Me And Dyspraxia (by sarah)

Those of you who know me know I am as clumsy as a clumsy thing stuck together with inept glue :/

I even got an award named after me :/ The Spym Award for the Most Spectacular Injury in the Field :/ (Mainly due to things like falling into a prickly pear patches and little things like tearing all the ligaments in my ankle and leg and being sent home on crutches). Add in the old getting lost in Ingleton (something I will never live down! It is not exactly a big place but I got confused and walked the wrong way - away from the bus/coach waiting to take us home).

But the issue is that even by this point I was no where near as clumsy as I had been! And I am less clumsy now. I remember the pain of being a child and not being able to run without tripping over, of ending up in detention because I would manage to knock the chairs off the desk at home time :/ We had to put the chairs on the desk to finish the day off and somehow I always took about five of them out on route to the door. (The draconian teacher who shouted at me over this was a primary school teacher - something I would be horrified to find happening to Jean - as it was the woman insisted I needed to go to a 'special' school and it involved the head mistress, my parents and an educational psychologist before she agreed that I was not retarded - just lazy).

PE was more than a horror - oddly not so much in Junior School though I was more inept - because the kids just sort of accepted it. No, the horror of PE came later.

Now I remember getting a pink crystal ball that lit up and tinkled at Easter People (a religious camp held every Easter) and this ball became a sort of obsessive life line for me. I think I was, what, eight years old? I thought the ball was a space ship for fairies and that they would help me.

I decided the first thing that needed sorting was balance and catching a ball. Being hyper flexible and small had meant my aunt had taken me along to try and get me gymnastic classes a few years earlier but I was 'not suited' so that went down the drain but I took away the idea of what I suppose was circuit training.

So I set up an assault course in our garden - not the normal type which involve lots of running and things but ones with fence posts balanced on brieze blocks, and a 'saturn ball' (a ball with a disc round the middle that you stand on and balance). All these sorts of things and I attempted to do this course everyday at least once without falling off of anything.

Then there was my magic ball; not being able to throw or catch was something that the other kids always picked up on and no one wanted me in the team for those catching ball games and I always ended up being piggy in the middle - a game I grew to detest and associate with bullying behaviour.

The ball was made out of little fused plastic beads, slightly transparent and in multiple layers. It was a mish mash of white to dark fuscia pink. I started by dropping in on the floor and attempting to catch it on the up bounce. Initially I never caught it. But I would try and try and my memory of it is chasing this ball around the patio as the light faded but it lit up on bouncing so it was ok.

Then I began to catch it - first one in five bounces and then slowly more and more. The boy next door asked what I was doing and I explained. And so then we began a game of throwing balls to each other over the fence and playing badminton with the fence as the net and things like that. These were fun but they only happened if he didn't have his friends over 😉

He then moved away and I was back to it being just me and my bouncy ball. By this point the light had stopped working but it still tinkled.

At some point I began catching it most of the time - this was initially done with both hands as I didn't really have the concept of left and right and didn't get that until I started playing guitar during my A'levels and then I would have to pretend to play the guitar to work it out!

But I began to catch it a 100 times with one hand then 100 times with the other. I then added in things like throwing it up and catching it and bouncing it off of the wall. Things continued to improve until I was pushing myself to catch it one hundred times in a row without dropping it at all, in all the different combinations - even roping my brother in to play catch with!

Of course there were a few blips with this and I didn't do it every day - just most - depending on how much time I spent playing with the kids in the street. My next door neighbour Micheal showed me how to rid my bike - I was 10 by this point and it took a lot of him holding the bike for me. The issue I had was the same with the balancing on the beams - I got like vertigo :/ Sort of a dizzy spell. But the more I did things the easy it got.

A big blip in it was when I accidentaly miss judged a football, treading on it and twisting my knee by treading on the damn thing instead of kicking it :/ This wouldn't have been too bad but I was on a cinder path at the time - all those little sharp fragments of burnt wood and coal ground into my knee and it was a trip to casualty. Fortunately we were in Wales and I got seen really quickly.

This was my first stint on crutches. (The second occuring not that long afterwards when I fell over the wheel of my own bike gashing open my knee on the wheel nut and chipping the knee cap! Told you I was clumsy).

The improvements I made where staggering especially when I think of the struggle I was having with reading and writing at the time as well which I was working equally as hard on. I had also had the hearing problems which had resulted in my speech needing work.

But even though I could now catch a ball I was still a little erratic at it and then the hardest thing - Secondary / senior school - no glasses allowed during PE. Now it didn't matter how much work I had done - I couldn't see the balls :/

PE was still a nightmare and then they gave the bullies large wooden sticks to chase you with - this was known as Hockey. PE became a moot point as I ended up on crutches and then on a walking aid for a year (yes again I know!). This was another football related injury 😉 I was given a pair of little patent leather shoes with little heels on them - the sort of thing people buy just-pre-teens as they are becoming all feminine and growing up :/ I'd never worn heels so it didn't occur to me that playing football on a parque floor that had just been polished was a bad idea. (this incidentally was the same ankle I killed later on during school and then again at University - this time however - I had seriously mullered the achillies tendon 🙁 )

The injury wouldn't have been so bad if the PE teacher hadn't decided to make me run cross country on my first day back with out crutches :/ That's right five minutes in me and a tree root had an altercation and the ankle that was still under going treatment was wrenched and racked all over again :/

Anyway the injuries are only semi-relevent due to hypermobility possible being related to Dyspraxia.

The things that really helped with my co-ordination during secondary education was the fact that in year nine (so aged 13-14) the school gave us a list of activities to choose from at Stubbers Outdoors center. Horse Riding did not appeal and as my swimming still was... erm.... "lets panic if we're out of our depth and not wearing a life jacket", sailing and rafting where out. This left archery and climbing.

Initially climbing - I spent most of the time clinging to the wall- vertigo, feeling like I was falling, getting dizzy was there again. But climbing I found I could do, it was that much different from scrambling across welsh mountains and as long as I didn't look down it was fine. So after the first week I started to find I could get to the top of the wall - then however vertigo set in when absailing was to happen.

But then I was asked if I liked roller coasters - the answer to which was yes! 'Pretend that's what this is, your safe on the line.' So that's what I did - the vertigo thing also affects me in cars but I used to just think of that as a roller coaster!

And then... the I found falling off was mostly fun (as long as you didn't crash into the wall at right angles to you with all the jabby hand holds on it.) And then I loved abseiling and then I found that the floppy twistiness of me made climbing easier! I had found a sport that I could not only do but that I was good at!

And then archery - it turned out I was allowed to wear my glasses! I started to actually win things which was a shock - it was around this time me and my friends started going on lots of camps and things. We did lots of climbing and archery and it even got me into canoes and kayaks and making rafts. Of course then due to guiding stuff I ended up working at Thriftwood Campsite where I ended up instructing the climbing! and archery!

I believe the climbing and really helped with my co-ordination and balance but that wasn't the end of it. When I got to University I found something else that helped - took me another leap forward and that was Wu-Shu Kungfu (I don't have a clue how you spell it but it basically a Chinese mish-mash martial art). I didn't actually do it for very long - just over a year what with crutches, back problems coming to the fore and stomach problems. But it did help drastically. It was a combination of Wu-Shu, physio, yoga, pilates and Chi-Gong (which I took up when Wu-Shu was obviously a no go anymore) that got me walking again after I had Jean.

I just feel that mostly the dyspraxia doesn't affect me that much - other than being a scatterbrain and getting lost still 😉 But it was a long road - I have included here the things I think helped me the most - in the hope that they may help others.

Dyspraxia Awareness Week (by sarah)

It is Dyspraxia Awareness Week! And as I didn't know about it until yesterday I am trying to spread the word!

10th - 17th of October.

Firstly what is Dyspraxia I here the multitudes cry (ok well one or two of you anyway) - Dyspraxia is sort of Dyslexia of movement - obviously it is a lot more than this but that is the easy way of putting it.

There are other things associated with it such as loose joints and speech difficulties. I was 'diagnosed' with both Dyslexia and Dyspraxia at the beginning of my A'levels - there is a huge overlap between the two along with ADHD and Aspergers. I have posted on this before here.

I knew of the Dyslexia Association but not that there was a Dyspraxia Foundation.

Anyway I will probably do another few posts on this topic through out the week - you have been warned!

Old Papers (and maths!) (by alaric)

This weekend, I've been going through old papers and dealing with them. This involves sorting them into three categories:

1. To be shredded and turned into logs with our log maker
2. To be filed in the cabinet (with many subcategories corresponding to the files therein), and sorted by date where applicable
3. Demanding some action (which, for now, means putting them into my in-tray, rather than disrupting the activity in progress)

The magnitude and importance of this task is not to be underestimated - when we moved here I had a new baby, a very sick wife, and two jobs to deal with; unpacking and properly setting up my office never really happened, as opposed to setting up a desk and digging through boxes to find the things I needed to get started. So my once-pristine filing system was never quite established, and my "to file" tray grew fat with paperwork I needed to put somewhere. There was slow progress, of course; but then two years later the house flooded, so we had to rush a lot of furniture and stuff from downstairs up into the office, then pack a lot of stuff up and send it into storage while the house was repaired... and we weren't living in the house for nearly a full year, so more often than not I was working on my laptop from wherever I could get an Internet connection. Once again, my paperwork was in disarray.

But, three years on, we're finally catching up. I've gone through my filing cabinet and re-filed the mish-mash therein, then gone through my to-file tray and the various piles of papers dotted around the place, and dealt with them all. "To shred" has been by far the biggest category; as I write, Sarah is sitting feeding sheet after sheet into the shredder. And I've found a bunch of interestings that need further action.

For one of them in particular, the action is to write it up. Many years ago, I bought and read a book on statistics in order to refresh my memory, as I was working on a system for analysing the actions of large numbers of people. Now, I didn't enjoy statistics much when I was doing A-level maths, and reading the book reminded me why: I find the random-variable notation unnecessarily vague and confusing, and the various other notations used in statistics seem inconsistent to me.

I recall reading this book on a long bus journey (the bus from Tottenham Court Road to Gallows Corner in Romford, to be precise), and deciding to take matters into my own hand, and designing m own notation for statistics based on set theory. I like set theory and find it sensible and logical, so this was an obvious choice. I wrote my notation down on a sheet of paper, tucked it into the book, and took it home.

Many years later, I found the sheet of paper inside the book, and put it in my TODO pile, as I needed to take a second look at it and do something with it. This never happened. Until now.

So without further ado, here's the content of the sheet. It still needs more thinking about, but if I write it up into the computer now, this is more likely to happen than waiting for me to encounter this bit of paper again.

Let L be a multiset of real numbers.

• SUM(L) = sum of x, where x is an element of L.
• |L| = the number of elements in L.
• L(n) where 1 <= n <= |L| = nth largest element of L
• MIN(L) = L(1)
• MAX(L) = L(|L|)
• MEDIAN(L) = L(|L| / 2) if |L| is odd, (L(floor(|L| / 2)) + L(ceil(|L| / 2)))/2 otherwise
• SUM^2(L) = sum of x^2, where x is an element of L
• VAR(L) = SUM^2(L) - (SUM(L))^2 etc.
• L ~ D iff L is distributed as per D (D is a distribution as per normal stats notation)
• SRn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L with replacement
• SWn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L without replacement

Let L be a multiset of records (named tuples) of real numbers (a,b,c,...)

• La is a multiset of just the as
• Lab is a multiset of the products, a*b
• sigma(L) f(a,b,c) is the sum of f(a,b,c) across all the elements in L
• pi(L) f(a,b,c) is the product
• L ~ (D1, D2, ...) iff. La ~ D1 and Lb ~ D2 and so on
• cov(a,b)(L) = sigma(L) ab - M(La)*M(Lb)

...and there it ends!

Why is Science Vital (by sarah)

Science is threaded through out the modern world, everything is affected by or initiated by science. Shouldn't the money be spent on health care? I hear you cry - what do you think is at the bases of the treatments? What allows the equipment to function and be used? SCIENCE!

What about the environment? Surely that was caused by science? No it was caused by ignorance and mis-management and what do you think allowed us to see what was happening? SCIENCE - what do you think will allow us to drag ourselves and our planet out of it? SCIENCE.

Then there is our transport systems, heating for our homes, clean water, foods and hygien. The cloths we are wearing - all those nice washable colours and enduring fabrics? SCIENCE was at the root of all of these.

The artists pigments and the fact they don't die as much from accidental substance abuse - SCIENCE.

Even trying to sort out the mess of the financial crises comes from SCIENCE. Because you know what Maths is SCIENCE. And on that subject we plunge straight into the humanities from war anylises to domestic abuse statistics.

What about business? I hear you cry - shouldn't we be concentrating on strengthening the private sector and let nessecity drive invention?

Ok but you see modern business is reliant on computers - weather it is running their e-bay shop or because they use a bank and where do software engineers get the tools to be able to make these boxes of lights do such amazing things? SCIENCE. Yep sorry guys but even if you only take the logic part of programming into account here - computing is a SCIENCE.

(For the purpose of Research and Development - Science, Engineering and technology in general are all far too interlocked to be seperated out - though I do have views on this aswell but that is beyond the point being made here.)

And to those who say - ok but get rid of all non-vital research - I say that without blue sky research you hamstring the entire scientific entity. Things crop up in unexpected places leading to major breakthroughs - just look at some medical history 😉

I was horrified over the proposed funding cuts in science - how to spiral a country into a social war of attrition as all our initiative and endevours - business start ups etc.... disappear - in other words - all the sorts of things you need to bump a country out of recession.

Looking at other countries it appears that those who invested in science regardless clawed their way up whilst those who didn't dwindled and became weaker.

All of our global equivalents are currently increasing science funding so this is pure madness which is why I have chosen to write yet another blog post about it. Please please check out ScinceIsVital and sign their petition at the very least.

Science is Vital Poem/Rap (by sarah)

Science is vital the scientist said
The politicians just shook their heads
And smiled oh so very primly
they knew what's best they said rather grimly

Science is vital the teacher cried!
The politicians shrugged and simply lied
The way they had done before
Is telling the truth such a chore?

Science is vital the nurse intoned
The politicians thought it just - another funding moan
Even with their private health care plans
They failed to see what drove - those cancer scans

Science is vital the cleaner shouted
The politicians just looked at money and counted
Forgetting to take in the longer view
Thus knotting the financials into a thorny stew

Science is vital the artist sang
The politicians ignored them till the world went bang
Or did at least for an island at the edge of the world
Crushed and broken is societal whorls

Slowly it crumbled to the sea
A brain drain leaving it's people be
Without the intellectual resources to save themselves
This is what historians will see once they delve

A people derelict and poverty stricken
Science is vital

Why
did
they
not
listen?