Blindness - Science topic

What are the support system needed for educating the deaf and blind?

Dear researchers,

I am excited to announce the launch of my second independent research project, Existential Threats of Nihilism. This interdisciplinary collaboration aims to explore nihilism from various perspectives, highlighting its multidimensional nature, existential threats, and ways to turn ontological challenges into optimistic opportunities. This project will run for approximately four to five months, depending on the number of participants and other factors. Meanwhile, my first project, The Essence of Knowledge Initiative, is still ongoing. This project will include 3 or more participants, including myself.

Project Outline

The goal of this project is to coauthor research articles on existential threats of nihilism based on participants’ disciplinary perspectives. Topics may include the meaning of human existence, philosophical dilemmas, and responses to nihilism. Each article will have three coauthors—myself and two other researchers. If more participants join, additional three-person coauthored articles will be formed. While each article will have a dedicated team of three, all participants will engage in weekly activities, such as research-based analysis and academic discussions. Insights from these activities may also lead to new research papers and presentations. Coauthored articles will be published on ResearchGate, and if possible, in an open access peer-reviewed journal. The program will be held asynchronously, allowing flexibility in terms of different schedules and time zones.

Participation Criteria

Doctoral researchers, PhD holders, professors, and a limited number of Master's holders regardless of disciplinary background, are welcome to participate.

Project Coordinator: Amalya Sukiasyan

I would like to share that I am blind and use a screen reader, NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access), to independently navigate the internet, teach, and conduct research.

Application Deadline: April 8, 2025

To apply, share your email in the comments of this discussion or email me at amalya.suqiasyan@edu.ysu.am

I look forward to collaborating with you!

Best regards,

Amalya Sukiasyan

As captioned, we would like to discuss with someone familiar with using TreeAge for cost-effectiveness analysis. We would like to know how to analyze years of blindness avoided.

Hello!

We are looking for a tool to assess quality of evidence for treatment studies with a single arm (not controlled and obviously not randomized and blinded). Is there a quality appraisal tool specific for this type of study? What do you recommend?

Best,

Vitor

Life is characterized by its versatility: it includes both challenges and opportunities, defeats and victories. These characteristics, particularly challenges, become even bigger and sometimes insurmountable when faced by people who are blind. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges that blind individuals encounter?

Think about willful academic blindness(ACADEMIC TUNNELING) vrs willful democratic blindness(POLITICAL TUNNELING)....

The first type/academic tunneling seems now normal, taking place at universities, thinktanks, international organizations, governments....which will lead to the death of science in a way that THOMAS KUHN was not expecting, BUT IT IS NOT BEING SEEN AS A THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL OF SCIENCE as it seems we are now in a non-science based world as science or not, they still will push what they want to push.....

The second type/political tunneling is SEEN as an existential threat to liberal democracy as political tunneling does not work under democratic rules just see the political dynamics under political tunneling processes under exism movements like Trumpism....

And this raises the question, Why willful blindness is taken as a serious threat to the survival of democracy, but not the survival of science?

What do you think?

What is the purpose of localised Panopticon? How does it bypass legal protection?

Technological advancements are one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century. Today's world is highly integrated through information communication, digitalization, and the blending of the real world with virtual reality. However, certain groups, particularly blind individuals, face significant challenges in accessing the internet and modern devices. Fortunately, the development of screen-reading software, such as NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) and JAWS, has made virtual spaces accessible to many people. Still, for various reasons, such as cost, lack of awareness, self-confidence, and training in digital proficiency, these screen readers are not available to everyone. In your opinion, what can be done to make online environments more accessible to blind individuals?

I want to do protein protein flexible blind docking ..Please let me know how to do it?

How do you think blind review can impact the quality and credibility of research findings?

I did two different protein-protein dockings for my bioinformatics project. First, I used the ClusPro blind docking method and then I tried the HADDOCK server where I needed to input a set of active residues for my input protein.

So, to perform the protein-protein docking with HADDOCK, I used the information from the docking results output by ClusPro and identified the residues that interacted between the docked complex using the Prodigy server. Using the interacting residues between the docked complex from ClusPro, I obtained a negative HADDOCK score and Z-score. However, I feel that the docking results from HADDOCK can be considered as false positive as I used the interacting residues from the CluPro docking results.

So, to avoid this I decided to search the active residues related to my designed vaccine construct based on previous literature reviews, but only managed to identify a few active residues to be input for the docking (9 out of 558 residues). As for the results of the docking, I got a positive HADDOCK score with a negative Z-score. I also checked the binding affinity using Prodigy and got a negative score. I was wondering if the positive HADDOCK score was affected due to the limited information given for the active residues during the docking.

If so, are there any suggestions on how should I improve my docking to get negative HADDOCK scores? Thank you in advance.

learning and treating in our clinic and what is the new method is using

Language, teaching, blind children, artificial intelligence

In order to submit a paper some authors choose journals which offer one side blinded revision, so that the identity of the referee/s remains/remain unknown for the author. Nevertheless other authors prefer journals with two side blinded revision.

I personally prefer the last option, more impartial in my opinion. I wonder what is your opinion. What do you think about this? Thank you very much in advance.

Is the universe really that complicated, or are scientists overcomplicating it, like a blind man seeing an elephant? What do you think?

I think yes, what do you think?

Is it widely accepted in the academic community to share a preprint of your paper immediately after submitting it to a journal? My concern is that if author names are disclosed in the preprint, it might compromise the integrity of the peer review process. When reviewers are aware of the authors' identities due to the preprint, it becomes challenging to conduct a blind review. As the double-blind review implies that both the reviewers and authors remain anonymous to each other during the review process.

without the effect of "blinds"

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. (Albert Einstein)

Blind recruitment is the process of removing any and all identification details from the candidates' resumes and applications.

Hello ! I am doing a research to identify the visual effects of Marketing on people with color blindness.

Colors red and yellow are known for stimulating appetite. Depends on the type of color blindness, we could have different effects on the affected people. How do I determine the effect ?

Thank you.

facilitation of persons with disabilities in buildings

Does it involve ethical obligations on the part of the editor? Or it is just for objectivity of the review and evaluation process.

Blind separation technology has attracted some scientists' attention in recent years, what is the technical bottleneck of blind separation technology? In what scenarios does it have good application prospects?

I work with people with complete blindness, and tasks are cognitively demanding. While I made sure our participants did not present comorbidities and cognitive impairments, I am looking for standardized tests that do not depend on visual abilities and are relatively simple to administer to people with no vision. My goal is to establish my participants' cognitive profiles for further analysis.

Hello,

I search a signal processing method that can extract a signal of interest form a set of severals raws signals (vectors). We know the repartion of density of the signal of interest for each vectors (ex: vector 1 contain 10% of interest signal, vector 2 contain 12%, etc.).

Any tool like an assisted ICA that can be used for that?

Thanks in advance!

Hello,

I am designing the experiment on application of Boron (H3BO3) on seedlings and checking if there's any result in blind plants.

Most teams use units kg/ha, only few mg/L.

I would like to convert the data from kg/ha to mg/L, is it possible? Can you please help me?

Greetings,

In my new paper, I used fungal strains from my previous study, however if i cite the source of the strains as (authors, year), the reviewers can easily find the identity of the authors just by searching the names of the fungal strains.

Rather than citing the source of the strains as (authors, year), what if I write "the strains were provided by" and I cite my previous paper? the reason for doing so will also be explained in the cover letter.

Best regard.

Hi, I am totally congenitally blind with nystagmus. When using marijuana, I am better able to direct my attention to a certain point in space and extract information about my surroundings, whether it be through sound or residual light perception. Since marijuana heightens my awareness of vestibular information, i hypothesized that galvanic vestibular stimulation would produce similar effects, but without the psychotropic effects of the marijuana. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to try GVS for the first time, and it was able to suppress my nystagmus to the extent that I had a much better sense of where my eyes were pointing, which gave me the perception of being able to direct my attention to that point, kind of like using a joystick to place a videogame character at certain coordinates on a 3d screen. I believe that there is potential in using GVS to help some blind people take advantage of residual light perception, and to use the vestibular system to enhance spatial imagery in those like myself who have difficulty extracting spatial information from sound. My current collaborators are in Boston, and I am moving to Washington DC in two weeks. I am looking for a DC-based collaborator to join us on this project. My data from yesterday was very preliminary and exploratory, but i will be able to share it with you if you are interested. Please reach out if you can help or know anyone who can.

Can anyone help me to identify the list of blind schools in India in chronological order?

Hi,

I am trying to simulatio how two excipients would interact wit our protein of interest. So far I've been able to simulate it with just one ligand using SwissDock and Achiles Blind docking servers.

How could I simulate it with both ligands simultaneously, to know if a combination for both would work better?

Thanks in advance

Now a days publishing or uploading manuscripts with preprint organizations /websites before actual publication is gradually becoming popular.

Does preprints [publication] have any negative impact on actual/journal publication or blind peer review process?

The US CDC knew very early, from post-marketing Adverse Reaction reports, that the COVID-19 vaccines were causing numerous Amyloid fibril diseases including Amyloidosis subcategories: Cerebral angiopathy, Senile, Cardiac, Cutaneous, Dialysis, Hepatic, Pulmonary and Renal.

Elegant work by Swedish researchers demonstrated that Synthetic Spike Protein can be broken down in vitro by incubation with the protease Neutrophil Elastase into short peptide sequences that can induce damaging amyloid-like fibrils.

References: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) Standard Operating Procedures for COVID-19 (as of 29 January 2021)

I have developed the Matlab code for blind equalizer using Regional Multi-Modulus Algorithm for 64-QAM. I have tried with number of step sizes, initial weight vectors but it is not at all converging even for large iterations about 10^6 symbols.

Then I decided to implement CMA and MMA for 4-QAM, they are also not all converging even for large number of iterations.

Then I first implemented data aided LMS algorithm for 1000 symbols for 64-QAM, then using that updated weight vector I have implemented the Regional Multi-Modulus Algorithm for 64-QAM. Now it is converging.

But my doubt here is how to select the initial weight vector and step-size without using data aided methods.

thank you and regards,

Naveen S

A question for my friends with a background in neurology:

I believe that visual cues are the major inputs that are used in programming our circadian rhythms.

How does the supra-chiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus function in those with congenital or bilateral blindness?

1. If yes, so they are not doing the blind review?

2. If not, where do we add authors' names?

if yes or no, please give me a reference for the answer. thank you in advance

I have designed around 200 ligand molecules for inhibiting a protein. I am a bit confused with the sequence of filtering them, in order to select the best molecules for conducting MD simulation. I have been using autodock 4.2 with 1000 to 2000 runs for blind docking. And I am having problems deciphering and analyzing the results, since clustering takes forever, and the result was not so straight forward to analyze. so I decided to use Vina for blind docking the results were more desirable. so I was wondering if it is a valid method, do other researchers use Vina for blind docking?

Most programs that read abi files use thin red/green lines that are indistinguishable to the color blind like me. Is there a program that allows the user to set the colors?

The peer review of manuscripts submitted to scientific journals is currently a basic pillar used to ensure the quality of papers. Besides other problems that the model raises (challenges such as the fact that it is unpaid, without charge to the publishers, or the debate about its relative reliability), I am very concerned about if blind peer review really helps to achieve the desired goal of accuracy and integrity. In many occasions I have received reviews by anonymous reviewers that have been very honest, fair and adequate to the standards of my discipline (Archaeology); however, in a number of cases, I consider that the anonymity of the reviewers has only served to spit poison without consequences, like the anonymous trolls that abound on the internet nowadays, without any intention of helping to improve the manuscript or any desire to ensure that the process serves to maintain the quality of the publication. I am quite sure that many others have experienced this same type of reviews, which are far from the ethical standards that should be considered, and which often have to do with personal vendettas, rivalries, and frustrations that have nothing to do with what the Academy should be. This has happened with journals with a low impact index, but also with others ranked high in international indexes. I consider that peer-reviews should be signed by their authors in all cases, without the option (as is usual nowadays in most journals) of remaining anonymous. If the review should always aim to contribute to the improvement of papers from a constructive perspective, and therefore to the progress of scientific knowledge, there should be nothing to hide about the identity of the reviewers, don't you think?

Blinding is done in RCT to minimize biases. Is it mandatory to do Blinding in RCT?

When blind reviewing research papers for conferences or journals, what would you do if you are assigned a paper that explicitly includes author details/affiliations?

Do you reject the submission? refrain from reviewing it? or just add a comment on that?

Here the constantan wire is fixed to the isolative cover and the isolative cover on the thermocouple is fixed in the mouth of the blind hole in order to avoid movement of the constantan wire

i have done several dockings and i have my docking results, and i want to create a validation parameter for my future blind dockings

does anyone have any idea how i can use my results for this?

Dear researchers,

I was using the Swissdock and Achilled Blind Docking server for last one year. Swissdock stopped giving results since last 8-10 months and Achilled Blind Docking server aslo not processing the files since last 15 days. Is there anybody related to or use to with these services. Please help to resolve my issue. I am using the online docking server for a academic research project.

Has anyone tried the Achilles Blind Docking Server? I'm looking for its methods, but I haven't found any specific papers describing it, but one referenced to BindSurf, which, I presume, isn't the same as they describe on its page - as it's said that the server uses an improved ADVina method called Vina_vision, which hasn't any papers or anything describing it.

Have you ever imagined how the physically disabled people feel under COVID-19?

Which type of disability is most impacting these minority under COVID-19?

Autism? Cleft patients? Mental health patients? Deaf? Dumb? Blind? Loss of limbs?

How can we help them?

We recently conducted a study on inattentional blindness among social and natural sciences students and found sustained sex differences in Inattentional blindness (IB). In the second study where we wanted to use Stereotype threat manipulation models in the experimental part of the study, we did not find any gender differences. Can this be because of differential professional socialization of medical students?

I"m hoping to connect with aphantasia researchers who are interested in individual differences (e.g. the presence or absence of aphantasia in congenitally blind people). I am congenitally totally blind and do have a form of aphantasia in that I'm not able to use other senses to form visual representations of the world or space around me. My conversations with other congenitally blind people shows that this is not what all of us experience; many of my blind friends can create pictorial mental images that use touch and sound. I think this is a research topic that could get overlooked because people assume that pictorial = visual, and therefore that congenital blindness automatically leads to aphantasia, when this isn't true. I have a very challenging time with orienting myself in space, and a lot of the methods out there for teaching blind people to travel rely on mental mapping to some extent.

How can I calculate the James blinding index (BI) in a clinical trial to assess for blinding success?

Review is not blind, but risk of sweetheart reviews is probably contained by the transparency of the process? https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/about/

Scientific temper and the Indian society

I am planning to do a docking of two proteins (one of which is 30KD and another one is 4KD). I would like to request the steps of protein protein blind docking. what are the online authentic resources for protein structure minimization for docking studies? is it always necessary to do protein structure minimization before docking in servers like cluspro, interEVdock(FRODOCK2) etc?

Hi!

I would like to know with which statistical software the bang blinding index and the James blinding index and how to do it.

Thanks

I have done a mini "thesis" concerning depiction of Jewish food from a large U.S. media, and how they represented it in an Ashkenazi-centric perspective.

I argue in background with research by Dalia Kandiyoti and Melanie Katrowitz (2007) that U.S. society tends to have a strong Ashkenazi-centric bias in everything from literature to seminars concerning Jewish culture. And in background with the agenda-setting theory I argue that the media depiction of Jewish food, along with the research mentioned above, will influence its U.S. readers to conceptualise the topic of Jewish food in accordance with the bias in question.

In sum; Jewish food is depicted in an Ashkenazi-centric perspective in a U.S. media + U.S. society has an Ashkenazi-centric = U.S. readers will tend to conceptualise the topic in accordance with the prevalent bias, as the alternatives are marginalised as a whole.

My problem is the blind standpoint I have taken in Kandiyoti and Katrowitz research, as my thesis becomes very biased. But my research question concern 'Depictions of Jewish food and if it aligns with prevalence of Ashkenazi--centrism prevalent in the U.S.'.

I have probably taken water over my head. But If anyone can point out any obvious problems I would very much appreciate that.

Dear all, I am thinking to develop solutions for blind people to navigate and positioning themselves in indoor areas such as malls, hospitals, etc. I am thinking about the tool or device that can be used to help in guiding them into the desired location. Mobiles and smart gloves are found in some research papers. I am looking for your ideas and opinions to help in solving this problem that affects a big portion of the community.

Thank you in advance.

The philosopher Einstein says science without a lamer religion and religion without a blind science .

What is the relationship between religion and science?

Thanks to all those who will answer this question according to three axes

First: Religion is included in all parts of science.

Second: Religion enters into some parts of science.

Third: There is no relationship between religion and science.

In case of blind equalization, information about reference input is not available. Thus channel modeling using NLMS, RLS or even Kalman filter is really difficult. Because weight update needs the information about desired or reference input.

mention the name of parasitic worm that causes river blindness?

During reviewing the articles some journals perfer the blind peer review that as author I will Know who will review my article, on the other hand some journals will not gives the names of the reviwers, so which is best to get the right and fair descion on your work

To be clear, apart from the subways, intersections, stairs, are these special tiles used on long walks on the sidewalks in your city?

Apart from extra security, what are the advantages of the non-blind watermarking scheme over blind and semi-blind techniques

I would appreciate any suggestions for effective methods for teaching geology to a blind student. 

Okay, I understand that visual fixation is essential for vision research. However, one of my recent findings says that fixation causes blindness under certain condition, such as very dilated pupils, or blurriness. Intentionally, I tried to maximize the effect of blindness with my special stimulus to warn the other researchers about any possible drawbacks of the fixation. Namely, I think it's always there with fixation, but the invisibility had several degrees; but I had reported the worst one. I am wondering whether this factor had been considered in the research based on behavioral recordings. You may find my article in the following link:

Sometimes after craniotomy for tumor or decompressive craniectomy, patient develop blindness. There was no injury to optic nerve,tract or chiasma. For example in falcine meningioma surgery. Any thoughts on the pathophysiology?

It is common, in the so-called "hard" sciences, that recent bibliographic sources are privileged compared to sources dating back several years. This practice is consistent with the notion of the constant construction of scientific knowledge from the knowledge already acquired. An idea as coherent with the myth of the inevitable progress that we associate with Modernity.

In the case of the social and human sciences, however, I have the impression that this tendency to favour in bibliographies recent documents could be the blind application of rules borrowed from other disciplilnes. Sometimes one might even perceive what appears to be a form of methodolatry, preferring recent analyses and discussions on a theme to the detriment of what researchers have said a few decades ago. I often hear the comments "Yes, but this study dates from several years... " to deny the interest of qualitative research using individual or group interviews. I find it hard to believe that the humans of 30 years ago are so different from those who live in 2019. And that newer is always better.

I am looking for authors who have published about that. issue. Do you have any suggestions?

Journals are different in their reviewing process in terms of the information given about the reviewers and authors. There are three major types

Theory predicts that blind fishes have an elaborated lateral line system with the number of free neuromasts increased. The high number of neuromasts is believed to compensate for the loss of the eyesight and to ensure proper orientation. There is one blind goby, the gobionelline Typhlogobius californiensis, which we found to have a reduced number and pattern of free neuromasts (see attachment). We related this loss of neuromasts to the life style of this goby. It inhabits shrimp burrows and is therefore seemingly not dependent on the lateral line system like blind fishes living in larger habitats.

As far as I know T. californiensis is the only fish species which shows a combination of lost eyesight and reduced lateral line system. But are possibly more fish species with a reduced lateral line system out there?

i want to check the interactions after calculating binding energies in blind docking analyze but it doesnt show me the interaction place . is there anybody who knows why???

Double blind reviewing may serve as guidelines for the authors to improve their submission. But many researchers say that double blind review involves some high-profile experts who are 'gate-keepers' against low-quality papers; the problem is that reviewers may be biased, prejudiced and even sometimes uninformed. Many doubt their impartiality. Double-blind is a kind of 'black box'. Nobody is sure what is inside.

Double blind RCT

see question above

Single-blind review versus double-blind review.

- is double-blind always better than single-blind review?

I am trying to run blind docking with multiple ligands and one macromolecule using PyRx but somehow i am getting poor binding affinities. What is the configuration file for blind docking in PyRx if i have multiple ligands and one macromolecules. Specially the coordinates of X,Y and Z centers.

We are faced with probabilities and statistics on a daily basis. These are most commonly presented as percentages (i.e. 10% of the population), but a more intuitive way of understanding this information called natural frequencies — is to present it as two whole numbers (i.e. 1 in 10 people) .

The researchers believe that people are ‘blind’ to probabilities — yet have a fear of changing them into simpler natural frequencies which would make them easier to understand.

Can anyone help me to select a phd thesis topic,i m feeling tottaly blind today,myn intrest is in politicis,i am starting my doctoral thesis in media studies

Am carrying out an interventional control study that will involve the researcher observing nurses demonstrating skill. The nature of the study though quansi experimental will not all blinding. So the researcher is opting for direct observation which may result in Hawthorne effect. What can the researcher do to avoid these effect. Thanks

Question in the job of research scientist

Blind peer review, date to first decision, date to acceptance, content...

Is the blinding (beneath the foundations) considered as important layer? And how many the optimum thickness of blinding (in Iraq between 5-10)cm.