简介：科技改变世界，但它更为盲人的生活带来前所未有的便利。联合国残疾人权利委员会主席ron mccallum自幼失明。1987年， 他拥有了第一台盲人专用电脑。由于有了电脑，有声读物(talking books)和志愿者们的帮助，他成为了一个贪婪的阅读者，同时也成为了一名律师和学者。
when i was about three or four years old, i remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and i remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing.
and my mum said, "darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page."
and i thought to myself, "but that's what i want to do. i love stories. i want to read." little did i know that i would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true.
i was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. the condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. little did i know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that i'd been born at the right place and the right time, that i was in a country where i could participate in the technological revolution.
there are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from north america, europe, japan and other developed parts of the world. computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but i think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. and so i want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person i am today. it's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. but let me tell you a bit about it today.
when i was five, i went to school and i learned braille. it's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and i can feel them with my fingers. in fact, i think they're putting up my grade six report. i don't know where julian morrow got that from. (laughter) i was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (laughter)
when you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. look for it. have you noticed it? i do. i look for it all the time.
(laughter)
when i was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so i'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way i could read. when i was in high school, i got my first philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. i could have family and friends read me material, and i could then read it back as many times as i needed. and it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. for example, when i studied at graduate school at queen's university in canada, the prisoners at the collins bay jail agreed to help me. i gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. as one of them said to me, "ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment."
(laughter)
but think of it. these men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities i'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help.
well, i went back and became an academic at melbourne's monash university, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. in fact, in my office in 1990, i had 18 miles of tape. students, family and friends all read me material. mrs. lois doery, whom i later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. one of the reasons i agreed to give this talk today was that i was hoping that lois would be here so i could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. but sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. but i thank you here, lois, from this platform.
(applause)
i saw my first apple computer in 1984, and i thought to myself, "this thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." how very wrong i was. in 1987, in the month our eldest son gerard was born, i got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. see it up there? and you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (laughter) it's a blind computer. (laughter) it's a keynote gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (laughter) don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (laughter) i think there's more memory in my watch.
it was invented by russell smith, a passionate inventor in new zealand who was trying to help blind people. sadly, he died in a light plane crash in XX, but his memory lives on in my heart. it meant, for the first time, i could read back what i had typed into it. it had a speech synthesizer. i'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. this now allowed me to read back what i'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory.
in 1974, the great ray kurzweil, the american inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. and his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of january, 1976. i saw my first commercially available kurzweil in march 1989, and it blew me away, and in september 1989, the month that my associate professorship at monash university was announced, the law school got one, and i could use it. for the first time, i could read what i wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. i didn't have to be nice to people!
(laughter)
i no longer would be censored. for example, i was too shy then, and i'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (laughter) but, you know, i could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- (laughter) (applause)
now, the kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. that's what it's shrunk to. and now i can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. i can keep up with my friends.
there are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that i haven't met. one is another american inventor ted henter. ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. he then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. but in 1989, he teamed up with bill joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the net or from what was on the computer. it's called jaws, job access with speech, and it sounds like this.
(jaws speaking)
ron mccallum: isn't that slow?
(laughter) you see, if i read like that, i'd fall asleep. i slowed it down for you. i'm going to ask that we play it at the speed i read it. can we play that one?
(jaws speaking)
(laughter)
rm: you know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly.
(laughter) (applause)
this technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iphone and on yours as well. but, you know, i find reading with machines a very lonely process. i grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and i loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. do you love being read to? and one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, mary reading to me and the children down near manly beach "harry potter and the philosopher's stone." isn't that a great book? i still love being close to someone reading to me. but i wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life.
of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. after all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on cds using the digital access system known as daisy. but when i'm reading with synthetic voices, i love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice.
now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. many websites we can't read using jaws and the other technologies. websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the world wide web consortium 3, known as w3c, has developed worldwide standards for the internet. and we want all internet users or internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. there are other barriers brought about by our laws. for example, australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. but those books can't travel across borders. for example, in spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in spanish. in argentina, there are 50,000. in no other latin american country are there more than a couple of thousand. but it's not legal to transport the books from spain to latin america. there are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the united states, britain, canada, australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where english is the first and the second language. and remember i was telling you about harry potter. well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different english-speaking countries: britain, united states, canada, australia, and new zealand all had to have separate readings of harry potter.
and that's why, next month in morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. it's something that a group of countries and the world blind union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. i want that to happen.
(applause)
my life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the university of sydney law school, where i served a term as dean, or now as i sit on the united nations committee on the rights of persons with disabilities, in geneva. i've indeed been a very fortunate human being.
i wonder what the future will hold. the technology will advance even further, but i can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." i'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world.
i'd like to thank my researcher hannah martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, professor mary crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. i want to thank her too.
i think i have to say goodbye now. bless you. thank you very much.
(applause) yay! (applause) okay. okay. okay. okay. okay. (applause)
学校比赛演讲稿范文汇编：科技创新
尊敬的各位领导、评委，亲爱的老师，同学们：大家好! 我叫胡存鹏，在这阳光明媚风和日丽的春天，我很荣兴和各位交流，刚刚看到同学们慷慨陈辞、侃侃而谈，我也倍受鼓舞。是啊，科技的创新给社会带来的冲击实在是太大了，科技所涉及到的方方面面实在是太广了，那么今天我仅就时下最时髦的一个话题——创新，来谈谈我对科技走进生活的感受。
首先我来讲个小故事，从前，有个国王在大臣们的陪同下，来到御花园散步。国王瞧着面前的水池，忽然心血来潮，问身边的大臣：“这水池里共有几桶水?”众臣一听面面相觑，全答不上来。国王发旨：“给你们三天考虑，回答上来重赏，回答不上来重罚!”眨眼三天到了，大臣们仍一筹莫展。
就在此时，一个小孩走向宫殿，声称自己知道池塘里有多少桶水。
国王命那些战战兢兢的大臣带小孩去看池塘。小孩却笑道：“不用看了，这个问题太容易了!”国王乐了“哦，那你就说说吧。”孩子眨了眨眼说：“这要看那是怎样的桶。如果和水池一般大，那池里就有一桶水;如果桶只有水池的一半大，那池里就有两桶水;如果桶只有水池的三分之一大，那池里就有三桶水，如果……”“行了，完全正确!”国王重赏了这个小孩。大臣们为什么解不开国王的问题呢?
就在于他们全掉进了常规思维的陷阱，被思维定势所困，越思考陷得就越深，越不能自拔。而那个小孩并没受到人们常规思维的限制，撇开了池塘里水的多少，而从桶的大小的角度来思考问题，一下子就迎刃而解。这说明，跳出思维陷阱进行非常规思维，有时只需换一种思维方式或换一个思维角度。我们中国人做许多事情总爱自己吓自己，喜欢把事情神秘化，总认为这也不可能，那也不可能，事情哪有那么容易啊?事情还没开始做，就自己把自己吓得退缩了。对于中国人来说，或许最缺乏的还不是创新的能力，而是创新的意识、勇气、欲望、冲动以及相关的人格，总之，最缺乏的可能是一种创新的精神。
人类得益于科技，科技得益于创新。现代无论是街头巷尾，还是茶余饭后，人们总也少不了聊上几句“基因技术”，这基因技术中蕴含着大量的科学技术!从前，我们的祖辈们面朝黄土背朝天，用辛勤的劳作去换取那五谷丰登。而今，几倍体小黑麦和杂交水稻诞生了，粒大籽饱，一年一熟，还抗旱呢!还有我们吃的西瓜，以前，我总是埋怨西瓜子太多，吃起来一点儿也不过瘾，有时我在想，要是西瓜能没有籽该有多好啊!现在这已不成问题了，三倍体无籽西瓜，早已走进了千家万户!个大瓤甜，老少皆宜!这些转基因作物的闪亮登场，无疑为我们的生活注入了鲜活的空气。
如果把科技比作一棵参天大树，那么创新是根，科技是叶，成果是果。只有根深才能叶茂、花繁、果硕。只有创新才能令科技之树常青!在谈到“引进技术”这一点时，陆老语教授曾经这样说：“我们仅仅知道引进别人的技术就得永远在别人后面爬行，霸权主义者的确喜欢卖给我们技术，可那些技术都是比我们将要研究出来的略好一点的技术啊。因为他们就是在用技术欺负我们，侵略我们。所以我们别无选择，只有自己做出来，用我们自己的创新赶上他们，超过他们!你们这一代要啊!”
是啊!回顾历史，他八国联军把圆明园的宝物洗劫一空，把我们的万园之园毁于一旦，不就是欺负咱们.科学就在强烈的创新意识啊!创新是科技的灵魂! 那么，怎样才能培养创新意识呢?此时此刻，我的耳边回想起中国工程院院士地震预测专家许绍燮老先生的话，他曾动情地说：“创新有大小、深浅之分，可就其创新点而言，都是世界第一。
一个人早期的创新为其以后更新更深刻的创新提供了信心。创新并不是高不可攀，而是一点点培养起来的。从我们做学生时有答案不看，非要自己做出来培养起。当然，创新有其偶然的存在，而归根到底，是对客观事实的切实把握，相关现象的充沛占有，综合现象的反复推敲，思维模型的不断完善。我国的地震记录我们已经做到世界先进水平，但地震预测别人都不敢做，我们一直在做，我要一直做下去……我要做到我的最后一刻……” 。
高中生演讲稿——科技节
本月27日，一年一度的科技节即将拉开序幕，这对我们每个人来说，都有着重大的意义。对于那些始终热衷于科技制作的同学们来说，这次科技节无疑为他们提供了展现自己聪明才智的大舞台。通过自己的实验，可以将书本中学到的知识运用到实际生活中去，亲身体验其中的奥秘，才能真正地把所学的知识转化为能力。而对于平常没有对科技深入研究的同学，这次的科技节又是一次拓展视野的好机会，在展览会上可以看到别的同学的小发明，也可以深入地与他们探讨生活中的先进技术，对于我们而言，又都将是一次心灵的扩张。
虽然我们还并没有完全走进这个充满竞争的社会，但我们都应该很清楚，这种竞争要比我们想象要残酷得多。现在，每年全国大学毕业生，很多都无法找到自己称心的工作，就业难已经成为了一个日趋严重的社会问题。对于整个国家而言，人才结构上确实存在着漏洞。在科技攻关方面，虽然中国的电脑生产、汽车生产在全世界首屈一指，但至今仍拿不出一件与世界先进水平接近的电脑cpu主板和符合世界汽车尾气标准的发动机，是完完全全中国制造的。缺乏产品的加工水平和核心技术的攻关水平，都使得我国产品在与外国产品的竞争中处于劣势，而像电脑芯片等要害部位，只能从外国进口，而在国内组装。
“基础扎实，特长明显”，是我校的一贯坚持，也是我校塑造高素质人才的目标。而在科技方面，我们也从未落后：车模小组、无线电测向、生物小组，经常能够在各级比赛中取得优异的成绩和突出的表现。在劳技课上，我们也亲手制作了测向器，学习了单片机的编程，丰富了我们的知识。很多毕业生在谈起对母校印象深刻之处时，也都提到了学校中各种科技活动小组，还有很多同学在科技小组的活动中对某个项目产生了浓厚的兴趣，高中毕业后便到大学相应专业中继续深造，奠定了以后的学习方向。由此可见，在国家急需科技人才的今天，学校的科学教育使得许多同学因此受益，也会使国家受益。我们学校是××市科技节在中学中仅有的两个分会场之一，这是学校的骄傲，同时也是我们每一位八中人的骄傲，那么，就让我们行动起来吧！积极地为班级、学校、科技节做出自己的贡献，用我们的双手，使身边的生活更加多彩。
中国梦演讲稿：实干铸就科技强国梦
实现“中国梦”是中华儿女的美好夙愿，是科技工作者的理想追求，离不开科技的驱动，离不开知识的力量。科学技术作为第一生产力，已成为当代经济发展的决定因素，也是中华民族实现“中国梦”的先决条件。“中国梦”的基本内涵包括国家富强、民族振兴、人民幸福，这三点的前提首先是“强军梦”。军强则民安，这是自鸦片战争以降170多年来中国命运跌宕起伏的深刻教训，也是中国人民在不屈不挠、艰苦奋斗中得到的经验启示。军强国富靠的是什么？靠得就是科技，只有强大的科技力量才能铸就起钢铁长城般的国防力量，只有强大的科技力量才能承载着中国经济的飞速腾飞，只有强大的科技力量才能实现中华民族真正的伟大复兴。内江市农科院的老一辈科学家胸怀理想、淡泊名利，献身科技事业，投身国家建设，以不懈奋斗精神和卓越科技成就实现了自己的报国之志，实现了内江农科院昨日的辉煌。我院现今的广大科技工作者也追逐他们的足迹，为实现内江市农科院的再次腾飞而不断弘扬科学精神，志存高远、脚踏实地、潜心钻研，努力实现自己心中那伟大的“中国梦”。
我身为内江农科院蔬菜所的科研工作者，我热爱我的工作，我的“中国梦”是通过科研育种，繁育出更多更好的甘薯蔬菜新品种，并研究出相应的高新现代化配套栽培技术，并加以推广示范，能够为农户带去丰厚的收益，为四川特别是内江地区特色保健蔬菜产业提供强有力的科技支撑作用，能产生较高的经济效益和社会效益。
身为中华民族伟大复兴“排头兵”——科技工作者的一员，我将在科研工作中志存高远、脚踏实地、潜心钻研，通过实干铸就自己心中的“中国梦”。古人云：天下大事必作于细，古今兴盛皆成于实。“梦”就是理想，就是目标，光靠说，梦永远是梦，只有实干，坚持不懈地向着“梦”前进，“梦”才能变为现实，才能实现。实干才能真正铸就科技强国梦，才能实现中华民族伟大复兴的“中国梦”。
