Posts Tagged ‘technology’
I don’t know a single person who hasn’t forgotten his password. 
And, generally, the reason you can’t remember your password isn’t because it’s so complex, but rather because you have so many of them. A site you frequent often might only require four characters, so you choose something easy like “eric.” Or another site you frequent requires at least six characters, one of which must be a number, so you choose “hockey9,” your favorite sport plus your high school number. Whatever the reason for the number of passwords you may have, there is a simple solution to creating an almost unguessable universal password — that is, a password you can use at almost any site, and yet will be unbreakable to friends, family, or strangers trying to guess your password.
First, there are many things most articles about best practices in creating a password warn against, including using your name, a kid’s name, a hobby, a favorite team name, the usual “abcd,” and the like. But using my method for creating an unbreakable universal password you can forget every bit of the “don’t do this” advice, and instead turn to these simple steps:
Choose any word you want… in another language.
I argue that in order to build a successful password, it has to be something you’ll remember. And that’s the reason you must choose a word or name you love and will always remember. Choosing something none of your friends would ever guess means it’s probably something that’s not all that prominent in your life. So in order to continue using a word or name that you cherish, simply transliterate (which is different than translating) it into another language.
The online translation site I often use is Im Translator : Free Translation Service. It’s an easy site that takes the word you want to translate, you choose the language to which to translate, and click the “transliterate” button which will allow you simple pronunciation. To make it a little more difficult, choose a language such as Russian, where it comes out in Cyrillic. For example, perhaps I want to use the word “hockey,” a sport I play. Translating it into Russian it will come out as “хоккей,” which of course can’t be directly used as a password. So I’ll change it to “xokken” since it’s close. Very easy to remember! (As a note, when I reference the password, it will be in quotations with any punctuation outside of the quotes, which is generally against the rules of correct English punctuation. I feel it’s necessary for clarity, however, to make sure punctuation is outside of the quotation marks since characters too could be part of the chosen password.)
Now that we have our base word, we’ll need to add some additional characters to make it universal. Let’s take a look at the requirements for most sites.
While many sites require 6-10 characters, many others require 8-20, making it harder to remember variations of your usually six-character password. An easy way to make your password universal, then, is to follow the next step:
Make your password eight or 10 characters long.
Our original, translated password, “xokken”, is only six characters, so we’ll need to add two. Let’s lengthen it by following another step:
Add a number or two.
Many Web sites require at least one number. Since our base word only has six characters, we’ll add two numbers. My old hockey number was 39, so I’ll add that: “xokken39″. Don’t add them to the front of the word, though, as many sites also require the password not to start with a number. If you want to make it more difficult, add the numbers somewhere in the middle of the password, but this makes it more difficult to remember and to type quickly.
We’re almost there, but there are two other requirements which are also often mandated by sites. The first is an easy one to add:
Make one or more of the characters uppercase.
Since many sites require a lowercase letter in addition to an uppercase letter, we’ll need to take our password and make it just a little bit bigger: this time not horizontally, but vertically, if you will. Since our password has two Ks in a row, let’s simply capitalize them. That makes it easy to remember. Now our password is “xoKKen39″.
Now we’re missing just one often-seen requirement:
Add at least one symbol.
Oftentimes a Web site will require a symbol or punctuation mark, and there are certain characters usually allowed by most sites, including ! ? – _ = + , ~ $ % and . Symbols less often allowed include < > [ ] { } ( ) # @ & ` ‘ ” ; : / , so stay away from those. For my password, I’ll choose the one I’ve seen allowed the most: the exclamation mark.
Most of the time you’ll probably just stick it at the end, much like I did with the numerals. But since I have a double letter in the middle of my password, I’ll stick it in the middle for a little added security. Now we have our entire password: “xoK!Ken39″.
Coming in at nine characters, including lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and a symbol, it can now be universally used by 99% of the Web sites I’ve encountered, is still easy enough for me to remember, and yet hard enough that no one I know could guess it, nor could anyone watching my fingers likely see exactly which keys I’m typing and duplicate it. To me, that’s an almost unbreakable password applicable for the everyday person’s use. Enjoy!
I recently attended a pedagogical conference class at M.I.C.D.S. entitled “Technology as the Cornerstone of Curriculum” presented by math teacher-turned-Director of Technology Karl Fisch. As an educator and technology-oriented professional, I hoped to get a fresh perspective of technology’s influence on education, and ways technology can be implemented in the classroom (which I and some others like to term “technogogy,” a play on “technology” and “pedagogy“). For better or worse, I did get a perspective other than my own, but it’s one that I’ve heard time and time again at Internet healthcare conferences and forums: there are new technologies out there, many people are using them, so you should, too.
While other things were discussed in the class, I’d like to stay generally focused on a single topic for this post: the use of many different technologies in curricula. It’s something I don’t particularly support, and I’m in the vast minority as far as technology educators and “facilitators” go. And while there are many great reasons and ways to introduce technology in the classroom, I don’t believe every new media technology is applicable to the classroom, just as I don’t believe every new media technology is applicable to healthcare.
For example, many of the examples he gave used Ning, which is a Web site at which you can create your own social networking communities. For example, if I wanted to create a network of fellow synesthetes, I could use Ning to create such a community. Likewise, teachers have used Ning as a free way to create a Web presence for their classroom. I have a few problems with Ning:
- It isn’t a course management tool, and therefore doesn’t necessarily offer you a great way to present information to students in the ways you wish. You could certainly make the same argument for some of the education-focused content management systems such as Blackboard, Saba, Campusuite, or Moodle, but because their focus is on education, the services supplied are generally adequate for education, whereas using Ning may require some work-arounds or unclear directions to get to the information you wish your students to have. This can create confusion for both students and instructors.
- It creates more work for the teacher. Granted, while education should be student focused, the ability for the teacher to adequately and clearly provide instruction is key to the students’ success. If a teacher is using Ning as a conversational tool, he or she might then need to spend more time moderating these conversations in a non-school environment.
- It becomes just another technology on top of three others for which the curricula calls. For example, imagine being a student, listening to a lecture during the day, and being mandated to use three separate technologies later that night. And, meanwhile, you may have to do this for three to seven other courses, as well. It can quickly become confusing for a student to have to use too many varying technologies, just as Mr. Fisch pointed out that he gave up Facebook because it was one too many social networks with which to keep up. Is it fair to expect our students to manage something even we as instructors cannot?
He likewise is a proponent of using Diigo, which is actually a neat little tool. It allows the user, once an add-on is downloaded and installed in the browser, to highlight and make notes on documents found all over the Web. Through this tool users can make personal notes, make thoughts public, and can collaborate amongst each other. Sounds like something applicable to education, right? I’m not so certain. I argue that there are a number of pedagogical drawbacks to using this tool:
- If the instructor first makes his or her comments on the document, it allows students — whether we like it or not — to focus on the instructor’s comments, and therefore may not have the will to read the whole document.
- Reading a document which is already marked up distracts the reader from continuously reading it, and perhaps compels the reader to make comments which, had they read the entire document first, he or she wouldn’t have made. Granted, you can turn the feature off for the first reading, but how many students will do that?
- I believe this type of tool, on the ground level, reinforces to students that making a whole bodied, well rounded argument isn’t necessary, and only focusing on excerpts or your opinions is necessary for academic work. This does education and students a disservice. I believe a whole bodied, argumentative, persuasive work is still a great benefit to students even if they will never again make such a document again in their lives. Making a well argued point in a whole bodied paper reinforces the concepts of references, citations, reputability, and persuasion, whereas comments are often half-formed opinions.
The question, then, becomes: what technology do I think is useful in the classroom? Contrary to popular belief, there are several:
- The use of course management systems (CMS) such as the aforementioned Moodle. A CMS allows students access to a standard-and-yet-encompassing technology where they can find course documents, media (audio/video), discussion boards, and other communication tools.
- Smart boards and other interactive hardware. These allow students to develop skills for presenting to and interacting with their audience.
- Information processing software such as Microsoft Office Suite.
There’s a reason post-secondary institutions all have a CMS and rarely rely on extraneous services like those offered at Ning: having all of the course information in one spot makes the purpose, objectives, and outcomes of the course clear for the instructor and students, and allows better time management for all. Simply running to the “next best thing,” whether that’s Ning, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, or Twitter, and then trying to mold that into an educational resource is risky.
Risk is a funny thing in education: instructors should encourage students to take risks, but instructors should do their due dilligence in making a strong argument for taking a risk before implementing it in the classroom. If a students take a risk and fails, it was a great effort, they learn from it, and they only suffer momentarily, whether it’s a grade for an assignment or project. But when an instructor takes a risk and fails, the suffering can last weeks, months, or even years, and on the scale of not just the individual, but the entirety of the class.
As I said to the colleagues sitting at my table, how much damage will you allow your students and faculty members to incur trying to “facilitate” and require them to use complex and often conflicting technologies to accomplish something that they’ve successfully accomplished without the technology for years? Unless the technology is proven or expected beyond a reasonable doubt to produce an unequivocal benefit greater than the previous pedagogical practices, I think it’s best not to take that risk on something so important: our children and the way they learn. Their next class, instructor, and/or institution depends on what you taught and encouraged them to learn; to give your students any less than what they need to succeed in the future on the basis of trying — without plan, process, or due dilligence — is a disservice to them and society. That’s a risk I won’t take, but one I encourage my students to value.
One of the most spectacular achievements of humanity has been our ingenuity for getting to space. It’s a beautiful but dangerous game, allowing us to see the universe like never before but costing some lives along the way. But instead of using solid rocket boosters, which require propellants which are toxic to both humans and the environment and can be unpredictable, perhaps there’s a better way to get to outer space: magnets.
I have two theories on ways to use magnets to get to outer space: a modified theory of the space elevator and using a rather large railgun.
The space elevator is an idea which has been around since 1895. Simply, it would be an enormous elevator which extends through Earth’s atmosphere and into space. But there are several problems with this idea, including construction materials and costs, and the amount of time it would take to get there.
Most current plans involve a complex system of pulleys which would lift the elevator much like our building elevators work. But the stress this would put on the cable would perhaps be too immense for any materials we currently have on Earth, despite new reports of using nanotechnology or even metal-infused spider silk.
My plan would be to use magnets’ poles, north and south, to our advantage. Using a polarized lightweight pod perhaps constructed out of nanomaterials to contain people or equipment/materials, the pod would use an enormously powerful electromagnet to repel into space.
The second plan would be to use a modified railgun to be essentially shot into space. Using this short diagram (via J. Walter at MIT), you can see how a railgun works:
In this diagram, the projectile is the small pod, perhaps developed to be polarized for added stability and velocity. The pod would then be essentially shot from Earth and up the two electromagnetically charged copper rails which have opposite currents. The pod then rides up the shaft using the two electromagnet fields.
I don’t know if these two ideas are feasible, but it hasn’t stopped others who are much more knowledgeable on the subject to continue trying. The main problem I see is the enormous amount of energy that would have to be used to power the electromagnets. It could even be more power than we expend using our traditional rockets. But I do believe these two ideas, in the long term, are probably safer even if it’s at the cost of some energy, materials, or velocity.
While I do not believe that most New Media technologies are applicable to certain types of organizations, such as health, I am a rather large proponent of perhaps the most prominent piece of Web 3.0 technologies: portals. While portals too aren’t applicable in every context, health organizations should be taking advantage of them and using them immediately. And some already do.
Currently, health-related Web sites, such as your local hospital, often have patient portals, employee portals, and even media portals for publications of news stories. But is it necessary to have three static portals that focus on categories of audiences, or would it be better to allow the audience to choose his or her own modules?
Enter iGoogle.
iGoogle is a portal of sorts that allows visitors to install modules on the Google homepage for their most-used services. For example, on my own iGoogle homepage I have Google Analytics installed so I can see my Web sites’ statistics, Gmail so I can see if I have any new messages, a few news resources to keep up on the daily happenings, and a forecast module so I can tell the weather outside (which is sad, if you think about it). I could also install modules based on a number of other things, including blog readers/feeds, note-taking resources, and so forth.
This is the type of model I would absolutely suggest health, education, and news organizations implement. Their visitors could choose modules based on their interests. For education you might have modules based on the student’s individual classes, grades, communication with faculty, and campus organizations. For health you would have modules for health test results, scheduling appointments, health records, and communication with the doctor and his office. And for news you might have modules based on locations/communities and sections (such as entertainment, food, sports, or comics).
This type of set up would also provide for different audiences to easily access the information they need, too. For example, while a health organization’s main audience is obviously the patient, modules could be developed for members of the media or employees. An employee could have a module for his or her vacation time, while a media representative has a module for press releases and images.
A further benefit to this type of set up is the almost inherent ability to make it open source, allowing various members of the organization to develop modules based on his or her needs. A doctor could develop a module for accessing orthopedic information, while a media person could develop a module for accessing contact information for approved employees. With a little education and oversight, this could be a great benefit to organizations looking to establish a portal without having to constantly oversee its content.
With Google becoming more involved with patient records, such as with Cleveland Clinic, I see an iGoogle-inspired portal in the near future. But other industries should also take note of the success of iGoogle and also implement their own versions of portals.
If you ever wanted to know what your friends and colleagues are doing at the moment, look no further than their Twitter page. Twitter, which allows you to update the world on what you’re doing in 140 or less characters, quickly took the world by storm. Unfortunately, but just as I predicted, Twitter is failing. As the Nielsen article states,
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
This is horrible news for Twitter. As the article correctly concludes, “Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”
So what went wrong?
New Media, or what you might call the aspects that make up Web 2.0 technology, is an inherently targeted medium. In other words, it simply isn’t applicable for every organization. We see this time and time again with the newest Web 2.0 technologies, but organizations don’t learn. Instead, they waste time and resources by focusing their efforts on looking the best and brightest, but failing in the long-term.
It reminds me of a few other technologies employed by organizations that have gone or are going by the wayside:
- MySpace: MySpace, once the bastion for social media marketing, has now been relegated to pop culture and entertainment marketing, such as music, actors, and movies. The generally lower-class demographic could have helped lead to its downfall.
- Facebook: When Facebook started taking over MySpace, organizations made “fan pages,” allowing people to become fans of their organizations. But quickly it was learned that becoming a fan doesn’t mean direct communication with the individual, and reputable causes with over 100,000 fans can barely make $5,000 cumulative over the years.
- Podcasts: As I keenly observed a year-and-a-half ago, “The day I download a podcast about treating a kidney stone is the day I will give up the Internet.” Podcasting was quite possibly the shortest boom in the history of Web technology. It was a process that could potentially take an entire day or more to plan, record, mix, convert, and upload… and then 10 people listened to it over the course of six months. It simply wasn’t worth the time or effort.
- YouTube: Much has been made about using YouTube to gain followers and, hopefully, clients. Organizations spent good portions of their budgets producing professional videos, put them on YouTube, and then… nothing. After six months, there may be 30 views. And, even worse, no way to track if any of those viewers led to a client.
- Blogs: For awhile, every organization thought it needed a blog. Why anyone would want to regularly read a blog about the newest garden hoses is beyond me. And it was beyond their target market, too.
But while those technologies have failed for most organizations, some other technologies that serve as a basis for Web sites have thrived:
- Content integration: This is cross-promoting content. For instance, perhaps you’re reading an article on Sigmund Freud, and over to the side is a little blurb about another article on Jung. This takes like-content and cross-promotes it so the visitor stays at the Web site longer. This has been wildly successful, and you needn’t look any further than Wikipedia to see that.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Simplifying Web design and making it easier for different browsers to access, CSS is a great technology that has allowed Web sites to implement templates on-the-fly. This has also been beneficial for advertising and when emergency issues arise.
- Mobile Web sites: with more and more people getting smart phones that allow users to get e-mails and access the Web at the palm of their hands, mobile Web sites are becoming more important. While Mobile Opera allows you to see Web sites in their entirety, it can still be bothersome to attempt to scroll around a Web site on a less-than-2 inch screen. Mobile Web sites let the users access data without bogging down their phone.
Unfortunately, those last three bullet points aren’t considered fun or pizzaz. Instead, the fun technologies are often the ones that fail. Perhaps that’s because it’s seen more as entertainment to the visitors, and entertainment tends to be short-term and/or sporadic. Focusing on the dreary technologies that make large impacts, though, is the way to go: it allows visitors to easily access the content they need. And the first priority of an organization should be usability, not aesthetics.