Amazing what a slight shift in life circumstances can do for your perspective. This morning’s tech column on the radio was a near paen to Mastercard’s SmartCards
The combination of keyboard and online connectivity are being marketed as a method of reducing credit card fraud. When a button on the card is pushed, the card produces a unique password that can be used once.
Passing over the inherent surveillance possibilities, I’m struck by a couple of accessibility problems with this type of device.
The teensy keyboard looks like it would be fertile ground for typos and frustration for anyone with the dexterity issues posed by garden variety changes that come with age.
More problematically the conceit of the card also relies on an invisible resource: the card holder’s short term memory. The ability to remember patterned information (such as a phone number) diminishes with dementia and the likelihood that someone with even a mild memory problem will recall a random string of digits is small. (Password systems in general wildly over-estimate people’s ability to remember random strings: there’s a reason why people hoard passwords on paper.)
A card such as this may indeed become part of a cashless society but it would also be a source of additional (and unneeded) frustration for people with less than obvious limitations.
Links:
Is this sad or is this funny?
Heather
Jenny Diski’s on to something. I’d order two of these paper brain holders. One in silver; one in something more manly.
Even better–let’s get a couple of butched up chatelaines–wouldn’t need to worry about losing the scissors.
Diski tip via Maud
I’m in the middle of writing Christmas cards and I find myself reluctant. All because I haven’t been able to bring myself to update my address book to delete the names of friends and family who have died. Every time I look at their names I remember them and miss them. Even though it’s been several years since they died, removing their names seems like a betrayal. Maybe next year.
I have a recurring habit of buying fragments of other people’s family history. There’s something very melancholy about finding discarded photos in antique or junk shops. Whole lives heaped in random jumble. On Saturday, I found bits and pieces of a photograph of a family at a beach. The partial captions place the family in 1924 in Ferndale.
These three women are probably sisters or cousins–they appear in other family groupings on the tattered pages.
The photographs I buy are always are in bad shape—browned, faded, dog-eared but I find them very compelling. Not just for the women in the foreground. The tiny things going on in the background: the sisters’ feet; a girl hugging an older woman; a boy waving.
The Midnight Skaters
The hop-poles stand in cones,
The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
But not the tallest thee, ’tis said,
Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.
Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch
Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.
Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.
Edmund Blunden
