February 11, 2005

Interesting if not somewhat disconcerting article on wired.com today, School RFID Plan Gets an F about a small California town that was paid byInCom(which has a really bad website), a RFID tracking company, to test the technology.

RFID, which has been in the news a bunch lately, gives the user the ability to track things, or in this case people, with small embedded chips that send out a radio frequency. Since the RFID chips have no embedded power source, they don’t send out a frequency unless in the presence of RFID scanner, so they’re not active for just anybody to track. This is also the technology behind those completely automated supermarkets that allow you to check out without removing anything from your cart that we’ve all been hearing about.

For obvious reasons, when applied to people, there are some privacy concerns. Compounding those concerns is that the school neglected to tell parents that such a system was in place. The idea behind the system is to allow simple tracking of attendance and to prohibit trespassers by mounting scanners above each classroom door. The scanners pick up the RFID chips embedded in student ID cards and send the data to a central server which then relays the information to the teacher who then visually identifies the student. It’s not as complicated as it may sound, but it may be as much overkill.

Now I’m certainly not the first person to write about the privacy issues involved in RFID chip tracking. Many people are afraid that once we have RFID chips embedded in all our products, a burglar could get a cheap scanner and scan houses to see if there are any items that apply to the B&E discount. To be honest, I’m not sure how that’s much different than looking in a window.

The other issue is that we’re loosing our privacy in regards to what we buy and when we buy (see:Lawmakers Alarmed by RFID Spying ). Here’s an example: Let’s say your sneakers had a chip in them that tracked tread wear. You go through a scanner at the grocery store that senses your sneaks treads were wearing low. When you checkout you receive a coupon toward new shoes. Sound farfetched? It’s not.

When applied to students, though, it brings up a whole new spectrum of privacy issues. For one, do we really need to keep that close of tabs on them? When all kids want is for their parents to trust them, what kind of message does this send to them? The more insudious problem, however, is obvious. If a predatory adult knew the tracking system for the kids and had a scanner, they could target and track a child in a much more concealed fashion.

I’m really on the fence when it comes to RFID. I can see all the good that comes from it. Then again, I think anything is good that allows me to be more lazy. I also see the privacy issues and the ojectifying of people. I mean, nothing says I love you like being assigned a 15 digit code.

What do you think?

February 10, 2005

I’m sure I’ll use the above cliche many times in the life of our boy Hayes, but his sleep patterns is the first time it seems to truly fit. Yes, he sorta looks like me. And yes, he had blond hair. But when it comes to sleeping, we’re — unfortunately — two of a kind. Reader and fellow daddy blogger, Cameron (he’s a good read, check him out), pointed this out in my Sleep, Good God Ya! post:

We went to a conference on infant sleep with a Nurse practitioner who has written a book on the subject (in French, sorry) and she basically said “look at yourself, how do you sleep, congratulations, that’s how your kid will wind up being”.

When I first saw him sleep I immediately noticed some physical similarities in the clenched fists, positions and the way he squirms around trying to get comfortable. It became more apparent when I was trying to figure out how exactly to fit on the pull-out lounge chair at the hospital and I was really cognizant of my positions. I thought to myself, “Hayes sleeps exactly like me.”

After a few weeks with The Boy, I can now say that there are even more striking similarities. For one, I can’t sleep during the day, even when I’m really tired. If I do manage to get myself to sleep, I sleep for 15 minutes. For the most part, I’d rather just stay up and veg. Normal infants are supposed to sleep 8 hours during the day. Hayes sleeps maybe 4, but mostly likes to sit… and… veg.

When I’m over tired I am a huge pain in the ass. I’m grumpy. I hate everyone. And most of all, I can’t get myself to fall asleep. Seems the more tired I am, the harder it is for me to fall asleep. I bawl at the top of my lungs until Jen picks me… oh wait, that’s Hayes. When Hayes gets over tired he, as the previous post illustrates, is inconsolable and it takes a long, long time to get him to sleep. Just like dad.

Finally, we both wake up a lot in the middle of the night, toss and turn, grunt, make sleep noises and then fall back to sleep. But the big shiny
happy fun question is why he can’t sleep like his flick’n mother? (Hayes’ lack of sleeping has gotten to the point where I feel justified to use pseudo swears a la Napoleon Dynamite) She falls asleep in literally 5 seconds, could sleep through apocalypse and sleeps soundly through the night. At least she did. Then Hayes showed up.

Are these all coincidences? Well, either I sleep a hell of a lot like an infant, or my infant sleeps a hell of a lot like me.

February 9, 2005

It happened yesterday, the moment both Jen and I had been waiting for, a complete HBomb meltdown. There’s nothing better to nail home the fact that you cannot logically reason with a newborn/infant like a meltdown. Oh, and the timing couldn’t have been more aprapos, as it it began as we were watching 24 (there are impending nuclear meltdowns in the plot) on our DVR.

But really, it began around 3 when I got home from work. HBomb had been sleeping for 15 minutes, which made a grand total of 3 hours in the last 12. He woke up and began to get his cry on. We were able to calm him down with some vintage formula and he started the closing the eye thing. He kinda drifted in and out of sleep while Jen made dinner — a delicious chicken breast in a leek cream sauce — and was pretty calm.

At about 5:45 I set HBomb down in the bassinet to free up my hands for dinner. Jen and I decided that if he continued to sleep until 6 we would start 24. Now the beauty of the DVR is that you can stop, pause, restart and see where you are in the program, so after 11 minutes, according to the DVR, HBomb’s condition went from sleep to fussy. Jen grabbed him so I could quickly scarf down some chicken, and then we did the hand-off. We gave him the bottle in hopes of calming him, but his condition quickly escalated to critical.

Condition Critical.

After about 45 minutes of subdued crying and 15 minutes of crazy infant bawling, Jen dialed the magic number of the pediatrician fairy. Surely, this was not normal. The person on the other end told us that someone would call and we should take his temperature. There has got to be a better way to take an infants temperature than sticking a thermometer up his ass. There just has to be. We read the thermometer literature and it assured us that we could put it under his arm. Sounded better than option one. Under arm it went. 97.8 degrees. Normal. Ok, so that wasn’t a problem. HBombs inconsolable crying, on the other hand, was.

The phone rang. It was a doctor or nurse or nurse practitioneror doctor nurse or something returning Jen call. Jen explained the situation to the whoever. Hayes hadn’t been sleeping, was incolsolable, wouldn’t eat, etc.. The nurse-whatever said Jen sounded tired and the best thing to do was to — GET THIS — involve her husband so Jen could get some rest. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I guess she was going to have to get me off the couch with my Bud Light and nachos and tear me away from the Celtics to make me help her. Yup. Right. I can’t possible be the only man in the Boston area that this woman has heard of who is taking an active part in his child’s life. From reading other daddy blogs and Metrodad’s post yesterday, I know I’m not the only caring father out there. I mean COME ON!

Jen explained to her in no uncertain terms that I was, infact, totally involved and was actually holding our child as she was on the phone. Further, she explained, we both were really tired. The doctor practitioner was calm, even after clearly insulting us, and gave Jen some advice — try to calm him down, feed him and then get him straight to bed. (Marge:”Ok Homer, you’re over stimulated, let’s get some beer in you and get you straight to bed.” Homer: “Beer! Beer! Beer! Bed! Bed! Bed!”) It worked.

At 8:15 HBomb was sleeping soundly in his bassinet in our bedroom and we ventured out to the living area to finish up our wine and 24.

I was the first one up for his feeding at 11:30. He was back asleep at 12. Back asleep! Take that, lack of confidence (see post below). Jen, on the other hand was not as lucky. She was up for the second feeding, and by virtue of being wide awake when he was in need of a third at 4AM, she was up for that too. It was a brutal twist of fate.

Condition Critical.

HBomb blew up again. This time it was almost immediate. Jen left the room to change him, returned and he was on high-volume, red-faced wailing. It took her more than an hour to settle him back down and get him to bed, but Jen was wired.

Which led to this morning. 6:15, HBomb is making sleep noises including crying, yelping and chirping. I wake up and begin to get out of bed. He stops. 6:30, HBomb is making sleep noises including crying, yelping and chirping. 6:45, well, you get the point. At one point I actually woke up thinking I was crying, only to realize it was HBomb sleep crying.

At 7:30 I roll out of bed to hit the shower and get ready for work. Didn’t last. As I’m turning the shower on, the wailing begins in earnest. I bolt out of our bathroom to Jen partially out of bed, trying to jiggle the Bugaboo to get him back to sleep. Ain’t working. She mumbles something about her taking care of it. I take a quick look at her and decide that, based on the fact that it looks like she lost a 15 round bare knuckle boxing match only to be hit by a bus as she crossed the street to get home, she needed more sleep.

So… here I am, 2 minutes before 9, unshowered, at work and finishing up cup-o-coffee #3. If I didn’t love the Bomb so and he wasn’t so damn cute, I might… just might… try to put him back. At this point, I’m not sure Jen would complain.

February 8, 2005

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again. No. Hell, I miss sleep.

During his short span on earth thus far, HBomb has taken to not sleeping. Good for him, bad for us. It didn’t start out that way… oh… actually, yes… it did. From the get go, HBomb used his strong neck to look around at everything. This, as far as we can tell, makes his life much more interesting for him then, say, sleeping. So it goes, lots of looking around, little sleeping.

Like HBomb’s food habit, we wondered if this behavior was normal. A check of most of our go-to parenting sites only provided us with this snippet of not-so-useful-to-apply-to-us-information: on average infants sleep 14-18hours per day. HBomb? 12? Maybe on a good day.

The interesting thing is that he seems to go from quiet and content looking around to scrunched red faced infant bawling for no apparent reason. Is it gas? Dunno. Is he over tired from not getting his 16-18 hours of sleep? Who knows, he isn’t talking.

I’ve even seemed to bumble into a surefire way to keep him up for hours on end in the middle of the night — Me. Yes, it seems that whenever I get up to feed the little dude, he wakes up, looks around and decides not to go back to Sleepytown for a good long time. Why? Maybe I try too hard to burp him. Maybe I make too much eye contact. Maybe it’s my intoxicating odor of manliness. The one thing I know for sure is it’s not the latter, I just made that one up. Whatever it is, his apparent no sleep policy after my night time feedings has become so consistent that my parenting self confidence has taken a hit in the family jewels.

Is it me or just coincidence? I dunno, but tonight I’m going to take a different feeding to see. Until then, Jen has instituted a new rule just for me: if he’s up for more than an hour, get her up so she can get him back to bed. Have I had to use this new rule. Every night.

Another gem from CNN.com this morning, that our local Fox affiliate promised to cover last night (”Does fruit juice make children fat? Find out at 11.”) is Study links juice, chubby children.

The abridged version is this: if your child is overweight at 3 to 4 years, and you give them fruit juice, they are 50% more likely to be overweight a year later. Those not overweight have no need to worry. While this is interesting and all, it seems more like a media machination than actual steadfast fact. For one, the universe in this study could by no means be construed as a true sample, as it was “10,904 Missouri children in a nutrition program for low-income families” My guess is that there were some other contributing factors inherent to low-income families that can account for some of these changes. Are low-income families who feed their kids fruit juice more likely to also give them other sweets? Does the same apply to all families? I don’t know, but as far as I can tell from the article, this, along with other variables, was not taken into account.

Also, as usual, the media gleans a big number, 5o%, without telling us the most important number. Is it 50% more than 200? 2000? 2? Big discrepancy. This is one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to “studies” and the media. Give us all the numbers, not just the ones that make the best headlines and USAToday graphs.

The moral, according to More Diapers? When it comes to fruit juice, use common sense.