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"The Psychiatric Service Dog Society (PSDS) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to responsible Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD) education, advocacy, research and training facilitation. We provide essential information for persons disabled by severe mental illness, who wish to train a service dog to assist with the management of symptoms. We consult regularly with mental healthcare providers in their efforts to learn more about PSD. We also host an online community of service dog handlers veteran and new..."

http://www.psychdog.org/

I recently wrote a short article for the Anthropology News titled: A Case against Giving Informants Cameras and Coming Back Weeks Later (. Vol. 49, No. 2: 20). Here is a snippet to whet your appetite:

A Case Against Giving Informants Cameras and Coming Back Weeks Later
By Karen Nakamura (Yale U)

Giving informants cameras and asking them to take photographs of their environment is a growing trend in anthropology. The resulting photos are later displayed, analyzed or exhibited as examples of a particularly internal, private or emic view of the world. Students love this technique, which is inexpensive and initially appears to be risk-free, with all of the hallmarks of reflexive anthropology. If not done carefully, however, it can be problematic both ethically and methodologically.

.....

For those who choose to do photoethnographic work that involves providing informants with cameras or video equipment, it is essential to first critically examine the ethical and methodological implications of a project. The anthropologist must consider both the potential harms and benefits that a project might pose for an informant. Possible ways to address these concerns include giving informants high quality photographic equipment (to keep) as well as technical training, so that in the future they can use their new tools and skills for their own purposes, to address their own needs. Informants working for an anthropologists (i.e. completing assigned tasks) should be paid as field assistants. Prior to using an image an anthropologist should receive permission to do so from both the photographer and any people that appear in the photograph. Finally, photography should supplement, not replace, long-term fieldwork–it is time and labor intensive, but ultimately necessary for interpreting and contextualizing visual images from the field.

You can read the rest at the full text PDF.

Comments, criticism, and feedback on this article are more than welcome -- either here or by e-mail.

As seen on boingboing, Ian Macky has scanned and uploaded a wonderful book from 1935 titled the Secret Museum of Mankind. Has to be read to be believed. An ethnographic treasure trove. http://ian.macky.net/secretmuseum/

Patricia E Bauer is running a disability blog with news and commentary on issues of interest to the disability community: http://www.patriciaebauer.com/

One of my colleagues has produced a documentary film about life in a wheelchair called Rolling. She recently wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine about the experience: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/25/2533.

From anthropologist-extraordinaire JR:

http://japundit.com/archives/2007/12/08/7524/

The world's first cell phone camera film festival is currently being
held in Yokohama.

The Pocket Films Festival features submissions by people who recorded
films on ther camera-equipped cellphones.

The works, streaming on monitors of cell phones strapped to
tables, are filled with everyday shots, some literally taken on the
run with streets and cars whizzing past in a blur.

They have a voyeuristic feel because the cell phone is so
unobtrusive. Devoid of the typical grandeur of standard films, they
offer grainy but patiently taken close-ups that don't rely on zooms
and other fancy editing techniques.

The Pocket Films Festival in Japan, which organizers say is the
first in this nation, marks yet another use for the omnipresent
portable phone here, already used to exchange e-mail, surf the
Internet, read novels and navigate on miniature digital maps.

Only in Japan? :-)

My buddies sent me a variety of pretty powerful videos about neuro-diversity:

In my language (autism)

Teenage Tourette's Sufferers Say What's On Their Minds

Thanks BB and JR!

One of my blog readers sent this along:

I received this from a friend who thought I could help find this wonderful dog a deaf family.. I typed American Sign Language into a search and after I filtered everything out I came across you autobiography.. Perhaps you could help??? Imagine a dog who only knows sign language...he must be lost, in a shelter where it's so loud and he can not understand a word they are saying... I will understand if you are not able to help Smokey but thought perhaps you could put them in touch with someone who can... Thank you for taking the time to read my request......Sincerely Patricia

http://search.petfinder.com/petnote/displaypet.cgi?petid=8803042

There's a short article on wheelchair accessibility at Yale: http://www.yale.edu/opa/v35.n27/story3.html

One of the nice things about the new anthropology building that is opening this fall at 10 Sachem Street is that we're going to finally be wheelchair and handicap accessible. For the longest time, the main anthropology building at 51 Hillhouse Avenue was totally wheelchair inaccessible. The new building will have accessible entrances and an elevator to all floors. Even the new Media Lab for visual and linguistic anthropology will have a wheelchair accessible soundbooth and editing stations.

I recently had to change out the hard drive on my partner's iBook G4. It's a tremendously difficult procedure with (what seemed like) over a hundred screws that need to get removed in the proper order. iFixit has a great guide series for disassembling and reassembling your Macs and iPods, including a very useful screw reminder sheet that I used to cellotape all the screws to in the order that I removed them: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/

I put the old drive in a portable USB enclosure and used SuperDuper! to clone the old drive to the new one. Everything worked spankingly and my partner now has a 100 gb drive to put her huge iPhoto database on! And an external 60 gb USB drive for backups.

You'll need an assortment of teeny Phillips screwdrivers (including a Torx, although I used a hex driver) and a "spudger" or a little lever tool that helps you crack the iBook case. iFixit will sell you one, I used one that I had from my camera repair toolkit. A small set of tweezers was also great for picking up small parts. My screwdrivers are magnetized, which also helps with the small screws.

p.s. I wish Apple made the iBook easier to maintain! You shouldn't have to take out 100+ screws just to change out the hard drive!

J.C. sends me a link to a fascinating website, the 100 year old photo blog: http://www.shorpy.com

This is something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, but I'm going paperless in my office. I've been scanning down my large library of photocopied journal articles and reducing them to PDFs which I store on my RAID network area server. It's a slow process, but I'd like to be done by the end of the semester which is when we're moving office spaces (again).

My current workflow is:

1. Scan using a Fujitsu ScapSnap
   
2. OCR using Adobe Acrobat
   
3. Index using Spotlight
   
4. Rinse, repeat.
   

Adobe Acrobat 7.0 for the Mac is buggy and has problems with some of the PDFs that ScanSnap generates, so I'm looking forward to seeing if Acrobat 8 solves them. I haven't been able to find other good OCR solutions for batch processing PDFs so if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Annie Donwerth Chikamatsu has a great photoblog called Here and there Japan, which contains photographs and musings from her everyday life in Japan with her husband, son, and in-laws.

Steve Borsch has an excellent blog entry on why using Picasa's web album is a particularly bad idea -- because posting your images on it gives away all of your photograph's duplication rights to Google, without compensation and in perpetuity:

Your Rights

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Picasa Web Albums. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Picasa Web Albums and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content through Picasa Web Albums, including RSS or other content feeds offered through Picasa Web Albums, and other Google services. In addition, by submitting, posting or displaying Content which is intended to be available to the general public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services

"Promoting Google services" is very vague. A coffee table book about Google could be construed this way. Definitely an advertising campaign -- how pissed would you be if Google used your photograph on billboards across America and didn't pay you a penny? They have every right to since you gave them that right.

Furthermore, this is hidden in the Terms of Service which no one reads. How many other photo sharing sites have similar rights grabs in their TOS? Previously, I've blogged about why you should never enter most photo contests, but now it appears you shouldn't ever post anything on the web unless you own your own server.

There's a wonderful review of Norwegian anthropologist Jan-Kåre Breivik's new book Deaf Identities in the Making. Local Lives, Transnational Connections on the Anthropologi.info blog.