Technology Category Archive

Tagging students in schools

10 Replies Jonny Hankins

This week a school district in San Antonio in Texas USA approved a program for tagging students while they are in school. The students will have to wear a small card at all times while in the school so that their positions can be constantly monitored by the authorities.

The RFID tags will be provided free of charge but if they lose or destroy it the student will have to pay $15 for a new one.

A student with a RFID tag

The latest fashion, an RFID tag

The schools that are implementing the project on a trial basis state that they want to “harness the power of the technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in school, and increase revenues,”

‘Increase revenues’ is the part that catches my eye the most here, why might the project increase revenue? The answer is in attendance, the schools receive state funding based upon attendance and how many special needs children take the school buses, in this case based upon the related Medicare payments.

The schools hope to make about $1.7 million a year, and with the cost of setting up the scheme about half a million and about $135 thousand a year to run they are ‘quids in’ as we say in Manchester.

Rather unsurprisingly some of the parents of the children that attend the 2 pilot schools have expressed some reservations. Privacy issues due to the invasive nature of the idea have been raised, and some argue that kidnapping and related horrors could even be made easier if someone managed to gain access to the system and the real time information that it produced.

This news reminds me of an article that I wrote a few years ago on the Bassetti Foundation website regarding spying technology and later its proposed uses in schools in Italy. Here is a mention on a blog related to the matter in question. As this article suggests, the problem of mobile phone use in schools and particularly for cheating in tests and exams is apparently rife, so one school bought a military jammer that blocks the signal making the phone system non operational.

This event also caused a few raised eyebrows (to say the least) with people claiming the right to contact their children in emergency situations. Problems of overspill and local disturbances were also raised but the school argued that the system was necessary in order to uphold the school rules and quality and reliability of its exam process. The law has now changed so the system is no longer in use but the will and means was there.

Coaxing and encouragement while at school and the notion of doing the right thing seem to be out of the door then!

As a note I was a teacher in an Italian secondary school for 11 years myself, and I don’t think this approach will work. Kids are smart.

Home genetic testing, pros and cons

7 Replies Jonny Hankins

Recently I have been getting interested in home genetic testing. I have written a few articles about this matter, including a 3 part post on the Bassetti Foundation website about a conference that I attended a couple of weeks ago at Harvard University.

The speaker at the conference was Anne Wojcicki, CEO of the world’s largest commercial genetic company called 23andMe. They offer a kit that you spit into and send back, then they analyze 4 million variables and you check out the results online.

Recent technological advancements have brought the price down beyond belief. What cost $100 000 a few years ago and took months cost $1000 last year and now $300  and can be done while you wait.

What they call Next Generation Genetic Testing has meant that the analysis has become incredibly more intricate, where as a few years ago they analyzed a few thousand proteins, they can now do millions, so if you already had your genome sequenced a few years ago you might want to re-do it to gain ever more information.
A strand of genomeAs I said I went to this conference with the CEO from 23and Me. They are a relatively new company but have the majority of the market share in DNA genetic analysis. The CEO very much presented her organization in business terms, but continuously highlighted the research they conduct in looking for cures for new diseases. They have amassed an enormous database and can conduct statistical analysis on Gene mutations in a few hours that only a few years ago (or without them they argue) would take years.
So what do they actually provide you with for the money?

Results are viewed online, and consist in various types of analysis presented as bar charts, pie charts and statistics. So one line of interest is where your Genes come from, for example how much of you is from Africa, Asia, Europe or elsewhere. How much of you is Neanderthal.

Then we get into the interesting stuff about how your genes relate to your parents, who are you most like.

Carriers and sufferers of diseases learn about their mutations, so if you have or are carrying a genetic disorder this information is also presented.

Then we move onto risks for the future. What percentage rise in risk do you have in your genes for developing certain diseases? Maybe you have a 20% rise in risk of developing Alzheimer’s or getting breast cancer. Here we are moving out of the present and world of scientific analysis and into the world of risk.

A world of interesting information and probably very useful in many cases and just a bit of fun in others, but I would like to raise some issues about the above.

No doctors are involved in giving this information, an individual reads their results online, so one of my reservations is about interpretation. What does a 20% rise in risk of breast cancer mean? How does an individual react to such news? What can or will they do? Also in terms of a negative result what are the effects? I have reduced risk of contracting breast cancer so I skip my mammogram for a few years, after all I am at low risk.

And what if I discover that I have some kind of genetic disorder? Well should I tell my brothers? Maybe they have it too. Do I have the right to tell them? Or am I obliged to tell them? Do they have the right to know or indeed the right not to know?

And ancestry, what if I discover that my father is not the man my mother is married to?

Then as a concerned scientist I start thinking about the data, and discover in the contract I signed (without reading because it is 10 pages long) on the internet gives the company the rights to distribute my genetic information to other research organizations. OK all in a good cause but are they going to make the information non traceable? Is that even possible when such an amount of intricate information is involved? Probably not say the scientists at Harvard.

I am not saying that 23andMe are doing anything wrong at all, their database must be a great resource for science and particularly medicine, possible benefits should not be underestimated and I am sure that their hopes and aims are all pursued in good faith, but I wonder if such a database should not be independently regulated. At present these types of operations are practically unregulated in the US, and maybe this should not be the case. Technology is moving ahead at an incredible rate in this field and nobody can say what this material will reveal, to whom and for which purposes. I note on the video that Christopher linked on his post about Google that they are one of the company’s biggest investors, and as they are a corporation specialized in data collection that does not really surprise me.

Legislation has been passed in the US called GENA, whose aim is to protect individuals from unfair treatment from certain sectors on the grounds of genetic testing. It is not however definitive and as I say only covers specific areas of commerce such as health insurance and employment, but I am dubious about the power of the state to enact laws as quickly as needed. Lawmaking is a slow process in a fast moving world as the genetic testing debate has proved. Equally however we don’t want to slow down the pace of research due to regulation, as that too has serious consequences for individuals who might be looking for breakthroughs in certain treatments.

I fear though that if you pay for such a test and the results show a tendency towards getting a cancer of some sort, a health insurance company might accuse you of hiding or having access to information you should have disclosed, and make life difficult when it comes to paying for the health care you need or for your funeral (I don’t think life insurance is presently covered under the legislation).

Or that one day they might ask you to lick a stick when you go in to the broker to buy your holiday insurance or apply for a job. What do you think?

Why you need waterproof electronics

12 Replies Jonny Hankins

When I dropped my phone into the toilet I was amazed to see that it continued to work for a few seconds. All hope was quashed however 2 minutes later when it stopped, short, never to work again. I had only paid 26 dollars for it from ebay, but this was not the first time that such an incident had occurred in my household. My wife dropped her phone in the toilet on the day I bought it for her and I fell over whilst wading through a river in a drunken moment of foolhardiness and drowned my first mobile (and almost myself).

None of this need ever occur again however, thanks to nanotechnology. A company called Neverwet has designed an all purpose waterproof coating that can be sprayed on that repels water so well that they can even show a computer dipped into water while turned on still operates. Last year they won the Grand Prix Award as an innovative start up and their product is really quite impressive. Check out the video on their website.

A man working on a computer underwater

Mr Phelps at work

The technology has many applications, it can be used to protect materials used under the sea to prevent corrosion, fabrics or small articles can be either dipped or sprayed, but the most interesting application certainly seems to be in electronics. A mother board can be sprayed and then used in wet conditions without failing. A great breakthrough I think.

If you are interested in weatherproofing you should know that there are already many all weather computers on the market. Terralogic sell a range of rugged computers and accessories for work and military purposes. Obviously if you are carrying a computer on a battlefield it cannot be a domestic lightweight and easily damageable machine, so these beasts are designed to be shock and water resistant, and they come in military green so you stand out from the crowd in your local Cyber cafe.

If you really need to go and work underwater you can purchase the WetPC, designed for the Australian military by Kord Defence Systems. This little baby is designed for underwater note taking, and offers a host of improvements over previous attempts making it much more user friendly through the adoption of its 5 key system. Combinations of the keys perform different functions making the machine suitable for underwater archeology, research and engineering as well as water sports.

If you want to go one step further how about the underwater cell phone? This little package allows you to make a receive calls as you dive, and works either at sea or in the lake or pool at the bottom of the garden.

Underwater Phone

The Alpha underwater phone in use

Joking aside the technology is designed for commercial divers. The kit can be used with any phone that has a voice dialing system, as it sits within a face mask that is attached to a long lead with a floating buoy attached. The buoy hosts the broadcasting technology so that the user can connect to their normal service. All for about $1700 US. Take a look at the Ocean Reef company website for more details and to see what else tickles your fancy.

So just dip your HP into Neverwet for domestic use or go the whole hog with a military machine, the choice is yours, but in the days of rising sea levels it is always better to be prepared.