into a mainstream setting it makes it difficult for them because they feel like they do not fit in with their peers and cannot fully identify with the Deaf community. One interviewee in the Christiansen and Leigh study states "In high school it was the worst time for me with the cochlear implant because I was really trying to find my identity with the cochlear implant...I never accepted my deafness. And the cochlear implant in some ways showed me that no matter what, the moment I take it off I'm deaf. I'll never be hearing 24 hours." [37]

    I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf). But then again, teenagers or children who don't fit in or feel inadequate for any reason are as common as grass since schools and children tend to try and enforce sociological homogeneity, it doesn't matter if you wear thick glasses, are socially maladjusted, or have any other issue that makes you different from the "average" kid.

    As for black people, I think the GP needs to learn a bit about skin tone discrimination amongst african americans and asians before he starts shooting off about skin lighteners and their evilness. Even americans of european descent do it, ever hear the term "redneck"? It immediately conjures a picture in one's mind of someone who is often poorly educated and poor financially and is often overweight.

    --
    Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
  16. URL Shorteners by emkyooess · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can we not use bit.ly and other URL shorteners on /.? There's no need to. They're harmful, actually. Thanks!

  17. Re:This is BAD BAD BAD by h4rr4r · · Score: 2

    Have contact lenses destroyed the basically fucking blind culture?

    Only a moron would want to be crippled, I say that as a person who has been effectively blind without corrective lenses since age 6. I can focus on objects within about 6 inches of my face without corrective lenses.

  18. But cochlear implants are oversold... by Estanislao+Mart�nez · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The premise of this submission is that cochlear implants are uncontroversially good, but that just ain't so; there's a lot of people who have objections to cochlear implants themselves or the way they're pushed on to deaf children.

    The National Association of the Deaf's statement on the implants makes pretty good reading about this topic. They don't come against the implants as their own, but they do point out a number of problems that they perceive on their use:

    1. The implants are pushed on to parents of deaf children as a "cure" for deafness, when they are at best a tool for deaf people to navigate a hearing world.
    2. The promotion of the implants often comes along with a negative image of deafness, which portrays deaf people as deficient and unable to communicate. The NAD would rather prefer that deaf people be represented by positive role models of successful deaf people.
    3. The implants require years of very frustrating training for many deaf children to learn to use, and a lot of that time might be better spent on sign-language based education.

    I don't know to what extent this would be a factor for blindness, however. It might well be completely different, because blind people can speak and understand spoken language, so they don't have the same developmental risks that pre-lingual deaf children are subject to if they don't have the chance to learn a full language.

    --

    Are you adequate?

    1. Re:But cochlear implants are oversold... by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      1. This is the best cure we have so far
      2. They are deficient, they lack the ability to hear. Hate to hurt their feelings, but that is the truth. I am deficient in sight, so I use contacts.
      3. Not if they want to communicate with 99.9% of the world that uses sound to communicate instead of gestures.

  19. In the land of the blind... by f8l_0e · · Score: 4, Funny

    the man with 640x480 is king.

  20. WW-2 experiments gave soldiers infrared vision by ZuchinniOne · · Score: 2, Interesting

    During world war 2 some soldiers were given a form of vitamin A that slightly changed the structure of the opsin molecule which the eye uses to detect light.

    This resulted in soldiers being able to see further into the red end of the spectrum and there are some reports that a few soldiers even saw the top of the infrared spectrum.

  21. Re:DoE? by Surt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But by eliminating the need for artificial lighting with superior eyes, they could get rid of 38% of the US energy usage. Frankly, nothing they can possibly do will have any substantially better yield than that.

    --
    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  22. So, what outcomes do you want? by Estanislao+Mart�nez · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Here's the difference between you and me: you insist on telling deaf children "the truth" about their "deficiency," outcomes be damned, whereas I really am interested in getting the best possible outcomes for them. So, to address your three points:

    1. "Best cure" by what measure? Ability to interpret and produce spoken language? Why is that the best measure of the outcome of deaf children treatment, as opposed to, say, high school graduation rates or standardized test scores (using written language tests)? Have you considered that by focusing on "fixing" deaf people so they can hear, you may miss the big picture?
    2. Do you think we would have good outcomes with deaf people if all of our treatment adopted your macho posturing about "just telling those weak deluded people the hard truth"? Do you realize that this type of treatment is uncomfortably similar to how domestic abusers treat their victims?
    3. Would you rather have us spend many man-years training a deaf child to understand spoken English with significant effort and difficulty, or rather to spend extra time using sign language to teach them written English, literature, math, history, science, etc.? Which do you think would make a deaf child happier and more productive: (a) struggling for years to learn to talk and hear without ever being able to do what hearing people do effortlessly, (b) getting an education comparable to what hearing children get?

    Note that I was careful enough not to simply come out against cochlear implants; I would not be surprised at all if there is some balance that can be worked out between sign language education and implants that produced better results than education alone.

    But my point is quite simply that the goal shouldn't be to "cure" deaf children; the goal should be to allow them to become healthy and productive adults. This definitely requires them to be able to manage interactions with the hearing world, and cochlear implants could very well help in that regard, but focusing too much on them just loses sight of the big picture.

    I'm going to stress one final thing: learning the native language(s) is one of the crucial parts of child cognitive development. One of the biggest risks of early-age deafness is that a deaf child may fail to learn any real language, and thus will have retarded cognitive development. This is why sign language education is so important: deaf children learn to sign as easily as hearing children learn to talk, and native learning of any language is much better for cognitive development than incomplete learning of spoken language. Again, big picture: is it better to have intellectually normal deaf signers, or intellectually challenged orally-educated deaf people?

    --

    Are you adequate?

  23. Re:DoE? by the+gnat · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, but shouldn't they pass on their research work to another, more appropriate Department?

    Senior academic scientists don't "pass on their research" unless they're exceptionally well-paid for it, or retiring. To do otherwise would be career suicide.

    To answer the original question: there are a variety of reasons why the DoE maintains other research programs that don't appear at first glance to be related to energy. One is that it's useful to have a sustainable and adaptable academic culture - for instance, the DoE is now putting a great deal of effort (and money) into biofuels, which is both directly related to the core mission of the Department, and dependent on biologists of every kind. If the DoE were strictly limited to physicists, synthetic chemists, and engineers, no one in the organization would have a clue about how to go about starting up a biological research program. You can always hire outsiders, but it is nice to have in-house expertise.

    Another reason is that the very nature both of science and of the DoE labs inherently introduces some mission creep. Because they have always done defense-related work as part of the nuclear weapons program, ever since the Manhattan Project, they have branched into other defense-related areas. The DoE is also probably the world's largest operator of particle accelerators, which have a variety of uses. At some point in the last century, someone figured out that a particular type of electron accelerator called a synchrotron (which the DoE has several of) was most useful as an X-ray generator. As a result, protein crystallographers - biochemists - are some of the most active users of DoE facilities. (This was my background, and I now work for the DoE.) More recently, they've started to work on X-ray lasers, starting with the old Stanford LINAC, and the hope is that these will make possible many new experiments in multiple fields.

    (Keep in mind, the time span over which new methodologies develop is typically multiple decades. The first protein crystallography experiment was in 1937; the first cyclotron was invented in 1929. No one actually solved a protein structure with X-rays until the early 1960s, by which time synchrotrons had been invented. It took another 20-30 years to realize the application of synchrotron X-rays to biology, and another 20 years for their use to become standard. It isn't simply a case of government bureaucrats searching for new fields to move into - although that happens occasionally too. Basic research is often inherently undirected and directionless, and you don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you start.)

    Finally, don't assume that the funding comes entirely from the DoE. The research group that I work for is mostly based at a national lab, but our funding comes almost entirely from the NIH and sponsoring companies.

  24. Re:You think the HDMI cables are bad? by bjourne · · Score: 3, Funny

    That's when they finally plug the analog hole for good.

    --
    Football Odds