Written by TheJemReport Staff
Apr 22, 2010 at 01:36 PM
With a history of conducting dedicated research into aeronautical energy conversion devices, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has long been considered a leader in the development and application of renewable energy products and systems. One of the most recent energy conversion systems developed by NASA is a bioreactor which has become known as the OMEGA system, due to it being an offshore membrane enclosure for growing Algae. The OMEGA system has shown the capability to produce energy efficient and environmentally sustainable aeronautical quality oil through the use of algae. The development by NASA is set to assist the bio fuels industry in taking renewable energy to a new level and also assist in the process of water recycling and purification.
By using recyclable plastic bags, The OMEGA system relies upon forward-osmosis membranes which use waste water to harvest algae through a process of photosynthesis. The sun’s energy then allows the developing algae to extract carbon dioxide which is derived through atmospheric conditions and the nutrients that are found in the waste water. Through this process the algae grows and develops biomass and oxygen which is then able to be processed into a renewable energy source for use in the aeronautical industry. The process also has other benefits for the environment as the forward-osmosis actions cleanses the waste water and generates fresh water which can then be used in both commercial and individual arenas.
In recent years there has been much green activity in the use of algae for the development of renewable energy sources. The breakthrough by NASA has provided a device which not only assists with renewable energy but also provides a safe process for water to be recycled and placed back into the community. The groundbreaking green technology developed at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California is also going to have benefits for the non government sector with NASA recently partnering with Algae Systems in Nevada so that the technology is not restricted for governmental use. The ability of green technologies to incorporate naturally formed algae into the renewable energy field is sure to see a continued refinement which will carry on assisting in reducing carbon emissions in a number of industries. The OMEGA system has shown itself to be one of the greatest green technology innovations developed through NASA which has multiple uses for both industry and the general community.
Metropolis Magazine recently announced the winner of their 2009 Next Generation Design Competition where the entrants were challenged to “fix our energy addiction.” A team of French designers have won the prize with an innovative, practical way to create renewable energy wind farms.
Their Wind Turbine Towers, called Wind-it, install wind turbines in out-of-use electrical transmission towers. The idea is simple and elegant. Because the turbines are installed into the old electric transmission towers, it is easy to get the power into the power grid.
This innovation helps propel the European Union towards its goal of using renewable energy sources to produce 20 percent of the energy needed by 2020. The French designers who came up with the idea are Nicola Delon, Julien Choppin and Raphael Menard. They claim 5 % of Frances energy needs could come from installing these wind farms in one-third of the transmission towers.
What is a major benefit of the idea is that the towers are already constructed and would not result in additional structures which many view as unattractive.
Dr. J. Craig Venter and the team of scientists at his institute are at the forefront of synthetic biology. They are working on, among other things, the creation of a bacterium that will both pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create natural gas. You might think this sounds like a far off dream, but they are optimistic they can get this done sooner rather than latter.
Dr. Venter’s track record makes the claim more noteworthy. Here’s a list of thing’s Dr. Venter has accomplished already:
1) He worked at the National Institutes of Health we a team to develop expressed sequence tags (ESTs), a new technique to rapidly discover genes. (1991) 2) He started a not for profit research institute on genomic research in the early 90s- The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). 3) His team became the first to sequence a free living organism, Haemophilus influenzae (accomplished in 1995) 4) He was part of one the first groups to sequence the human genome. (2001 – Celera Genomics) 5) He went on a two-year ocean voyage and collect different genomes from all sorts of sea life. The global ocean sampling expedition found more than six million new genes and thousands of new protein families. 6) He has created an the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) by merging several leaders in genomic research and amassed a group of more than 400 scientists and staff, more than 250,000 square feet of laboratory space, and locations in Rockville, Maryland and San Diego, California. (the merger included The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) , The Center for the Advancement of Genomics (TCAG), The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, The Joint Technology Center, and the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA)) 7) His team successfully transformed one species of bacteria into another, which is a major milestone in synthetic biology. His institute patented the foundation genome they created, M. genitalium JCVI-1.0
The finished “to do list” Dr Venter and his colleagues have accomplished is far more impressive than my list, which normally involves picking up groceries and dry cleaning.
So now JCVI is using their collection of genomes, army of scientists, and knowledge of synthetic biology to create the natural-gas-creating-carbon-dioxide-eating bacterium. It sounds a lot more plausible given the list of accomplishments to date. Oh, and by the way, they are on a “quest to create a synthetic chromosome and organism”, which is even more stuff of science fiction. Go to the J. Craig Venter Institute web site and look at it’s history, (www.jcvi.org). You will find they “seek to make a worldwide impact with our science”. Clearly, they are serious and have the track record to make it happen.
When discussing synthetic biology it’s hard not to bring up the ethical issues involved in creating new life forms. If you are interested in reading more on this, there is an excellent article on the topic called “Synthetic biology, ethics and the hacker culture” at:
In a trial by AT&T, consumers in Atlanta can get a “netbook” for $50 when you sign up for their internet service. The netbook differs from a regular PC because the new breed of PCs are built to connect to and run applications on the network. The netbooks are much thinner and smaller and are configured with less features than a regular PC. The also won’t run out of battery nearly as fast.
Is this a game changer? DisplaySearch, a unit of the NPD Group comments, “With the economic crisis on everyone’s minds, many buyers are adjusting their discretionary spending and purchasing mini-notes as lower-priced alternatives to notebook PCs.” The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the market for netbooks will be growing by 65 percent this year compared to 3 percent for regular PCs. The New York Times suggests that the netbook could control 10 percent of the PC market by the end of 2009.
This new trend is troubling for Microsoft because the netbooks are typically based on a operating system called Linux and the inside of the netbook looks more like a cell phone than a Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft is working on a version of their operation system to work with the traditionally lower cost netbooks.
It is not out of the question that very soon some cellular phone company will offer a netbook for free if you sign up for their internet and data service. That is a game changer and most of the industry is taking notice. Writer Michael Horowitz commented on netbooks, “I think that Netbooks will be the first computer for a whole generation of children, starting, perhaps, as early as the upcoming holiday season (said in late 2008). Netbooks will help and benefit from the transition away from plastic DVDs as a movie medium to electronic media.”
Not everyone is is singing the netbook’s praises. Michael Arrington, comments in and article on TechCrunch called Three Reasons why Netbooks Just Aren’t Good Enough, “I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible. The basic problem as I see it: Netbooks are designed to appeal to two very different markets – the price sensitive and the size sensitive. The two are really mutually exclusive.”
For more information:
Norway has proven itself to be a consistent player in the development of green fuel technologies and has once again taken the spotlight with its latest green technology innovation, the Tofte Osmotic Power Plant. The Tofte Osmotic Power Plant which utilizes a process that extracts the chemical energy which is produced by a groundbreaking osmosis procedure when salt and freshwater collides. Initial testing showed that the Osmotic Power Plant was capable of producing ten kilowatts of energy continually, although it has been speculated that with continued refinement the Osmotic Power Plant will be capable of producing a continual twenty five megawatts of energy.
Osmosis has generally been used in the purification of water by establishing a membrane which blocks unwanted particles within the water. Researchers in Norway have however, reversed the osmosis process by using the membrane to drag in fresh water so that it combines with salt water. The pressure of the reverse osmosis procedure was found to generate significant energy and research then focused on delivery of sufficient energy to engage electricity turbines. By drawing the energy into a pressure exchanger researchers uncovered that the salt water flow diverted by the membrane into the fresh water output there was sufficient energy to drive electricity turbines. During the design of the osmotic power plant it was found that without the pressure exchanger there was insufficient energy to drive electrical turbines. The developments by researchers from Norway have shown that in locations where freshwater meets saltwater there is an alternative and sustainable energy source available to the community.
The osmosis power plant system has raised interest throughout many coastal cities throughout the world as the system provides an energy efficient process which has also proven itself to be sustainable and cost effective. The actual process developed by the research team was not initially intended to relate to renewable energy as they were engaged in developing water purification treatments. However, researchers quickly realized that the osmosis process had the ability to be applied within the energy field and diverted their attention to working on the energy potential of osmosis. With the Tofte Osmotic Power Plant showing its ongoing energy performance in Norway this green technology has proven itself to be one of the major players in the reduction of carbon emissions produced by energy industries. Further research is currently being undertaken to identify other green technologies which can be produced through osmosis and it is expected there will be further groundbreaking discoveries in the near future.
Wayne Campbell and Ashton Partridge of Massey University in New Zealand have made efficient solar cells made from organic dyes. The dyes used in the solar cells are efficient, made at low cost, and can even generate electricity on a cloudy day. What is more exciting is that the dye Cambell and Partridge developed ( made from a biological pigment called porphyrin, a component of chlorophyll) makes a dye-sensitized solar cells far more practical to produce. There has been a lot of research in this area since the early 90s when Micheal Graetzel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology first created such a device using dyes that contained the metal ruthenium. The issue with Graetzel’s device is that ruthenium is not plentiful enough to practically mass product.
So what is the catch?
Solar cells based on dyes have an issue with stability: they tend to break down quickly. This is an area of major research right now, and, if this issue can be overcome, we may see this new technology on the market as early as a year from now.
This type of solar cell can be incorporated into windows, walls, and even clothing.
Several developments in healthcare research during 2008 promise to have exiting possibilities as we look toward the future. Some of them may take years to move into a phase where their results are commercially available, but, nevertheless, the innovations will make a difference. Here are five such developments.
1) Refurbished hearts
More than 22 million people have heart failure. Even with the major advances in treatment for heat failure, over 50 percent of these people die within five years or learning of the condition.
Dr. Doris Taylor, the Medtronic-Bakken Chair in Cardiac Repair and the Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota , is researching another alternative. She researches using stem cells, genes, and devices to create new cardiac and vascular technologies. What Dr. Taylor and her team have been able to do is to strip a rat’s heart of all cells and then to put the living cells from a healthy rat back into it. The new cells divide and can create the tissues needed to reform the heart and, miraculously, the new heart starts beating. More Information.
2) Adult cells to insulin
Ou August 27,2008 Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers posted the results of a startling new experiment: using mice, they converted adult pancreatic cells into insulin-producing beta cells. Although early in the process, this experiment opens the door for new cures for a variety of illnesses. A diabetic, for example, could have their own cells transformed to help them produce insulin. The study was published on the online journal, Nature.
Douglas A. Melton, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and postdoctoral fellow Qiao “Joe” Zhou were involved in this study. Mr Melton comments, “What this shows is that you can go directly from one type of adult cell to another, without going back to the beginning.” More Information.
3) Cocaine cravings
Scientists have puzzled over the fact that cravings can intensify the longer a drug user has stopped taking cocaine. A new finding has new hope in developing treatments for cocaine addiction that can reduce the risk of relapse.
The study published in the May 25 issue of the journal Nature, “reveals a novel mechanism for why cocaine craving intensifies after cessation of drug use and suggests a new target for the development of medications to decrease the risk of relapse in abstinent cocaine abusers,” says National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Dr. Nora Volkow. More Information.
4) Early detection of Alzheimers
Amyloid plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients have been a subject of scientific discussion for years. Scientists have thought that either (1) the plaques have caused Alzheimer’s disease or (2) these plaques were generated as the disease progresses. Ganesh M. Shankar, Ph.D., and Dennis J. Selkoe, M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with several universities and hospitals have shown beta-amyloid protein fragments may damage brain cells. This finding would suggest that beta-amyloid protein fragments play a key role in the start of this irreversible disorder. This studing is published online in Nature Medicine, June 22,2008. More Information.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a “microscope on a chip” that is small and can be produced very inexpensively. The Science daily, July 29, 2008 claims that it can be mass-produced at around $10.
Because this device is small, has no lens to break, and can be produced at low cost the potential applications for this new microscope are exciting. You could, for instance, develop a microscope that could fit in a cell phone sized devide. Such a device would, amoung other things, help field workers in undeveloped countries to check for malaria or for hikers to check for microbes. More Information.
UK University researchers have been working with the steel industry to create a “solar paint”, where solar cells are applied to sheets of steel. Production of this solar paint is set to begin very shortly. With the power conversion efficiency reported above 10 percent, the potential energy generation of this new technology is staggering. “If the solar cell paint can be successfully brought to the market, it could spell big changes when it comes to the future production of electricity,” said Steve Fisher of the Corus Group, a European steel manufacturer.
What is solar paint?
In a recent article in ScienceDaily.com dated March 2008, two scientists working in the Materials Research Centre at Swansea University in Wales, Dr. Dave Worsley and Dr. Tristan Watson, discovered that rolling thin layers of solar cell infused paint on steel led to the discovery of a new way of encapsulating solar power. The researchers have been concentrating most of their efforts on making steel more durable and resistant to corrosion. Part of Worsley and Watson’s research also centers on how paint is damaged by sunlight and what can be done about it.
The method of applying solar paint occurs during the manufacturing process of steel when a thin layer of solar cells is applied via rollers. The flexible steel grids can be horizontal in a field, or attached to buildings and homes. As the solar paint absorbs heat from the sun it creates an actual electrical current which generates power for batteries, telephones, and other equipment.
The promise of solar paint
One of the benefits of modern solar powered thin cell paint is that it produces higher levels of energy over its life than it took to create them. Meaning, ten years ago, it took more energy to manufacture a solar cell grid than was “paid back” in energy usage. Another benefit is that a thin celled painted grid may have a life of 20 to 30 years with little or no harm to the environment. Currently, multiple expensive solar panel grids are necessary to supply enough energy for homes and other buildings. Research continues to develop solar paint with even higher wattage and efficiency at more cost effective levels. As solar paint becomes a more viable source of power, along with the global necessity of finding cheap alternative sources of energy Рyou may soon find the science of Photovoltaics right in your own backyard. For more information, or to read other related articles please visit www.sciencedaily.com/releases . Swansea University (2008, March 10). Colorful Idea Sparks Renewable Electricity From Painting Solar Cells. ScienceDaily. Retrieved. And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
What is photovoltaics?
The field of Photovoltaics (PV), also used in space exploration, studies how solar cells may be used to create electrical energy power from the sun. The excitement about Photovoltaics stems from the current demand for cheap energy sources. Most people are familiar with the idea that solar energy can be tapped with less environmental impact – making it one of the most important and vigorously studied technologies in recent years.
The frustration of proving one’s age to buy things like alcohol and tobacco does not end when you reach the appropriate legal age. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have a youthful appearance are forever burdened with having to carry a state-issued ID card to every place where we might want to buy alcohol or tobacco. Over the past few years, we’ve been gradually subjected to another, more intrusive ID-related hassle — that of electronic drivers license scanning. It’s one thing when a government representative scans your driver’s license; it’s another thing entirely when a restaurant does it, and records your personal information in the process. Is this legal? Ethical? Secure? In order to find out, I contacted an electronic security and privacy expert, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The incident at Houstons
It was August of 2006, and I decided to take my girlfriend out to a nice dinner. She’s particularly fond of the veggie burger at Houstons, a regional restaurant chain owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Hillstone Restaurant Group, which also controls the Gulfstream, Bandera, Rutherford Grill, Palm Beach Grill, Cherry Creek Grill, Los Altos Grill, and Cafe R&D restaurants.
We sat down and ordered drinks. I was, of course, asked for my driver’s license, which I presented to the waitress. My girlfriend was not asked for her ID, which she found somewhat insulting, being that she is of an age to be insulted by the assumption that she looks over 30. The waitress thanked me for handing over my Florida driver’s license, then hurried away before I could both recognize the fact that she’d walked off with my ID, and organize some kind of protest. She returned a few minutes later with our drinks, and handed me my ID card. “Why did you need to take my license?” I asked. “Oh, we had to verify it,” she replied. “Out of curiosity, what do you do to verify it?” “We scan it through a machine that makes sure it’s real,” she said cheerfully.
I was totally shocked and really upset that my driver’s license was just scanned without my consent, so I asked the speak with the manager. Not only was he clueless as to the license scanner’s method of operation — he insisted that it was for my own protection, which is as bizarre a statement as I can imagine — but during the course of our heated and repetitive conversation he tried to flirt with my girlfriend to get her on his side, against me. I wrote a letter to an executive at Hillstone to complain about the situation on both levels, and a few days later I got a call from Robert Hardie, a regional vice president at Hillstone. The first thing he did was apologize for the manager’s behavior; I responded by thanking him for the effort, but that the only appropriate apology for the situation would come in writing from the manager I dealt with, not a proxy. This was the only remedy I was interested in, because I felt more insulted at the manager’s behavior than I did about anything else — I already wasn’t going to eat at Houstons ever again because of the license scanning issue, but I wanted the situation to be made right. I was told that a written apology from the restaurant manager was not an option available to me. The second thing Hardie told me was that serving alcohol was a privilege, not a right, and that Hillstone implemented the license scanning procedure to protect customers from false IDs. I told him outright that what he’d just said was ridiculous because my safety and security were not at risk until my license was confiscated and scanned by the waitress, effectively putting me at risk instead of removing some imaginary risk. I asked him to explain how I could possibly benefit from his license scanning scheme. The answer was that it protects people under the age of 21 from drinking alcohol, which has benefits that are supposed to be obvious to me, and as a side effect it protects the restaurant from underage drinking sting operations. “Aha,” I said, “So it does not protect me, it protects you.” He agreed reluctantly. Hardie further stated that he would make sure the manager I dealt with was reprimanded accordingly, but he was more concerned that the manager did not know all of the appropriate technical details of the scanning machine than he was about the man’s behavior toward my girlfriend. Before our conversation was over, Hardie provided me with the exact make and model of the license scanning machine Hillstone-controlled restaurants used — an IntelliCheck IDC1400. This model is no longer in production, but there are many like it showcased on the IntelliCheck home page.
Last week we decided to see if the restaurant had changed its policies, and reserved a table at Houstons. Again, the waitress tried to walk away with my license, but this time I stopped her and told her that under no circumstances was it to be scanned. “Look at it, test it with a blacklight, call the motor vehicles bureau, whatever — you are not allowed to record that card electronically,” I insisted. I then provided her with a second form of government issued photo ID that did not have a bar code or magnetic strip — a concealed weapons permit. “That’s two forms of government-issued photo ID — that should be enough,” I told her. She said she’d have to talk to the manager about it. It was a different manager this time, but instead of being condescending like the previous one, this manager was confrontational and aggressive. He asked what the problem was with license scanning. I told him what I’ve related here for the most part, adding that I’d researched the machine he was using and discovered that it was designed to record drivers license data. I would not permit this. “Then we don’t serve you,” he said indignantly. I told him that I was the only person at a table of 4 people who was asked for ID, and that this was not only insulting and belittling towards me, but that because of the waitress’ inability to approximate my age, I had to forfeit the privacy of my driver’s license information. This caused a rather explosive confrontation that prompted us to leave and relocate to a different restaurant. Was I right to disagree with this policy? Was I being paranoid, or was I just upset that at 29 I was still being asked for my license by some waitress who was not only substantially younger than me, but might actually not have been of legal age to serve me alcohol?
The security of license scanners
My first concern was the security of the data being collected from my driver’s license. To better understand the risk in this situation, I contacted security expert Bruce Schneier. In addition to his blog, Schneier is also the author of 8 security-oriented books, including Beyond Fear, and many essays on cryptography, and security and privacy in the information age. The first thing I wanted to know was, of course, if civilians scanning state-issued drivers licenses constituted a dangerous and insecure situation. “The situation with hackers — can the data be intercepted, can the database be hacked — is scary, but it’s not really a realistic threat when you consider the other information available to them, like credit card numbers and social security numbers,” he replied. “This is just yet another database of information on you.”
There isn’t a lot someone can do with your driver’s license number — it’s not nearly as important as a social security number, unless you live in a state like Arizona which uses your SSN as your driver’s license number. SSNs are important to identity thieves, so electronic scanning of driver’s licenses puts bar and restaurant customers at a hightened risk for identity theft. But if you have a non-SSN driver’s license number, the data is not particularly important to thieves and other people with nefarious intent. What other threats would collecting this information pose? “Would you like a list of every bar you’ve visited to be posted on the Internet? How about marketing — would you like to receive more of that? This data is sold to ChoicePoint and combined with other data about you and sold to a wide variety of companies for marketing.” He went on to explore the idea of how this might be used in the future: “Let’s say I had a bar — I could offer a drink special for 10% off if you agree to let me sell your drinking data to Bacardi. There’s nothing wrong with that because as the bar owner, I’d be telling you about it upfront and you’d have to agree to it. But to do this without notifying people, by collecting data through age verification, is kind of sleazy.”
Indeed it is. I was not told that my license would be scanned, that my data would be collected and transmitted over a public network to some unknown corporation that has access to information that I thought was private between the state of Florida and me. The waitress took my license, walked away with it, and came back with my drink and the license. It wasn’t until I questioned her that I found out that it was scanned. I told her that I did not give her permission to scan my license, but she thought I was joking with her. So now somebody somewhere has a record of my buying alcohol — or more specifically, being carded for attempting or intending to buy it — along with my name, address, height, eye and hair color, driver’s license number, date of birth, the status of my eyesight, the classes of vehicles I am authorized to drive, and possibly also my photo and a copy of my signature.
“The record of your drinking habits could be used in court as evidence — for instance, in a divorce case if your wife accuses you of being an alcoholic. A record like this could be used, but this kind of thing happens all the time in our society. Do you have some kind of toll booth pass, like EZ-Pass? Data from EZ-Pass usage has been used in divorce cases.. Every time you use a credit card, there’s a record of the purchase and where it occurred. Your cell phone’s whereabouts can also be tracked. All of this information is being collected, organized, and used for all kinds of purposes, good and bad.”
So how do we as consumers fight this? Schneier says that we’re of course free to boycott establishments that use scanners, and that someday we may even see some bars advertised as offering anonymous drinking, as an alternative to places that collect and record information about your drinking habits. “You’re basically screwed, because if you don’t let them scan your license, they make you leave, or won’t serve you. The courts and the ballot box are a better way to fight this matter. Talking to the employees won’t make a difference because, as you said, it’s company policy. They’re going to do it because it’s company policy, and since the decision about scanning is made far away from the point where it happens, you’re not going to get anywhere.”
Bruce Schneier suggested I contact that American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), so I did. I received a response from Jay Stanley, the public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program. Here’s what he had to say:
“This is certainly a violation of our privacy/civil liberties. It is a violation of the principle that personal information collected for one purpose should not be used for other purposes without an individual’s affirmative, fully informed permission. The fact that you provide information to prove you are complying with drinking-age laws should not require you to give up other personal information about yourself, and to be tracked.
Personally when I am asked for a driver’s license for various reasons (age-verification being an increasingly rare occurrence for me), I watch carefully to make sure that it is not scanned and am not afraid to challenge, ask sharp questions if I have to.
At the same time, there is only so much the individual can do, for example if such scanning is widespread or if you’re not in a position to walk out on a place whose practices you don’t like. This is just one of many examples we are seeing today of novel privacy violations due to the growth of technology. Ultimately, our country needs good privacy laws implementing the “use limitation” principle I mentioned above and the other well-established basic principles of privacy, which every other industrialized nation around the world has enacted through overarching privacy legislation.
Does it really work?
Currently, the best way to visually identify a valid driver’s license is to view the holographic image embedded on the front face of the ID card. If you can’t see it well enough by tilting the card at an angle, you can easily see the image with a blacklight. Many bartenders do have a small blacklight behind the bar exactly for this purpose. But the holographic image can be faked — or more accurately, it can be suitably reproduced on a counterfeit ID. It is not easy to do this, and requires sophisticated printing technology that few civilians have easy access to, but you can buy a fake ID on the Internet or in person that will reproduce the holographic technology.
IntelliCheck offers little information about its technology on its Web site — probably because it isn’t terribly complicated to read a card, verify its data in a database, and print a message. In its “fast facts” PDF, IntelliCheck’s only technical point in its list of advantages is, “Our patented technology reads, verifies and parses the information encoded on issued drivers licenses, identification cards and military IDs with magnetic stripes, one- and two-dimensional bar codes and smart chips.” So we are to assume that the magic that makes electronic ID verification solutions more secure and accurate is contained in the bar codes and magnetic strip. Since bar codes are optically read, they can easily be visually reproduced, and since they’re in standard, documented formats like PDF417 that have freely available encoders and decoders, they can also easily be hacked. You can make a bar code record anything you want — including that you’re of legal drinking age. That means that any electronic scanning solution that provides simple feedback will be defeated by hacked bar codes. Scanning solutions that involve authentication against a remote database can also be easily hacked — you can simply use someone else’s (valid) data in your bar code. Don’t think you can defeat this by erasing the strip or drawing a black line through the bar code — defacing your license is against the law in the state of Florida (and probably everywhere else, too), and you face a $100 fine if a police officer discovers that your license is not in good condition.
The restaurant managers at Houstons and their superiors at Hillstone told me that they had the utmost confidence that the IntelliCheck devices they used were totally safe and effective, but could not tell me who stores the driver’s license data, or how it is transferred. All of them also denied that any data is recorded, but the IntelliCheck IDC1400 that they use is designed to permanently record driver’s license data. In fact, all of IntelliCheck’s current devices except one have the capacity to permanently store ID data, and some are designed solely for this purpose. According to Bruce Schneier, if the device reads and transmits data, it’s recording it in some way, even if it’s not kept on record. Furthermore, whatever entity is in charge of the driver’s license database is likely recording when and where a license is verified because some electronic ID verification companies list the elimination of duplicates (multiple simultaneous or successive verifications, indicating a possible duplicated ID) as a feature.
There are many ways to work around or defeat this technology, some of them new (hacking the magnetic strip and bar code data), some of them old (having someone else buy the drink for you). There is no evidence to suggest that total reliance on devices like the ones produced by IntelliCheck and other vendors is any more effective than visual verification of IDs, and in theory could actually be much worse. When I was in Philadelphia last year, two bars I visited had a bouncer at the door scanning IDs with a handheld device. Neither of the bouncers were looking at the photos or other information on the licenses they were scanning — people could have been handing them someone else’s ID for all they knew. Neither did the waitresses at Houstons visually compare my photo and my actual appearance — I could have given the bouncers or the waitress my older brother’s ID for all they knew. It would have verified and been recorded, and had I been underage, I would have had a drink illegally and the bar would still have been at fault despite the use of electronic license scanners. So much for being safe — a license scanner can’t defeat the oldest of underage drinking tricks.
The long fingers of prohibition
Even if I were underage and used my older brother’s ID and the waitress had checked the photo, who would know besides me (and possibly him)? There is enough of a family resemblance, and driver’s ID photos are notoriously bad and barely representative of their subjects, that no bartender or even a police officer would be able to truly determine who I really am with an ID alone. When I was a teenager, friends over 18 used to let other people borrow their IDs to buy cigarettes all the time — no one ever got caught. Security is a process of making easy attacks more difficult; it is not in the business of making things impossible, nor could it ever realistically be. Electronic license scanners will not stop underage drinking, and in effect could make the problem worse as they become more ubiquitous and bartenders and bouncers create logical shortcuts in their habits, scanning cards without looking at them. In situations where alcohol purchases involve little or no human interaction, such as at automated checkout lines in stores like Wal-Mart, the risk of underage alcohol sales through a totally electronic age verification process is greatly increased.
The current methods of license verification that most grocery stores use is to view a license and type its date of birth numbers into the register, which then approves or denies the alcohol sale depending on age. Again, because this is a tedious process, if you look old enough or if the date on your license makes you significantly older than 21, most cashiers just type in 11111 for the date to make it easier. There really is no substitute for proper inspection and scrutiny — electronic devices may make this process quicker, but they don’t make it more accurate or secure. Sometimes technology makes our work easier, and sometimes it makes it easier for us to be lazy.
The heart of the issue here is that prohibition doesn’t work. Every little scheme to try to enforce an unreasonable drinking age restriction will be met with a workaround or hack. Someday there may be a fingerprint scheme to try to ensure that you and your ID refer to the same person, and I have no doubt that within six months from the start of that policy, there will be a prosthetic skin device that will allow you to fake your fingerprint. As long as there are laws that people want to break, there will be clever ways to break them. Even if the sale of alcohol were somehow totally prevented to people under 21, the home brewing of alcohol would increase dramatically, just as it did during all-ages prohibition in the early 20th century. But before both the government and private businesses make more of an effort to crack down on under-21 drinking, they will first make it less private for everyone and more profitable for themselves. So like both the ACLU and security expert Bruce Schneier suggested, perhaps the best way to deal with this for now is to avoid places like Houstons that scan driver’s licenses, and hope that someday in the future we don’t have to actively seek out an establishment that offers anonymous drinking.
On my primary World of Warcraft (WoW) server, I have several high-level characters on the Alliance faction — all male. Every now and then I get sick of guild drama or the game’s snail-like progression through the high level armor and weapon set upgrades, and I head over to another server where I have some Horde characters. I think of this other server as my own personal Bizarro World, where I make totally different character choices than I would on my Alliance server. As such, most of my Horde characters are female — not for any other reason than wanting to make different choices so that I can see parts of the game that I’ve never seen before. That mission was easily accomplished; the entire social aspect of WoW is completely different between male and female characters. Here are a few of the things I’ve discovered about playing a female character in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
Traditional gender roles bleed into the virtual world
Among the World of Warcraft player classes that can be healers, players unanimously assume that if you are female, you are a healer. If you’re male, you’re generally assumed to be a tank (you take all the damage and focus enemy attacks on yourself) or DPS (an abbreviation for Damage Per Second, meaning you do most of the damage). There is a sense of surprise when you announce that you, a female paladin, are in fact a tank or DPS. Even after you’ve made that clear, you’ll probably still be expected to heal a 5-person group, even if there are male characters more qualified to heal than you are. People just tend to assume that a girl cannot do as much damage as a guy, and that your primary strengths as a female involve caring for others.
The good news is, if you actually are a healer, the male characters feel a much stronger urge to protect you from enemy attacks. This has an overall positive effect on group dynamics, because all 4 other players should protect the healer with their lives — it’s the healer that is keeping everyone from dying. One of the things that frustrates me about my main Alliance character — a healer-spec shaman — is that your teammates tend not to notice that you’re being attacked until you’re dead or you scream at them to protect you. My shaman is not only male, but kind of ugly too — nobody you’d want to impress, I suppose.
You can fit through doors
Some races are taller than others. Gnomes are the shortest and can fit through any door without any trouble. Draenei and Tauren are the tallest of the races, and can’t fit through some openings (like the stable side door in Arathi Basin). While on a mount, these races are even taller, and can’t fit through most doors in major cities, which forces you to dismount before you can go inside. Obviously this is annoying. Female Draenei and Tauren, however, are just a little bit shorter than their male counterparts, and can usually fit through the same doors that males cannot, while mounted. This may sound like a trivial problem, but to some people it is a really big deal — so much so that some people have vigorously petitioned the WoW developers to allow them to switch genders on their Draenei and Tauren characters.
You get free stuff
Just standing around in a major city, it’s quite possible that someone might walk up and give you something valuable. I was in the Silvermoon City auction house once, when a male character sent me a whisper asking if I liked 2-handed swords. Since I obviously had one equipped, it was more or less a rhetorical question. “Yeah, they’re okay,” I replied. The character responded by opening a trade window and giving me a good 2-handed sword close to my level, with a pretty decent enchantment on it.
Oddly, the character that gave me that sword did not seem to expect anything in return. He didn’t ask for payment, bother me with personal questions, or follow me around like a lost puppy.
In dungeons, if a female character asks to take particularly good loot, male characters won’t usually argue with her at all, even if they really want it for themselves.
Everyone wants to group with you
No I will *not* be your fairy princess, and put that back in its sheath…
Whether I’m looking for a 5-person dungeon group, or running around the outside world on quests, people are constantly inviting me to groups. At first I thought they were spammers, because group/party chat channels are a common way to send gold spam to players, so I usually declined the invitations. But then I’d get messages from the people who invited me asking me why I didn’t want to group with them for a certain quest or whatever else they were doing.
The positive side to this is that it’s much easier to do group quests. On my Alliance server, I have characters who have had group quests in their quest logs for months, unable to find other people who will help to complete them. On my female Horde characters, it’s never a problem to find help, as long as the other players can see me. In some cases, a female-sounding name is good enough to merit an invitation.
You are the center of attention
In party, raid, battleground, and guild chat channels, conversation always flows to and around the female members. People are always commenting on what you are or are not doing, or are telling you jokes, offering support, or asking if you need help. Being a female character in World of Warcraft is like being a D-list celebrity in the real world.
Of course, when you screw up, everyone sees it because you’re the center of attention. But since all of the male characters want to be on your good side, people rarely say anything other than words of support and encouragement. One time I was waiting for an auction delivery to go through in Undercity, so I thought it would be funny if, while I waited, I laid down in one of the coffins near the mailbox. A couple of male characters made a show of doing various mournful emotes at me as they came to the mailbox.
Being the center of attention can also make you feel a sense of guilt or shame, since being a male in real life, I am deceiving other players in the game. I’m not actually claiming to be female, though — it’s just a cartoon character in an online game — but I do generally allow other people to assume that I am who my toon looks like.
Nothing infuriates a man like a woman laughing at his ineptitude
I have a female Blood Elf hunter character that I really enjoy playing in player-vs-player (PvP) battlegrounds. As any WoW player knows, hunters absolutely destroy in battlegrounds. If you’re dominating the kill list as a female player, male players really get upset and tend to spend the rest of the match focusing on killing you. If you’re in a world PvP situation and you kill a male player and laugh at him, the gloves come off and the fury is truly unleashed.
Maybe this is part of the traditional male and female roles point I made above — that women aren’t supposed to do more damage or be more physically powerful than men. It might also be that the female Blood Elf laugh emote sound is unusually derisive and evokes an elevated emotional response in male players. No matter what the reason is, the fact of the matter is that most men get really pissed off when a woman laughs at them, even moreso if said woman has just beaten him in a video game.
Men are creepy
Most of the points I’ve made so far are generally positive things, at least from a female character’s frame of reference. But there’s a dark side, too. I’ve had several people ask me how old I am and where I live. A lot of male characters follow me around, and stand close to me when I stop moving, presumably so they can get a closer look at my toon. Some have even asked me if I would take my armor off (characters are equipped with bikini-style undergarments, so you can’t be totally naked, but you can certainly reveal more if you unequip your gear).
Isn’t there enough porn on the Web to satisfy these men? Furthermore, do they think I actually look like my character toon? I mean, all of the characters in WoW are smokin’ hot — even the rotting undead female characters are thin and have have nice boobs, even if there are green exposed rib bones below them. Reality says, however, that most women do not look like this in real life, no matter where you live. Not only am I male, but for all these online guys who hit on my toon know, I could be some fat, hairy, slob. Honestly, why risk it?
Boys are petulant
Recently I was in a 4-person group for Ragefire Chasm. Just as we were running toward the instance gate, a Tauren druid who had been waiting nearby sent me a whisper, asking if he could join my group. I wasn’t the group leader, so I told him to send a whisper to the leader to ask him. He repeated his question, and I clarified that I was not the group leader and could not add him. Guessing that he might be too young, stupid, or drunk to figure out what to do, I mentioned in the party chat channel that this druid wanted to join our group, so the leader invited him. We figured out our group roles based on level and spec; I was the designated tank because I had the most armor and hit points.
After 4 or 5 battles, the Tauren druid sent me a whisper. I can’t recall exactly what he said because at the time I did not understand what he was asking me — it didn’t make any sense, so I said, “What?” He replied by asking how old I was. When I did not reply (being a tank requires that you pay close attention to the fight), he told me that he was 16 and asked my age again. Over the next 15 minutes, he asked me my age several more times, all of which I did not reply to. At the same time, he kept attacking enemies when the rest of us weren’t ready, which caused the healer and I to work harder to keep him alive and get the attackers off of him. When we got to the first dungeon boss, I began re-issuing magic buffs for the other party members to prepare us for the battle, when suddenly, in true Leeroy Jenkins style, the druid went charging forward into the boss. “Stay back!” he exclaimed heroically, apparently trying to prove his worth by getting creamed by an elite monster. We leaped into action to save him, and ended up pulling through without any serious trouble. As we rested to regain our health and mana, our 16 year-old hero asked me one more time how old I was. This time I put him on my ignore list, figuring that he’d get the hint without a confrontation. Soon after, he left the party and logged out. All I saw were the other 3 party members asking what happened. I told them that he’d been repeatedly asking me my age, and because of that, I’d put him on ignore. The group healer told me that the druid left because he said he didn’t want to be in a party that hated him. We all had a good laugh about it, then easily finished the dungeon without him.
If any parents are reading this, please take my advice: Do not teach your children that being annoying and repeatedly making demands will get them what they want. Make “no” mean “no,” — not “no” meaning “ask me 50 times and I will give up and say yes just so you’ll stop bothering me.” The rest of us human beings, who are forced to interact with your unruly brat, will be ever grateful.
Is being female right for you?
I’m sure I’ve made female MMORPG characters sound like a good option to you, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Your guy friends will certainly tease you about it, for one. And for every free item you get and group you find, some high school boy or creepy old man annoys or bothers you about personal details. I have not yet had a real-life female unload a bunch of girl talk on me yet, but I’m sure that given enough time, it will happen. And what will I do when I get to the maximum level and am more or less forced to use voice chat to participate in raids? I guess I’ll have to come clean about my gender at some point, if I’m going to raid with a guild. It’s not that big a deal, though — I’ve played the game with a lot of guys who had female characters, and nobody really cares so long as you don’t try to role-play a different gender. After all, you are not an Orc, Tauren, Troll, Draenei, Undead, Elf, Gnome, or Dwarf anyway, so in essence you’re already creating a character that is clearly not representative of your real life appearance and persona. If you’re going to choose a different race, why is it such a stretch to choose a different gender? Creating a female character when you’re male in real life doesn’t mean you’re confused about your gender or sexuality any more than creating an Orc means that you’re confused about your race.
Playing a girl character in a computer role-playing game is not remotely a new concept; Roberta Williams thought of it back in the 1980s when she developed King’s Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella. In a brief incarnation of the first Warcraft-like MMORPG, Quest For Glory V Online, one of the three character choices was Elsa von Spielberg, a female warrior (that game never made it out of beta; it’s a shame, considering how World of Warcraft-like it was, and predating the latter by several years). The majority of the Final Fantasy games have had main characters who were female.
World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs are not virtual hook-up services — they’re not Second Life — they’re adventure games. The point of playing is to virtually destroy the virtual forces of evil, not to find virtual love with someone you’ve never met. At the core of the issue, this really is just an online game and it should have no bearing on your real life activity, so roll whatever character race, class, and gender you think will be the most fun to play.
His institute patented the foundation genome they created, M. genitalium JCVI-1.0
