Kind Of Blindness Research Articles

Obstacle Detection and Navigation for Blind Using Smart Blind Stick

Abstract: In this paper we are going to discuss the implementation and working of smart blind stick for obstacle detection and navigation. This project is implemented to provide a smart electronic guide for blind people. Different kinds of blindness and visual impairment makes people difficult to move from one place to another place. The main of our project is to provide some type of guidance to blind people while moving by helping them in detecting obstacles in their way via ultrasonic sensors, navigating them using GPS module and sending emergency message for rescuing them to caretakers using GSM technology. The system we proposed is an economical, easy-to-use solution for the blind to increase their mobility. Index Terms: Arduino UNO, Node MCU, ultrasonic sensors, APR9600 voice record playback module, GPS, GSM

Derrida, la cécité et les arts du visible. Une perspective philosophique sur les représentations artistiques du handicap

The aim of this paper is to determine what a philosophical approach, the one that Jacques Derrida uses on blindness in his Memoirs of the Blind, can bring to Cultural Disability Studies. Using some of the paintings and drawings reproduced in this 1990 work, the present study first intends to show that, for Derrida, it is a particular way of considering the mutism of visual art works that leads to seeing or imagining, in those that show blind people, representations of blindness that have in common to make it a powerlessness. This paper then analyses how, for the philosopher, these same works can be approached by virtue of a second way of considering their mutism, and thus read as giving rise to the idea of a completely different kind of blindness, understood this time as a power that is highly resistant to the narratives that, in history, have made it an powerlessness. Finally, he proposes to complement this way of reading pictorial images of blindness with Stiker's theorized “Reversal scheme” and the “neo-historicism” applied by Snyder and Mitchell to artistic representations of disability.

El sesgo patriarcal del conocimiento

No periodization is ever neutral, much less the dominant perspectives on how history is interpreted. Our forms of knowledge imply a patriarchal bias that constitutes a form of reductionism in at least two senses: first, the tendency to reduce the totality of human history to what I call the patriarchal horizon, and which is but the last breath of a much longer and complex story; and second, even within the patriarchal horizon, this kind of blindness tends to fade out the role of women and their contributions in any field. The bias gradually becomes a canon, it seems natural and goes unnoticed. This paper discusses the depatriarchalization of knowledge and the study of long history, both understood as indispensable strategies for the political struggle of women and the elimination of gender-generic systems of oppression.

Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Timothy Erwin. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+279.

<i>Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture</i>. Timothy Erwin. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+279.

Tropical bat hoards carotenoids

A tropical white bat with yellow ears and a leaflike, sprawling yellow nose doesn’t just look bizarre. It also has a peculiar—and enviable—ability to hoard the pigment that colors its yellow appendages. This pigment, lutein, is a member of the carotenoid family. It’s also a chemical useful for protecting cells from oxygen damage, particularly in the eye. But mammals—with the exception of this bat—are poor accumulators of carotenoids, including lutein. Instead these pigments are distributed evenly in mammalian bodies, preventing accumulation in regions at risk for oxygen injury. Researchers led by Ismael Galván at Doñana Biological Station, who identified lutein as the bat’s decorative pigment, also propose that studying the bat’s carotenoid-hoarding capability could lead to new strategies for avoiding macular degeneration, a kind of blindness that can be delayed by the presence of lutein (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2016, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1609724113). “The Honduran white bat … may be

Lessons from a Purblind World

This paper was an experiment presented on the “Organizing Care” panel of the 2014 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. It deals with a variety of kinds of blindness, not least those of the literary critic. It reflects upon an overlooked episode in the annals of British medical history, illustrating substantive changes in the understanding of eye disease and eye care, as well as the discrepancy in visual health between rural areas and the metropolis. Additionally, the episode raises important questions about seeing and its relationship to reading – or what we care to read. The partial or “pur”-blindness of readers haunts literary criticism. In advocating “surface reading,” for instance, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus suggest “that what lies in plain sight has been overlooked or cannot easily be seen” by scholars of literature. The oral presentation of this paper shifted the terms from visual to aural: sections of the audience heard distinctly different papers and understood questions and answers according to disparate sets of concerns. They did not see (or hear) the parenthetical references or footnotes of the printed paper: this experiment would work best if the reader also could ignore these additions.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography by James Bieri

114 BOOK REVIEWS into something “like a different kind of blindness” (147). The intelligent material on Keats builds to a cogent climax with an account of Moneta’s “visionless” (quoted, 168) blindness, though one would, ideally, have liked a fuller exploration of Keats’s self-questioning art. Byron and Shelley are discussed in relation to Byron’s identification of “Milton as the ‘blind Old Man’ in the Dedication to Don Juan” (177), a blindness involving many aspects, including the older poet’s “blindness to the power of his own Satan” (178), and Shelley’s concern to explore the “deep truth” (quoted, 178). The reading of Rousseau’s fate at the hands of the “shape all light” in The Triumph of Life hinges on Larrissy’s sense that the poem “has already established that Rousseau’s will is flawed” (185). From this sense, he adumbrates an ethically consistent and potentially hopeful reading. But it is Rousseau who diagnoses himself in this way, and it is not his will but his heart that he blames (“I was overcome / By my own heart alone”), and can his own self-diagnosis be regarded as straight­ forwardly confessional and trustworthy? Again, one wants a more tena­ ciously extended and engaged reading. Larrissy produces a sketch of an ac­ count; this reader would have enjoyed seeing it worked up into a finished, more detailed picture. And yet the overall canvas of the book is rich and ambitious, concluding with a lively reading of the motif of blindness in Mary Shelley’s fiction. The balanced fairness ofjudgment, which pervades this fine book, is evi­ dent in the account of Frankenstein and its pursuit of “a better, if disillu­ sioned, way of seeing” (194). Such a way of seeing, in turn, comes close to defining Edward Larrissy’s very considerable gift to his readers in The Blind and Blindness in Literature of the Romantic Period. Michael O’Neill Durham University James Bieri. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+ 832. $45.00. The publication ofJames Bieri’s biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley—ini­ tially in two volumes from University of Delaware Press in 2004 and 2005, and now in one volume from The Johns Hopkins University Press (includ­ ing in paperback)—is a true milestone. It has been a staggering thirty years since the last comprehensive biography of Shelley appeared, Richard Holmes’s 1974 Shelley: The Pursuit. While the gap has been filled by the ongoing publication of the indispensible Shelley and His Circle project, as well as by the complete reediting of Shelley’s poetry underway by Donald SiR, 51 (Spring 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 115 H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (two volumes to date), Bieri’s exhaustive and painstaking portrait of the poet, reportedly the culmination of decades of travel and research, may rightly be called standard, in the sense that all suc­ ceeding biographies ofShelley will both benefit from and be judged against it. It achieves this distinction through its patient and exceedingly thorough marshalling of documentary evidence, as well as through the new light it shines on, and context it provides for, several previously murky and in some cases unknown aspects of Shelley’s life. Bieri devotes the second chapter of the biography to the poet’s mother, Elizabeth Pilfold Shelley, and presents the six extant letters written by her along with details of her early life. This is the first appearance of these let­ ters and the richest contextualized portrait we have of Shelley’s mother, who obeyed her husband Timothy’s wishes not to acknowledge their son for the last third of his life and then for years after his death. Bieri finds her a lively and “feisty” intelligence, a letter-writer “more literate, outspoken, and expressive” than her Oxford-educated MP husband (23). The eldest daughter of Charles Pilfold and Bethia “Theyer” White of Horsham, Sus­ sex, Elizabeth might have possessed a “temper,” and she apparently har­ bored an “underlying anger toward Timothy expressed not only in out­ bursts but, more subtly, in feelings of disdain and disparagement that her son would have sensed” (26). Bieri’s description of Elizabeth’s letters and family life...

Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory

Introduction: Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory Stef Craps (bio) and Michael Rothberg (bio) During the 1980s, memory emerged as an urgent topic of debate in the humanities. By now, a great deal of research has been devoted to collective memory, a term developed by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s to denote collectively shared representations of the past,1 or cultural memory, a related concept coined by Jan Assmann in the 1980s that stresses the role of institutionalized canons of culture in the formation and transmission of collective memories.2 Early work in memory studies focused on the ways in which memories are shared within particular communities and constitute or reinforce group identity. Very often, most notably in Pierre Nora’s monumental Lieux de mémoire project, the nation-state has been taken as paradigmatic of such “mnemonic communities.”3 However, with the aid of mass cultural technologies, it has become increasingly possible for people to take on memories of events not “their own,” to which they have no familial, ethnic, or national tie. In recent years, therefore, the transnational and even global dissemination of memory has moved to the center of attention. Arguments about the transnationalization or globalization of memory typically reference the Holocaust, still the primary, archetypal topic in memory studies. In the second half of the 1990s, for example, Alvin Rosenfeld,4 Hilene Flanzbaum,5 and Peter Novick6 called attention to the so-called Americanization of the Holocaust. While reaching back at least as far as the theatrical and cinematic versions of the Anne Frank story in the 1950s, this process of Americanization began in earnest with the enormous success of the 1978 television miniseries Holocaust, a media event that influenced popular reception and memory of the Nazi genocide across national and identitarian boundaries.7 The transnational resonance of the Holocaust did not stop there, though. According to Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, the global spread of Holocaust discourse has generated a new form of memory: “cosmopolitan memory.”8 In their view, as in Jeffrey Alexander’s, the Holocaust has escaped its spatial and temporal particularism to emerge as [End Page 517] a common moral touchstone in the wake of the Cold War, and can thus provide the basis for an emergent universal human-rights regime.9 However, both Levy and Sznaider’s and Alexander’s studies display what Avishai Margalit has called “the danger of biased salience” accompanying the construction of a shared moral memory for humankind: because they are generally better remembered, the atrocities of Europe are perceived as morally more significant than atrocities elsewhere.10 A common critical response to the privileging of the Holocaust is to provide a counterclaim for the uniqueness or primacy of other histories of suffering. However, what Michael Rothberg has identified as the zero-sum logic structuring this debate—whereby remembering one thing must come at the cost of forgetting another—is historically problematic, as well as politically and ethically unproductive.11 Insisting on the distinctiveness and difference of one’s own history can indicate a kind of blindness, a refusal to recognize the larger historical processes of which that history is a part. As Hannah Arendt,12 Aimé Césaire,13 Paul Gilroy,14 A. Dirk Moses,15 and Dan Stone16 have argued, the Holocaust, slavery, and colonial domination are in fact interconnected, and by refusing to think them together (except in a competitive manner) we deprive ourselves of an opportunity to gain greater insight into each of these different strands of history and to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the dark underside of modernity. Moreover, claims for the uniqueness of the suffering of the particular victim group to which one belongs tend to deny the capacity for, or the effectiveness of, transcultural empathy. This is not to say, though, that a comparative approach to the study of Holocaust memory is intrinsically more correct or beneficial than a noncomparative one. As Andreas Huyssen17 and Miriam Hansen18 have pointed out, Holocaust comparisons may work as screen memories—meaning that the Holocaust is remembered in order to repress other instances of historical oppression that are closer to home—or simply block insight into specific local histories...

Mismatched or Maligned?: A Race Crit's Qualitative Analysis of African American Males in Law School

As a prosecutor for approximately a dozen years, I tried to implement the judicial ideology of blind justice. My interdisciplinary approach connecting law with education and cultural studies has led me to believe that another kind of blindness – colorblind – is both unhelpful and unconscionable. Researchers, such as Professor Richard Sander and Thomas Sowell, have argued that there is often a “mismatch” between African American students and their institutions of higher education, resulting in lower levels of success for such students. Another implication of the mismatch theory is that affirmative action policies, that may have helped these students gain admission to top-tier universities, are failing because the students are not “succeeding” at these institutions or after graduation.My study’s purpose is to investigate, compare, and contrast the experiences of African American former law school students attending less-selective and more-selective law schools. An integral part will be a consideration of their “costs” and “benefits” suggested by the mismatch theorist. This will be a qualitative study, focusing on case studies of approximately 10 African American law school graduates but also including approximately 6 members of faculty and administration. I will conduct in-depth, structured interviews with study participants to gain an understanding of their law school and post-graduation experiences. Thereafter, the interviews will be coded, sorted, and triangulated for validity. Other sources of information will include interviews with faculty, the students’ undergraduate and law school grade point averages, law school aptitude test scores, rankings within their schools, job opportunities, experiences taking the bar examination, and career satisfaction.My primary aim is to provide a rich, contextualized, and nuanced picture of each participant’s law school and post-graduation experiences, so that we may better understand the applicability and accuracy of the mismatch hypothesis.

The Collective Repression of `Pathos' in Organization Studies

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the specific way in which rationalist utilitarianism has influenced both organizational practices and the experts' way of thinking about organizations from the birth of the discipline until the rise of organizational symbolism in the 1970s. The hegemony of the rationalist paradigm—it is argued—led the scientific community to a sort of collective repression of the expressive dimensions of organizational life. The forms of this repression and the expedients adopted to reduce the cognitive dissonance created by this kind of blindness are explored.

The ethics of authentic transformational leadership

In response to worries about the morality of transformational leadership, Bass and Steidlmeier [Leadersh. Q. 10 (1999) 181] distinguish between authentic transformational leadership and inauthentic or pseudo-transformational leadership. The present article analyzes the conception of authenticity at the core of this normative account of leadership. I argue that the distinction between authentic transformational leadership and pseudo-transformational leadership fails to ground a sufficient response to ethical concerns about transformational leadership. To the extent that this theory holds that altruism suffices for ethical success, it misses the fact that leaders sometimes behave immorally precisely because they are blinded by their own values. In the end, we can expect that this kind of blindness will come to bear importantly on the moral psychology of leadership and, in some cases, encourage transformational leaders to believe that they are justified in making exceptions of themselves on the grounds that their leadership behavior is authentic.

Stimulation of insulin release in vivo by the methyl esters of succinic acid and glutamic acid.

It is currently believed that, in non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, the pancreatic islet B-cell suffers from a kind of blindness to D-glucose. The secretory response of the B-cell to the hexose indeed appears to be more severely affected than that evoked by other nutrient or non-nutrient secretagogues.