A Deaf Mississippian Cheers For the Seahawks

Image of Derrick Coleman from Seahawks.com

One Mississippian will be cheering for the Seahawks during the Super Bowl--she's deaf just like the team's fullback, Derrick Coleman. Callie Daniels writes, "It’s a relief for me to see someone else who gets it and also shares with the public all the struggles we, the deaf or hard of hearing, have faced. No matter where we grew up or what we did with our lives, we all had the quiet stress of frantically lip-reading a person who mumbles, the cold dread of our batteries dying in middle of an important conversation and the learned endurance of listening to someone who talks to us as if we were all in a Special Education class. I snickered when Coleman said he turns off his hearing aids whenever he encountered a rude person." Read the full story of why Callie calls Coleman her hero here.

Interpreters for the deaf tell of their role

One of the students taking the Issues in Interpreting course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf says interpreters have to be careful because "People's lives can be impacted in a devastating way" as a result of poor interpretation. Read the full story in the Democrat and Chronicle here.

School gets $1 million gift

An anonymous donor is giving one million dollars to California's Fresno State. The money is designated for helping families with deaf children who have other special needs. The money will be distributed through a program started by deaf studies professor Paul Ogden. This isn't the first gift intended to provide services for families with deaf children. The school got a $1.5 million gift and another $2 million gift a couple of years ago. And last year the Education department gave the school more than a million dollars. Read more about the most recent gift here.

How NY mayor's terp got his job

screenshot from YouTube

The sign language interpreter for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio got national attention last fall after a news conference about Ebola. New Yorkers saw Jonathan Lamberton again when the Mayor spoke about the potential blizzard that could affect the city. The Village Voice got to checking on how Lamberton got the job in the first place. Read the full story about the California native who graduated from Gallaudet and ended up getting a position next to the New York mayor here.

Are Smartphones killing off deaf social clubs?

"Before technology made things easier, sign language users would drop in to deaf clubs so they could have conversations with those who spoke the same language as them," William Mager writes. But things have changed and the producer of the show See Hear speculates as to why things have changed. Read the full story here.

Voice messages into Text

Facebook is testing a new feature as part of its Messenger app that allows you to automatically convert voice messages into text. “We already offer a feature that enables people to send voice clips to their friends without having to type out the text. Today we are starting to roll out a small test that helps people read the voice clips they receive instead of having to play them out loud,” wrote the vice president of Messaging. If the testing goes well, Facebook will make it more widely available. Read the announcement here.

School Museum packed with history

A museum at the New Mexico School for the Deaf tells the story of this institution that opened its doors in 1885. Read about the small museum packed with 130 years’ of history at the The Santa Fe New Mexican here. There's information from the school about visiting the museum here.

Hearing through your tongue

Researchers claim they have combined a Bluetooth earpiece with a retainer--a special retainer, to be able to transmit information that the brain will understand as sound. The Colorado State University team says when the wearer presses the tongue to the retainer, their device skips the ear altogether. There's a news release here. Below is a video about the "tongue mapping" research underway at Colorado State.

Meet a VSDB staff member

Chris Bo Payne loves his job at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind. He tells the Staunton Virginia News, "I was thrilled by the opportunity to return to a school that had played such a big part in giving me a fulfilling life. I am now dorm monitor for students ages 8-13. I love every minute of my job." Read the full story here.

Tickets & Seating an issue in OK

Members of the Deaf community are expressing their frustration with the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The arena forces deaf ticket buyers to sit in places where they can either watch the stage or the interpreter but not both at the same time. KJRH-TV has a report on what's being done to make changes here.

Turning shelter dogs into service dogs

A Colorado organization that finds "dogs from local animal shelters and trains them to be hearing dogs for people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing by identifying noises like alarms" is getting some attention in the Denver Post. The executive director of International Hearing Dog told the newspaper, ""When a dog is matched with a person and they come together as partners, it's an incredible, emotional thing." Read the full story here.

Deaf pressman retires

James Krakowiak has worked at the newspaper plant that publishes the Arizona Daily Star for 42 years. It all started when he took a printing class at the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind. Krakowiak found his vocation. But now "Jimbo" is retiring. Read about the legacy he leaves here.

Top Engineering Award to CI Developers

The National Academy of Engineering is giving five of the people who played important roles in the development of the cochlear implant one of the highest awards in engineering. Receiving the 2015 Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize--along with half-of-a-million dollars are:

• Graeme Clark, an Australian doctor who was motivated to pioneer the first multi-channel implant by watching his deaf father struggle in his daily life.
• Austria electrical engineer Ingeborg Hochmair worked with her husband, Erwin Hochmair, to develop their own multi-channel implant in Europe, eventually starting MED-EL--one of the "big three" cochlear implant makers. 
• Blake Wilson, co-director of the Duke Hearing Center. He is strategy advisor for MED-EL and is credited with inventing many of the critical signal processing strategies used in implants today.
• Michael M. Merzenich, a neuroscientist and professor of otolaryngology at the University of California at San Francisco, established some of the fundamental design for Advanced Bionics.

A ceremony will take place in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 24. There's more information from the National Academy of Engineering here.

Deaf Church on Chopping Block

The Catholic Church is planning to shut down the only church in the Archdiocese of New York with a priest who is fluent in sign language. Unless something changes, Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary will close in August. WCBS-TV in New York has a video report.

Age-Related Hearing Loss

About one-out-of-three Americans over the age of 60 have age-related hearing loss. The condition is known medically as prebycusis. It happens naturally with age. It can be caused by changes in the inner ear, auditory nerve, middle ear or outer ear. Some of its causes are aging, loud noise, heredity, head injury, infection, illness, certain prescription drugs, and circulation problems such as high blood pressure. Studies indicate it is probably inherited.

Deaf woman reunited with service dog

Sue Perry got the best gift possible on New Year's Day. The Canadian woman's service dog was lost and after months went by it looked like there was no hope of seeing Milo again. See what happened in this video from CBC news. No captions but you can read the story here. Below the CBC video report is a video of the entire reunion.

Deaf man loses ability to Sign

A gunshot wound turned Sterling Everidge into a quadriplegic a few months ago. The bullet "essentially took his voice" says the New Orleans Advocate. Read the whole story of how Sterling, his wife and five young children are struggling to survive  here.

Deaf-blind drummer graduates from prestigious music school

Vaughn Brown is now teaching aspiring musicians how to play the drums after he earned a degree from Boston's Berklee College of Music. The Columbian has a video interview with Brown (posted below--no captions) and the story of how Brown became a drummer here.