The 5th Deaf and Hard of Hearing Student Day

The 5th Deaf and Hard of Hearing Student Day was held in Tel Aviv University, Mexico Building on last Thursday 27th October 2005. The Day was jointly sponsored by the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel and the Tel Aviv University Student Association.

The Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel celebrated its 13th year of operation. When they started the pilot project for helping deaf and hard of hearing students in Israeli postsecondary educational institutions, in cooperation with the National Insurance Institute (the Israeli counterpart of Social Security), they helped 6 students. Now they are serving 300 students in a full spectrum of topics of study.

The formal program of the event consisted of three parts:

  • Handing out of scholarships
  • Panel discussion about the world of work in Israel and integration of people with special needs into it
  • Art program

Scholarships

Five scholarships, donated by the Globes newspaper and by Motorola Israel, were handed out. In her acceptance speech, one of the scholarship recipients, Yifat Ben-Zeev, a M.A. student in conflict resolution, pointed out the difficulties she endured in her B.A. studies before Sign Language interpreting or notetaking were available to students. Today’s situation is a dream relative to the situation several years ago.

Panel Discussion

The panel discussion hosted two employers of deaf persons, three administrators of various rehabilitation programs, and two working deaf employees.

There was one glaring accessibility problem in the event. The hall, in which the formal program was held, is not accessible to people with wheelchairs. They are forced to stay in the hall’s back and they cannot reach the podium where speeches are made. The representative of the Tel Aviv University Student Association told the audience that they are fighting for full accessibility of the university halls.

It is easier to make workplaces accessible to hard of hearing employees than to deaf employees. This is because the hard of hearing need only equipment, which is one-time cost (plus deprecation), whereas the deaf need Sign Language interpreter or notetaker, and this is a recurring expense.

Today, the bottleneck in employing people with special needs is with educating the employers. Self-help NGOs which work with people with special needs serve the important role of bridging between the know-how accumulated in them and the employers, who were not exposed yet to this know-how.

In the past, deaf boys learned metal working and deaf girls learned to be seamstresses, and everyone was happy with this state of affairs. Today several well-paying professions need a M.A. or M.Sc. degree. Accordingly, the Institute for the Advancement of Deaf Persons in Israel and the National Insurance Institute started a pilot program for helping deaf and hard of hearing students study for their M.A. or M.Sc. degree. Today there are 50 students in the pilot.

Art Program

The art program was supposed to include a group of drummers. However, they did not show up. The other three artist groups did show up. One of them was a group of folk dancers. The second was a single woman, who rated a wow wow. The third was a couple of man and woman acrobats.

The wow wow woman had a rubber-like body and danced her way into and out of all kinds of seemingly impossible positions. She had plenty of talent left over, and she poured large part of it into making the dance a sensuous one. Her clothes, while covering most of her skin, were uncovering her beauty. Overall, this was a wow wow.

A way to pass the time during Yom Kippur

… is to read the tome “The Shepherd – The Life Story of Ariel Sharon” by Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom.
I am still in the year 1969, but I am already impressed by the circuitousness of his life story. He was groomed by David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel. In the 1950’s he founded Unit 101 and later, in spite of quarrels with other commanders of IDF, he was made responsible for developing methodologies and training soldiers. He already exhibited the qualities of thorough preparations and rigorous postmortem analyses, which served him well in his career.
If his qualities were not needed for defending Israel against its enemies, he would probably have become an agricultural or biotechnology tycoon by now.

Do air force combat pilots use a true Sign Language?

As I am continuing to read the book “Language in Space – a window on Israeli Sign Language” by Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler (ISBN 965-311-056-X), the following question arose in my mind.

Combat pilots serving in air forces of the world are used to describe their dogfights by their hands.
Apparently spoken language is not sufficiently expressive to do justice to the nuances of tactical maneuvers performed by pilots during the heat of air battles.

My question: do they use only pantomime, or do their gestures have elements of true Sign Language?
Was any research done about this subject?
Are air force cadets taught, in a systematic way, how to describe dogfights?

Sara, the deaf Bedouin

On September 28,29,30, the Kamri Theater and Ariella House in Tel Aviv are holding a festival of art by people with disabilities. This is the first festival of its kind in Israel, and it is called “100% Art”.
On Sept. 29, three short movies were shown in the “Visual Sound” track.

One of those movies was about Sara, the deaf Bedouin. Her deafness is hereditary, and she has lots and lots of deaf relatives.

Her primary education was with Jewish deaf children in “Niv” school, Beer Sheva. Her deaf nieces and nephews now have their own class in the local Bedouin primary school. The deaf in her tribe use a Sign Language, which is different from the Israeli Sign Language. Sometimes it was confusing in school.

Anyway, the thing which struck me was the simplicity of her life ambitions. She wants to be the first wife of a Bedouin man, rather than 2nd (or 3rd) wife like her female deaf fellows. She wants to have her job back. And the job was not an engineering one or top level management. It was folding clothes after having been washed in a laundry. She worked in this job and had to leave it for few months due to health reasons. Then she had to struggle with tradition to get her job back. She got her job back and was happy with it. And she did not look to me mentally retarded or so. Just a woman bound by her limited education and limiting tribal traditions.

I wonder whether she is alive today, because near the end of the movie, she mentioned a nice man whom she met at work. And her people have a tradition of “family honor” killings.

When the “Visual Sound” track movies were shown, there were only five people in the auditorium. Two workers who operated the projection equipment, a newspaperman and his girlfriend, and the TDDPirate. Sometime in middle, the journalist and his girlfriend had to leave. At the end, the TDDPirate exchanged quips with the two workers and left the auditorium. Apparently there was insufficient public relations effort.

Third kind of languages?

I am now reading the book “Language in Space – a window on Israeli Sign Language” by Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler (ISBN 965-311-056-X). The book applies linguistic analysis to the Israeli Sign Language, used by most of the Deaf in Israel.

There are similarities and differences between spoken and signed languages. There are principles, which serve as common denominator between those languages.

As I am thinking about programming languages, I wonder whether they can be regarded as a third kind of languages. In other words, if we apply linguistic analysis to programming languages, what can learn from the linguistic analysis results? An example for a programming language, whose design takes into account linguistic issues in an explicit way, is Perl, especially Perl 6.

One major difference between human languages and programming languages is that humans can freely invent new words, new ways to modify words, and new ways to combine words into sentences. However software developers are constrained by the compiler/interpreter’s limitations and cannot easily break away from those constraints.

For example, to discuss sorting in Hebrew you need only to invent a new meaning for the word “מיון”. However to discuss sorting in a program, you need to develop, find, beg for, or steal a library, which implements the sorting algorithms, which interest you.

Recent programming languages are less constraining than early ones (with the exception of LISP, which was early, difficult to learn but not constraining). Languages like Perl and Python support lists (arrays indexed by numbers) and hashes (associative arrays, which map arbitrary-but-immutable values into other arbitrary values). They also support classes/objects. I wonder if there are more concepts, like lists, hashes and objects, which need to be supported in order to make programming languages feel as unconstrained as human languages.

Microsoft is too big to be able to grow further

Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis
The root problem is that MBAs are taught to grow their businesses.
Shareholders expect their shares to appreciate in value.
Therefore, the top management of every company is compelled to hold to double-digit growth rate even though the company will be greater than the entire Earth in 10 more years.
Everyone is ignoring the reality of the S-curve. If your company already has 50% of the market, it cannot double its share of this market.

One solution is to diversify to other markets. Eventually all markets, which the company can efficiently serve, are saturated. The company then wastes capital on entry into other markets, which it is not competent to serve. The company also gets too big to manage itself efficiently, especially as it is not focused on performing well and efficiently those tasks, which it knows to perform well.

I would like to suggest another direction for advancement for oversized companies. Work on the value added per employee/subcontractor index. Let go of part of the capital, if you do not know how to invest it wisely. Sell off operations, which you do not excel in managing. Streamline and optimize your core operations. Become part of a network of independent companies, which may sometimes collaborate on large projects. Hire new employees only if their contribution raises the value added per employee/subcontractor.

When letting go of capital, disburse it as dividends to your shareholders (in fact, Microsoft paid huge dividend to its shareholders in the last year). In effect, this throws back to them the responsibility to wisely invest their capital investments, as your managers are not better than your shareholders in this task anymore.

Trying to get information about the observatory in Mitzpe Ramon

While trying to collect information about the star observatory in Mitzpe Ramon, for a possible visit there, I found the Hebrew Astropedia Web site at http://astroclub.tau.ac.il/astropedia/The_Wise_Observatory.html.

Then I found that I cannot scroll the page horizontally or vertically (I use the Mozilla 1.7.8 Web browser under GNU/Linux, Debian Sarge distribution).

I wrote a complaint to the address provided by them (astroclub strudel wise.tau.ac.il) suggesting that they use the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org/.

I am not holding my breath for them to accept my friendly, free and concerned advice.

UPDATE:
Yiftah from Astro Club replied. They really want to make the Web site FireFox-compatible. However, they do not have the resources to pay someone to modify the Web site accordingly, so volunteer work will be very much appreciated.
If you can do the following, please contact astroclub strudel wise.tau.ac.il and offer your help:

  • Modify the CSS definitions to make them W3C compliant and ensure that the Web site is standards-compliant (of course).
  • Develop a (free and) faster Javascript implementation of the menu.
  • Modify the CSS definitions to make them W3C compliant.
  • Define the printing style (currently it is not defined, so the Web pages look terrible when printed).

Shira Ben-Hur's Blog

Finding Shira Ben-Hur’s blog was for me like finding at last a distant relative in the world of blogs. Before seeing her blog, I saw no blogs of Israeli hearing impaired persons. There is an important difference – she lost her hearing several years after having acquired speech and having been acclimated in the world of the hearing, while I am deaf since birth.

One thing is painful for me (in an egoistical way): I had to wait until she wrote it in her blog in order to know her story, even though I knew her from Bekol. She was in a group of activists, which excluded me because I was “too deaf” for them, even though I was involved with Bekol even before it was officially registered as an amuta.