deafbiz.com

I learned about this new service from LifeHacker

Keep in mind that this is for making hearing phone calls as you can use it from your mobile phone or if your computer is capable of making phone calls from the browser. It’s a useful tool to minimize wasting minutes on the cell phone and aggravation with phone menus.

Fonolo uses a patented process called “Deep Dialing”.  Fonolo works by automating the nativiation through the dreaded touch-tone menus. (”Press 1 for English…”)

Instead, you navigate a company’s phone menu visually, through a web or mobile interface.

Just click the point in the menu you need to call and fonolo will automatically dial the company, navigate to that point and then connect you to the call.

For those using Relay Services, this is a handy guide to prep you for the phone menu so that you can decide ahead of time which numbers to press for the right services.

For example, here’s what it would look like if you plan to call AOL:

Main menu

Main Menu

Hi. Thanks for calling AOL.

This call may be monitored or recorded for quality service.

[click to expand] Main Menu:

To get to the right place, just say one of these:

“Reset password,”

“Tech support,”

“Billing,”

“Sign up,” or,

“Cancellations.”

If nothing sounds right, say “It’s none of those.”

Right now, they’re limited to a small number of companies since it’s in Beta mode. Fonolo built a system that “spiders” the phone system, much like a web search engine spiders the web. Fonolo dial companies, navigate their menus and use a combination of voice recognition, signal processing and human editing to maintain a map of phone space. Since phone menus can change any time, Fonolo continually spider each company to keep the database current.

Not a bad idea to reduce your time on Relay Services (but of course a bad idea for Relay Services because that’ll mean less money for them, heh).

Fonolo

Best cartoon drawings about how USA has gotten into the subprime mess. Really simple to understand and gets right to the point.

How subprime works

Warning: swear language

The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker

A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a message: no, of course not; he could easily discuss her situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written notes.

The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.

So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted, researched the law and found that he was indeed obliged to do as the patient asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that he would probably lose.

If he ultimately operated on the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would also then need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time. By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.

He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out, she didn’t need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who would have to pay the interpreter’s bills.

Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had a dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked about, because doctors are just getting squeezed further and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed on, getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”

So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question to answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled?

Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first place.

Of course, if they had a UbiDuo, none of this would be a problem anymore!

Here’s one if you took a dip in the water with your Sidekick:

Save a wet cell phone

Use with caution and common sense.

I found this website via LifeHacker which focuses on Informercial Scams.

I see DirectBuy TV commercials all the time. I recalled a very similar high-pressure sales pitch when we first bought our house. I can’t recall the company name except it started with “C”. At the sales pitch, they told use we must join today or forever lose the opportunity to save money. Well, my B.S. antenna shot way up and I said I needed time to think. The salesperson suddenly became cold to us and we were quickly shown the door.

So I had a hutch that Direct Buy was a reincarnation of this defunct company. Sure enough, the complaints listed at Infomercial Scam described the same high pressure sales pitch.

Here’s one of the complaints that caught my eye:

4/15/2007 - Karen writes:
We are a deaf couple from Phoenix, Arizona. We called them for an appointment for showroom etc. They said we would have to bring an interpreter(sign language) The supervisor (guy) was very rude to us. We cancelled it. Thank God. Later we found this website and learned more about Directbuy scam. Please do something to shut it down ! Contact the TV media- 20/20 !!!

Good thing they walked away. Supposed they had a UbiDuo? That would’ve solved the communication issue but then would they have fallen for the sales pitch anyhow?