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sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy

A discussion of cochlear implants, technology, aviation, and other topics of interest to me and (rarely) others. See the menu on the right (under HomePage) for other topics. This blog is very infrequently updated. My more active blog is at KPAO.

The obligitory Mac OS X Applications I Use Post

Here's the obligitory "3rd Party Applications I use on Mac OS X" post. I find these lists useful when I stumble across them, as I often find tools that I didn't know about before. A good case in point in the "Thrupp" application (see below). I learned about that while reading a post like this one, and now find it to be a useful way of getting my iTunes music on our Tom Tom GPS in an organized and consistent way.

Here's my list, broken up into classes of frequency of use, but otherwise in no particular order.

Key Applications

These are the applications that I use these every day or nearly so.

Secondary Applications

I use these from somewhat frequently -- they are all great applications, just not things I need all day every day.

Tertiary Applications

The are the tools I use very occasionally -- again -- they seem like good applications, I just don't need them for my daily routine.

by David Creemer : 2007/03/07 : Categories technology (permalink)

Review of the Nokia E61

I got a new phone a couple of days ago -- a Nokia E61 "smartphone" -- here is a random collection of some of my thoughts after two days of use.

E61 First off, I should point out that I didn't buy the phone through a cellular carrier, but rather I got it "unocked" from Expansys (Mobile Planet in the US). I just popped in my T-Mobile USA SIM card, and it worked right away. Nokia has a nice web site that will additionally send some more carrier-specific configuration information via an SMS, and in addition, since the E61 has WiFi, you can do that same thing via the internet on your phone. In any case, getting the phone up and running on T-Mobile for voice and data services was pretty painless.

The E61 more or less does everything -- it make calls (of course), is a competent PIM, has a very good web browser, plays music, has five or six different email options (both personal and corporate), plays videos, has games, is a note taker, speech synthesizer, world clock, book reader, VoIP client, reads -- edits -- and prints office documents and on and on and on. In short, it's really a full productivity computer in many ways. It is not designed to be a primary productivity computer of course, but rather an in a pinch or on the go productivity tool.

I'm happy to report that pretty much everything works as claimed -- thanks in no spall part to the very capable Symbian OS. I'm not happy to report that though everything works the end product is a user interaction disaster. If you read this blog, you probably know a bit about me -- I'm a computer professional, and have spent a decade working at Apple and Palm. I'm pretty familiar with all of the technologies in the E61, but I'm amazed at how much difficulty I'm having making the product work smoothly. I'm not running into bugs (as far as I know) -- just running headlong into what is obviously an software stack riddled with poor design choices and the unmistakable evidence of committee design. Somewhere along the way to producing the E61, too many product managers spent too much time in too many meetings with too many carrier people. I've been in exactly this situation, and it is amazingly easy to forget the end users' needs. When a cell phone company refers to a customer they are usually not talking about you and me -- they mean Vodaphone and T-Mobile, etc. I'm under no illusion that Apple's forthcoming iPhone will cure cancer and stop global warming, but I do hope it will seriously kick Nokia's ass back into focusing on the needs of their real customers.

Here's some of the most exasperating examples: As I said above, the web browser is actually quite capable. It renders pages much like I'd see on a desktop computer, and even has a nice overview mode for seeing the whole page and then zooming in to read some detail. Unfortunately, it takes eight key clicks to switch to page overview mode (and then just one click to go back to the zoomed in view). I knew this couldn't be right -- there had to be a shortcut key to do this, as the feature is so useful, but there's no "key equivalents" listed on the menus. After consulting the manual, I found what I needed -- press "8" -- which you do by pressing and holding the numeric shift-key while pressing "B". Why can't this be discoverable on the device?

Far far worse is the way the E61 in specific and Symbian OS in general treat data access. Nokia comes from the thick specification manual world of Networks and Carriers -- not the wild west of WiFi. When I turn on my MacBook, it connects to any known available wifi network without my interaction at all. If it can't find a know network, but it can find an open network, it offers to connect to that. On the E61, I have to define "Access Points" and "Access Point Groups" -- the former a named specific instance of a wifi networks, and the latter specify an ordered collection of data access methods. Hold on we're not done yet. When connecting to the Web, I must specify which Access Point or Access Point Group I want to use -- if I'm in a new open wifi area I must add the Access Point to my list. But wait -- click on a streaming media link in the browser, and the Real Player is (nicely) launched, and then you must re-specify which Access Point to use to access the stream. The Real Player doesn't seem to support the concept of Access Point Groups (and neither do many of the other apps on the E61), so you have to pick the right individual Access Point. By this point you're ready to throw the phone at the wall.

And on and on. Settings for various things are poorly organized; streaming media is handled through three different applications ("Real Player", "Mus. Player", and "Gallery", and yes, the application is labeled "Mus. Player"). Flash is installed, but doesn't work with the browser -- apparently it's only for "mobile Flash application" -- cool, but there is no Java application icon on the device, yet I know the phone runs Java apps -- the inconsistency is just stupid and confusing. The main screen of the phone is called -- get this -- "Active Standby Mode". (!). I poked around the phone for 30 minutes trying to figure out how to change the application shortcuts on the main screen -- it turns out you have to hit "Menu > Tools > Settings > Phone > Standby mode > Active standby apps.", and then choose from a small window that shows a long list of all applications and some bookmarks. Some -- not all.

In the end, I have a lot of sympathy for the folks at Nokia -- I know some of them, and I know they're probably trying to build great products against the usual pressures of budgets, schedules, partner agendas, carrier needs, and so on. But those things are all the kind of excuses that can kill a company by a death of a thousands cuts. Make no mistake -- the E61 technically accomplishes pretty much everything listed on its data sheet, and is probably currently as good as it gets on a smart phone. But from an actual end-user's perspective it's a piece of poorly designed, barely usable garbage.

The E61 is a good example of the phone evolving to become a true general purpose computing device -- in both good and bad ways. I support my less technically-savvy friends and family members on their computers, I can see that in Nokia's vision of the future I'll have to add their phones to my list too. Thanks a lot.

by David Creemer : 2007/01/27 : Categories technology (permalink)

Millions of dynamic web application hits a day with open source

At my day job, our traffic has grown quite a bit over the last few months, and we're now serving web pages to hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. When we designed our basic system architecture, we planned for this and more traffic, and I'm happy to say that our design seems to be scaling well, using a modest hardware investment.

In many ways, our application is a "traditional" three-tiered web application -- front-end web-servers connected to mid-tier application servers connected to back end databases. Our front-end essentially consists of a web server (lighttpd), content cache (Squid), and load-balancing proxy (HAProxy). Lighttpd, though not without its warts, is a reliable very fast webserver. All of our static web content is server by lighttpd, and the source data fits within the OS's page cache. We've seen peaks of more than 1000 requests / second handled by the front end without any trouble. Any complete page that can be cached for a reasonable amount of time is requested through the Squid cache. All requests that need to go to the middle tier -- both cache misses and completely dynamic pages are routed through the HAProxy load balancer. HAProxy is a very, very nice product -- it handles millions of requests/day, proxying to and monitoring the next tier, and reporting and allowing configuration of everything anyone could want -- all without placing much of a load on the CPU. We used to use Pound for this task, but switch to HAProxy to fix some timeout issues. Pound worked OK, but HAProxy provides a much greater level of monitoring and control.

Our application server middle tier consists of -- well -- our application servers, written in Python. What makes this layer interesting from a systems-architecture perspective is its statelessness. Client sessions are not stored in this tier, and so we can add appserver capacity by simply adding more application servers to our cluster. The application servers are managed as a unit, so things like pushing software releases can be accomplished with a single click. The application server's main function is to process web requests and return result pages (and AJAX page content). Much of this result data is aggressively cached in a shared memcached pool -- all of the application servers share the same pool and can therefore benefit from the work of their peers.

Finally we come to the back-end database. We run PostgreSQL on x86_64 Linux, and I'm very pleased with it's performance. As our load has grown, we have migrated to a more capable database configuration. We're currently running our primary database on an 8-CPU, 32GB Penguin Computing server, with lots of very fast disks. We work hard to minimize our database load, and our current system should handle our load well through at least the next 5x growth in traffic. In the grand scheme of things, RAM is pretty cheap -- even 32GB, and our system has room for another 32GB. With some help from Varlena LLC we learned about many of the ins and outs of the Slony replication system, and replicate our database in near-real time to both a co-located backup system as well as an offsite backup, which we also use for analytics.

The whole thing is monitored with Munin using and a collection of standard and custom plugins, and the system sends us SMS notifications of anomalous events. Putting together the whole system has been a ton of fun. I'm especially happy that we here able to do it entirely with open source software, contributing fixes and enhancements as we go along.

by David Creemer : 2007/01/23 : Categories technology python (permalink)

End of Year Charitable Gift

The ads on this blog do not make me much money -- actually I don't make any money from the ads. As the link says, I donate the proceeds to charities. This year we're also taking advantage of the a nice US tax code "loop hole" to give gifts of long-term appreciated securities (i.e. stock).

It turns out that many charities can accept stock as a gift. If you were to sell the stock, and then give the money to a charity, you would pay the long-term capital gains on the stock sale. If you just give the stock directly, you pay no capital gains (assuming long-term), and still get the full market value for the charitable deduction. Since 2006 has been a good year for stocks, I bet that many people have a bit extra to give.

by David Creemer : 2006/12/06 : Categories life ideas (permalink)

Easy and cheap PDF Document Management (with OCR) on Mac OS X

I recently purchased a Canon CanoScan LiDE70 scanner today for $80, intending to set up a simple document management solution for all of my paper bills, statements, receipts, etc. My hope was to develop a workflow that easily supports scanning a sequence of paper documents into a single PDF containing both the scanned images and the text of the document. I would then store the PDFs in Yojimbo -- the application I currently use (and like) for my document management. After a bunch of fiddling and a couple of "a ha" moments, I'm happy to report a very easy to use system that surpasses my expectations.

The Canon scanner comes with a (sadly PowerPC only) application called CanoScan Toolbox, as well as assorted other "shovel-ware" applications, including OmniPage SE OCR software. The first step is to throw everything away except for the CanoScan Toolbox -- even the OmniPage OCR software. Just install the scanner driver and the CanoScan Toolbox, and either don't install, or throw away everything else.

I then created a simple Automator workflow to open a PDF file, apply a Quartz filter to reduce the image size and quality somewhat (adjust as necessary), and then open the file with Yojimbo. Yojimbo will then automatically import the file into its document library. Next, I edited the "PDF" workflow in the CanoScan software to open the scanned PDF file with my workflow.

I pushed the "PDF" button on the scanner, and my document was pretty quickly scanned, compresses, and imported into Yojimbo. But then I noticed something very cool -- the text in the PDF was selectable (!). Apparently the CanoScan Toolbox software has OCR built in -- scanning the package contents of the application bundle gives some hints that this is so. There are files in the package with names like "basicj.ocr" and "cocr_carbon.shlb" -- so I guess this where the OCR is taking place. Unlike OmniPage, there are no options to tweak, but then again -- everything seems to work exactly as I want it.

So that's it -- in fact I think the same software suite comes with the $40 CanoScan LiDE25, so for about $50 you can have an amazingly easy to follow path to a paperless home or office.

by David Creemer : 2006/10/09 : Categories technology (permalink)

More on Cochlear Implants and Playing Piano

My son Brendan, who was born deaf, seems to hear quite well with his cochlear implants (see the previous link for more writings on that). He has now been taking piano lessons for about three months and likes to practice -- which he generally manages to do about four or fives days a week.

At first, I was unsure how well he would do at playing the piano. Before the first lesson, I sat him down at a piano, and asked him to identify the higher of two notes, which I then proceeded to play while he turned his back. He couldn't do better than chance at discriminating between two notes played on adjacent white keys (middle C and D, for example).

After three months of playing, he can identify the higher of two adjacent notes now with much, much better accuracy. While playing a song, he also seems to be able to hear when a note is one step off and self-correct. While he has not yet started playing chords in his lessons, we have been experimenting with them a bit at home. He can generally do a very good job discriminating between a single key, and a two or three note chord. His implant has theoretical frequency range from about 100 Hz to 8000 Hz, so all but the very lowest piano notes (range of about 28 Hz to 4200 Hz) should sound fine to him.

The piano lessons are a great source of joy and humor for me, and I hope for Brendan too. The teacher has pretty clearly just forgotten that Brendan is deaf -- she gives him no breaks and he responds well to her style. I still haven't told her that he has an off-the charts, fiendishly sharp memory, though she's starting to suspect that something isn't quite run of the mill. He also seems to have the best singing voice in the family, though that may be more sad than funny.... :-)

by David Creemer : 2006/09/11 : Categories cochlear_implants (permalink)

My new MacBook is very nice.

Count me among the many new MacBook fans. I've had mine for all of a week now, and it's without question the best computer I've owned.

I have switched back and forth between the PowerBook and iBook lines for a number of years. The PowerBook (now MacBook Pro) has of course always been targeted to the high-end, or "pro" user and that's me. The problem is, I use my computer every day -- a lot. I use it at work, I use it at home, while I traveling, and so on. The iBook line (now MacBook) always seems to be able to handle the wear and tear better than the pro-line.

So now the pendulum swings back to the consumer model, and I have replaced my 12" Aluminum PowerBook (PPC) with a fully-loaded black (of course) MacBook. It feels pretty tough -- and I hope it is. It is certainly very, very fast, especially with 2GB of RAM. I have no heat or fan issues or dead pixels; I am fortunate in that all of the applications I use for work and play are fully Intel-native, so there's no PowerPC emulation penalty to pay. It connects to my 24" LCD monitor at work and spans the display to include the extra pixels without any trouble. WiFi performance is much better than my "old" PowerBook; the built in video camera works well with iChat, Delicious Library, and Skype. My calendar and contacts sync to my phone via Bluetooth.

Everything just works, and works well.

by David Creemer : 2006/08/26 : Categories technology (permalink)

Deep Linkers -- Not Thinkers

I posted a blog entry a while back about my observation that the Aeronca C3 airplane looked a lot like Droopy Dog. Of course the search engines crawled the page, and pretty soon the Droopy image was in their image search results. Apparently a lot of people found this image, and "deep linked" to it from various sites.

By "deep linking" in this context I mean this: someone built a web page (or more commonly posted a comment on a blog or other forum) that included the image served from my poor little server. Every time the page on that website is served, the image gets pulled from my machine. In effect, I'm providing free image hosting of a sort. Now actually, I don't mind this too much, but recently the deep links have come from some very high traffic web sites.

Instead of just removing the image I configured my web server to look at the referrer header when receiving a request for the Droopy image. If the request came from this website, Yahoo, or Google, or if it has no referrer, then the Droopy image is served. If the request comes from anywhere else, then a different image is served. This has the nice effect of continuing to show Droopy on my website as it always has, and letting that same Droopy image show up in Yahoo and Google search results. But if used directly by another site -- then no Droopy.

I'm writing about this for two reasons: my amusement, and to let the deep linkers know (should they care to investigate), why the image they linked to of Droopy Dog:

Droopy Dog

now looks like this:

George Bush

by David Creemer : 2006/08/10 : Categories humor technology (permalink)

Steal this idea, please

My Friend Philip had a great idea (well many and that's the point, but read on) -- it's probably the case that everyone has great ideas from time to time, but they usually just get lost. The ideas come and go because doing something with an idea is of course the hard part. Since we all can't be captains of industry, and let's face it -- we're not all going to run down to the patent attorney's office after every brilliant (or not so brilliant) thought, why not just post the idea on a blog and let someone else "steal it." I'm glad Philip decided to do something about at least that original idea.

I like the concept of sharing the ideas which I'll probably never get around to implementing (see for example my earlier idea about importing Cuban cigar leaves as works of art). So here's why I thought of today -- literally in the shower this morning:

Can the consumer goods companies please put a simple "usage counter" dial or sliding indicator on my disposable razors? Every time I use it, I can just flick the number up one. Then at a glance I can see that I've used the razor four times. If they are very clever, counter will go up to one less than the average number of uses.

by David Creemer : 2006/07/31 : Categories ideas (permalink)

Integrating Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service

At work today, I spent a fun few hours migrating our picture storage from local files to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) web service. Our application lets customers upload images for display on their customized listing page (like an online Yellow Pages). I've been thinking about ways to both scale and "clusterize" our services as we grow both our customer base and consumer web traffic.

Like many cool applications these days, we use lighttpd to serve up our static images -- the scalability is fantastic and our web server's CPU usage is essentially zero no matter the bandwidth. OK, not zero, but close -- and lighttpd is the reason why. The web server hosts the images locally, and the directory is exported via NFS to our application servers for their use (which is mostly just writing new files). The server winds up getting many of the images in the OS's page cache, so serving them is obviously efficient. This all works great, and probably gives us at least a year's worth of traffic growth, but leaves the lighttpd / NFS server box as a single point of failure.

I've investigated the Linux-HA heartbeat and drbd technologies for building a clustered NFS server (and in fact I am using heartbeat to cluster our application servers). This seems promising, but we strongly, strongly favor simple solutions over perfect-but-complex ones, and a drbd/NFS cluster does not seem super simple.

That's where Amazon's S3 comes in -- it gives effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth, with Amazon's reliability, on a pay-as-you-go basis. Since our application nicely encapsulates all image management in a single Python class, I was able to move all image functionality to S3 in a few hours. Instead of generating URLs that point to our own web servers, the code just points to the S3-specific URLs, and the rest of the application is unnaffected. So now in exchange for one day's work and a few dollars per month, I get a scalable, reliable image serving and storage solution. If I were working in a Fortune-500 company instead of a tiny startup, I might call this a Server-Oriented Scalable Grid Computing integration, but that seems like quite a mouthful for a two hundred lines of Python :-)

by David Creemer : 2006/07/26 : Categories python (permalink)

Looking for a 3rd Airplane Partner

It's time for me to get a bit more serious about acquiring an airplane. A partner and I are interested in finding a 3rd for a Diamond DA40, to be based somewhere between San Carlos, and San Jose, CA -- with a strong preference for Palo Alto airport.

If you're interested in a partnership operated largely along the lines outlined by AOPA, please contact me via this blog.

by David Creemer : 2006/06/03 : Categories flying (permalink)

Briefly Mentioned in a Cochlear Implant Article

I previously mentioned that I was interviewed for an article on cochlear implants some time ago. The article seems to have been published now in NYC24 -- a biweekly from the Columbia School of Journalism, where they apparently teach writing and reporting, but not yet how to construct decent web sites with proper links.

by David Creemer : 2006/05/10 : Categories cochlear_implants (permalink)

Excellent Gelato

I have a nice every-other Saturday ritual with my son. We go to Packard Children's Hospital for a fun physical therapy session, (amazing staff, horrible billing system), then to Taxi's restaurant in downtown Palo Alto for a greasy veggie-burger, then off to piano lessons (after washing our hands of course).

Today the therapy started and ran late, so there was no time for Taxi's before taking the deaf kid to his piano lessons. To make amends, I promised Taxi's for dinner for the whole family. And that's exactly what we did, followed by a nice people-watching stroll up and down Palo Alto's main street -- University Ave.

I guess I don't get out much, since I only just noticed that what used to be Swenson's Ice Cream has now become Michael's Gelato & Cafe. Apparently the change happened sometime in December, but regardless it's a great improvement! The ice cream (technically 'gelato' I guess) was absolutely amazing. I tried the coffee, espresso, cocoanut and vanilla flavors. Excellent all around.

A dinner at Jing Jing's followed by ice cream at Michael's Gelato & Cafe has to be pretty close to the perfect inexpensive Palo Alto meal.

by David Creemer : 2006/04/29 : Categories life (permalink)

Meta-Religion

It may be somewhat annoying to come to this blog expecting another post on cochlear implants or software development, only to find another rant on religion and philosophy. It's not pleasant for me either, as my Adsense revenue goes through the floor on philosophy days -- not too many people buying Nietzsche or Kierkegaard ad keywords I guess.

My Sartre quote from a while back ("god shaped hole) got me reading a bit more about existentialism, rationalism, and a few other systems of thought. I am obviously so far down the amateur scale in these fields that I have no hope of contributing an original thought, but that's OK. I am interested in my own reactions to learning about these things, and perhaps by writing about them in a public forum I will get useful input on new directions to pursue.

So what have I learned? Plenty! As long as I can remember I have been a fairly strict rationalist, with a secret longing to understand and maybe even partake in a bit of irrational behavior. I don't believe that you can make someone believe in a god or God -- and I find it quite amusing and frustrating that I don't but wish I did (at some level). Regardless, I have observed that others do believe in a deity, and I enjoy learning about how all of us choose to fill our "god-shaped holes". So I consider this "hole" -- the sense that there is something beyond the rational, to be a characteristic of a being -- just like the shape of a face or the color of one's hair. We all have this gene and it may be hugely present in some people or completely absent in others. If that's true, then trying to convince someone that their set of irrational beliefs is right or wrong is like discussing the rightness or wrongness of their hair color (i.e. a waste of time).

The old joke says there are two kinds of people in the world -- those that divide people into two classes, and those that don't... So there's two kinds of people in the world -- those that agree that we all have spiritual needs of various sorts that can be met through a variety of needs -- and though any given set of personal beliefs may be dearly held and closely adhered to it is fine and perfectly valid for others to have a different set of beliefs -- and those who don't. Perhaps we should both now stop and re-read the previous run-on sentence. "Those who don't" I suppose consists of people who have decided that all of humanity has the exact same god-shaped hole (whether non-existent, tiny, or huge), and that they know the correct set of beliefs that perfectly fit the mono-hole.

The latter style of thinking strikes me as rigid, and in engineering we learn that unless you're careful rigid often means brittle (especially when confronted with new data that doesn't fit the basic assumptions), but in any case the purpose of this essay isn't to criticize but rather to express a (rational) belief and a wish.

I believe that rationalists can find a place in their being for irrational thought, so long as it is acknowledged as such. (That's not new -- I think that's what Kierkegaard was saying). I believe that this irrationality can take many equally valid forms, ever dynamic in response to our existence, and serving a useful purpose -- great in some, and inconsequential in others. I wish there was an institution that embodied this set of beliefs and encouraged its development, critique and dissemination -- sort of a meta-religion, that didn't involve a bi-annual "building fund" drive.

Ah well, at least I got to talk about Kierkegaard a bit -- let's see what kind of ads show up.

by David Creemer : 2006/04/06 : Categories life (permalink)

Thinking About Cochlear Implants

I recently received a request to be interviewed from a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University for an article about cochlear implants. Included below (edited for length) is the request and my response, which I think might be useful to share with others.

The Request

Dear Mr. Creemer,

... I am interested in writing a story about cochlear implants and in my research ran into your very interesting website. I thought it would be great to have a parents perspective on the implants and since you also seem to be very instructed in the theme I would like to include your remarks in my story.

What I want to do is write about the technology, the pros and cons and the debate over the surgery with the Deaf Community. I would also like to know if there is something like a bank or library of sounds recorded through cochlear implants. (Is it even possible to do that and tell the difference between how a human ear records sound and how the implants do it?) ...

My Response

One of the reasons I write the blog is to facilitate discussion and learning, so I am more than happy to talk / email about the topic. ...

From my perspective, the technology is nothing short of stunningly amazing. My son is completely deaf, yet talks on the phone to his grandmother without difficulty. It's worth pausing for a moment to consider the achievement and implications of the previous sentence. Brendan is six, and has had an implant since age one, and two implants since age 5 (the standard of care is only just now shifting from a single one side only implant to bi-lateral or stereo implants). Brendan can converse pretty much equally well with either implant, but does noticeably better with two. (You can try that experiment on yourself -- see how well you hear in a noisy room when plugging one ear). His speech quality is indistinguishable from his hearing peers. He attends our neighborhood elementary school, in a regular old first grade class (and is generally at the top of his class academically :-) ). He is now just about one month into piano lessons, and is singing on key (doubly amazing as neither of his parents can do that). If I sound like a typical Dad crowing about the achievements of his son, then, well -- great! It's probably worth pausing once again to consider the previous sentence -- he's not "doing well for a Deaf kid," -- he's doing well for any kid!

I used to worry more about the ethical issues of implanting a child -- I fully understand and respect that the Deaf community does not consider themselves "broken" in any way -- quite the contrary actually, as some see deafness as a gift. I can understand that. I also understand math and basic genetics pretty well, and when about 90+% of deaf kids are born to two hearing parents, that doesn't bode well for the continued growth and vitality of the Deaf community and it's unique culture. Believe me -- I understand serious threats to a culture -- there are big chunks of my family tree that did not survive the Holocaust. These circumstances can sometimes bring out the worst in people, and I have been called a "child abuser" and worse by one or two especially bitter members of the Deaf community. But I consider that sort of behavior to be the exception. I certainly understand that our society has not always treated Deaf people with the kindness and respect that all of us deserve.

Thankfully, it appears that much of the misinformation about this debate seems to be largely a thing of the past. The safety and efficacy of cochlear implants are now pretty well understood -- if implanted at a young age, my sons results are more typical than extraordinary. (And the "young age" part is critical -- result drop off a lot with age). What is left is a "should you or shouldn't you" question. I can't see how either side will make much progress on that debate. From the perspective of a parent, a cochlear implant "fixes" deafness; and as best as I can understand it, from the perspective of many in the Deaf community, there is nothing to fix, and cochlear implant is like getting cosmetic surgery on your kid, only far worse.

Like many ethical debates, it may be instructive to try to "poke at the edges" of each argument. What if a child is born blind and deaf, for example, or with a condition that causes vision loss over time? Would a cochlear implant still be "wrong" in that circumstance? What about a child who can hear in one ear (and therefore is not deaf), but who risks losing his hearing in the one good ear? What about an autistic child who generally doesn't look at faces, but responds to sound? Is sign language the right thing for her? (These scenarios are more common that one might imagine).

I'm rambling, and haven't reached your last question -- sorry. I'm not sure that you can accurately "listen" to what someone with a cochlear implant is hearing in some cases. For the sake of argument, divide the population into two classes -- adults who had hearing and lost it, who now use a cochlear implant, and children born deaf who have only known artificial hearing. From what I understand, adults report that they hear "like AM radio" -- i.e. a smaller dynamic range, etc. But these adults have spent hours with an audiologist fine-tuning how their implant sounds to achieve the best results.

For kids implanted pre-verbally, the audiologists seem to take their best (educated) guess at the settings, and tweak as we go along using both telemtry from the device as well as sound production and hearing tests with the child. Who know what the kid is hearing? It must be something like what adults hear, but regardless, the auditory information is sufficient to understand and produce speech, appreciate some music, etc. In some sense, this is like the old philosophical debate of "how do we know that we both see the same thing for the color we call blue?" :-)

Hopefully this perspective is useful.

by David Creemer : 2006/04/05 : Categories cochlear_implants (permalink)



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