Question Technology

Risks of Mixing iPods and Pacemakers

From Reuters:

iPods can cause cardiac implantable pacemakers to malfunction by interfering with the electromagnetic equipment monitoring the heart, according to a study presented by a 17-year-old high school student to a meeting of heart specialists on Thursday.    

The study tested the effect of the portable music devices on 100 patients, whose mean age was 77, outfitted with pacemakers. Electrical interference was detected half of the time when the iPod was held just 2 inches from the patient's chest for 5 to 10 seconds.   

The study did not examine any portable music devices other than iPods, which are made by Apple Inc.

In some cases, the iPods caused interference when held 18 inches from the chest. Interfering with the telemetry equipment caused the device to misread the heart's pacing and in one case caused the pacemaker to stop functioning altogether.

The study was held at the Thoracic and Cardiovascular Institute at Michigan State University. The results were presented at the Heart Rhythm Society annual meeting in Denver.

Link: iPods can make pacemakers malfunction: study.

I imagine this is not terribly surprising and from the little I've read I get the impression that  people with pacemakers are told to be cautious with any electrical devices.  So I doubt this is big news for most regular people who might actually be affected by it. 

What I find most interesting is two aspects of the coverage this story is getting online, based on articles and comments I've read at TechCrunch, CrunchGear, TechDirt, and Consumerist.

First there's the ageism: people assume that only old people have pacemakers and only young people use iPods.  Newsflash: old folks like music! and they too like to take it with them.  And one day you kids will be old and you'll still want your iPods, though you'll probably need extra large buttons by then because of the arthritis in your fingers from all the text messaging you're now doing.

Then there's the bizarre criticism that the study is invalid because they didn't test other music players, as if medical research is just Consumer Reports-style product testing.  Apple virtually owns this market -- it'd be strange not to start with an iPod if you were doing this sort of study.  I assume their message (to the heart rhythm specialists they presented this to) is that the medical community needs to be aware of this, study it further, and maybe make their patients more aware of it.  It's silly to think that they're saying to anyone "buy a Zune instead."

Of course I should know better than to take seriously the stuff at TechDirt and its ilk.  Reading TechSmug (as I like to call it) always irritates me.  I should have stayed away from it like I swore I would months ago.

(For the record, I use an iPod and a Mac too!)

Sherry Turkle on Technology and Alienation

New article by Sherry Turkle in Forbes: Can You Hear Me Now? Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected--or more alienated (via Michael Zimmer).

Technology and Emergency Communication

Over at the PBS Teachers "learning.now" blog, Andy Carvin has started a discussion about the use of text messaging and other technologies for emergency communication. The discussion is prompted of course by the Virginia Tech shootings.  He writes:

So as I watched the events unfold on Monday as police realized the magnitude of the shooting that had taken place on the Virginia Tech campus, one of my first thoughts was, “Of all the campuses in the country, how could this happen here?” Of course, there’s no way any institution can be 100 percent prepared for such a random, terrifying event.

As a high-tech university, VT’s students are about as wired as any other school, with laptops everywhere and cell phones close to ubiquitous. Over the coming weeks, we’ll surely see more hand-wringing and outrage over the two-hour delay that took place between the time the first shootings occurred and the first mass emails informing students and staff that an incident had taken place. I don’t want to second-guess why the university waited, or why they chose not to lock down the campus immediately. Instead, I’d like to focus on a broader technological issue - why email probably wasn’t the best way to notify everyone on campus.

[...]

Last July, you may recall, I wrote about how some universities were bucking the trend seen in K-12 schools, actually making cell phones mandatory for cases of emergency. Why? Because almost every cell phone available today is able to send and receive SMS text messages. SMS infrastructure generally holds up better in times of crisis than email, and it automatically appears on your phone’s screen when you receive one.

Link: PBS Teachers | learning.now . Virginia Tech: Yet Another Wake-Up Call for Better Emergency Preparedness | PBS.

I don't know enough about text messaging to give an opinion on its merits for this purpose -- it may well be a great improvement, though I think a healthy dose of caution (not to mention careful risk assessment) should be in order when considering bringing more complex technologies into the mix.

As Technology Advances, 911 Systems Break

From today's New York Times:

As in many areas of the country, more 911 calls here come from cellphones than land lines. But 40 percent of the nation’s counties, most of them rural or small-town communities like this one, cannot yet pinpoint the location of cellphone callers, though the technology to do so has been available for at least five years.

The delay has been life-threatening. [...]

Since the inception of 911 more than 30 years ago, the three-digit S O S has become universally familiar and relied upon. But the system has not kept pace with the nation’s rapidly changing communication habits. As it ages, it is cracking, with problems like system overload, understaffing, misrouted calls and bug-ridden databases leading to unanswered calls and dangerous errors. [...]

Officials in places large and small have declared a 911 crisis. When 30,000 emergency calls went unanswered in Chattanooga, Tenn., where Bob Corker, the Republican candidate for United States Senate in 2006, had served as mayor, his Democratic opponent, Harold E. Ford Jr., made it a campaign issue.

Officials in Riverside County, Calif., fed up with misrouted calls, have been advising residents to call the sheriff or local fire department directly.

In Bessemer, Ala., city employees could not get through to their own 911 system when a colleague had a seizure, at a time when the city and others like it are struggling to upgrade their systems at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yet even the newest systems cannot adequately handle Internet-based phone services or text messages, which emerged as the most reliable form of communication during Hurricane Katrina.

Link: An S O S for 911 Systems in Age of High-Tech - New York Times.

Where are the telecom companies in all of this?  In a sane world they'd be financially supporting 911 service as part of the cost of doing business.

Slow Down, Brave Multitaskers (NYT)

A good article by Steve Lohr in today's New York Times debunks some of the current mythology surrounding multitasking:

Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention?

Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while.

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug.

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

[...]

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author, with Shamsi Iqbal of the University of Illinois, of a paper on the study that will be presented next month.

“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

Link: Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic - New York Times.

These findings are not completely new, but I guess a new generation of multitaskers needs a new generation of evidence.  And that last point about work interruptions was made twenty years ago in the software management classic Peopleware.

Cory Doctorow on e-Books

A disjointed little essay by Cory Doctorow tries to argue that you do like reading off of screens.  In it he makes light of the fact that he welcomes distractions from e-mail, IM, YouTube, etc., though it could help explain his bizarre logic.  Some excerpts:

"I don't like reading off a computer screen" — it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.

But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly — in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph.

This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium — indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago.

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.

[...]

Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner, than anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from YouTube. The video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the phone rings and a scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something while answering an IM.

And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking devices — you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call — and their social context is that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room — a whole room for TV! — is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs.

The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

Link: Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen.

via  BoingBoing: Why ebooks' success has nothing to do with screen quality.

All a-Twitter

I don't know much about Twitter -- maybe it's truly useful, but I find this column by Ivor Tossell amusing:

You have to keep an eye on the computer nerds. One day they're abuzz about some new Internet widget — something with a funny name and indistinct purpose — and the next thing you know, everybody bar nobody (except you) is using it. They're kind of like college kids that way.

So here's an early warning: Something new is brewing amongst the nerds. The next new thing is called Twitter, and for once in this Web 2.0 world, its name is both correctly spelled and apt: It exists to fill the ether with an endless chirping.

Twitter lets you post public updates about your status; it presents a simple page with a text box, that asks "What are you doing?" The catch is that you're only allowed an answer that's 140 characters long — but you can post as many updates about your day as you like.

Judging from the postings from around the world that are continually updated on the Twitter website, that's more or less what they get — and by the thousands. Here are three updates that popped up from random Twitter users (Twitterers?) in the last few minutes: "Done with grading! Time for a break!"

"Very, VERY pleased with how Apple and UPS handled this."

"Twitter won't let me post Pi to the first 140 characters. What's up with that?"

[...]

Its brand of micro-blogging hits a sweet spot: it has the shout-it-to-the-world appeal of blogging, but without the strenuous effort of ideas and paragraphs. It has the immediacy of instant messaging, but carries no obligation of getting embroiled in an actual conversation.

It's the ultimate in relaxed communication: little farts of consciousness, unpackaged and unaddressed, sent out into the void without the pretension of being of any interest to anyone. It has its appeal, and soon, everybody and their dog (except, possibly, you and your dog) will be on it. Brace yourself.

Link: globeandmail.com: Reading online column now.

Cellphone Cameras and Public Shaming

The Montreal Gazette has a feature on the growth of "cyber-shaming" using cell-phone cameras and the web:

Hey you, the scofflaw parked illegally in the handicapped spot. Smile! You're in cyberspace. And that goes for all you other wrongdoers out there: the jerk parked in a bike lane, the flasher on the metro, the negligent nanny, the litterbug, the loud-mouth cellphone user and the reckless driver.

It's time for your close-up.

Public shaming isn't just for celebrities any more, thanks to a new crop of websites that expose those who commit crimes and misdemeanours that often used to go unpunished.

Cellphone cameras and the World Wide Web have ushered in a new era of cyber-vigilantism in which offenders risk instant, global notoriety.

"People really are more afraid of appearing on a website than getting a $150 ticket," said Fred (not his real name), a former Montrealer living in New Zealand and founder of caughtya.org. The site blows the whistle on people who steal handicapped-parking spots by posting photos and licence-plate numbers of illegally parked vehicles.

Parking offences are just one of many transgressions that can land you in the modern-day equivalent of the pillory.

Link: All eyes on you,

Via Michael Zimmer.

Technology Addiction

The BBC covers the ongoing discussion over technology addiction.  An excerpt:

The seemingly exponential growth of portable technology has sparked fears that people are becoming addicted or swamped by gadgets and their uses.

One major consequence of this phenomenon is that the line between work and private life is much more blurred, now that e-mail and phones provide a 24-hour link between employers and staff.

Experts believe that even the decision-making process of the average person can be adversely affected.

However, others think that the bombardment of various communications can enhance the brain's ability to process information.

Addiction symptoms

Nada Kakabadse, a Professor at the Northampton Business School, said: "Your judgement is impaired. Equally your decision making processes are impaired.

"It's like losing your spatial judgement, so instead of walking through the door you walk into it. You're more prone to have a car accident if you drive."

Prof Kakabadse added: "It's addiction to portable technology, which you take with you practically to bed, the cinema, to the theatre, to a dinner party. The symptoms are, like with any other addiction, that people spend more time using their technology than spending it in socialising or in family time."

Link: BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | The rise of technology addiction.

The Importance of User-Centered Design

CNET has a story about the growing importance of fields like human-computer interaction, usability, and human factors engineering.  As someone who has done work in this area, I heartily agree.

Wonder why YouTube skyrocketed in popularity in less than two years?

One obvious reason is that the video-sharing Web site has kept it simple. YouTube doesn't require a video player download or a special account just to watch a video. With just a click on a link, a video is up and running in a few seconds. It's a people-friendly design, and that attention to simplicity has paid off.

Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction, however, say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA's Mission Control.

Now companies, universities and even government agencies like NASA are investing time and dollars as they take a hard look at how people interact with technology.

Link: The human factor in gadget, Web design | CNET News.com,

via Usability In The News: The human factor in gadget, Web design.

Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great introduction to the ideas behind HCI.

Banning Cellphones in Toronto Schools

Schools in Toronto are the latest to deal with the problem of cellphones in the classroom, and they seem to be going about it more sensibly than their New York state counterparts (previous post).  The public school board is considering a ban, while many private schools have already acted.  From the Globe & Mail:

[Branksome Hall spokeswoman Janet Sailian] says her school is not blocking technology from entering the education realm; there's just no use for cellphones in the classroom. The school recently added the iPod to its list of items not permitted in the classroom.

"As technology evolves, we try to evolve our code of conduct and our rules," she says.

However, everyone seems to agree that it is a mistake to ban cellphones, or even other new technology, completely from school grounds, as is the case in New York.

"There will always be a new technology. It's about teaching kids to live with technology in a way that makes them good citizens," says Kim Gordon, head of Bishop Strachan School.

Link: globeandmail.com: Personal Tech.

iPhone to come with free iCancer

Okay, maybe that title is a bit alarmist, but earlier this week there was more news of a possible link between long-term cellphone use and brain cancer:

A large-scale study found that those who had regularly used mobiles for longer than 10 years were almost 40 per cent more likely to develop nervous system tumours called gliomas near to where they hold their phones.

The new research, to be published later this year in the International Journal of Cancer, is the second study to suggest increased risks of specific types of brain tumours in regions close to where mobile phone emissions enter the head.

However, a number of other studies have found no increased health risks associated with mobile phone use.

Prof Lawrie Challis, the chairman of the government-funded Mobile Telecommunications Health Research (MTHR) programme, said last week that most research had shown that mobiles were safe in the short term but that there was a "hint of something" for longer-term users.

Link: Telegraph | News | Mobile phone use 'linked to tumour'.

Of course, just recently there was another study in the news and this one claimed to show that there was no link.  More studies need to be done, and the fact remains that cellphones haven't been around long enough for anyone to be able to say for sure how dangerous they are.

Track Your Workers With GPS

The Globe & Mail has an interesting article about companies installing GPS tracking on company vehicles to monitor workers.  Excerpt:

Called telematics, the technology goes beyond simply providing businesses with vehicles' locations -- it can also supply data on things like when a vehicle's doors are open, when engines are turned on or when cargo has been picked up. What's more, the technology can also enable a business to remotely control a vehicle by turning off its engine, locking a door or disabling the ignition.

But the technology does have its drawbacks. For every advocate trumpeting the benefits of telematics, there is a critic who says tracking workers violates privacy. Unions, for example, are looking at telematics carefully, and some are negotiating restrictions on monitoring workers in collective agreements.

However, those concerns do not seem to be diminishing telematic's growing popularity. Recent research says businesses' use of telematics will continue to expand this year, growing into a $1.2-billion (U.S.) industry by the end of this year.

Link: globeandmail.com: Do you know where your workers are?.

Camera Phones Bring out the Best and (Mostly) the Worst

Michael Agger has an excellent essay in Slate on the wonders of the camera-equipped cellphone.  Link: The Camera Phone: The gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine.

He also points to an interesting blog, PicturePhoning, which "covers the latest news on camera and videophones, their social impact and more recently, what's the latest on mobile socializing and user generated content going mobile."