Cladocera @daphsci@qoto.org

My lab is looking for a postdoc to work on NGLY1 deficiency. In particular, we are looking to test a bunch of candidate therapeutics in preclinical models. Fully funded, though all our postdoc have received independent funding. DM or email me! https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5586048de4b00e437dfae87d/t/63a0953f5d8db34ca5ee0f9b/1671468351274/Postdoc_ad_2022.pdf

OK #Mastodon. I've seen several toots on #accessibility for #screenreader users, however, I've not seen one from a screenreader user (as far as I know). I've used ZoomText, Outspoken, JAWS (AKA JFW), Supernova, NVDA (Windows), and VoiceOver (both on Macs and iPhone). I don't have experience with Windows Narrator or TalkBack. I would like to rectify and clarify a few small things.
First off, any awareness of accessibility issues, and endeavours to make things more accessible is great. Keep going!
But…
Blind/low-vision people have been using the internet as long as everyone else. We had to become used to the way people share things, and find workarounds or tell developers what we needed; this latter one has been the main drive to get us here and now. Over the past decade, screen readers have improved dramatically, including more tools, languages, and customisability. However, the basics were already firmly in place around 2000. Sadly, screen readers cost a lot of money at that time. Now, many are free; truly the biggest triumph for accessibility IMHO.
So, what you can do to help screen readers help their users is three simple things.
1. Write well: use punctuation, and avoid things like random capitalisation or * halfway through words.
2. Image description: screen readers with image recognition built-in will only provide a very short description, like: a plant, a painting, a person wearing a hat, etc. It can also deal with text included in the image, as long as the text isn't too creatively presented. So, by all means, go absolutely nuts with detail.
3. Hashtags: this is the most commonly boosted topic I've seen here, so #ThisIsWhatAnAccessibleHashtagLooksLike. The capitalisation ensures it's read correctly, and for some long hashtags without caps, I've known screen readers to give up and just start spelling the whole damn thing out, which is slow and painful.
That's really all. Thanks for reading! 😘

"Bernard Kalb, a veteran correspondent for CBS, NBC and The New York Times who also made a brief and unhappy foray into government as a State Department spokesman, died on Sunday at his home in North Bethesda, Md. He was 100." #journalism

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/business/media/bernard-kalb-dead.html?action

This just in: Dystopian science fiction will no longer be sold or streamed in the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley due to the high risk of it inspiring new tech startups. #tech #scifi

@jason_ritt @manlius @neuroscience @networkscience @complexsystems @PessoaBrain @WiringtheBrain @kordinglab @ricard_sole @c4computation

Great question, not sure. Top or my mind is Nick Strausfeld’s paper describing the origin of the insect’s glomerular organisation of both the antennal lobe and optic tuberculum in the ancestral leg neuropil of the crustacean biramia segment. So yes hox genes and their A-P diversification, also evident in the human brain (rhombomeres and also cerebral cortex).

Every few months, I find myself recommending basically everyone read this one article about the protactile deafblind language. But particularly relevant to mastodon users (AND people working on automated image captioning) is its great discussion of what makes good alt text.

Don't add excess detail! It may make you look like a True Ally, but you're not helping blind people. https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html

@daphsci @SciCommDennis @jason_ritt
Cosmos! Me too. I'll never forget how he described 4D.

Sagan is a great demonstration of the nuances - he inspired so many of us, but he was also a controversial figure, accused of grandstanding and going too far beyond his expertise:

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/carl-sagan-and-the-rise-of-the-celebrity-scientist/

https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/04/18/lisa-feldman-barretts-new-book-supported-by-a-guggenheim-fellowship-corrects-pervasive-neuroscience-myths/

Old man sitting on bench next to a dog
Another old man sits down and asks, "Does your dog bite?"
"No," says the first man.
The second man tries to pet the dog and is bit
"You said your dog doesn't bite"
"Yes," says the first man, "but this is not my dog."

every paragraph in this paper is blowing my mind https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00236-4 even as someone who already believed in the infinite variety of language, there are just so many deeply researched counterexamples to basically anything you think is universal (especially if you're using english as your basis for "universal")

#MNastodon I sure do know a lot of people either moving to the Twin Cities or planning on doing so this year all of sudden. So I guess we’re no longer super scary? 😏

#MNastodon Gonna make a local
observation as I pack up our perfectly serviceable artificial tree purchased at the Lake Street Kmart: that store and the Super Value employed a ton of local people and enabled a whole neighborhood to get things they needed without extra commuting/buying from the Zon. Watching certain segments of hipster circles celebrate the demise of businesses that filled those needs hits all of my working class buttons. Placement? Terrible. Existence? Useful.

When you see someone like Elon Musk embracing the far right, it's not because the far right has any kind of coherent political or intellectual worldview he agrees with. It's because the far right is the last bastion of shitty people - they will accept anyone regardless of their personal behavior.

The far right have no standards for behavior, identity or beliefs - you only need to share the raw desire to dominate others. The far right welcomes all manner of abusers, thieves, grifters, and scoundrels.

Logically therefore if you're an abuser, thief, grifter or a scoundrel you will eventually find that the only friends you have left are far right extremists.

@daphsci Yeah, a corner lot is a lot more work for sure! It's frustrating because for the homeowner-clears-the-sidewalk custom to work, everybody needs to do it to a certain level of service.

Our neighborhood's pretty good but, generally, it's walk-in-the-street season here. And getting to the street over the mounds is a challenge. Always has been but we're having a particularly good old-fashioned winter. #Minneapolis

Sure, I'm the "end o' story" guy in the movie "Fargo" out here chipping away at the driveway, but it doesn't take that much more effort to clear a sidewalk full-width than it does a goat path.

The block-end plow windrows are terrible and are made worse by those temporary bollard bump-outs the city has put up everywhere. #Minneapolis

I was driving to Bloomington the other day when I noticed the City of Richfield has Bobcats.

"The man from Minneapolis threw down his shovel and picked up his pen."

Jennifer Brooks on the snowy 'mergency facing walkers and rollers in the Mill City.

The long road to clear sidewalks in Minneapolis
https://www.startribune.com/the-long-road-to-clear-sidewalks/600241576/

Bison in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, USA.

#photography #LandscapePhotography #bison #winter #NaturePhotography #SouthDakota #PhotoOfTheDay