Media Technology

Via the SJ Mercury News (sub. req.), the FDA has approved an RFID chip that you place on (not in) a body part that’s to be operated on to identify the proceedure and other info:

The system works like this: At an initial visit, the information on the operation is placed in the computer. The patient sees it on a monitor and verifies that it’s correct. The data is then printed out on the chip and then re-read by the computer. Again, the patient verifies the data.

On the day of the procedure, the patient once again verifies the chip is correct, and it is then placed on the area to be operated.

At the suggestion of the FDA, the chip will have a notice on it that it should be removed before the procedure.

This would presumably replace the current technique of using a sharpie and writing stuff on the patient like “no, the other leg!” I’m curious but a bit sceptical — on the one hand the RFID tag can hold a lot more info than you can fit on a body part (allergies, etc.), but I don’t see that making up for the immediacy of reading what’s written on the body part you’re about to operate on. Why would an RFID tag be any more likely to be read than the patient’s chart?

A major security hole has been found in TWiki which allows anyone with access to the search function to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privilages of the web-server process. Anyone running TWiki should read here and upgrade and/or take countermeasures immediately.

Google’s got a new service for searching journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly writings called (appropriately enough) Google Scholar. Nice clean interface, and like Citeseer they’re pointing not just to the official pay-for-download sites like the ACM and IEEE portal sites but also the free-for-download versions that authors usually put on their own sites (often in violation of copyright, but the last thing professional orgs want to do is piss of their own community).

Seen at the DEAF’04 festival: Very Slow-Scan Television. Gebhard Sengmüller builds on Slow-Scan TV, a video-transmission system developed to send TV over Ham Radio at around 8 frames per second. Then he hooks it up to a large robotic ink-jet printer that injects cyan, yellow and magenta ink into bubblewrap, producing one frame in about 10 hours.

the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S⁵) gives you PowerPoint-like presentations in pure XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. See it in action here. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license, and backwards-compatible with OperaShow Format 1.0 — Neat!

I’m not giving up using Keynote, but it sounds perfect for retro-folk who still like writing your slides in Emacs or Vi…

OK, I don’t know where I’d put it or exactly what I’d do with it yet, but I want one of these. FogScreen is a large wall of fog kept in a thin sheet using laminar flow, then used as a projector screen. That part has been around for a while, but they’ve recently added the ability to “write” on the screen like some wizard writing runes in the air, using the same ultrasound-tracked pens used in virtual-whiteboard systems. Check out their video.

For many Californians there will be something of a reforendum in tomorrow’s election that isn’t on the ballot: paper or plastic. As you’ve probably heard, there have been serious and significant security issues with electronic voting machines. That’s an implementation problem which is shameful, but not a fundamental limitation of the technology. A more fundamental issue with the smart-card system most of our touchscreen-voting counties are using is that the system lacks any kind of voter-verified paper-trail — meaning there’s nothing to fall back on if you suspect electronic fraud. The argument I sometimes hear is that getting rid of paper eliminates the problem of hanging chads and the recount problems from Florida 2000. This is true, in the same way eliminating all financial accounting records would reduce fraud convictions.

Here in California, our Secretary of State has insisted that all voters be given the option to vote via a paper ballot… but many counties feel that’s an extra burden so they won’t inform you of that right, and some counties even plan to further inconvinience paper-ballot voters. My advice to those who are voting in touchscreen counties: ask for paper anyway. My hope is that Wednesday’s headlines (under the one that says “Kerry Wins,” of course) all report record numbers of voters requesting paper ballots and giving a resounding no-confidence vote in the shoddy technology we have this time around.

I mailed my ballot earlier today, but for all you folks doing meat-to-meat voting on November 2nd, People for the American Way has a website to find your polling place: MyPollingPlace.com. Nice, simple. (Props to Political Animal for the link.)

There’s been a lot of talk about how touchscreen voting is a better interface than paper ballots, but that we should not (and should not have to) sacrifice the security, understandability and reliability of having a paper audit trail as well. Now it seems we’re seeing interface problems with touchscreen voting.

I expect the voting officials are right that this is a case of “user error” — that’s what we call it in our industry when the interface designer didn’t do enough of a good job and now wants to blame someone else. Having watched technologically-minded researchers get confused when they accidentally trigger our giant presentation touchscreen at work, it doesn’t surprise me much either. Unfortunately, with all the cases of actual voter-registration fraud, invalid and highly-suspicious selctive purging of voters from the rolls, back doors secretly coded into official vote-counting software, and laughable “security” protocols in voting machines these voters (Democrat and Republican) are right to be skeptical. We need to do better.

FujiFilm recently showed off the F-next Image Viewer, a cute prototype hand-held digital photo album that includes a search-by-face function. Select a face in any picture, the device will show you all the other pictures where that face shows up.

(via enGadget, TechJapan and DCWatch, thanks to DC Watch for the picture.)