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Smart Holograms Used as Biosensors
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this short article, eWEEK writes that the next generation of biosensors will consist of small holograms costing only fractions of a cent. Prototypes developed by a U.K. company, aptly named Smart Holograms, include contact lenses that monitor glucose levels or thin badges that detect alcohol levels. Not only these holograms used as sensors will be cheap to produce, they'll also require less training for nurses or police officers. This is because these holograms can be designed to show results graphically, such as morphing into an image of a green car if someone subjected to breath analysis is sober and can drive. Read this overview for other details and an illustration showing how to create a sensor hologram."
"they'll also require less training for nurses or police officers."
Less training for those that need more as it is.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
In a way, it's opened up the field of diagnostic medicine - as many of these functions require complex tests now. if technology can boil down the plethora of tests into a stick-it-on-and-read type instrument, then the standard level of healthcare will rise.
Will it lower costs? Only time, and the health insurance companies will be able to answer that one...
Get the pictures and facts straight from the source.o logy/creating_sensors.htm
http://www.smartholograms.com/site/sections/techn
Humans are the best biosensors yet made, with dogs perhaps a close second. Intelligent, intuitive, experienced humans can scan someone's face, question them, trip them up in inconsistent statements, and otherwise sniff out intruders and frauds. Dogs can literally smell or otherwise somehow sense nervousness in people and make excellent guards. They ID people by scent and they don't forget scents quickly.
If we focussed on human intelligence we would perhaps be able to avert more catastrophes, such as the series of missteps that allowed the 9/11 hijackers to get on board their planes despite some rather suspicious behavior.
Computers are always going to be only as good as the programs that control them, and there are always going to be workarounds for people clever enough to find them. Insiders will create back doors in biosensor systems, or they will sell passwords to outsiders. A team of Japanese researchers already cracked a fingerprint biosensor a couple of years ago, so where's the security in using one? I would imagine even a DNA sample can be faked; just get someone's DNA, replicate it in a test tube using E. coli, and coat your hands with it. Standard laboratory biology.
No one can steal your identity at the low-tech neighborhood store where you shop once a week and the clerks know you (if only this were always the case). The humans at the store will look at your credit card, then at the face that does not match yours, and they'll go in the back and call the police. A machine will simply pass the buck, leaving the owner to dispute the theft with the credit card company.
The Israelis for decades have relied on human intelligence and it has stood them in good stead, with zero airline hijackings. They have very smart people who look at everyone before they board. We in the U.S. are just beginning to wake up to this level of need and we have a lot to learn.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com] [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php [clara.net]) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. K
I want a hologram that shows me whether I have bad breath
That's called a "girlfriend" and the display consists of her face pulling back with a funny face when you kiss her.
and another that shows my blood-alcohol content - privately
The "girlfriend" device above can detect that too. You may not count upon the privacy of the display though...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
God I wish we could have an option to not display Roland stories.
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...they'll also require less training for nurses or police officers. This is because these holograms can be designed to show results graphically, such as morphing into an image of a green car if someone subjected to breath analysis is sober and can drive.
So I have to be able to say the alphabet backwards while standing on one leg and touching my nose, but the cop who pulled me over doesn't need to be capable of knowing if the number on his digital readout is greater than 0.08?
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I dislike "wizards" in my software development tools that tell me what kind of mentality I should use to start my development; I don't want "wizards" to bug the emt's, police, or nurses that have very tight and constrained opportunities to help people. These tools may very well cover up some sort of useful data that would have indicated some other problem or more complex outcome.
Beyond just the annoyance and delay factor, we can also get into a Brazil or Philip K. Dick like realities where we no longer know what these results are showing us. Perhaps the CEO of the hologram company gets the DUI tests to check for a white list of genetic signatures and to always show them as passing the test no matter what the actual results. Perhaps a religiously obsessed development manager surreptitiously adds additional constraints that will cause certain pregnancy tests to fail until the fetus can't be aborted.
These tools are not developed under security and strong testing now because they don't render the judgement. If these tools can in any way cloud or mislead the judgement of those using them then they are a bad idea.
The simple fact is that Roland doesn't exist. It's a damn front for the slashdot editors to pocket a few more bucks each month with more ad-driven pages. Think about it: fake name, obviously fake pictures on the journal site, next to no participation in the comments.
It's clever but sad that the salshdot crew are so greedy as to go after table scraps like this.