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The Disabled Student Scandal

Today, the BBC is reporting that many Disabled Students are still waiting for grants. Only 6,507 out of 19,006 approved applications from disabled undergraduate and postgraduate students have been fulfilled, leaving 12,499 students without their entitled assistance.

12,499 students is approximately equivalent to 1.5 times the size of Royal Holloway’s entire student population. Thousands of students are struggling without necessary equipment or support required to facilitate their studies. Staggeringly, the organisation responsible for administering support for disabled students has already identified a recognised need to provide additional facilities for these 12,499 students and has failed to deliver over four months from the start of the academic year.

Many have sat exams without the technology enabling them to perform at their best, whilst others have been forced to subsidise their equipment themselves, in hope of reimbursement at some unidentified future date. All are studying at an unfair and significant disadvantage.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have all the equipment and human support to which I am entitled. Yet that still isn’t enough. My recent challenges include access to reasonably complex technical diagrams and PDF lecture slides produced by a LaTeX compiler. In one module I’m currently approximately ten days behind which would certainly be the full four weeks if I hadn’t managed to find an exceptionally generous support worker who is prepared to work more hours than I can pay her for.

I shudder at the thought of the unnecessary stress the vast majority of new disabled students are being subjected to due to such gross incompetence and blatant dereliction of duty by the Student Loans Company. This behaviour is indeed truly shocking undoubtedly unacceptable in a society supposedly as inclusive as ours. I sincerely hope all those who are presiding over this scandal are at the very least, seriously considering their continued involvement. I’m also astounded at the government’s continued silence over this issue, in an election year. I’ve no doubt that my already prolonged academic career would have been haulted long ago without the provision of a laptop. Should those politicians in opposition be seeking our votes, an immediate apology, public enquiry and some sort of emergency equipment loan scheme might persuade me.

Accessible Literature

Reading can be difficult. Many people have never received an education and yet of those of us who have, there are still a multitude of possible obstacles that might prevent us from enjoying books.

As a blind person, the most obvious barrier for me is that of finding accessible books. Technology is constantly improving the situation with the development of scanning and character recognition. Yet even then, legal considerations often prohibit distribution of such materials, making finding them, challenging.

I’ve recently devoted more of my time toward reading the Bible. As you might expect, the same difficulties exist in reading the Bible as with anything else. There are a number of websites which freely offer online access to a variety of translations. However, there still remains the problem of accessing materials offline. Fortunately, help is available. Optasia Ministry is an organisation offering their entire library without charge to visually impaired people throughout the world. As well as Bibles, their library contains a surprisingly comprehensive collection of related literature. Take a look at their website to find out more by visiting www.optasiaministry.org.

The Twenty-Five Game

If you’re on Facebook, you know the drill.

  1. I’ve been enrolled as an undergraduate student somewhere or other since Saturday 22nd September, 2004.
  2. I’ve just noticed that the three keys on my keyboard directly to the right of my left shift key: (\ z x) aren’t directly in line with the gaps in between a s and d as they are on most keyboards.
  3. I have far too many bits and pieces of old website experiments scattered over the internet.
  4. I have published several small computer programs which improve how Window-Eyes, my screen reading software, interacts with other software.
  5. I share my initial with my dad and as such, all mail addressed to Mr D Paskell is opened by him.
  6. I once played a small prank on our family computer which meant that it would only agree to turn itself on properly after my dad agreed to a significant pocket money rise (not recommended).
  7. I remember the last time London had snow similar to the conditions around here last Monday.
  8. I’m obsessed with dates and can mentally calculate the day of the week on which any given date fell.
  9. I’ve loved radios since I received one as a Christmas present in 1993.
  10. I could have been heard hundreds of times, usually on BBC local radio. My particular favourite competition was the treasure hunt on Radio Berkshire’s Saturday breakfast programme, then hosted by Andrew Peach.
  11. I’am particularly pleased with my tiny battery operated walkman-like radio with a solar rechargeable panel.
  12. I hold valid dual citizenship for both the UK and Ireland.
  13. I met Michael Schumacher eleven days before he won his second grand prix race.
  14. My nicknames have included derivitives of a well known white washing powder, Arbuthnot, Wheel nut, Dazareth and DJ.
  15. I used to have my own Internet Radio show on ACB Radio Interactive.
  16. I’m an accomplished blind shooter with nowhere to train and not enough time to establish my own facilities.
  17. At Great Marlow School, I received the lower school History and French prises from the late Sir John Mortimer in 1998. I was permitted the afternoon off to practise manoeuvring on and off stage in advance and did so that evening, without guidance or use of any mobility aids.
  18. I’m the only person I know to have successfully broken an arm by landing on a stack of crash mats.
  19. My sense of humour has always gotten me into trouble. I was rebuked at primary school for randomly bursting out laughing whilst walking off the playground on my own.
  20. According to Who’s Who, my interests include flogging servants, shooting poor people; and the extension of slavery to anyone who hasn’t got a Knighthood. (profile of Sir Talbot Buxomley) – See, told you!
  21. I’m one of few people who can boast of A-level results of A A E.
  22. I’m utterly terrified of balloons.
  23. I have an extremely short attention span and have been known to nod off just 111 seconds into a lecture.
  24. I am of a naturally shy disposition.
  25. At the time of writing, I’m killing time, waiting for my dad to come and pick me up from university.

oh for the love of everything “markup”!

I’ll try and keep this short, since the internet is boring. Did I say that? Some bits of it are, but there is also some fabulous stuff around! I’m targeting some of the technology behind it today, in particular the stuff that exists to hopefully make the life of the programmer, easier.

In a fairly simplistic level, I’m fond of html and its derivitives. This is the simplist method out there for creating web pages. Ever wondered why that bookmark ends in bla.html? Now you know! As with almost everything vaguely geeky, it’s an acronym of Hyper text markup language but since that’s almost entirely irrelevant, don’t worry about it for now.

Then we have XML. Why? Someone somewhere realised a few years ago that it was really inconvenient for those of us with more than one computer, to transfer our documents and the like from one to the other. Shouldn’t be a problem if we all have the same version of Word, Excel and the like installed, but what if we don’t even have Excel? All I want to do is look at some spreadsheet (goodness knows why), but I don’t have Excel! That’s hardly fair now is it? I’ve been given permission to read the spreadsheet. Why should I have to pay Microsoft for the right to read my work?? And so, some boffins came up with the idea of extendable markup language, XML. It’s just a way of defining all sorts of other ways of saving files, with the main advantage being that it is relatively straightforward for anyone to understand other people’s methods of storing data. Ever tried opening a .doc file in Notepad? Try it some day when you’re bored, and you’ll see it’s just a scrambled load of gibberish, even if it happens to be your prise dissertation when you open it in Word. If it were based on XML, it wouldn’t be quite so daunting, although it would be necessary for someone like me to write some sort of filter to strip the words in your document from all the rest of the junk that should show a computer how to format it.

Again, don’t worry too much if you haven’t got a clue what I’m on about, you’re not necessarily supposed to understand this stuff – that’s my job!

Why am I going on about “markup”? Wonderful as it is, a third of all of our lectures this semester seem to be devoted exclusively to markup. That is the same amount of time we had last semester in class, for the express purpose of learning how to program for the first time.

“But,” you ask. “Isn’t this markup blurb programming as well?”

Absolutely! But, it’s far easier by definition than learning how to write the software which renders web content. I guess they want anyone to be able to put stuff on the web, even without the benefit of wikis and expensive tools like Dreamweaver. For want of a more apt example, think of it in terms of learning to write a web page versus learning to make our own web browser to display it.

Sure, the internet appears to be constantly increasing its penetration of influence into our daily lives. It’s important, possibly vital for the future career path of a computer scientist. I happen to have enjoyed a time of employment thanks to my knowledge of these web technologies. That is my point. Why bother to lecture us about this stuff now? It’s important, I’ve already said that! If it’s necessary to spoon-feed computer science students with this sort of stuff, why not do it before we come onto more advanced programming? As far as I can tell, this module is wasting at least four hours of my life a week – time I could be spending robot building or researching the under-documented methods implemented by Microsoft for including sounds in their XBoxes. Or better still, it could be devoted to extra time understanding theories of computation and logic programming, or the “maths stuff” as I like to call it, stuff which I’m quite crap at by nature.

We’re expected to use our resourcefulness to find out about the finer points of robots and our Java programming in general. If there’s one thing well documented on the web, it’s web programming, so why does the same principle not apply here?

P.S: I’m proud to have spent all of these lectures so far, working on prolog and generally procrastinating. I am however, reassured by the promise of low-level network protocol troubleshooting and hacking later on in the term. Bring on March!

Journalism or Sensationalism?

Here in the UK today, the main headline in our news is the aeroplane which crash-landed at London Heathrow Airport. I think it’s fair to say that us Brits have somewhat of an obsession with aviation, probably thanks to those engineers and service men responsible for the defence of Britain during the second world war. Whenever an amateur pilot encounters a problem with their aircraft, it will usually make national news, although naturally such false factors as the perceived importance of those involved will often dictate the degree of air time devoted to their plight.

However, my view of aviation is undoubtedly distorted, given that my dad worked as an air traffic controller for forty years. Whenever anything aviation-related made news, I have been privileged to have the knowledge of a professional view of a situation to call upon, for as an analytical thinker I do value any opportunity to establish what’s really going on.

Let’s return to this particular crash. What do we know?

  1. A British Airways airliner crash-landed.
  2. Everyone on board survived and escaped without serious injury.
  3. The cause of the accident is currently unknown.
  4. The cause can be and will be found out, once materials such as the flight instrument data have been fully analysed.

Here are a few other things we can also fairly safely assume.

  1. While many of us know how to drive a car, few of us know how to fly a commercial airliner.
  2. As in any industry, there are a multitude of technical terms and procedures associated with flying. I don’t intend to insult the intelligence of anyone with experience of working in aviation, nor do I wish to embarrass myself with my complete ignorance of most of it. I have enough trouble getting my head around three-dimensional movements!

Given all I’ve said so far, why is it that in the whole of this afternoon’s media coverage, I’ve not noticed the BBC make any attempt to probe this incident by consulting anyone from the aviation industry? On one hand, we should be reassured by this absence of experts from our media coverage, since their wisdom is needed elsewhere in making sure that normal operations around our airports and airspace may be restored. Yet there are folks, such as my dad, who have retired from a life’s service to aviation. Why were their views not sort? Instead, all I heard questioned on the radio were views from those who saw the accident. But unless they were on board the plane and could see both of its engines and examine the flight instruments first hand, what can they tell us? We already know that the plane crashed, but only an aviation expert such as a pilot is qualified to analyse this information and make valid conclusions from it. In the space of a few minutes, I heard BBC journalists describe the crash as an emergency landing, a crash landing, a catastrophic failure from a few hundred feet above the built up area that surrounds the airport, and an incredibly lucky escape for a plane which was just a few feet above the ground while still a couple of miles away from the runway. This contempt of the truth only serves to confuse the audience. If we don’t know what’s going on, why is it considered disgraceful to admit as much?

There are issues of competition between news agencies which must not be forgotten. If Joe Blogs the reporter doesn’t know what to make of what’s happened, you can bet your bottom dollar that John Block might, leading to a loss of respect and audience for Mr. Blogs.

I only feel compelled to write in here though as one factor, that of the British weather, was not explored at all. Power failures, engine trouble and all sorts of other rather dramatic possibilities have been analysed by these journalists. But not the weather.

On this occasion, dad was very lucky, not least because he wasn’t on duty! But as it happens, he flew back into the country and into Heathrow, minutes before the crash. He noticed that wind seemed to be affecting the horizontal balance of his aircraft when it came in to land. He told me as much when I rang him, after I heard about it. So I proceeded to try and contact the BBC. I left voice messages, sent texts and emails, inviting them to seek the professional opinion of an air traffic controller. Dad also composed several detailed correspondences for the BBC’s benefit when he returned home. Nothing happened.

“So what?” you ask. “Surely they can’t be expected to get in touch with everyone,” and you’d be right. But in all that time, they managed to track down several passengers, a cabby and a few other people who observed the event from the odd car park or back garden.

We can’t dismiss any source of data until we begin analysing it, so I’m not going to criticise the BBC for concentrating on tracking down those who might have observed the crash. What infuriates me is their complete failure to consult anyone who might have helped piece together the information as it became available. Analysis of such a unique situation performed by those of us unfamiliar with this sort of data is bound to lead to inaccurate and irresponsible conclusions. Yet perhaps more worryingly, we’re ready to embrace these analyses as the truth!

Given that we suspect our media of failing to consult experts when analysing an aviation matter, it’s almost tempting to question their authority in piecing together other circumstances, although I’m obviously only speculating here. What I can’t help but wonder is if the media are not at least partly responsible for the synical attitude adopted by many of us, according to various examples of market research, toward issues such as politics, crime and the social responsibility of our youth (for want of better examples).

End of Rant