Technology Effects on Health & Well-Being

1. Phubbing

Ever heard of phubbing? Probably not, but I can bet you've phubbed someone or have been a victim. Believe it or not, phubbing is n the dictionary, and defined as the practice of ignoring one's companion or companions in order to pay attention to one's phone or other mobile device. It's become so big that there is actually a social media campaign called Stop Phubbing. The website is actually quite interesting and contains facts and statistics on phubbing, merchandise like posters and decals, and even a letter of intervention to that one friend who you just can't seem to get through too about their phone misuse. There are even wedding place cards that read "You belong here, your phone doesn't". Even a study at Baylor University's Hankamer school of business found that cellphones have a significant impact on romantic relationship leading to depression. The title of the study done by the marketing department was cleverly titled "My life has become a major distraction from my cell phone: partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners".

The first survey of 308 adults helped Roberts and David develop a "Partner Phubbing Scale," a nine-item scale of common smartphone behaviors that respondents identified as snubbing behaviors.
The resulting scale includes statements such as:

• My partner places his or her cellphone where they can see it when we are together. 
• My partner keeps his or her cellphone in their hand when he or she is with me. 
• My partner glances at his/her cellphone when talking to me. 
• If there is a lull in our conversation, my partner will check his or her cellphone. 

Results of the survey showed that:

• 46.3 percent of the respondents reported being phubbed by their partner 
• 22.6 percent said this phubbing caused conflict in their relationships 
• 36.6 percent reported feeling depressed at least some of the time 

Source: (Baylor study: Cellphones can damage romantic relationships, lead to depression)

The study revealed some fascinating discoveries to the researchers on cell phones effect not just on romantic relationships but also on personal well-being.  More specifically "momentary distractions by one's cellphone during time spent with a significant other likely lowers the significant other's satisfaction with their relationship, and could lead to enhanced feelings of depression and lower well-being of that individual" (Baylor Study).

2. Effect on Kids

The millennials in our class will tend to argue that they didn't grow up with as much technological as the grades below us, or probably anyone born past year 2001. Am I wrong? We may not have seen the first computers or first television sets but we lived through the birth, and transformation, of the smartphone, one of the most commonly used technologies today. How often have you seen the examples below in your daily life?

Pretty often I bet. Parents are the educational lifeline to their children. So it should come as no surprise that adult technology habits are going to be directly rubbed off on their kids. Many studies have shown that has parents increase their screen time, the children follow suit (Lappe 2015). Parents are portraying a message to their young children that their phone/tablet/laptop/etc. is more important than them. One study done by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that increased phone use at playgrounds correlated to children more likely to get involved in risky behavior. The means by the behavior weren’t determined but we can infer that if my parent isn’t watching, I can do whatever I want.

Another major discovery relating to our images above is that passive parenting, or parental neglect. The more time adults spend on technology the less affection is felt by the children, leading them to a similar digital addiction behavior. By the time a kid turns seven, they'll have watched the equivalent of one year's worth watching some sort of screen. This addiction behavior is discussed by Dr Sigman, a biologist and associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, where he says "that on-screen novelty and stimulation caused the release of dopamine, a chemical which plays an important role in the brain’s “reward” system and may be linked to the formation of addictions" (Bingham 2012). At age 10, kids have access to more than 5 screens in one household, and often are found looking at more than one at a time.

To conclude, technology can be a wonderful tool but if it's being misused and cause health problems in our small children then we need to reevaluate. The main thing technology takes away is the ability to communicate and read people's emotions which reduces their ability to be empathetic. Sue Palmer, author of the book Toxic Childhood, talks about a midwife who says it's becoming more common for mother's to text or post updates on their delivery, "They are not even really present at their children’s
births any more".

Sources:

Bingham, John. May 22, 2012. Mobile Addict Parents guilty of child 'neglect', warns psychologist. The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/9280194/Mobile-addict-parents-guilty-of-child-neglect-warns-psychologist.html

Lappe, Sara. June 12, 2015. How Electronic's Could Be Affecting Your Child's Health. US News. Retrieved from http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2015/06/12/how-electronics-could-be-affecting-your-childs-health

Public Release. September 29 2015. Baylor Study: Cellphones Can Damage Romantic Relationships, lead to depression. EurekAlert! Retrieved from https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/bu-bsc092915.php

SpaceX & Elon Musk's Journey to Mars

Elon Musk is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, a company with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of mars. SpaceX has been in the process of creating a space shuttle system that will allow humans to travel to Mars in order to colonize it and eventually make commercial interplanetary travel as easy as using an airline today.

The Falcon 9 is a multi-stage rocket that uses a refuelable booster system that will make refueling and getting large amounts of people into space easier in the future. This is how it works: SpaceX Interplanetary Transport

The Falcon 9 will make history today, March 30th, at 4:30PM MST when it will deliver the SES-10 satellite into orbit. This is the first time SpaceX will reuse one of the 14-story-tall boosters it recovered from past missions. The reused rocket will ferry a communications satellite into orbit for Luxembourg-based SES SA, SpaceX’s first commercial customer, and signals a leap forward in Musk's 15-year quest to drive down launch costs and eventually create a human colony on Mars. Upon success, this will mark the first time a reusable rocket has ever been launched into orbital space and landed upright.

Watch launch here on March 30th at 4:30PM MST: SpaceX Launch Livestream

Phil Larson, a former space policy advisor to President Obama stated “This is a Wright Brothers moment for space.”

Reusing rockets could lead to cheaper launches for commercial satellites and government partners – Elon Musk hints at giving discounts of up to 30 percent. Ultimately, if we’re going to send loads of humans to live on Mars, we need much cheaper systems for launching payloads into orbit.

SpaceX’s goal is very ambitious and has required millions of dollars of investments but Musk believes that the first humans will land on Mars within the next 6 years. With global warming and other threats to the Earth, looking to Mars as a hospitable planet is becoming more appealing for future generations.

Mars is very similar to Earth as it has

·            24 hour days

·            polar ice caps

·            seasons that change throughout the year.

However, there are many things that still need to be worked out for a life on Mars. How would infrastructure be built, how would politics work? There are many questions now but hopefully soon we will be able to at least see the first humans walk on Mars. And maybe through Elon Musk’s vision and time, we will be able to call Mars home in the future.

Tech Briefing: Li-Fi

Background

Li-Fi is similar to Wifi in that it is a high speed, wireless communication technology. However, it differs from Wifi because it uses light from light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to deliver the network connection, whereas Wifi uses radio waves. This is a form of visible light communication. Li-Fi uses light from LEDs by switching the current to the light on and off at a rate that is too fast to be detected by the human eye, and the signals are picked up by a photo detector and then it is processed. The use of visible light communication to transmit information has actually been around since the 1880’s, but the term “Li-Fi” was created by Harald Haas during a TED Talk in 2011. Haas is the Chairman of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh and is the cofounder of pureLIFI, which is the company that released the first commercially available Li-Fi system.


Pros and Cons

Li-Fi has many beneficial characteristics. For example, Li-Fi can actually be much faster and has a much higher capacity than Wifi. This is because the visible light spectrum that Li-Fi uses “is 10,000 times larger than the entire radio frequency spectrum” (Li-Fi, 2017). Li-Fi has been used to reach data rates of 224 gigabits per second, and the record setting Wifi speed is “at 100 Gigabits per second” (Limer, 2013). Another positive aspect is that “Li-Fi is expected to be ten times cheaper than Wi-Fi” (Li-Fi, 2017).

One Li-Fi characteristic that is both a pro and con is that because light waves are unable to travel through walls, Li-Fi is more secure than Wifi in regards to being hacked, however this also means that capable LED lights will need to be installed throughout the area where a connection is desired, meaning there is a high initial cost. Going along with this, the lights must be on in order to provide a connection, so lights would have to be left on at all times when a connection is wanted.

References

Li-Fi. (2017, March 25). Retrieved March 27, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi

Limer, E. (2013, October 14). The World's Fastest Wi-Fi Makes Google Fiber Look Like Dial-Up. Retrieved March 27, 2017, from http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-fastest-wi-fi-makes-google-fiber-look-like-d-1444857507

A Senate Vote Is Not the Final Word on Internet Privacy

I'm going to keep this discussion going, even if you don't follow tech news (which, btw, you should) if you want to consider yourself an MIS professional.

To reiterate, in a 50-48 vote mostly along party lines on Thursday, the Senate moved to strip consumer privacy rules that had just been created in October. Next week, the House is expected to go along with the Senate measure, and the rule changes would then head to President Trump for his signature.

The move by the Senate means Verizon, Comcast or AT&T can continue tracking and sharing people’s browsing and app activity without permission (see Thursday's article here), and it alarmed consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers. They warned that broadband providers have the widest look into Americans’ online habits, and that without the rules, the companies would have more power to collect data on people and sell sensitive information.

But as we learned earlier about end-to-end encryption, there are options, if you are willing to consider them (which you should).    Here is another (and similar) list:

• A number of browsers, for example, have “stealth” settings that make it difficult to track a web surfer’s activities.

• Other software can make it difficult to pinpoint where that traffic is coming from. Perhaps the best known is Tor. 

• There are also a number of apps that can encrypt internet messages. Signal, free software offered by a company called Open Whisper Systems, may be the best known of them.

• Another example among many free software packages designed to prevent eavesdropping and hide a user’s internet address is the Hotspot Shield software offered by AnchorFree, a company based in Mountain View, Calif.

Now is the time to look again at encrypted devices.  Of course, you probably don't care that your phone is not secure from cyberattacks or that your ISP can sell your data without you knowing.   So why worry ... until it happens.

Five Ways Cybersecurity Will Suffer If Congress Repeals the FCC Privacy Rules

As I mentioned in class, taking action against the repeal of the FCC's "Broadband Privacy" ruling from last October 2016 will have severe consequences for our privacy and cyber security. According the EFF's summary, last Thursday, Republicans in the Senate voted to repeal those rules. If the House of Representatives votes the same way and the rules are repealed, it’s pretty obvious that the results for American’s privacy will be disastrous.  

But what many people don’t realize is that Americans’ cybersecurity is also at risk. That’s because privacy and security are two sides of the same coin: privacy is about controlling who has access to information about you, and security is how you maintain that control. You usually can’t break one without breaking the other, and that’s especially true in this context. To show how, here are five ways repealing the FCC’s privacy rules will weaken Americans’ cybersecurity.  

Read the article for more details on each of these five ways, including technical and easy to understand examples of how it works.

Risk #1: Snooping On Traffic (And Creating New Targets for Hackers)

Risk #2: Erasing Encryption (And Making it Easier for Hackers to Spy On You)

Risk #3: Inserting Ads Into Your Browsing (And Opening Holes In Your Browsing Security)

Risk #4: Zombie Supercookies (Allowing Hackers to Track You Wherever You Go)

Risk #5: Spyware (Which Opens the Door for Malware)

In the end, the cybersecurity implications of repealing the FCC’s privacy rules come from simple logic. If the privacy rules are repealed, Internet providers will resume and accelerate these dangerous practices with the aim of monetizing their customers’ browsing history and app usage. But in order to do that, Internet providers will need to record and store even more sensitive data on their customers, which will become a target for hackers. Internet providers will also be incentivized to break their customers’ security, so they can see all the valuable encrypted data their customers send. And when Internet providers break their customers’ security, you can be sure malicious hackers will be right on their heels.  

The net result is simple: repealing the FCC’s privacy rules won’t just be a disaster for Americans’ privacy. It will be a disaster for America’s cybersecurity, too.

You can still call your representative!

Share other articles or offer your point of view.  This isn't just an EFF issue.  You could argue that Google, Amazon, and Facebook do the same thing, but the difference with ISPs (like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cox, etc.), is that you don't have a choice about which ISP or cable company you use, and they have vast amounts of customer data that they can use however they want.  The risks are disastrous.   It wasn't clear what choices we have, either.  

Russian Hacking

Background

Many controversies have surrounded the past US presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which resulted of Donald Trump being the new president of the United States. One main controversy was focused on the Russian interventions to help US candidate, Donald Trump win the US election.

A Timeline: Russia and President Trump (added by Dr. Suzie)
(This link is missing the graphic, but the timeline is below that).  It starts:

• Trump’s efforts to develop business in Russia date to 1987. In 1996, he applied for his trademark in that country. Discussing ambitions for a Trump hotel in 2007, he declared, “We will be in Moscow at some point.”
• Read here for a complete long list

Secret CIA assessment

The CIA concluded that Russian operations, which included the exposure of thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, were executed to hurt the election performance of Clinton. Trump continues to dismiss the CIA claims.

Also, during the 2016 election, the FBI issued warning to state election officials to be on the lookout for intrusions into their election systems and to take steps to upgrade security measures across the voting process, including voter registration, voter rolls and election-related websites. They issued this flash warning because they detected successful and attempted cyberattacks from Russia. Victims including Arizona, Illinois and both the Democratic and Republican parties. Because of these actions, something needs to be done before the next election.

How do we fix it?

Adida recommends a voting system that experts call end-to-end verification - encrypting the votes with STAR-Vote (Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable). This method uses a cryptographic system with real and physical voting machines and ballots. Thus, the installment of STAR-Vote would allow the public to verify the vote themselves creating a mousetrap and sharing it with everyone else, according to a county clerk in Texas.

How it works

• Registered voters input their vote on a touchscreen machine. 
• The machine prints their ballot with their choices with a receipt
• Voters feed their printed ballot into a ballot box with a scanner 
• The ballot box reads a barcode on the ballot and confirms to the network that the vote has been cast 

Back end
The input machine encrypts the results, shares the encrypted vote data with all the other voting machines at the polling place, and enters it into a database of all the encrypted votes that will be published online at the end of the election day. After the votes are published, anyone can use a tracking number on their receipt to look up their vote online and confirm that it was registered. The machine can also be challenged to test it and make sure that the vote was counted for the candidate that the voter chose. Once it has been decrypted, the vote doesn’t count anymore and must be redone.

IBM Tealeaf - A Website's "Black Box"

Background

IBM Tealeaf is a company now owned by IBM that captures customers interaction with a website by recording the customers movements online.

It was founded by the man who also created SAP AG when he realized he was having a hard time tracking user problems. This technology tracks real life customer usage while on a website by recording what the customer is doing on a website.

Tealeaf is utilized to replay and analyze details of visits that will provide information to help detect errors or issues with a business process specifically with online purchases. This is a tool to look at specific customers that use a website or mobile app and track all of their moves throughout the website such as why some customers leave an online purchase early due to invalid promotion codes or other issues. You are able to view custom dashboards and understand customer trends on a more detailed level. This is yet another technology that is tracking your every move to collect important data.

Youtube: Tealeaf: Capturing the Complete User Experience

What can you do with Tealeaf?

This technology is extremely helpful for tracking website transaction errors. Once you are able to see that there was a poor experience by the user, you can see exactly what went wrong and try to alleviate that problem.

Once a transaction was recorded that it was not successful, you can have a call center contact the customer or utilize email marketing to try to gain that customer back.

Understanding visitor behavior is very important because you can track multiple visits and capture the complete user experience and see exactly what the visitor saw.

Youtube: IBM Tealeaf – Key Learning & Best Practices

The Decline of Physical Media

Background

The increased capability of modern bandwidth and availability of streaming services has already begun to kill physical media. The ease of access to movies (Netflix/Hulu) and music (Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud) greatly reduce the demand for for relatively expensive physical copies such as Blu Ray.

(Source: PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook report, June 2015)

In basic practice approximately $10 a month unlocks a number of movies/songs that would cost a small fortune to physically purchase. For the average consumer (myself included) the benefits of this model are more than enough incentive to sign up. That being said, this paradigm shift of how we consume media has also changed the ownership dynamic for said media.

Who owns media?

Streaming, by definition, is funneling a continuous stream of data from a server over networks onto a client device. At no point is the data actually downloaded or stored on a client device in any permanent fashion. This is why streaming services can offer such a wide variety of content for relatively low prices and so conveniently. It also means that as the end user, you only own the right to access the content, not the content itself.

The most obvious and common issue brought about by this is price hikes. The early days of Netflix streaming had a monthly subscription of $4.99, half of what it currently is today. Furthermore, in 2016 Netflix got rid of all grandfathered rates. Spotify has undergone its own price increases as it reached maturity and these instances are the most probable outcome of the streaming business model.

Amazon took criticism recently when they pulled a Christmas movie from their library right before Christmas season. Amazon movies are streamed on a per-purchase basis as opposed to Netflix's all-size-fits-one approach. Natural disasters, mergers/acquisitions or a new CEO could also change a consumer's access to "their" content.

The video game industry is the streaming hold out so far in terms of digital media for a few reasons; 1) the size, depth and interactivity of a video game greatly trumps even the longest movie let alone song, and 2) video games are notoriously hard to pirate or crack compared to other media (more on that later). Even so many of these issues mentioned above are appearing in the realm of video games as physical discs are being phased out.

The EULA’s that no one reads cover a wide range of these instances and issues and more often than not the end user has no recourse regarding changes to the deal. Owning a physical CD, or even a flash drive with .mp3 files on it, eliminates these problems for the consumer but acquiring it is time consuming and either costly or illegal...

Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Intellectual property (IP), piracy and torrenting have been hot button issues in the tech world for some time now and are intertwined with the phenomenon of declining physical media. Pirating movies and music was a popular method of circumventing IP owners long before the rise of Spotify and Netflix. A little bit of know-how and guile allows most anyone to freely download songs, movies and even expensive software suites.

As previously mentioned, video games (console) have always been difficult to pirate. Console manufacturers are so heavily involved in the specs and development of games for their consoles that cracking games was always relatively difficult. It would almost always require plugins, emulators or even physical hacks to the console. PC games have historically not had this issue, though even the top pirates report that anti-copy protection has become to hard to crack. 

Your Choices

Given that most laptops being sold right now don’t have a CD drive and the phrase “Bluray player” is going the way of “VCR” you have two options for consuming media. There’s the high road:

• Netflix.com
• Spotify.com
• amazon.com/Movies
• apple.com/itunes

And there’s the free road:

• thepiratebay.org
• sounddrain.com
• videograbby.com

Most everyone under the age of 30 will take no issue with the convenience of streaming or saying good bye to DVD’s. I just find it interesting that the standard, legal and kosher mode of consuming media has had its ownership system so drastically changed. 

Sources/Further Reading

http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/blu-ray-struggles-in-the-streaming-age/

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/04/netflix-is-increasing-its-monthly-subscription-her.html

http://lifehacker.com/why-its-okay-to-buy-digital-movies-from-itunes-google-1697004619

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131216/16292925583/you-dont-own-what-you-bought-disney-amazon-play-role-grinch-taking-back-purchased-film.shtml

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/capture-streaming-video-website-5-tools/