Portfolio Life .net

Negroponte Keynote: Electronics Are ‘Obese’

Posted in 4. action, Portfolio Life, Social Services by russ on the February 18th, 2008

Negroponte Keynote: Electronics Are ‘Obese’:

“Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of both the MIT Media Lab and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child, delivered the last keynote speech of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting tonight.

The talk focused on the groundbreaking work of the OLPC, which has managed to deliver thousands of $187 laptops to children in the developing world. Negroponte ran through a list of the organization’s accomplishments, noting that they had half a million machines in their pipeline and that production had reached 110,000 units per month. The big key to large-scale adoption remains price going forward,… “

(Via Wired News.)

He promises a price of $50 in 2011. I’m thinking evolved iPod Touch devices in 2011.

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boomer generation’s independent streak

Posted in 6. effort, Aging Care, Conversation, Health Care, Social Services, The Sandwich Generation by russ on the January 5th, 2008

C/net news has an article - Elderly to benefit from ‘fuzzy logic’ research

…The technique has already been used in a number of applications, but Coupland said the project’s researchers will now focus on quality of life for the elderly.

he Centre for Computational Intelligence will work with the University of Missouri’s Center for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology, which has carried out extensive research on sensor technology.

Specially developed sensors can monitor people’s movements, capture sleep patterns, or measure pulse and respiration, making them useful in identifying medical emergencies or diagnosing health problems.

Using the information gathered by the sensors, for example, fuzzy logic will be able to distinguish between similar-sounding but disparate events such as someone falling over and a door slamming, therefore reducing the number of false alarms….

they go on to describe how the technique doesn’t use cameras or other privacy intrusive devices. It does include audio monitoring but is looking for key sounds like someone falling or a door slamming.

“One of the big things is to do this without impeding on their personal life,” Coupland said. “We’ve got to be careful how we use this.”…

Professor Robert John, director of the Centre for Computational Intelligence, said this kind of technology will play an important role in allowing people to lead more active lives in the future, with less dependence on social care….

It’ll be at least fives years before it is fully tested, approved and implemented. Sounds very timely given the boomer generation’s independent streak.

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Caring for elders

Posted in 3. speech, Health Care, Social Services, The Sandwich Generation by russ on the December 16th, 2007

GenBetween posts about another site, Aging Parents and Elder Care.
I’m sure its good, given the recommendation. And I may post more about it later.

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DNA news - 08/05/07

Posted in 2. thought, Health Care, Social Services by russ on the August 5th, 2007


Police Want to Collect Abandoned DNA from Everyone by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei, Eye on DNA

This morning I spent a couple of hours at my local West London high road shopping and hanging out at the park with my kindergartener. Little did I know that the police could have been following my every move, collecting my fingerprints, DNA, footwear impressions, photographs, and other samples that I might have left behind on discarded drink bottles or candy wrappers. I say “could have been” because the scenario is unlikely. For now.

The UK Home Office is planning to give police the power to collect DNA samples off anything on the street without first arresting and bringing the suspect in to a police station. That means they can collect your DNA without your knowledge from any bodily samples you leave behind in public. Police in the US have been secretly collecting “abandoned” DNA from suspects for some time to convict criminals who might have never been caught otherwise….

Mendel’s Garden #17: Blog Carnival of Genetics, Science Roll

This time, it’s the honor of Scienceroll to host Mendel’s Garden, the blog carnival totally devoted to all the fields of genetics. I thought I couldn’t find enough articles as most of the bloggers were on their vacation. But I have to share 30(!) blogposts with you and as I would like to make it easier to go through all the submissions, I also present some funny videos on genetics. Enjoy and welcome in Mendel’s Garden!

(includes an amusing YouTube Mendel rap.)

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Charles Dickens revisited

Posted in 7. mindfullness, Social Services by russ on the July 23rd, 2007

Study of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA
By ADAM LIPTAK, The New York Times, Published: July 23, 2007

…When an airplane crashes, investigators pore over the wreckage to discover what went wrong and to learn from the experience. The justice system has not done anything similar.

But a new study does. Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice….

The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant….

I’m surprised by this. Partly because I know how faulty my own recollection is of features of someone I just met - let alone saw walking down the other side of the street. And, I believe, there have been studies done on how faulty the human mind is between discriminating between this is person “X” and this is someone who looks like person “X”.

…Most of the forensic evidence involved problems with the analysis of blood or semen. Forty-two cases featured expert testimony about hair, an area that is, Professor Garrett wrote, “notoriously unreliable.”

Informants testified against the defendants in 18 percent of the cases. (In three cases, it turned out they had an unusually powerful motive for their false testimony, as DNA evidence proved they were in fact guilty of the crime they had pinned on the defendant.)

There were false confessions in 16 percent of the cases, with two-thirds of those involving defendants who were juveniles, mentally retarded or both.

and then the thought provoking observation

The 200 cases examined in the study are a distinctive subset of criminal cases. More than 90 percent of those exonerated by DNA were convicted of rape, or of both rape and murder, rape being the classic crime in which DNA can categorically prove innocence. For other crimes, there is often no biological evidence or, if there is, it can give only circumstantial hints about guilt or innocence….

So we get tough on crime. We don’t rehabilitate and slowly improve our system of evidence.

[Charles] Dickens’s novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum that was the basis of the story’s Jacob’s Island. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens “humanised” such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as “unfortunates,” inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people’s lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation.

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