Fractions are used constantly. So are decimals. You may not realize it. You not even think about how you use it. But simple things like manipulating money, adjusting recipes, all use decimals and fractions. Understanding sale prices uses percentages.
Volume and area is only a tiny bit less used, but ask a general contractor how often they use the concept of area. How big is that yard? How much tile is needed to do that floor, or that bathroom? How much fence to enclose that yard? How many square inches of window is needed for that particular window (used in pricing windows).
The problem isn't that people don't use math, but people learn the math and use it intuitively and claim they never use it at all. "Pizza and money" is what I learned as how to explain most math problems. (Pizza is for fractions and geometric problems, money for decimals and percentages).
A classic problem today done by an actual math teacher in a community college. "Someone tell me your credit card rate. Okay, someone else tell me your current balance. Okay, someone else tell me your minimum payment. Now let's calculate how long it takes to pay that off at that rate, and how much you will spend." Eyes light up when the problem is done.
A lot of algebra is learned not for the reason you think, but for learning how to set up problems. I don't do much traditional math in my job today, but I use the concept of setting up problems all the time, not just at work. I even use it when cooking and the recipe needs adjusting. Without the middle school algebra, or even some of the high school algebra, setting up those problems is very difficult, and knowing that you set it up correctly is very hard.
I found in high school, only those truly interested in math took Calculus. In college, calculus was required for many majors because the basic material of the course required at least some understanding of calculus concepts. Then again, I was dismayed to learn that in some states, it was possible (if difficult) to be certified as a math teacher to teach calculus, without ever having taken it, including have the degree in education.
Finally, math doesn't just teach math, it teaches how to think. Analytical thinking ought to be fundamental.
Publishers provide editing services? After speaking with more than a couple authors who have been published by various different publishers and types of work (novels, poetry, essays, articles, short stories, etc.), one of the few constants is there is no editor who will help correct your work's minor mistakes. If it isn't publication ready, don't send it in for review. I'm told a number of years ago, things were different and an editor might actually accept a work with some minor updates required, and work on getting those changes made. Even looking at novels published in the 1950s, I often see a wealth of obvious typos and wrong word choices.
Anyone who does serious editing today on a word processor should learn about stylesheets. You may have heard of them with web pages. You create a stylesheet that matches your stylistic demands. Mine are 12 pt Times New Roman, double space, with a specific header (Name of work, comma, my name, then right justified the page number. To make life really easy on me, I've set up styles for section breaks and chapter breaks.
I open a word processor, that stylesheet is my default. I start typing. Chapters auto-number themselves so if I go back and add a new chapter (I sometimes will realize that a section break needs to be a chapter break later), I have a much easier time.
Learn to turn off those autotype and autocorrect options that you don't want. The method is fundamentally the same for only the past ten or so years. I do this with OO.o, MS Word, any editor I'm going to use.
My biggest complaint about OO.o is the impossibility of getting a good high contrast selection color scheme. I'm even able to set the screen color to what I want and save it.
If I change my mind in a document on layout, I change the stylesheet, not the hard formatting. This isn't rocket science, and the switch from hard formatting to stylesheet based formatting should be natural to anyone who has tried to use CSS on web pages.
Mc* and Mac* names sometimes do and sometimes do not have spaces in the name. Where I work, two people have the same first and last name. One person spells his with a space, the other without. It's part of the proper spelling of their name. Don't try and tell either one to change the spelling of their name.
This is rapidly changing. A certain large employer forced their health insurance provider for employees to issue new ID cards to all members using alternative identification numbers a few years back.
The problem isn't use of SSN. It could be name/address/date (full name, an address, and a date that one was at that address). While longer, that's also a specific identifier. Anyone who ships to you will have at least address and a date automatically. Getting a name is trivial from that point (though it may be your roommate instead).
The problem is use of SSN as combination identifier and authentication token. Few seem to be foolish enough to use a phone number as an authentication token, so most people are accepting of the concept of giving that phone number. It's already considered public information. If the SSN was used in a similar manner consistently, most of the issues around it would disappear. It wouldn't be wonderful for privacy, but neither is address, name and date, information one is generally already giving them, unless one chooses to take fairly active steps to avoid such. (Use PO Boxes, not buy via credit card or check, etc.)
Just because they say there is a cavity doesn't mean there is one. A younger dentist insisted I had three cavities that needed filling. No x-rays, just based on the pressure test (where they push down on your teeth with a probe), where the dentist pushed down much harder than standards from several other dentists.
I changed dentists. He used x-rays and the pressure test and concluded no cavities. I mentioned what the other dentist said and he said no, no evidence of even smaller cavities. Since I was a new patient to the new dentist, he did a full workup, not just a routine visit checkup. Several years later, still no evidence of these supposedly obvious cavities.
Unfortunately, such fraud does occur. I don't know how common it is, but I am now convinced the one dentist was trying to invent work to justify excessive personal spending (she talked a lot about how much she'd spent on her home lately). I've seen enough guides to say that one of the best defenses against such fraud is to ask to see the pictures.
No, I'm not a dentist, but one doesn't have to be a dentist to realize that sometimes, a professional will claim work needs to be done when there is no professional justification for that work. It happens in all fields. I'm suspicious of the "well, our standards and technology have improved" excuse. For some reason, the older the dentist, the more likely they are to be willing to show me pictures or justification of any advised work (dating all the way back to when I was a kid and advised to get braces).
So the book that takes five years to write has to be registered by the amateur novelist five times before they can finally publish and possibly get the first copyright registration done to prevent some big studio from outright stealing the work? (Five years for a first book to publication is pretty good).
Copyright doesn't just protect the large companies, it also helps prevent a larger corporation from stealing an amateur's work that they've been working on.
When did all of IT get reduced to that of the lowly developer? Technical architects, system administrators, IT managers, project managers, security analysts (with its dozen or more related specialties), application support, et cetera are all standard IT jobs, and in my experience, few of them think the way a developer does.
The goal of the signature isn't to prevent fraud, but provide evidence to detect it, and provide repudiation of a fraudulent charge. It is relatively non-trivial to forge multiple instances of a signature (with just enough variation to not look machine generated but close enough to the on file signature to avoid a trivial "this isn't me"). With a purely digital system like a pin, that's easy.
I don't even like credit card purchases that don't require signature. As I recall from the standards, if there is no signature slip on file, then in the case of a charge dispute, the merchant has very little recourse to claim the charge was legitimate. Some businesses decided that the risk of such was less than the cost of collecting the signature slips and dealing with them, so they self-insure, ready to eat the cost for smaller transactions (usually most merchants use $25 as the limit for no signature credit card purchases in the US).
Specifically to protect against this, I was advised by my bank to create a separate bank account for each automatic debit. Three days before the scheduled debit, an automated transfer sends the money into the account. I keep about ten dollars beyond that in the account. Since it is a saving account, I even earn a few pennies interest. I could probably double up to two or three automatic payments per account if I could ensure the debit date was isolated.
The merchants can't take massively too much because it just isn't there. No automatic overdraft protection (obviously). It prevents one merchant's pull from influencing another debit.
Fortunately, most of my regular bills still take check. Even with the cost of stamps going way up, it is cheaper for me to pay by check and post it through the mail than to do online bill pay, and with far more legal protection against abuse or fraud. I don't tend to use checks for routine purchases anymore, but I do use them for monthly bills.
At least in the US, EFT is a disaster. There are at best very minimal legal protections that exist around checks. For example, if too much is withdrawn from my account on a check, I have a lot of legal protections to restore the challenged amount quickly, and the nice recourse of the image of the check that I signed.
For EFT, the bank isn't allowed to step in. You have to pretty-please ask the merchant to reverse the charges. To make matters worse, they aren't even waiting until you sign their slip to charge you. I had a case where they wanted to do Electronic Check Conversion (ECC), and contrary to the guidelines in the US, there was no conspicuous sign warning of that fact. When presented with the signature slip, I refused, saying I was paying by check, not ECC. They still debited my account. No signature, just an account number and check number (which can be guessed readily) and they were allowed to withdraw an arbitrary amount from my account. The bank can't even stop it.
Debit cards only recently got some of the same legal protections as credit cards to dispute fraudulent charges. They aren't just made by identity thieves, but also by merchants that just don't care.
There is too few protections on an account today. Slow things down until some reasonable consumer protection comes back.
Instead we should have devastating fines or other punishment for companies that are found to have problems preventing fraudulent changes to data, so that companies could build in meaningful safeguards around ACTUAL financial data (with the ROI being the prevention of said fines so security groups could get funding), as opposed to safeguarding anything that smells like financial data to auditors (with the auditors of course paid more the more systems they have to audit). Let auditors audit crooks, not the innocent. Then we could also document the real bypasses to processes instead of having them but having to pretend they do not exist because auditors and high-level execs Cannot Know.
Most of the IT portion of SOX is based around having meaningful tools to have an effective security policy to tell people what they can and cannot do, as well as means to detect when those rules are violated. It is the latter portion that seems to often cause the most grief. You cannot know where the problems exist unless you provide for an accountability trail to ensure that people manipulating financial impacting data are tracked.
Actually, what is needed is a clueful audit response department. This department would be able to classify systems as SOX impacted or not depending on if they process data that is relevant to SOX. Then, you make sure you have a reasonably effective security policy and follow it.
It seems a lot of companies have a problem with writing a security policy that is reasonably effective. Many firms I've seen seem to do the "wink system", where they write a ridiculous policy that is impossible to follow in reality, then wonder why the auditors hold them to that policy as audit findings.
Others write policies that don't even pretend to cover basic security. The model at some of those firms seems to be "What developer wants, gets." Developer wants unrestricted permanent root on the prod box? They get it. Developer wants direct login to shared accounts as a part of the application? They get it, and no one dares tell them no.
A lot of what I've seen as very effective in audits is to provide for a strong audit trail of who did what. There are multiple ways to do that. Have a process in place to detect errors, and a check to ensure that process is being followed. Ensure that no one person can do something malicious and erase all evidence of it.
Disclaimer, part of my job is audit response on SOX and PCI and other audits, preparing servers for the audit, ensuring compliance outside the audit, etc.
It'd be nice if the author made it more clear what OS this is claimed to apply to. For example, Solaris 10 has/usr/bin/ldd as an ELF. I don't have my HP-UX or AIX test systems handy, nevermind recent releases of RHEL.
Also, what efforts has the coder gone to in order to notify the appropriate security groups so that a fix can be produced quickly? I'm not disputing the potential security issues, but there is a reason for first disclosing to a vendor on non-public channels. Give the vendor/coder the chance to do the right thing and produce a fix.
When I purchased a home, I was informed in no uncertain terms by the lawyer handling the transaction that my legal signature was first, middle and last name written out in full. I don't know what he would have done had I printed instead of tried to fake cursive. (I've forgotten most cursive capital letters).
Calculus itself may seem to have changed little, but ways to teach it have changed dramatically. Consider the series of debates over "traditional math" (often taught until around the 1950s) vs "New Math, vs "Whole Math" vs the latest fad. That's just the methods to teach basic arithmetic and a few unrelated topics.
One of the constant updates for textbooks is to keep the word problems feeling relevant. I recently took my child through a pre-algebra text and was amazed at how the word problems actually related to the material without feeling the least bit contrived. Some classic works like "How to lie with Statistics" are harder for someone today to understand because the products often don't exist, the numbers don't have that intuitive feel to them anymore.
Technology does have a place in schools. I remember sitting there watching as the teacher struggled to get that filmstrip going and timing the tape player to advance each slide at the perfect instant. Oops, the last two slide advances weren't obvious, rewind the tape and try again. Today, that is less of a problem. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those monsters.
One place technology has a place is a student who is not capable of typing before they reach high school is not adequately prepared for high school. This nonsense about making touch typing a mandatory course in high school is just a fancy way of saying that students shouldn't be learning touch typing when I did, by grade five. By high school, the student should be turning in all papers typed. Learning to type can come right after they learn to print, leaving cursive to the art class where it belongs.
* Drivers were only given 15 minutes to adapt to a driving simulator, simulating a very unfamiliar vehicle. This is much lower than I would expect, and would tend to magnify even the slightest distraction. When I bought a new vehicle, I felt uncomfortable with it for days until I really felt like I had memorized all the subtle differences like how sensitive the gas pedal was, the slight difference in the height of the dials, the blind spots created by the frame, etc. * The participants were driving an unfamiliar course, again a factor * The traffic conditions were deliberately chosen as suboptimal, again a factor * Lulling or dropping the conversation was not given as an option to the driver or the converser, creating an artificial scenario where the driver was instructed that they must continue the conversation without break
* The definition of success was not measured based on actual leaving of the lane, but on some undefined level of drifting from the perfect center of the lane. A driver who consistently drives slightly off center would thus be penalized under this measurement, depending on the details, possibly more than the driver who deviated outside their lane once briefly. * Several presumptions were made without reference to a prior study to justify them in creating the results.
In short, the procedural design creates significant doubt in my mind as to the significance of the results.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't disagree more.
Fractions are used constantly. So are decimals. You may not realize it. You not even think about how you use it. But simple things like manipulating money, adjusting recipes, all use decimals and fractions. Understanding sale prices uses percentages.
Volume and area is only a tiny bit less used, but ask a general contractor how often they use the concept of area. How big is that yard? How much tile is needed to do that floor, or that bathroom? How much fence to enclose that yard? How many square inches of window is needed for that particular window (used in pricing windows).
The problem isn't that people don't use math, but people learn the math and use it intuitively and claim they never use it at all. "Pizza and money" is what I learned as how to explain most math problems. (Pizza is for fractions and geometric problems, money for decimals and percentages).
A classic problem today done by an actual math teacher in a community college. "Someone tell me your credit card rate. Okay, someone else tell me your current balance. Okay, someone else tell me your minimum payment. Now let's calculate how long it takes to pay that off at that rate, and how much you will spend." Eyes light up when the problem is done.
A lot of algebra is learned not for the reason you think, but for learning how to set up problems. I don't do much traditional math in my job today, but I use the concept of setting up problems all the time, not just at work. I even use it when cooking and the recipe needs adjusting. Without the middle school algebra, or even some of the high school algebra, setting up those problems is very difficult, and knowing that you set it up correctly is very hard.
I found in high school, only those truly interested in math took Calculus. In college, calculus was required for many majors because the basic material of the course required at least some understanding of calculus concepts. Then again, I was dismayed to learn that in some states, it was possible (if difficult) to be certified as a math teacher to teach calculus, without ever having taken it, including have the degree in education.
Finally, math doesn't just teach math, it teaches how to think. Analytical thinking ought to be fundamental.
Publishers provide editing services? After speaking with more than a couple authors who have been published by various different publishers and types of work (novels, poetry, essays, articles, short stories, etc.), one of the few constants is there is no editor who will help correct your work's minor mistakes. If it isn't publication ready, don't send it in for review. I'm told a number of years ago, things were different and an editor might actually accept a work with some minor updates required, and work on getting those changes made. Even looking at novels published in the 1950s, I often see a wealth of obvious typos and wrong word choices.
Anyone who does serious editing today on a word processor should learn about stylesheets. You may have heard of them with web pages. You create a stylesheet that matches your stylistic demands. Mine are 12 pt Times New Roman, double space, with a specific header (Name of work, comma, my name, then right justified the page number. To make life really easy on me, I've set up styles for section breaks and chapter breaks.
I open a word processor, that stylesheet is my default. I start typing. Chapters auto-number themselves so if I go back and add a new chapter (I sometimes will realize that a section break needs to be a chapter break later), I have a much easier time.
Learn to turn off those autotype and autocorrect options that you don't want. The method is fundamentally the same for only the past ten or so years. I do this with OO.o, MS Word, any editor I'm going to use.
My biggest complaint about OO.o is the impossibility of getting a good high contrast selection color scheme. I'm even able to set the screen color to what I want and save it.
If I change my mind in a document on layout, I change the stylesheet, not the hard formatting. This isn't rocket science, and the switch from hard formatting to stylesheet based formatting should be natural to anyone who has tried to use CSS on web pages.
I hope you never have to work with credit card processing applications then.
PCI DSS 6.3.4 prohibits using actual production data (live PANs) for testing or development.
Mc* and Mac* names sometimes do and sometimes do not have spaces in the name. Where I work, two people have the same first and last name. One person spells his with a space, the other without. It's part of the proper spelling of their name. Don't try and tell either one to change the spelling of their name.
Hen3ry
Voting systems
First rule of computer security, don't have a computer.
Second rule of computer security, if you do have a computer, don't turn it on.
(It goes on from there.)
This is rapidly changing. A certain large employer forced their health insurance provider for employees to issue new ID cards to all members using alternative identification numbers a few years back.
The problem isn't use of SSN. It could be name/address/date (full name, an address, and a date that one was at that address). While longer, that's also a specific identifier. Anyone who ships to you will have at least address and a date automatically. Getting a name is trivial from that point (though it may be your roommate instead).
The problem is use of SSN as combination identifier and authentication token. Few seem to be foolish enough to use a phone number as an authentication token, so most people are accepting of the concept of giving that phone number. It's already considered public information. If the SSN was used in a similar manner consistently, most of the issues around it would disappear. It wouldn't be wonderful for privacy, but neither is address, name and date, information one is generally already giving them, unless one chooses to take fairly active steps to avoid such. (Use PO Boxes, not buy via credit card or check, etc.)
Just because they say there is a cavity doesn't mean there is one. A younger dentist insisted I had three cavities that needed filling. No x-rays, just based on the pressure test (where they push down on your teeth with a probe), where the dentist pushed down much harder than standards from several other dentists.
I changed dentists. He used x-rays and the pressure test and concluded no cavities. I mentioned what the other dentist said and he said no, no evidence of even smaller cavities. Since I was a new patient to the new dentist, he did a full workup, not just a routine visit checkup. Several years later, still no evidence of these supposedly obvious cavities.
Unfortunately, such fraud does occur. I don't know how common it is, but I am now convinced the one dentist was trying to invent work to justify excessive personal spending (she talked a lot about how much she'd spent on her home lately). I've seen enough guides to say that one of the best defenses against such fraud is to ask to see the pictures.
No, I'm not a dentist, but one doesn't have to be a dentist to realize that sometimes, a professional will claim work needs to be done when there is no professional justification for that work. It happens in all fields. I'm suspicious of the "well, our standards and technology have improved" excuse. For some reason, the older the dentist, the more likely they are to be willing to show me pictures or justification of any advised work (dating all the way back to when I was a kid and advised to get braces).
You mean people who are paid by the hour work hard the whole time, don't try to space things out a bit to add hours?
Plato wasn't much of a mathematician. Archimedes was much more important.
So the book that takes five years to write has to be registered by the amateur novelist five times before they can finally publish and possibly get the first copyright registration done to prevent some big studio from outright stealing the work? (Five years for a first book to publication is pretty good).
Copyright doesn't just protect the large companies, it also helps prevent a larger corporation from stealing an amateur's work that they've been working on.
When did all of IT get reduced to that of the lowly developer? Technical architects, system administrators, IT managers, project managers, security analysts (with its dozen or more related specialties), application support, et cetera are all standard IT jobs, and in my experience, few of them think the way a developer does.
The goal of the signature isn't to prevent fraud, but provide evidence to detect it, and provide repudiation of a fraudulent charge. It is relatively non-trivial to forge multiple instances of a signature (with just enough variation to not look machine generated but close enough to the on file signature to avoid a trivial "this isn't me"). With a purely digital system like a pin, that's easy.
I don't even like credit card purchases that don't require signature. As I recall from the standards, if there is no signature slip on file, then in the case of a charge dispute, the merchant has very little recourse to claim the charge was legitimate. Some businesses decided that the risk of such was less than the cost of collecting the signature slips and dealing with them, so they self-insure, ready to eat the cost for smaller transactions (usually most merchants use $25 as the limit for no signature credit card purchases in the US).
Specifically to protect against this, I was advised by my bank to create a separate bank account for each automatic debit. Three days before the scheduled debit, an automated transfer sends the money into the account. I keep about ten dollars beyond that in the account. Since it is a saving account, I even earn a few pennies interest. I could probably double up to two or three automatic payments per account if I could ensure the debit date was isolated.
The merchants can't take massively too much because it just isn't there. No automatic overdraft protection (obviously). It prevents one merchant's pull from influencing another debit.
Fortunately, most of my regular bills still take check. Even with the cost of stamps going way up, it is cheaper for me to pay by check and post it through the mail than to do online bill pay, and with far more legal protection against abuse or fraud. I don't tend to use checks for routine purchases anymore, but I do use them for monthly bills.
At least in the US, EFT is a disaster. There are at best very minimal legal protections that exist around checks. For example, if too much is withdrawn from my account on a check, I have a lot of legal protections to restore the challenged amount quickly, and the nice recourse of the image of the check that I signed.
For EFT, the bank isn't allowed to step in. You have to pretty-please ask the merchant to reverse the charges. To make matters worse, they aren't even waiting until you sign their slip to charge you. I had a case where they wanted to do Electronic Check Conversion (ECC), and contrary to the guidelines in the US, there was no conspicuous sign warning of that fact. When presented with the signature slip, I refused, saying I was paying by check, not ECC. They still debited my account. No signature, just an account number and check number (which can be guessed readily) and they were allowed to withdraw an arbitrary amount from my account. The bank can't even stop it.
Debit cards only recently got some of the same legal protections as credit cards to dispute fraudulent charges. They aren't just made by identity thieves, but also by merchants that just don't care.
There is too few protections on an account today. Slow things down until some reasonable consumer protection comes back.
Instead we should have devastating fines or other punishment for companies that are found to have problems preventing fraudulent changes to data, so that companies could build in meaningful safeguards around ACTUAL financial data (with the ROI being the prevention of said fines so security groups could get funding), as opposed to safeguarding anything that smells like financial data to auditors (with the auditors of course paid more the more systems they have to audit). Let auditors audit crooks, not the innocent. Then we could also document the real bypasses to processes instead of having them but having to pretend they do not exist because auditors and high-level execs Cannot Know.
Most of the IT portion of SOX is based around having meaningful tools to have an effective security policy to tell people what they can and cannot do, as well as means to detect when those rules are violated. It is the latter portion that seems to often cause the most grief. You cannot know where the problems exist unless you provide for an accountability trail to ensure that people manipulating financial impacting data are tracked.
Actually, what is needed is a clueful audit response department. This department would be able to classify systems as SOX impacted or not depending on if they process data that is relevant to SOX. Then, you make sure you have a reasonably effective security policy and follow it.
It seems a lot of companies have a problem with writing a security policy that is reasonably effective. Many firms I've seen seem to do the "wink system", where they write a ridiculous policy that is impossible to follow in reality, then wonder why the auditors hold them to that policy as audit findings.
Others write policies that don't even pretend to cover basic security. The model at some of those firms seems to be "What developer wants, gets." Developer wants unrestricted permanent root on the prod box? They get it. Developer wants direct login to shared accounts as a part of the application? They get it, and no one dares tell them no.
A lot of what I've seen as very effective in audits is to provide for a strong audit trail of who did what. There are multiple ways to do that. Have a process in place to detect errors, and a check to ensure that process is being followed. Ensure that no one person can do something malicious and erase all evidence of it.
Disclaimer, part of my job is audit response on SOX and PCI and other audits, preparing servers for the audit, ensuring compliance outside the audit, etc.
It'd be nice if the author made it more clear what OS this is claimed to apply to. For example, Solaris 10 has /usr/bin/ldd as an ELF. I don't have my HP-UX or AIX test systems handy, nevermind recent releases of RHEL.
Also, what efforts has the coder gone to in order to notify the appropriate security groups so that a fix can be produced quickly? I'm not disputing the potential security issues, but there is a reason for first disclosing to a vendor on non-public channels. Give the vendor/coder the chance to do the right thing and produce a fix.
It seems Microsoft FUD doctors have been contracted out to the medical profession these days.
I don't understand. Your subject says news, but your post says Fox. Which is it? Fox xor a news website?
When I purchased a home, I was informed in no uncertain terms by the lawyer handling the transaction that my legal signature was first, middle and last name written out in full. I don't know what he would have done had I printed instead of tried to fake cursive. (I've forgotten most cursive capital letters).
Calculus itself may seem to have changed little, but ways to teach it have changed dramatically. Consider the series of debates over "traditional math" (often taught until around the 1950s) vs "New Math, vs "Whole Math" vs the latest fad. That's just the methods to teach basic arithmetic and a few unrelated topics.
One of the constant updates for textbooks is to keep the word problems feeling relevant. I recently took my child through a pre-algebra text and was amazed at how the word problems actually related to the material without feeling the least bit contrived. Some classic works like "How to lie with Statistics" are harder for someone today to understand because the products often don't exist, the numbers don't have that intuitive feel to them anymore.
Technology does have a place in schools. I remember sitting there watching as the teacher struggled to get that filmstrip going and timing the tape player to advance each slide at the perfect instant. Oops, the last two slide advances weren't obvious, rewind the tape and try again. Today, that is less of a problem. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those monsters.
One place technology has a place is a student who is not capable of typing before they reach high school is not adequately prepared for high school. This nonsense about making touch typing a mandatory course in high school is just a fancy way of saying that students shouldn't be learning touch typing when I did, by grade five. By high school, the student should be turning in all papers typed. Learning to type can come right after they learn to print, leaving cursive to the art class where it belongs.
From the linked article...
* Drivers were only given 15 minutes to adapt to a driving simulator, simulating a very unfamiliar vehicle. This is much lower than I would expect, and would tend to magnify even the slightest distraction. When I bought a new vehicle, I felt uncomfortable with it for days until I really felt like I had memorized all the subtle differences like how sensitive the gas pedal was, the slight difference in the height of the dials, the blind spots created by the frame, etc.
* The participants were driving an unfamiliar course, again a factor
* The traffic conditions were deliberately chosen as suboptimal, again a factor
* Lulling or dropping the conversation was not given as an option to the driver or the converser, creating an artificial scenario where the driver was instructed that they must continue the conversation without break
* The definition of success was not measured based on actual leaving of the lane, but on some undefined level of drifting from the perfect center of the lane. A driver who consistently drives slightly off center would thus be penalized under this measurement, depending on the details, possibly more than the driver who deviated outside their lane once briefly.
* Several presumptions were made without reference to a prior study to justify them in creating the results.
In short, the procedural design creates significant doubt in my mind as to the significance of the results.