Tag Archives: ethics

Macs' "Custer" brought low by Capitol Hill foes

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Ngozi Pole told me in 2002 (less than a year before he started pilfering from Kennedy’s office, the government alleges) that he had enemies — “trying to ruin (his) reputation” on the Hill.

As the sole Apple fan in the Senate, he seemed all cool-like to me, ’cause he was, like, “thinking different.” And everyone in at the Sergeant at Arms Office hated him.

I even called Ngozi a rebel (from a piece I wrote for Wired earlier this century):

The rebel’s name is Ngozi Pole. He is the office and systems administer at Kennedy’s Boston and Washington offices. He got Dungan and the other staffers their iBooks during the anthrax scare. And for years, Pole has been locking horns with anti-Mac administrators at the Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms.

“Instead of seriously considering my suggestions, (the SAA has) tried to ruin my reputation,” Pole complained.

via Macs’ Last Stand on Capitol Hill.

GSN loved him, too.

He may have merely been a charmer. But I look forward to hearing his defense.

RFID scare? Blame the media

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Journalists “screw up” health story… trust business to fix the problem, says business blogger.

http://flickr.com/photos/daubentonia/ Creative Commons agreement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

(RFID tags didn’t cause his heart attack. But arphids can make matters worse. Photo: Daubentonia)

from Mark

Widespread reports this week that RFID signals could kill you in the hospital are false, a technology business blogger is claiming.

The blogger, at the technology website ZNDet, makes this bogus assertion: that hundreds of news outlets are twisting the results of a disturbing Dutch finding (published by the Journal of the American Medical Association): that RFID tags and readers can cause livesaving equipment to switch off.

In fact, Vrije University researchers reported total switch-offs and other severe malfunctions in its tests of pacemakers, dialysis machines and ventilators, operated within about ten feet of RFID tags.

The ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, employing a condescending “now let’s set the record straight” voice, ignores the central findings of the Dutch study.  Instead, Blankenhorn says that hundreds of news reports, based on the JAMA report, “screw up” those facts.

Blankenhorn says a tweak in RFID standards — a process that could take nearly a decade, as today’s standards did (something he does not note) — is all that is needed to fix the EM interference problem.

But the RFID horse is already out of the gate: The tags are becoming as ubiquitous in hospital wards and operating rooms as they are on the street. (Click here for my Boston Globe report on RFID tags in hospitals.)

Lack of RFID standards leads to media panic | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com
There is a problem with RFID in hospitals. There is no standard that will tell hospitals what frequencies the tags are using. Thus they can’t tell when the frequencies being used by the tags might interfere with other gear.

This problem is very easy to fix. The industry gets together on an RFID medical standard, which specifies which frequency is to be used. My choice would be the upper range of 802.11, around 5.8 MHz. Medical devices don’t run there.

What's wrong with this story?

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“Second Life” employee enjoys second life as a reporter; reads like a psyop

snapshot_002.jpg I’ve been trying to enjoy Second Life this week, as Markbaard Meredith. (That’s me visiting the Star Trek museum.)

Bt first: I am mystified that this is what passes for an embedded journalist in SL:

W. James Au
From April 2003 to February 2006, I was a contract writer for Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, primarily hired by the company to cover SL as an embedded journalist in an emerging society– its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions, along with larger themes of identity, social norms and organization, and cultural expression important to online worlds in general.

That contractual relationship has ended, but the story continues here.

That means Au was a paid marketing person for Linden Lab for almost three years. Yet he has kept his title seamlessly through his rebirth as a journalist.

Au continues to publish a positive overall message about the brave new world he helped to build.

Au (below) appears to have to have we-make-money-not-art charmed.

A blogger quotes Au: “SL is an international cutting edge creative space with high barriers to entry.”

In other words, the message is: Second Life is where the cool people hang out. Anyone who has explored SL knows this is preposterous, although there are excellent artists like John Craig Freeman working inworld.

But Au’s challenge, and invitation, should make more inworlders out of us.

For good or ill, robots set to kill

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U.S. engineers are building unreliable, autonomous killing machines, a U.K. computer scientist said today. Terrorists will be making their own.

robart3e.jpgToo cute? Watch the DoD’s 12-year-old Robart III (left) knock down some Coke cans, here. The Army’ s more recent SWORDS robot (below, right) has made the rounds at auto and robotics shows. (Images: U.S. Department of Defense)

While Japanese researchers are building humanoid robots that will care for their aging population, the U.S. Department of Defense is developing autonomous weapons that will decide which humans to cut down.swords22004-12-03.jpg

But there’s a problem: Robots make lousy decision makers, said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey, in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall.

“Current robots are dumb machines with very limited sensing capability,” said Sharkey, in a statement released yesterday. “What this means is that it is not possible to guarantee discrimination between combatants and innocents or a proportional use of force as required by the current Laws of War.”

Sharkey also predicted that terrorists are likely to replace suicide bombers with killer robots, which they can produce for only a few hundred pounds with off-the-shelf parts.

Some military officers argue that without any messy emotions to get in the way, autonomous weapons (AW) will make more efficient killers.

“AW can better discriminate targets and calculate the impacts of an engagement in real time to insure the impact is proportional to the military advantage gained,” writes U.S. Air Force Major Michael A. Guetlein, in a 2005 research paper (click here to download the PDF). “Emotions and adrenaline cease to affect the decision to engage. Instead, the decision becomes one of probabilities.”

Guetlein also predicts that “social conditioning” (his words) will eventually any public objections to giving robots a license to kill.

“Society is likely to welcome some aspects of AW,” Guetlein writes.

–mb

Notes: See my 2004 Wired article, “Robots May Fight for the Army.”

The DoD has been trying for years to turn soldiers into flesh-and-blood-based killing machines. See “The guilt-free soldier,” about emotion-deadening drugs, which my brother, Erik, wrote in 2003.