A Social System that Inspires Pride and Shame

This story continues to fascinate me. 

China’s social credit system started in 2015. 

China scores individuals based on public data (social media, financial, insurance, health, shopping, dating, and more), and they have people that act as “information collectors” (i.e. neighborhood watchers) who record what their neighbors are doing–good and bad. 

Each individual starts with a 1,000 points. 

If you do good things in Chinese society–helping people, cleaning up, being honest–you get points added. 

If you do bad things in China–fight with people, make a mess, be dishonest–you get points deducted. 

Fail below 1,000 points and you are in trouble–and can get blacklisted!

A good score is something to be proud of and a bad score is something that shames people to hopefully change for the better. 

But more than that, your social score has tangible social impacts–it can determine your ability to get into certain schools, obtain better jobs, homes, loans/mortgages, high-speed internet, and even high-speed train tickets/airplane flights. 

While maybe well intentioned, certainly, this has the very real potential to become a surveillance state and the embodiment of “Big Brother”!

On one hand, it seems like a great thing to drive people and society to be better. Isn’t that what we do with recognizing and rewarding good behavior and with our laws and justice system in punishing bad behavior?

Yet, to me this type of all-encompassing social credit system risks too much from a freedom and privacy perspective. Should the government and all your neighbors be privy to your most intimate doings and dealings?  And should people be controlled to such an extent that literally everything you do is monitored and measured and counted for/against you?

It seems to me that the price of sacrificing your very personal liberty is too high to make in order to push people towards positive social goals.

Guiding people is one thing, and rewarding outstanding acts and punishing horrific ones is understandable, but getting into people’s knickers is another. 

This type of social credit system really borders on social control and moves us towards a very disturbing, dystopian future. 😉

Freedom Is Worth It

This was a photo I took of a sign in my daughter’s old high school.

It says, “Respect for Self, Others, and the Environment.”

That is a great principle, which I was reminded of today in sitting for an IT certification exam–how lucky we are to live in a country that affords us respect to be ourselves…to speak, write, and practice as we believe. 

In this case, the certification exam was typically given on Saturday, but as a Sabbath observer, I was able to provide a request for an accommodation, and was able to take the exam this morning, Sunday.

What was absolutely amazing to me though going for the exam at this designated fancy facility, in Washington, D.C.–and with two proctors–was that I was the only one taking the exam today.

This was not just some lip-service tolerance for differences, but rather true respect for diversity, even when it’s not convenient and it is costly. 

I have got to say, how grateful I am to be part of a society where we are free to be who we are–what can be more amazing than that?

I feel this all the more when we are at a time in history when still so many in the world are battling dictatorships, demagogues, terrorist and corrupt regimes that impose harsh restrictions, censorship, monitoring, and severe punishments on those who don’t follow the dictates of the authority holding power. 

When we fight those restrictive regimes–from ISIS to Communism–that are looking not just to hold, but to spread their clutches on power and abuses of freedom–we are really fighting to be who we are and that is a serious fight worth having. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Smart Electronic Skin

I liked this concept reported on in BBC Technology about using swarms of sensors to create a type of electronic or “smart skin.”

Like nerves in our human skin, multitudes of sensors placed on anything that we want to monitor, could create a sensing/feeling and reporting mechanism for evaluating the health or condition of that thing. 

Rather than wait for something to fail or break, we could actively collect information on changes in “temperature, strain, and movement” and other environmental impacts to analyze and predict any issues and proactively address them with countermeasures, maintenance, or fixes. 

As human beings, we are architected with regular monitoring and self-healing biological systems to protect ourselves from daily dangers around us, we can develop homes, factories, transport, robots, and everything important around us with similar properties to be more durable, last longer and be more productive.  

When we emulate in our own development efforts what G-d has created for the good in the world, we are on the right track. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

SCADA In Pictures

So SCADA are Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems.

They are a form of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that monitor and control major industrial processes from power generation, transmission, and distribution, to water treatment, chemical production, air traffic control, traffic lights, building controls, and more.

These are part of our nation’s critical infrastructure.

In the lab, we are able to use tools to capture and analyze communication packets and edit and re-use them to:

– Turn on and off lights

– Open/close perimeter gates

– Control water and gas pipelines

– And even open and close a bridge

This was very scary!

No one, unauthorized, should be able to do this in real life, in the physical world.

This is a major security vulnerability for our nation:

– SCADA systems should not be openly available online, and instead they should be able to be controlled only either locally or remotely through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN).

– SCADA systems should not be available without proper access controls–there must be credentials for user id and passwords, and even two-step authentication required.

No one but vetted, cleared, authorized, and trained personnel should be able to monitor and control our critical infrastructure–otherwise, we are giving them the keys to disrupt it, destroy it, and use it for terror.

We owe our nation and families better, much better.

(Source Photos from lab: Andy Blumenthal)

A Razor to Apple’s Throat

I love Razer’s Project Christine – a completely modular PC.

There is a stand and you simply attach the components you want: Central Processing Units (CPU), Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), Power Supply Unit (PSU), Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage, and so on.

By making the architecture open and plug and play–just jack in a new module– and change out whatever you want, whenever you want. Obsolescence be gone.

This is a challenge to pure standardization, and a way to make customization cost-effective.

The cooling is done with mineral oil that is pumped throughout from the bottom reservoir.

At the top, you see a module for a command center for adding operating systems, adjusting configurations and settings, or monitoring performance.

A subscription model is planned where for a annual fee you can get the latest and greatest upgrades.

Project Christine PC is the epitome of simple, useful, scalable and beautiful.

Watch out Apple, you have a Razor at your throat–it’s time to seriously up the innovation game. 😉

Halo Arrives To Our Warfighters

So excited about the Army’s experimental Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS).

This is really our fast, strong, and agile fighting force of the future.

The integration of technologies for the individual warfighter, including sensors, exoskeleton body armor, weapon systems, communications, and monitoring of health and power makes this an unbelievable advance.

I think the MIT research on magnetorheological fluids–which convert from liquid to solid body armor in milliseconds (sort of like Terminator 2) with a magnetic field or electric current (controlled, so the enemy doesn’t bog down the forces) is a true game changer for balancing agility and force protection.

In the future, I believe these suits will even incorporate capabilities to drive, dive, and fly.

This will complement unmanned swarms of dumb drones with intelligent human fighters that will take the battlefield on Earth and beyond. 😉

Mayim Chaim

You can only live about 3 days without water–that’s why protecting our water is so critical.

Emergency Management (May/June 2013) says, “There are numerous ongoing threats to our water supply. Some of them [natural or man made] could be catastrophic.”

– Water poisoning: Already in the 1st century, Roman Emperor Nero poisoned the wells of his enemies. These days you’d need a large supply, like “several dump trucks of cyanide or arsenic to poison a reservoir. Plus the water system is monitored and has purification protections such as chlorine, so it’s not that simple. We can also issue “boil alerts” for people to boil the water before drinking it. Then again, we saw what some radiation did to the Japanese water supplies after Fukushima.

– Blowing it up: The water system infrastructure can be disrupted using explosives, so keeping intruders far away from it is important to keeping it safe.

– Earthquakes/Hurricanes: Much of the water system pipes are old–some built during the Civil War–and these can be destroyed by natural disasters or even a construction crew jackhammer hitting in the wrong place.

– Electrical outage: If you shut down the electricity, you shut down the water pumps…and even with generators taking over for a while, your up against the clock, if you don’t get the juice flowing again soon.

– Cyber Attack: Our water systems, like other industrial control systems are vulnerable to cyber attack. A hacker that gets control of the systems could overheat it, overtreat it, flood it, or otherwise break it and shut it down.

Keeping our water infrastructure secure, the water supply safe and potable, the transport pipes intact, the electricity working, and the systems under control–are not little matters–they are the difference between life and death for millions.

As in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner, when the ship gets blown off course into unchartered waters and the crew is thirsty for water and desperate to survive, the poet states, “Water, Water. Everywhere. And All The Boards Did Shrink; Water, Water, Everywhere. Nor Any Drop To Drink.”

In Hebrew, there is a short saying that sums up this topic, “Mayim Chaim”–water is life. 😉

(Source Photo: Dannielle Blumenthal)

A Seeing Eye

This video from NOVA is an amazing display of the surveillance capabilities we have at our disposal.

ARGUS-IS Stands for Automated Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.

Like a “Persistent Stare,” ARGUS provides continuous monitoring and tracking over a entire city, but also it has the ability to simply click on an area (or multilple areas–up to 65 at a time) to zoom in and see cars, people, and even in detail what individuals are wearing or see them even waving their arms!

Created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARGUS uses 368 imaging chips and provides a streaming video of 1.8 gigapixels (that is 1.8 billion pixels) of resolution and attaches to the belly of a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone.

ARGUS captures 1 million terabytes of a data a day, which is 5,000 hours of high-definition footage that can be stored and returned to as needed for searching events or people.

The Atlantic (1 February 2013) points out how using this over an American city could on one hand, be an amazing law enforcement tool for catching criminals, but on the other hand raise serious privacy concerns like when used by government to collect data on individuals or by corporations to market and sell to consumers.

What is amazing to me is not just the bird’s eye view that this technology provides from the skies above, but that like little ants, we are all part of the mosaic of life on Earth. We all play a part in the theater of the loving, the funny, the witty, and sometimes the insane.

My Oma used to say in German that G-d see everything, but now people are seeing virtually everything…our actions for good or for shame are visible, archived, and searchable. 😉

A Healing Environment

We’ve all been in work environments that make us either feel good about coming to the office in the morning, and those which don’t.

For those that don’t — is it the mundane and unsatisfying work? Unpredictable work hours and demands? Annoying co-workers? Bullying boss? 

Let’s face it—the environment we work in can make the difference between whether we enjoy a long happy career someplace or whether we want to run out the door screaming. 

At the extreme, I remember a colleague telling me how when they were temping in college they worked in some mind-numbing jobs for some awful companies and they literally lasted in some cases until noon before they couldn’t take it anymore. 

Factors aside from the people can make a person feel good or bad. 

In an interesting article in Fast Company (December 2012/January 2013) called “Spaces That Heal,” hospitals have found that the patient’s room itself can actually be designed to aid in bringing people back to good health.

Research shows that “the color, shape, layout, and accoutrements of a hospital room have a direct effect on health.”

Some design items in the hospital that aid recovery, for example, are:

– Sunnier and brighter spaces with big windows (unless you are having a migraine!)

– Exposure to “nature and art” (I choose nature—the greener, the better)

– Classical music (make mine high energy or pop)

– Colored walls (light blue is relaxing for me)

– Lot of clean circulating fresh air (I like the air conditioner on all year long–even Winter!)

– Presence of family members (well certain family members anyway) 🙂

Additionally, rooms wired for smartphones, tablets, and computers and that keep patients busy and engaged are another big positive—I remember when I was in the hospital and my wife brought me a device so I could blog and be me, and I felt like a productive human being again.

New room design in hospitals will also be single rooms (yes, a little privacy and personal space when you’re not feeling well).

They will also have beds at an angle that “face both the window and the media wall”—the media wall is very cool where you can look at everything from digital photos of your kids to watching Netflix or being able to Skype.

Beds will be placed in line of sight of nursing stations for safe monitoring, and bathrooms will have dual accessibility from the patient’s room for doing your business, and from the hall for hospital staff to come and restock it or clean without waking a resting patient. 

The environment we recuperate in matters to how we recover and the environment we work in matters to how we stay healthy, happy, and productive. 

People are not machines, but thinking and feeling beings, and how they are treated physically, emotionally, and mentally all make a world of a difference to their success or failure—and to that of the organization that employs them. 😉

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Be Live Hotels)

I’m Looking At You Looking At Me Looking At You

Almax, the Italian maker of mannequins has a new high-tech version that does more than stand around and look pretty.

The EyeSee Mannequin has a camera built into its eye that watches you while you shop. 

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (6 December 2012), the EyeSee Mannequin sells for about $5,130 and it conducts consumer profiling–using technology to identify criminals–it determines your age, gender, and race and tracks your shopping patterns. 

Newer versions of EyeSee will likely have a sensor for hearing you as well, so it can “eavesdrop on what shoppers say about the mannequin’s attire.”

Next to these mannequins, you have to consider who are the real dummies, when everything you do and say can be monitored. 

Next time, you’re peering at that mannequin, be careful, it may be peering right back at you–and when it says something be ready to jump. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)