The Phantom City

Technology has the unfortunate quality of tempting people to use it, no matter how deleterious the effects. The growing ability to keep everyone under some sort of surveillance is a good example. Just today, I ran across a couple of stories that really creep me out in terms of what kind of society we are building.

The first story is a classic case of how good motives don’t necessarily excuse ill effects. A school in California tags its children with RFID badges and scans them wherever they are in the school. Apparently this gives them a good way of keeping out trespassers, keeping an eye on the kids, and taking accurate attendance. (Hmm, that doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult. I’m thinking it’s a matter of convenience in collecting data, kind of like the idea of checking out an entire cartload of groceries at once by running it under a scanner.)

But does it send a good message to the kids? Should they be growing up with the idea of casually accepting tagging as a means of surveillance? I know, it won’t be long before face-recognition technology just keeps track of them without even the need for an RFID tag.

The second story is a good example of another way surveillance enters your life: Silently, without permission, and for the most prosaic of reasons, money. ChoicePoint Inc. is a private firm that busily collects data about you from everywhere, starting off with credit records — they’re a spinoff of Equifax — and moving on through many things you wouldn’t imagine were kept, and then provides screening services and “actionable intelligence” to the government and various Homeland Security functions.

In the world of the Internet and databases, there’s a lot of information out there that folks don’t know is being kept on them, and ChoicePoint and other companies, such as LexisNexis, are looking to get in on the ground floor of a growth industry. Problem is, we don’t have a lot of restrictions or oversight on how that data is used. If we’re not comfortable with a governmental entity having easy access to our credit reports, dental records, genetic data, insurance information, driving record, email history, school records, criminal records, shopping receipts, video rentals, library books, etc., a private entity has even less oversight.

Update: Looks like the company providing the student RFID tags and tracking technology decided they didn’t agree with the idea that any publicity is good publicity. They’ve terminated their contract with the school.

Update, again: ChoicePoint illustrates a “small” problem with collecting your information and selling it to anyone who asks.

More North Korean stuff. This time, it’s a fascinating gallery of governmental propaganda art lionizing the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and the Great Mother, Kim Jeong-Sook.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing, which points out the Norman Rockwell-ness of at least one of the pictures. (Freedom of Speech is turned into Criticizing and Exposing Collaborators.)

Ouch.

I’ll give Duke credit. They played their game, and forced Carolina to play it as well.

Roy’s comments are available at Scout.com, as well as audio of the press conference.

And let’s not forget another good night for Jackie Manuel. 3 out of 4 on both field goals and free throws. Not bad.

Anyway, hope Duke enjoys it. I just have a feeling they won’t as much in three weeks.

I thought they had already announced that they had them? Maybe not.

The unfortunate brief description of this column in the Chronicle of Higher Education was

A music professor who prides himself on his cultural sensitivity suddenly finds it wanting in the classroom of an urban university.

As you can see, while the author talks about his cultural sensitivity and the challenges of teaching in a multicultural classroom, the hook for the story doesn’t seem to have much to do with culture. Essentially, the story revolves around two students who simply did not feel it necessary to respect the class or anyone in it, and then left after midterms. Given that he doesn’t mention problems with the other students or any specifics about the troublesome pair — something that may have fallen out in the editing — I’m not sure why this would be a cultural issue so much as the kind of discipline issue teachers run into all the time.

He recognizes that problem, when he talks about the need to set clear expectations like he did while teaching elementary school, but in that case I don’t know why this column was framed as a difference between the elite schools at which he taught before and the Queens, NY, university at which he teaches now. Was the point that poor kids don’t know how to behave? (I’d be ticked off if that was the point of the story.) I don’t understand, particularly when the story doesn’t mention the socioeconomic status of the two students.