AnarchistArtificer

It's a particular shade of paint. It's widespread enough in the UK that multiple brands do their own version of Magnolia. It's often what's used when people don't want to have to decide what colour to paint, or in council housing, and it's increasingly common in private rentals.

Based coverage from 404.

So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they're self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy

Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn't commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!

Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can't find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly "meh" quality, especially compared to other universities' (now that I've seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they're now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you'd be disappointed. No doubt you'd find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you'd be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is

Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that's far harder to record or share, and that's the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it's really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor's feedback — the pace was just too frantic.

I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I've ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I'd done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I'd done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn't work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.

That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they're not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it's much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn't back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don't have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.

The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn't the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.

I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it's just exam question papers (because I realise that it's useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what's your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you're interested in?

I agree, but also we can never know what's in a person's heart. It seems more useful to consider his actions; if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck...

God, that's a horrifying thought.

Reminds me of the Medtronic ventilators that got hacked to unlock them when Medtronic insisted on similar nonsense during the pandemic

Increasing temperatures will lead to increased human deaths due to high heat, far more than the reduction in cold deaths.

Crop yield per acre is not going to increase. What are you basing this off, the general notion that plants need CO2 for photosynthesis, so more CO2 equals more growth? Because the reality is that crop yield looks likely to decrease, because of ecosystem disruption

I possibly disagree — I'm a part time wheelchair user (as well as other disability related devices/aids) and I'm always fascinated by how dynamic and relative the concept of "accessibility" is, even if we're only considering the perspective of one person. For example, for me, using my wheelchair often means trading one kind of pain for another, and depending on specific circumstances, that might not be worth it. Being disabled often forces you to get creative in hacking together many different solutions, balancing the tradeoffs such that the "cost" of using one tool is accounted for by the benefits of another. I wish I could recall some specific examples to share with you, but I have seen friends be incredibly inventive in using regular items in a context that makes them into accessibility devices, if that makes sense.

This is all to say that expensive hardware, learning curves, unpleasant tradeoffs like friction of wearing — all of these things are core to my experience of most accessibility devices I've ever used. For any prospective accessibility device, the key question is "given the various costs and inconveniences, are the benefits of this thing worth it?". Even without knowing much about this specific device, I would wager that for some disabled people, it absolutely would be net helpful.

That being said, you raise a good point, in that "accessibility" is often used as marketing hype, and in its worst form, this looks like disabled people's experiences being exploited to develop and sell a product that doesn't actually care about being accessible, so long as it has the appearance of such for investors. I'm not saying that's what this product is doing, but certainly I am primed to be wary of stuff like this.

Even besides the exploitative instances that I allude to, you're right to draw attention to existing products on the market. It's possible that some disabled people struggle to make use of devices that would be "good enough" for most (and maybe these people are who this new device is aimed at helping), but with accessibility stuff, it's far too easy for well-meaning people to jump to making new gadgets or tools, instead of meaningfully examining why the existing "good enough" solutions are inaccessible for some. A specific example that's coming to mind is someone I met who had a super high tech prosthetic limb that was so hilariously impractical compared to her existing options that this new one literally never got used. She said that it's a shame that such an expensive bit of kit is made functionally useless by much more basic designs, but she's learned that excited engineers are rarely receptive to being told about the practical problems with their new devices.

TL;DR: i think your instinct to be cautious about invoking accessibility is wise, though my own caution comes from a different context

Edit: I watched the video and I feel less dubious of this device after learning that this particular project arose following an email from someone who was mute and would find something like this useful. It helps that CharaChorder's chording keyboards are established (albeit super niche) products, and this project is less about a fancy new device, and more like "chording keyboards like ours allows for faster typing than any other method, with training. Maybe this means it could be an effective text-to-speech input method. Let's find out".

I'm not sure I'm politically knowledgeable to know what a liberal is

(This is a joke, and I don't need anyone to explain it to me. The thing I struggle with is discerning whether the people I'm talking to at any given point know what a liberal is)

For many, I imagine it's just the straw that broke the camel's back

Surely the zen of perpetual "resting bitch face" towards men is one of the selling points of being a nun?

Congrats! It feels incredible when a " ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ worth a try!" repair turns out well; I can practically feel your astonished jubilance through the screen.

I've got to the point where I have enough experience fixing things that I feel completely confident in my ability to have an initial look at the problem (possibly opening the device), and to know whether I'm likely to break things worse by dabbling. Sometimes this means immediately closing up the device, but increasingly often I feel comfortable taking a crack at the problem, and sometimes it even works!