Tia Marie

Social Media and the Armed Forces

I was reading a Reuter's article about how the military plans to allow Twitter and other social media applications for usage.  I have some pretty strong feelings about this.  While I do believe that the usage of Twitter and Facebook should never be restricted from some one's personal life, I believe that the military is making a grievous error in allowing it's usage in deployed locations. 

I use applications like Twitter, Facebook and even Foursquare.  They are popular web applications that tie our virtual relationships in with our real life happenings and relationships.  The folks over at the site "Please Rob Me" does show that in our strong desire to share our real lives with our digital friends, many choose not to omit things and have full sharing of their lives. We don't see much harm in sharing our lives online.  I don't mean to put anyone down, but I feel that the most problematic group of individuals for this "overshare" of personal details online, are our youths.  

I know when most people think of soldiers, the image of impressionable youths certainly isn't the first thing that comes to mind.  Though it is true.  A good number of individuals enlisting in the military are the under 21 crowd.  Turning to the military before college or to help them with college.  Fresh out of high school youths. I certainly was one of them.  I made a pile of mistakes growing into my adult life, mistakes that I was grateful to be under the care of the US Military instead of on my own.  

There are so many innocuous things that a young soldier could want to post, that could hurt people and not in the way that the media would present it. I'm not talking about terrorists finding your location, I'm talking about information that needs to be delivered appropriately.  Here is a situation for you, it's purely fictional but a very plausible situation.

Jack and his girlfriend Jill are soldiers from an Army Reservist group from Texas.  They are friends with each other in facebook, friends with each other's parents and family.  They've been in Afghanistan for more tours than they want to, but thankfully have been able to use facebook to keep their families in touch, even their update about the upcoming marriage when they finally return to the states.

Their tours are extended for another two years and Jill slips into a bit of depression.  To make matters worse for Jill, a good friend of hers is killed in a roadside bombing.  Jill does the unthinkable and takes her own life. Jack without thinking, writes a very touching note and tagged Jill in it.  No one has broke the news to Jill's parents yet... not the right way.  

A very sad and horrible situation, but unfortunately very possible.  Things happen in deployed locations, very bad things (not all the time, but it's possible) and it's hard for a youth to process what happens and even harder for them to handle their emotions and express their feelings of loss, fear and confusion in a mature and healthy way.  Sadly the military doesn't help much in giving our deployed youths the emotional tools needed to handle these situations.  

There are so many other situations in which the allowance of social media applications in deployed locations are horrible ideas.  I just can't say I support their decision. 

Those were my two cents. 

Military Tales: There's no crying in medicine

Note: I've changed the names of people to keep their identities anonymous for reasons of 1. Not being a jerk and 2. HIPAA regulations. 

By the age of 18, I was a young Airmen in the United States Air Force and living nearly 3,000 miles away from home working at the training hospital on the base.  It was a very large training hospital (I believe the second largest in the United States) so we saw a great deal of patients both active duty, retired and their dependents.  

The first memorable event that happened to me while I was in the military was at this hospital.  I was very young at the time and still learning the ropes of medicine and the hospital.  I had the chance to meet some very interesting people while doing work on the various wards of the hospital.  

One lady in particular I'll never quite forget, for the purposes of this story we'll call her Amihan Smith.  Amihan was an elder asian lady married to a retired Air Force officer.  The amazing thing about Amihan was that she was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, she had met her husband shortly after.  The two had been married for quite a long time and were each other's first loves.  After he husband left in the evenings, I spent my free time talking to Amihan to keep her company during the sleepless nights and hear her tell stories of her journey on the March, it was a heart wrenching story and hearing it first hand from a real survivor was something that the history books could've never taught me.  

Despite her failing memory, she recounted the entire thing in nearly perfect detail and had many stories about her husband.  She was taught English by her husband and he took very good care of her, he was the only thing she had in the world as her entire family was either killed during the initial attack in the Bataan peninsula or were tortured and killed during the march.  

Her adoration for her husband and the length of time they had been together was incredibly touching it had a very romantic feel to it to meet a woman who had sought safe harbour in the US as a victim of war crimes, fell in love with her and had been each other's one and only up through their elderly years.  

Amihan was the first patient that I grew attached to and I was taught many things because of her.  That's why, when I got the call from the ward that she had passed away, I had taken it especially hard.  One of the side tasks that I did as part of my first rotation in the hospital was initiating death certificate paperwork and everything that went along with a patient's death (organ donation stuff, autopsy stuff, coroner case determination and getting the doctor to sign off the cause of death and such), problem was I had never actually done one before.  It was the first time I had a patient die on my shift.  It was also the first time I had to deal with a death since my friend Tilde had died in high school. 

I read through the manuals and gathered what emotional fortitude I thought I had and went up to the ward.  Getting the doctor to fill out the death certificate was the easy part, going into the room with Amihan and her husband was the hard part.  

I stepped in the room thinking I was prepared to deliver the messages I had to, get his signatures where I needed to and go.  How wrong I was.  I stood there in silence looking at the lifeless face of the woman I had grown so fond of and admired.  Her cooling hand was being held in between Mr. Smith's hand and he called me over in a quiet and defeated voice.  He said to me, "Airman, did Amihan tell you how we first met?" 

I was paralyzed with emotion, I bit the inside of my lip hard in an attempt to hold back any emotion so not to make things harder on him.  Mr. Smith didn't want to sign or answer anything until he recounted in his words a brief summary of his life with Amihan.

I cried.  I wept the first tears I had wept since my mom had died when I was 16.  The only thing I could think of was how unfair it was for him to have lost the only woman he had ever loved.  My first death case toppled up with some emotions I had been holding back for a while wasn't as clean as I had hoped it would be.

Trying to compose myself, Mr. Smith did something even more unexpected. He stood, wrapped his arms around me and patted my back and said, "She led a good life and she won't be alone for long.  Don't cry, she's better now." I was taken back as he then went and took my paperwork and filled out what he needed to do and simply asked me, "Can I stay with her alone a bit longer?" I just nodded and backed out of the room a bit puffy eyed and shocked at how it had all went down.  

After he had left, I insisted on helping the med techs clean up and get Amihan's body down to the morgue, helping clean everything off of her and remove the various tubes and needles that had been attached to her and making sure to careful remove her personal affects and place them into neat little containers to have for Mr. Smith to pick up later.

Later never came.  I kept her things down in my department in the safe where they should've gone and asked daily if Mr. Smith had come down and called his number and left messages.  I found out that two weeks after Amiha's passing, Mr. Smith had passed away in his sleep at home.  It was almost like he had decided on his own that he had no purpose past being with Amiha.  

DIY RFID an intro - Tags

Yesterday I wrote about the multiple uses of RFID and things that you can do on your own with RFID. Today I'm going to write a bit of an intro to RFID.  Some basic information about RFID tags and what you need to know about them. 

First off, what is RFID?  Simply defined, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, it describes exactly what it does: identification using radio signals.  RFID is a two-part system including interrogators and tags.  The interrogators are the "readers" and the tags are the pieces where the information is stored.

Here is an image of various RFID tags that I got with the RFID kit for Ketralnis from ThinkGeek. 

Sparkfun has 125kHz RFID card style tag for only $1.95, or you can find other places that offer bulk tags for reasonable prices. 

It's important to know that how the data is stored, accessed, changed and transmitted over the air is going to be different based on the maker of the tag.  There are a few standards in place, but many manufacturers have their own methods for storing data and their own protocols. You have passive and active RFID tags, the difference being that active tags have a transmitter and require their own power source (think like highway toll payment tags). The power source is used to run the microchip's circuitry and to broadcast a signal to the reader.  Passive tags require no battery, they instead draw power from the reader, which sends out electromagnetic waves that induce a current in the tag's antenna. You can also find semi-passive tags that have a battery to run the chips' circuitry, but communicate by drawing power from the reader.  Active and semi-passive tags are generally useful for longer range needs but cost more than passive tags. Another difference is that the battery in active tags may be used to boost read/write range and allow for larger memories.  Passive tags typically have any where between 64bits to 1 kilobyte of non-volatile memory. Active tags have memories has high as 128kilobytes.  

So what about the relationship between frequency and tag/antenna distance?  

High frequency Passive tags (typically 13MHz) and low frequency (around 12kHz) systems have a read range of less than 3 feet.  With high frequency and low frequency tag systems, the size of the tag (and the antenna area) will have a big impact on their read range.  Some applications limit the read range to about 6 - 8 inches while some newer technologies (that use UHF systems) have a long read range in the 20 - 25 feet area. Read range is going to depend on a few factors: Transponder antennae size, size of the reader's antenna and it's output power.  Usually with passive (non powered) tags, long read range and small size are mutually exclusive. There are three primary frequency bands being used for RFID. 

• Low Frequency (125/134KHz) - Used for tracking and general access control
• High-Frequency (13.56 MHz) - Used where medium data rate and read ranges up to about 1.5 meters are acceptable. This frequency also has the advantage of not being susceptible to interference from the presence of water or metals.
• Ultra High-Frequency (850 MHz to 950 MHz)—offer the longest read ranges of up to approximately 3 meters and high reading speeds.

(source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479355.aspx)

There are also two basic types of chips you can find in RFID tags: Read-Only and Read-Write.  Read-Only chips are going to be programmed with information during the process of making them.  You can't change information on Read-Only chips.  Read-Write chips allows for information to be added to the tag or overwritten.  

So that being said, where can you as the DYI-er get your hands on various types of RFID tags?  Here are a couple of sources that might be helpful:

• Trossen Robotics, EM4102 125 kHz RFID Tags
•  Sparkfun
• Atlas RFID

So that wraps up my intro to RFID tags, hopefully this was informative and not too terribly scattered.  Next up will be RFID readers. 

We have the technology, it exists.

I remember fondly watching Sci-Fi shows like Star Trek, Star Wars and various other shows that have computers as their everyday appliances.  I keep looking around my house and wondering when my computer appliance is coming?  

With technology like RFID, many of the things in futuristic representations of daily living can be done!  RFID is already cheap enough for consumer facing products.  Recently a RFID tag has been produced that can be purchased for under $1.00. We know that Samsung is already prepping for the RFID fridge, but will these appliances be cheap enough for the casual consumer? 

With RFID you could do an incredible amount of things to change your daily living.  Here are a couple of examples of things RFID could do right now:

• Keep track of your favourite clothes when you want to wear them, are they dirty or clean?
• Never worry about losing your car keys again, unlock/lock and start your car without keys. 
• Remind you to take the trash out on garbage night
• Get notified by phone or email when your kids/loved ones return home
• Automatically open a pet door when your pet approaches the door
• Control lights, music, TV and temperature based on if you are in a room or not.
• Control door locks, security system and tons of other things whenever your car leaves or approaches your home.
• Remind you to buy new milk or restock things in your fridge
• Suggest recipes to cook based off of what food you have in your home

All of these things can be done with technology we have available right now!  So why isn't it being done?  Why aren't these things cheaply available for consumer facing products?  

You can buy some kits and try to start doing these things on your own.  I bought Ketralnis an RFID kit from ThinkGeek for $99 for Christmas, but other websites have more expensive kits that would get you on your way to doing everything I'd listed above!  

Do you have any other neat ideas to do with RFID?  I'd love to hear about it.  I've been growing this passion for RFID and this desire to automate my life a little bit more.