• Frank
• Jul 20,2008
• In: Features

The Last HOPE, Part 4 of 4

I finish the series of my experience on Friday at The Last HOPE.

At 7 PM I attended Exploration of Possibilities: Brain Hacking, presented by one “Dot.Ret”. In a lecture that was more like a tired series of observations, building to what I can’t say, and was long on vagueness and intuition and short on actual psychology, at least in my perception, Dot.Ret explained that the brain was the “most complex and powerful computer known” but due to its form–evolution has caused newer structures to be built over older structures–susceptible to attack. Social engineering was given as an example, as was hypnosis and other means to owering the ‘critical factor’ of believability. A brief explanation was given as to the meanings of speech, including gestures and expressions. Needless to say, this was only twenty minutes. As I wrote earlier in regards to the first talk, the Q&A sessions go on tangents and are not enjoyable to sit through. I rate the talk 2 / 5.

I then left Brain Hacking and sat through the remainder of Hacking the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: Dispatches from the Field of Educational technology, presented by Gillian Andrews. I did miss a substantial part of the presentation, but what I did hear was thought-provoking. Reading a website is not like reading a textbook, but where technology is taught in schools it is often taught as if it were. No child Left Behind emphasizes standardized testing and crowds out other parts of elementary school curricula. In addition, a number of observations were shared: beginning a conversation with an insult is a total failure; computer-science logic is not universal, but is based on the mindset and culture of the designers. The one laptop per child program was briefly discussed, and it was emphasized that they are not a panacea. I rate the talk, or at least what I saw of it, 4 / 5.

At 8 PM I attended The New York City taxi System: Privacy vs. Utility, presented by Nick Leghorn, an intern at the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The presentation is available online from his website. He outlined the essentials of the taxi and limousine system–there are exactly 13,237 medallions–and described the pen-and-paper reporting system used from 1935 to 2006. Drivers would log their start points, end points, time and fare on a sheet of paper, which would be turned over to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The pages were often illegible and thus functionally useless. In addition, riders wanted to watch their progress.

The solution devised by the Commission in 2006 was T-PEP, a system that featured the sending of messages to cabs, use of credit card for payment (authorized wirelessly from one of three companies), a GPS map for riders to track progress and a driver GPS that would keep track of the cab, with only start and end points reported to the Commission and the rest for the owner of the cab’s eyes only. There were some concerns with the new system–wireless and GPS dead spots are common in New York City, due to the “canyon effect”, but Leghorn thinks the reason for the taxi driver strike over the GPS system was the fact that the new system was legible, being computer-based, and thus drivers could no longer underreport their earnings to the IRS using illegible sheets. I rate the presentation 4 / 5.

At that point, I left, thus ending my Friday at The Last HOPE. I again apologize for the 36-hour delay, which is effectively an eon on the internet. A number of talks are planned for yesterday and today, and this HOPE is proving to be, if no one is arrested, a great convention, and, I wish, not the last.

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