I spent all of Thursday and Friday on zoom, from 9-5:30 each day with no breaks other than quick runs to the restroom often not during breaks. So Saturday this introvert spent playing spelling games on the switch. Which I should not play video games because now that’s all I want to do and DH had to gently drag it out of my lands last night in order to get me off the couch. Anyhow, that’s why this is Sunday link love. There’s not many links because during the week I kept seeing them and thinking I would remember them and of course I didn’t and by the time today rolled around all the twitter feeds had long-since moved on. There’s important things happening out there but I can’t remember what they are. I need to do less service. Also I need to get off this grant proposal where the PI is completely disorganized and the senior white male Co-PI doesn’t believe in the existence of the very commonly used term that the granting agency is interested in and goes of on 20 min lectures without allowing interruption on how all social scientists believe X, when in fact, not even most sociologists believe X, just him and all of his indoctrinated students and former students. The PI is going to be sad and she’s going to spend a lot of time trying to convince me to stay since I’m the only person on the team with any organizational skills apparently and she’s been trying to convince me to join a group on a tangentially related topic that sounds like a book club that meets 2x/week and also a support group for stuck at associate people. Except I’m not really *stuck* at associate, I just did not *want* to go up for full even though I should have done it 3 years ago (I’m going up this year because none of the reasons I was putting it off for turned out to help because my department head decided to reward the person in my department who she believes is incapable of service and a lazy teacher because this person has slightly more citations on google scholar, which is a function of hir having been out longer even though zie got tenure later, and having most of hir papers coauthored with a big name in the field even if they’re at second-tier journals, thus breaking a long-standing tradition of rewarding the good citizen, whether research active or not, who has been in the department longest). Anyway, I should get these two meager links posted. FML.
You can play the original oregon trail on stata! (But not the dying of dysentery version– this is a precursor). I also added a few of these ado files to my stata. I’m contemplating whether or not it is worth capture ssc install to some of my .do files so my RAs get a surprise at the end of a program.
Here’s a post on the topic of disability simulations that we were talking about the other week. I did not google for it– I came across it organically! Here’s a quote that better puts into words what I’d been thinking:
The difference will be because, without any of the coping skills and techniques people with disabilities create and master throughout their lives, the best you will be able to manage will be to emulate the experience of being the single most hapless, incompetent individual with that particular disability on the face of the planet.
which then has the possibility of limiting what kinds of jobs we think disabled people can do and decreases a focus on accommodations.
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
January 31, 2021 at 10:41 am
I have about 80% cured my belief that I will just remember something later that I saw online. That 20% is because sometimes I do remember or I remember a tiny detail that is key to finding it again and that reinforces a terrible habit. (Like these really cool dragon cards I found and want to buy if I can justify the price.)
These are good links and worth posting! Glad you got some downtime yesterday after so many meetings.
As someone whose fibro (chronic pain) slowly took away most of the things I loved, that assessment of a simulator hits on a very important point. I found ways to cope with most of the losses and I most definitely found ways to carry on working almost seamlessly from the outside perspective. People don’t know I’m suffering unless I say so, and I’ve been the top
or key performerr in all my jobs for a long time.
January 31, 2021 at 10:44 am
Accommodate but don’t underestimate!
January 31, 2021 at 5:38 pm
So I learned last week that poverty simulations are a thing too??? Can’t we think of better ways to build empathy?
January 31, 2021 at 5:40 pm
Thanks for the additional comments and article on disability simulations. They now remind me of those food stamp challenges where people who don’t know how to cook try to live on $1/day or whatever and it’s sickening.
January 31, 2021 at 9:08 pm
That post on disability simulations includes:
“…More sophisticated exercises might also include headphones with white noise generators to simulate a hearing loss…”
I have worn hearing aids for more than 50 years, so I can say that would not be a very accurate simulation of hearing loss. The analogy I use is, imagine you are driving a car in the middle of nowhere and can only get one distant FM station on the radio. The reception is bad. You can crank the volume and you can adjust the equalizer, both of which will help *some*. Hearing aids basically crank the volume and adjust the equalizer, plus some filtering that attempts to remove noise. Way better than nothing, and hearing aids now are vastly improved compared to the 1960s models of my childhood. But they don’t restore normal hearing.
Hearing aids are NOT like spectacles. I am nearsighted, but that’s much less of an issue in my daily life because with corrective lenses my vision is almost exactly the same as it would be with correctly focused eyes. That’s because myopia is a very simple optical issue for which the solution has been known for centuries.
For the most part my hearing impairment is not a huge issue; I can use regular phones, Zoom, etc., just fine. I do have to expend some of my cognitive effort on mentally reconstructing what I do not hear based on what I do; this is a skill called Auditory Discrimination that has routinely been taught by Speech Therapists to kids like me for decades. Partly for this reason, and partly because I can read very fast, I prefer novels to movies.
February 1, 2021 at 6:55 am
Maybe a better simulator would have you constantly interrupted with math problems that need to be solved before you can continue with what you were doing. Before I injured my knee, walking was a joy. Now, there’s a mental overhead of making sure I’m not going to trip, worrying about slippery surfaces, making sure I’m in my seat or at least hanging on to something when the bus starts moving. They physical disability needs to be accommodated, but the mental overhead is also pretty challenging.
February 1, 2021 at 7:56 am
Or in a work environment the surfaces could be made safer to reduce trips and injuries in place of trips!