Iris Scans Are the New School IDs 217
An anonymous reader writes "Winthrop University in South Carolina is testing out iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer. Students had their eyes scanned as they received their ID cards in June. 'Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don't have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University's Information Technology department. 'It can be hands free security.'" I wouldn't want to be locked out a building because of a scratched lens or a system outage, though.
Re:lol wut? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not an easy process for some people (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Height issues (Score:5, Interesting)
questions remaining unanswered... (Score:2, Interesting)
What are the procedures when the information that the iris scanner has recorded is no longer valid? The human iris is not a static unchanging feature of the body. Obviously it changes with the intensity of the light it experiences, but it also changes as a result of the fact that it's moving, and the components of the iris do break down over time. This is going to chang ethe pattern of lines in the iris. This may not be significant for a 4 year degree (does anyone really get a 4 year degree in 4 years anymore?) but if you ad in graduate and postgraduate work, as well as separate degree tracks if those become necessary for some reason, you can easily spend 12-16 years in college, which is a reasonable period of time over which your iris may change.
Additionally, if the iris scan for ID is required of instructors, administrative personel and custodial service staff, it's practically guaranteed that you will encounter these changes over time. Unless the scanners are designed to tollerate, and over time adjust for, such changes, the system is likely to run into issues over the tenure period of a professor, the career of staff, or that doctoral candidate who suddenly can't enter the building the day he needs to appear before his examiners to defend his thesis.
Re:Not an easy process for some people (Score:4, Interesting)
They can scan the Iris with Infrared light which is not detected by the eye, and therefore won't trigger the bright-light reaction. The part they are scanning is also the Iris - the colored ring surrounding the pupil - and not the Retina, at the back of your eye, requiring said pupil dilation.
Re:What are we doing to our children? (Score:4, Interesting)
These things are not mutually exclusive. I think you have mistaken my meaning and that we have more in common than you might guess. I hold to know "brainwashing" or "pod-people" theory. Indeed, the only snarky comments you'll find me make on /. is in response to people who reckon others "sheeple". Neither did I indicate that manageability was the only interest industrialists would have is in publicly educated workers. I only focused on this because it pertained to GP's comment. Just because the powerful secure one set of interests does not mean they do not simultaneously secure others. Nor is this "conspiracy theory", much less conspiracy theory gone wild.
From your statement quoted above, I'll take for granted that you agree with me that the industrialist/philanthropists who supported public education did so at least in part to serve their own interests (much like the modern parallel FWD.us [wikipedia.org] has an interest in promoting certain kinds of immigration policies). Indeed, having a worker who can at least read is an enormous advantage to the industrialist, to say nothing of the worker. Even so, there are aspects of public schooling that lend themselves quite well to promoting what I described as "docile" behavior. The first is the unnatural hours for a child. No one who has spent any amount of time with children can hold that maintaining an 8-4:00 schedule is natural for them (or, arguably, any human being). It's not. But it's perfectly fitted for the needs of an industrial economy where laborers working in shifts make the system more efficient.
Second, the grouping of children in the institutionalized environment inevitably requires that they maintain a certain kind of regular discipline which would be unnecessary for other economic structures, but is essential when you've an industrial economy. In school you learn you must work precisely when you're told and rest only during allotted breaks. You have a lunch hour (which you must walk in a line to attend). You must request trips to relieve yourself. You are always answerable to supervisors, indeed for every word that comes from your mouth. You learn to apply peer pressure to others on the line (I mean classroom), knowing you're often evaluated based upon group projects. You're encouraged by those in power to rat your peers out. All these things are necessary in the setting of the modern classroom but they're also perfect motivations for support from industrialists. Little wonder, in light of this, that the pro-industrialist Whigs would be so pro-public schooling. Thus we find so important figures as Horace Mann promoting public education as a means of "moral" improvement and disciplining the rabble. The discipline here is the discipline of the industrial age, governed by the clock and not by the natural rhythms of the adult (much less the juvenile) person.
But I also say this from personal experience. My own wife was home-schooled and I've had numerous friends who were as well. Of the home-schooled, I've noticed a common pattern: they've a much lower tolerance for institutional, bureaucratic nonsense than I and my other public-schooled friends have. For the latter (myself included) it seems perfectly, even comforting, to pull a 9-5, deal with irrational BS from coworkers, and blow it off at the end of the day. For the former, at least in my experience, have some trouble adjusting to the rather absurd work schedule and, above all, to the basic irrationality of human behavior in institutionalized life. They're just as bright and often better educated (again, in my experience) than their public school peers. But they frequently lack that cynicism one manages to develop as a survival mechanism in public school. I remain uncertain whether such a survival mechanism is a blessing or curse.
The fact is that the modern educational system works on