"A paralyzed Belgian man who spent the past 23 years incorrectly diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, was fully conscious and could hear everything around him the entire time.
The man, Rom Houbens, can finally communicate, thanks to a neurologist's persistent research.
Doctors had assumed the 1983 car crash that paralyzed Houbens, now 46, had also put him in a vegetative state -- awake but not conscious of his surroundings.
Houbens, a one-time engineering student and martial arts enthusiast was trapped in his own world. That is, until Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liege, using modern brain scanning technology unavailable in the 1980s, saw that Houbens' brain lit up with near-normal functioning when he was asked a question.
Houbens had heard the doctors, nurses and family speaking in his room for decades.
"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me -- it was my second birth," Houbens told the German magazine Der Spiegel, communicating via special keyboard. ""
http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=9159555
"Google Inc. said Thursday it is introducing automatic, machine-generated captions for videos on its YouTube site. The new service, being launched this week, is intended to make online videos accessible to the deaf and hearing-impaired.
Hundreds of thousands of videos on Google sites already contain caption tracks that users have created and added manually with Google's existing captioning service. But with 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, most videos on the site still lack captions.
So Google is tapping into the speech-recognition technology that it uses for its Google Voice call management service to make captions an automatic feature on YouTube.
Because the speech-recognition technology is still a work in progress, Google is launching the automatic captioning service on the YouTube channels of just a handful of partners, including PBS, National Geographic and a few big universities. But the company promises that the technology will improve over time — and it hopes for a much broader rollout.
In the meantime, Google is adding a new "auto-timing" feature to its existing manual captioning service to make it easier to use. Video creators will now simply have to create a text file with all the words spoken in a video and Google's speech recognition technology will take it from there — matching the text to the words as they are spoken. Google hopes this will encourage more users to add captions to their videos."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hetJ0S2aMJ1_foyMRobfjxkk3evgD9C2PQ981
I found the following that may or may not be suitable for young children. Take your own precaution.
http://community.livejournal.com/hard_of_hearing/227900.html
""Up"? More like down...(cross-posted to deaf)
So I rented the movie Up off of Netflix. Came in the day it was released in stores. Stick the disc into my player...
No closed captions.
Flick through the subtitle menu on the DVD player...
No subtitles either.
Apparently, as I'm gathering from some Twitter searches, Disney (who handles the distribution of Pixar's movies) released a special bare-bones version of the DVD to major rental businesses— Netflix, Redbox, and Blockbuster are all confirmed— that not only lacks the bonus shorts from the retail DVD, but even lacks the closed-captioning. Which is, y'know, half the reason I rented the DVD in the first place rather than going to see it at the dollar theater.
FAIL, Disney. EPIC FAIL.
I'm going to be checking to see if my local indie rental store has a retail copy of the DVD; I've got confirmation that that version, at least, is captioned.
Seriously, Disney? What were you thinking?!
Edited to add: Twitter user TheFarmerJoe contacted Disney and got an explanation: the removal of captioning was intentional, because they viewed closed captioning as a bonus feature. I don't even think I need to mention how utterly made of EPIC FAIL that reasoning is. >_<;;"
