| Guide dog sees for Madison woman | | Posted Sunday, December 24, 2006 2:55:36 PM by Blog57 Team | | With the tip of her right foot, Nicole Meadowcroft feels the edge of the curb along the eastern side of South Central Avenue, about ready to step across Fourth Street. "Dale, forward," commands Meadowcroft, 30, of Madison, and her companion, a 2-year-old black lab, pulls forward by stepping off the curb. Meadowcroft feels the movement through the dog's harness in four fingers of her black-gloved left hand. She can't see -- except for a narrow tunnel of vision. Halfway across the intersection, Dale notices the streetlight pole on the northeast corner is directly in Meadowcroft's path, and takes an immediate sidestep to the left, bringing her safely out of the obstacle's way. "That was good, very good," says Doug Weil of Neillsville, a trainer working with the team to provide Meadowcroft with a guide dog.... | |
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| | | Advanced Cell Technology Scientist Dr. Robert Lanza Invited to Address The National Academy of Sciences at Stem Cell | | Posted Wednesday, November 08, 2006 10:58:19 AM by Blog57 Team | | Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACTC) (OTCBB:ACTC), applying proprietary human embryonic stem (ES) cell technology to the emerging field of regenerative medicine, announced today that Dr. Robert Lanza, Vice President of Research and Scientific Development of ACTC, will present before the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) at a special meeting to explore the latest developments in embryonic stem cell science and policy. Dr. Lanza will make his presentation at the NAS's meeting of the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, scheduled for November 7-8 in Washington, D.C. The meeting is dedicated to the furtherance of stem cell science and technology. His presentation will focus on ACTC's single-cell blastomere technique, which the company developed to derive new stem cell lines while preserving the embryo's potential for life and normal development.... | |
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| | | Dining in the dark TRAVELER’S CHECK | DANS LE NOIR? | | Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 1:00:19 PM by Blog57 Team | | Afflicted with the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, I'll someday be as blind as Dans le Noir's waitstaff. For me, dinner there promised to be a very apt aptitude test. What better way to glimpse the future, and, at the same time, allow my spouse of 52 years to understand the implications! We showed up at the restaurant's bar entrance well in advance of the first seating at 8. When we passed on a before-dinner drink, the bartender continued to busy himself by polishing glassware and rearranging a shelf of exotic liqueurs. The front of his black T-shirt contained raised white dots (Braille, I guessed). In bold white handwriting on the back was a line attributed to Shakespeare: "There is no darkness, only ignorance." The quote, I learned, reflects the philosophy of sighted businessmen Edouard DeBroglie and Etienne Boisrond, who opened Dans le Noir? in July 2004 with a threefold aim: to let patrons know, if only briefly, what it's like to function without sight, to oblige patrons to rely on their other senses for culinary enjoyment and to level the playing field between those who can see and those who cannot.... | |
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| | | Which Winn (or Wynn) wins in a situation like this? | | Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 11:03:20 AM by Blog57 Team | | It wasn't me. I didn't do it. This time I can't be blamed, as critics are, for mangling, damaging or destroying some work of art. But when I heard that Las Vegas hotel tycoon Steve Wynn, my soundalike, sort-of namesake, had recently popped his elbow through a Picasso masterpiece that he owned and was about to sell, I couldn't help feeling -- how to put this? -- involved in some obscure but oddly nagging way. My first reaction to the news was probably akin to what a lot of people felt. Initial alarm about the wound to Picasso's lyrical "La Rve" (1932) quickly gave way, given the circumstances, to a certain semi-suppressed, schadenfreude-laced amusement. The stratospherically rich Wynn is a major collector of modern art, some of which he displays in galleries in his luxury hotels. I had actually seen "La Rve," a gently Cubist and tenderly erotic study of a sleeping woman, on a 2004 visit to Las Vegas -- and, as I recall, paid $15 to view it and the small number of other paintings on display.... | |
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| | | Oops! Millionaire pokes Picasso materpiece | | Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 10:58:20 AM by Blog57 Team | | Picasso's famed Dream painting turned into a nightmare for Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn when he accidentally gave the multimillion dollar canvas an elbow. Wynn had just finalised a $US139 million ($A184.8 million) sale to another collector of his painting, called Le Reve (The Dream), when he poked a finger-sized hole in the artwork while showing it to friends at his Las Vegas office a couple of weeks ago. Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, who witnessed and related the incident in her blog on the Huffington Post website, said Wynn had raised his hand to show the group something about Picasso's 1932 portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter. "At that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise," Ephron wrote, noting that Wynn has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that damages peripheral vision.... | |
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| | | How the mogul from CNY ruined a $139M Picasso | | Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 2:55:04 PM by Blog57 Team | | Pablo Picasso's "The Dream" became the highest-priced painting ever when Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn sold it to art collector Steven Cohen for $139 million a couple of weeks ago. Before Wynn shipped it to the buyer, he invited a few high-profile friends to his office at the Wynn Las Vegas casino to take one last look. Wynn, who grew up in Utica and was a 1959 alumus of the Manlius School (which later merged with Manlius Pebble Hill School), described the history of the painting to a group that included TV personality Barbara Walters and Hollywood screenwriter Nora Ephron. The billionaire often gestures when he speaks and has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision. He talked about Picasso and the painting, known in French as "Le Reve." He backed up.... | |
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| | | Computer firms hope to improve access | | Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 10:54:16 PM by Blog57 Team | | Microsoft's Windows operating system offers several aids for people with disabilities. There's a screen magnifier for the vision impaired, for example, and ways for people with limited dexterity to use the keyboard instead of mouse. But a few years ago when Microsoft researched how those technologies were being used, "most people didn't know about them," recalled Rob Sinclair, head of Microsoft's assistive technologies group. That was particularly disappointing because the same research showed that accessibility-enhancing functions didn't just affect a small subset of users considered to be somehow "disabled." It turned out 57 percent of computer users between 18 and 64 could benefit from some such feature, such as increasing text size or screen contrast to ease the job for tired eyes.... | |
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| | | Microsoft improves disability access | | Posted Thursday, October 05, 2006 6:53:49 AM by Blog57 Team | | BOSTON ? Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system offers several ways for people with disabilities to tweak the software. There's a screen magnifier for the vision impaired, for example, and ways for people with limited dexterity to use the keyboard instead of the mouse. But a few years ago when Microsoft researched how those technologies were being used, "most people didn't know about them," recalled Rob Sinclair, head of Microsoft's assistive technologies group. That was particularly disappointing because the same research showed that accessibility-enhancing functions didn't just affect a small subset of users considered to be somehow "disabled." It turned out that 57 percent of computer users between 18 and 64 could benefit from some such feature, such as increasing text size or screen contrast to ease the job for tired eyes.... | |
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| | | The gift of sight | | Posted Friday, September 29, 2006 12:53:47 PM by Blog57 Team | | Sight is a gift largely taken for granted - however some people who cannot see need to rely on a vital canine lifeline. On the 75th anniversary of guide dogs on the streets of Northern Ireland, a moving and thought-provoking BBC NI documentary follows four local visually impaired people as they receive their 'seeing eyes'. Here one of them, Strabane woman Ann-Marie Houston, shares her experiences of this life-changing time. 27 September 2006 During my late teens it was apparent all was not well with my sight. My early symptoms were night blindness and tunnel vision. As my central vision was fairly clear, I was not officially diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) until the age of 23. RP is a genetic condition, fortunately no one else in my family suffers from it.... | |
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| | | Tech cos. push disabled software for all | | Posted Thursday, September 28, 2006 2:53:43 PM by Blog57 Team | | But a few years ago when Microsoft researched how those technologies were being used, \"most people didn\'t know about them,\" recalled Rob Sinclair, head of Microsoft\'s assistive technologies group. That was particularly disappointing because the same research showed that accessibility-enhancing functions didn\'t just affect a small subset of users considered to be somehow \"disabled.\" It turned out that 57 percent of computer users between 18 and 64 could benefit from some such feature, such as increasing text size or screen contrast to ease the job for tired eyes. These realizations sparked an overhaul of how the world\'s largest software maker deals with disability access technologies, changes that will appear in the next generation of the company\'s flagship programs.... | |
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