[studiotheory]

Thinking your password: New computers that can identify you by your thoughts

“Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password, according to School of Information researchers. A new study explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords.” 

This would be really interesting to see what happens when you forget your password, or how it could be applied to aging populations.  The article continues: 

“In recent years, security researchers have proposed using electroencephalograms (EEGs), or brainwave measurements, for computer authentication, replacing passwords with “pass-thoughts.”

This may work better for people losing their memories, passwords, or thought processes. Or if it holds while those degrade. It uses tasks, rather than passwords, so these may be easier to remember, whatever state of aging a user may be in. 

“The key to the success of a brainwave authentication system, then, is finding a mental task that users won’t mind repeating on a daily basis. Researchers found that users would prefer to repeat tasks that are fairly easy but not too boring. Users’ favorite tasks included counting objects of a specific color, imagining singing a song of their choice, or simply focusing on their own breathing.”

KALQ Touchscreen Keyboard

“The research team of Antti Oulasvirta at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices.”

The reason for this is that the qwerty layout, they say, is illsuited for tablets and other touchscreen devices.  Here is the new KALQ keyboard image from the article: 

(C) MPI for Informatics

The Max Planck Institute is in Germany. The researchers name sounds Finish. English keyboards are QWERTY but in other countries, the layout is different.

Is he solving for English issues, is English universal enough in business, work, research environments that users use the QWERTY keyboard on their devices, to match the language? (I tend to use the French layout, even when typing in English. Switching back and forth between layouts takes a moment of typos and then resets pretty quickly.)

The article doesn’t mention why this problem, other than the lack of optimization. I’d be curious to see what the extent of use of English is, on tablets, for people who aren’t first language English speakers, and what keyboard they choose to use. 

Visibility

I sat in the local library for several hours last week. I’d walked the floors before I sat in a squishy chair in the corners. 

What was insanely notable to me is that where I was sitting did *not* have a camera trained on it. There were cameras in the entrances and exists, at the stairwells, and near the computers. But on the top floor, near the non-fiction stacks, no cameras. 

I sat and read for a few hours, but noticed that I’d look around now and again, trying to see if I’d missed one, and I really was on camera. I don’t think I was. 

Why was this so surprising? Have I just become accustomed to being recorded all the time, when in public spaces? When the camera is far from me, the utter lack of control makes them almost invisible. With Google Glass, the proximity and visibility of the person in control of the recording device makes me want to make it stop. The last stop in hope that I am not constantly recorded. It’s not realistic, it is the invisible becoming visible.

Pharma for the Baby Boomers

I’ve been reading PIs - prescribing information - for a handful of drugs in the market. I was trying to find clinical trial information, how easy it is to find. How good do you feel about a drug that was testing on 980 people for a year, and has massive side effects?  Where will your side effects fall on that curve? How does it feel if one of those side effects is death? 

Curious thing though, most of the studies don’t include a lot of women (unless they are drugs for women specifically), but the other thing I am finding is that they don’t include older populations. 

So here we have the baby boomers on many drugs, not well tested for their interactions, and, it turns out, not tested on aging humans.  

No idea if pharmas are enrolling the baby boomers on their drugs into studies, but I’d guess not. Expensive, and adverse effects can result in the drug being pulled. (Or so we would hope, but given the FDA has left drugs on the market that it knows were based on insufficient data…)

Prospect’s World Thinkers 2013

Prospect polls 10k+ people from over 100 countries*  and comes up with their World Thinkers list.  Listening to complaints about the gender inequity in the list had me taking a closer look.

The top female on the list is Arundhati Roy. Do we think she is the greatest living female thinker of our time? She is also listed as a novelist writer. (my error, in the first iteration of this post) I wonder if this is how she describes herself.  Sandberg and Slaughter seem ‘women of the moment’ rather than serious long term thinkers on par with Pinker or Dawkins. 

I am curious though, how was the poll done? Poll implies the user was given choices, not write in candidates. So where did the list come from? How many choices was a user given? How were they grouped? 

I can’t find the poll itself or how it was taken, or the makeup of the people who took it. I’d like to see all of that though. 

*according to their intro, I don’t see any notes on methodology

UPDATED: I found this:  a poll based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel.

So now I want to know who their expert panel is.  There are five women out of the 65, and one is the Prospect’s editor, Bronwen Maddox. 

Physician accountability for time

Considering the inequality in the medical establishment, time and price. The model penalizes patients but lets doctors go free. 

• If you miss an appointment with your doctor, you usually must pay for it
• If you are more than a certain amount of time late, the appointment counts as missed, and you pay
• If you cancel or change within 24 hours of an appointment, you must pay

However: 

• If a doctor is late, be it fifteen minutes or hours, there is so change in the price you (your insurance) pays
• If a doctor cancels an appointment with less than 24 hours notice there is no penalty
• If you arrive for an appointment, wait two hours and leave, you do not pay, but neither is there a penalty

Consumers who must pay for missed appointments are charged directly. This is not billed to insurance. 

Doctor’s visits, late or otherwise, are billed to insurance, so penalizing a doctor for lateness, with price, is of no value to a patient. 

There should be some more equal system of recompense, however I have no suggestions at this time. And it needs to be flexible enough to account for medical emergencies that arise for physicians. 

It could be as simple as politeness, respect and openness from office staff, in updating the situation. Moving the situation back into a personal one, from a financial transaction. 

Any ideas?