Technology

I have forwarded the link to this article that I got via Slashdot about how social media could render covert policing impossible to a number of people and somehow didn’t think to post it here (I must have pre-semester brain…). The idea is simple once you see it – with good quality facial recognition software, we know anonymity becomes challenging, and that is particularly true for careers, like undercover police work, that require strong anonymity and yet for which there is strong incentive to discover true identities, and high risk if they are found out. Though I do think the article … Continue reading I see you

I love stories of unexpected weak spots, like the discovery that Apple laptop batteries can be hacked to store malicious code and brick the battery. The weakness revolves around cracking a couple of passwords, one of which is a factory default – with the protection being patches that will reset the password and lock the battery’s firmware. From there, it doesn’t seem like the researcher who discovered the weakness has found any particularly damaging holes from the battery back to the rest of the system, besides having the battery lie about its state, so this probably won’t be the root of … Continue reading Battery Hacking

I do not want a computer telling me what other people are feeling, or telling other people what it thinks I am feeling – these emotion indicating glasses do not appeal to me at all. First, even if people only assess others’ emotions correctly 54% of the time, a 64% success rate isn’t that impressive either. It means that over a third of the time, you could be getting the wrong advice from your emotional feedback device. Furthermore, this tells you nothing about why the person is reacting that way. If you say something that makes me react in a … Continue reading Ultra Xray Specs

So, seems that iRobot has come full circle, taken one of their high power industrial robots, and now attached a vacuum to it; specifically they have modded a Warrier to have an industrial vacuum attached to it to clean up radioactive dirt and debris at the Fukushima plant. Follow the link for video – go little robot, go!

In the further disappearance of the concept of anonymity, statistical analysis allows individuals’ marks on bubble forms to be identified as corresponding to the same person. That is, someone’s marks on a bubble form can be used to identify them the same way handwriting might (though it still seems with less accuracy). We learn that filling in your bubbles thoroughly and completely is probably the best way to stay anonymous. The shocker here of course is that a small little mark – filling in a circle – can be unique across a sample of almost 100 surveys. It did bring … Continue reading Fill-in-the-Bubble Anonymity

This is mostly a note-to-self that I need to watch this documentary on the “female computers of WWII”. Their excerpt alone is interesting, and poking around the site it seems that the film looks at Mauchly’s project and how these women became not just computing machines themselves but then ENIAC programmers. If it is any good it could be a great complement to the Campbell-Kelly and Aspray book we teach in IT & Society.

Moving financial information tracking to an intuitive interface, MIT’s Media Lab has developed “smart wallets” that provide tactile feedback about your financial transactions. The three designs either vibrate when funds are deposited or withdrawn, grow or shrink with the size of your balance, or become harder to open as you have less money in your account. The video showing these interactions is highly recommended. I like not just the cuteness of the tactile interface, but I also enjoy that they are embedding the interactions in a wallet, which is already linked to financial tracking in our minds, and not just … Continue reading Feeling the Pinch

If you don’t know what an error-correcting code is, or you have never heard of Richard Hamming, this retrospective on Hamming codes and early information theory is a nice read. The details of how these codes allow the integrity of the message’s contents to be verified are left unexplored, but I’m not sure how many people are aware that these types of integrity checks are possible and built into communication technologies. My personally strongest associate with the content, though, is taking my subject GREs about this time of year and reaching a question that simply asked me the Hamming distance … Continue reading Hamming and information theory

The generally entertaining The Daily WTF recent had a nice, more serious than usual article Documentation Done Right about the role of documentation in the development process. Particularly relevant to my Systems Analysis class is the discussion at the end about the role of diagramming, as well as the acknowledgement of the dangers of documentation when that documentation is inaccurate. Provocative quote: “Less complete documentation is generally better all around.” But if you haven’t thought a lot about why documentation is necessary in the world of “self-documenting code”, it’s worth a look. And the weblog in general is a fun … Continue reading Embracing Inaccuracy