Divemedic

How Palm Scanners Work

There have been a few questions about how palm scanners work, and how this affects reliability. Let’s take a look at the technology, its strengths, and its weaknesses.

If you’ve ever had a pulse ox on your finger, you know that it is a system that allows a machine to determine how much oxygen is in your blood. Have you ever asked yourself how it works?

Hemoglobin in the human body is responsible for transporting oxygen. Deoxidized hemoglobin absorbs infrared light differently than does oxidized hemoglobin. The pulse ox shines two different frequencies of near infrared light through your skin, and measures how much of the different wavelengths gets absorbed, and uses this to calculate the ratio of oxidized to deoxidized hemoglobin in your blood. Palm scanners use the same technology to determine your identity.

Veins transport deoxygenated blood to the heart. Therefore hemoglobin present in vein blood is deoxidized. When the near-infrared light from the palm scanner is directed on a person’s palm, hemoglobin absorbs its rays. The veins’ capacity to reflect the light is reduced, and they appear like a black pattern on the image taken by the system. Then the system processes the image and compares the results with the data from the database.

Since the pattern of veins in the palm is unique to each person, this image is a very accurate way of verifying that the person who was just scanned is the same person who has been scanned in the past. All you have to do is verify a person’s identity at the same time that you scan their palm and place the image in the database. Future scans verify that the person scanned in the future is the same person who was scanned and identified in the past.

Strengths:

  • Given the possibilities of modern technology, many biometric identifiers, like face or voice patterns, can easily become subject to forgery. Palm vein patterns are hidden inside the human’s body and are more difficult to capture without a person’s knowledge.
  • Unlike the face, which is visible to anyone in a public place, palm vein patterns cannot be scanned from a distance without a person’s consent.
  • The palm vein pattern is significantly bigger in size than those of the finger or iris. Consequently, the scan from it contains more data, which increases the accuracy of the identification.
  • Unlike many other biometric parameters (face, fingerprints), palm vein patterns are not likely to change due to some unexpected circumstances over the course of a person’s life.
  • The technique of identifying a person by their fingerprints has a number of serious disadvantages. Fingerprints are easily affected by external factors, like aging, disease, or the state of the skin on the hands. Palm vein patterns usually remain the same throughout the person’s life.
  • The results of the measurement are not affected by the state of the hand’s surface: dirt, grease, and oil don’t affect the image because IR passes through these substances easily.
  • Unlike retina scans, the risk of passing infections is lower because the system doesn’t require physical contact.

Weaknesses:

  • Some health factors, such as fevers, can affect the quality of the image
  • Companies aren’t always great about information security when storing their database, but this is true of all identification technologies

Palm scanners have been in use by the medical field for identification purposes for over a decade. Banks in Japan have been using it for even longer.

By Divemedic, ago

Work At Home

The hospital where I work has an extensive training program. One day a week, I get scheduled to work from home, attending online training. The hospital follows a protocol model, where everyone is expected to follow the hospital’s official guidelines when treating patients. An encyclopedic level of knowledge of those protocols is required in order to comply with this. My last hospital was more of a “come as you are” model, and I actually think that the protocol model is safer and more efficient. Still, that means there is a steep learning curve.

My wife seems to look at this as an opportunity to assign “honey do” chores for me to do, because she apparently hears the “from home” part more than the “work” part. Today, she has asked that I get laundry done, put away the dishes in the dishwasher, and fix the ice dispenser in the freezer.

Uh, you DO know that my workday begins at 8:30, right?

By Divemedic, ago

Sue Them, Then Sue Them Again

If you have a child in the Orange County, Florida School system, you need to sue the school for violating the law. They are refusing to remove the book “Lawn Boy” from school libraries, despite the fact that it contains child grooming pornography like this:

What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goebbels’ dick in my mouth. I was in fourth grade, it was no big deal. He sucked mine too. And you know what, it wasn’t terrible.

excerpt from Lawn Boy

Offensive? You bet. Even worse when you realize your kids are reading it. I’ve posted about this book before. Now supporters are claiming that the law is racist because the characters in the books are not white, so the mean Ron DeSantis is trying to ban books about POC children.

By Divemedic, ago

My Proposal

Democrats have proposed a 1,000% tax on all “assault weapons” and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammo. That would make an AR15 cost $5,500 to $33,000. I didn’t realize that we were taxing Constitutional rights. Let’s try a few others:

  • a $10,000 tax for each person who wishes to register as a Democrat.
  • You can only vote for one Democrat each election. Each vote for a Democrat candidate after that will cost you $500. No cash? No vote.
  • In fact, only people who pay income taxes can vote. If you don’t pay any income taxes, you don’t get a say in how things are run. Skin in the game, and all that.
  • $2,500 fee for your first jury trial. Guilty or not, that fee doubles for each subsequent trial. Can’t pay? You get a bench trial.

What’s that you say? People can’t be taxed for exercising their rights?

Exactly.

By Divemedic, ago

That’s Not How It Works

There is a whole lot of angst going on with regards to the following video and the “mark of the beast.”

Except that isn’t how this works. No one accepts any sort of computer chip in their hand or any of that kind of nonsense. I had to do the same sort of thing when I took my licensing exam to become an RN. The device has a camera inside of it that takes an infrared picture of the blood vessels in your palm.

Due to anatomical variation, the blood vessels in a person’s hand are unique to each individual: no two people’s vessels are alike. Even people with identical DNA have unique features, such as fingerprints and blood vessel patterns. In this case, customers of Whole Foods create an account, where they associate a credit card with the image of the blood vessels in their hand. This allows them to show their hand to the scanner, which then matches the photo to their account and charges the credit card on file.

It’s no different than a fingerprint reader or facial recognition, except the blood vessels in your hand are more difficult to spoof than a fingerprint reader or facial recognition. This isn’t any sort of “mark of the beast” or anything like that. This is a file kept of attributes that you are born with.

Now one could argue that you don’t want a business having a file on your personally identifying attributes, and I could certainly understand that, and I am not sure that I would be willing to do this, but I just don’t see it as ushering in the apocalypse.

By Divemedic, ago

Two Economic Plans

What he is talking about is Demand side economics, or Keynesian Economics. Named for Economist John Maynard Keynes, who developed his economic theories during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the chief underpinning of this theory is that the demand for goods and services drives economic activity. Keynes believed that unemployment is the result of inadequate demand for goods and services. To solve this, he believed that governments should increase spending to spur economic activity by artificially creating demand.

The problem with this is that low demand causes a matching reduction in production. If a government tries to spur demand artificially by putting money into the economy, the increased demand in the face of reduced supply sees more money chasing a limited supply, which is a key driver for inflation.

Especially since he is providing the increased spending through application of Modern Monetary Theory. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). says that government spending can be financed by printing money rather than borrowing. Biden is doing both.

The US government has increased our debt by $1 trillion in the past 57 days. Our debt today stands at $32.8 trillion, and on June 27, it was $31.8 trillion. At the same time, the M2 money supply has increased from $20.5 trillion in the summer of 2021 to $20.9 trillion today.

So we have large scale government spending coupled with an increase in circulating money supply.

That’s Bidenomics.

Biden and the rest of the Keynesians are wrong- demand isn’t the problem. Demand remains strong, as evidence from the credit sector indicates that credit card debt is skyrocketing.

According to recent data from Credit Karma, Gen Z and millennials have experienced a significant increase in credit card debt in the second quarter of 2023. Average credit card debt for Gen Z now exceeds $3,300 — a 4.2% rise — while millennials hiked up credit card debt by 2.5% to an average of nearly $7,000.

This marks the first time since 2001 in which credit card debt didn’t fall in the first quarter. In fact, the only times card debt didn’t fall in the first quarter of the year since the New York Fed report began were 2000 and 2001. Every year since, card debt fell at least a little bit — until this year.

The money in circulation (M1) has decreased from $19.4 trillion to $18.5 trillion, so overall savings are increasing while credit card debt is rising. So the overall savings of Americans is increasing while at the same time credit card balances of GenZ and Millennials is increasing to record levels. This indicates that people born before 1981 are beginning to sit on bank accounts, while those born after 1981 are continuing to spend using credit cards.

So what will happen as a result? Rising interest rates, coupled with increasing credit card balances, will cause increasing credit card defaults and banks tightening up their exposure to risk. We are seeing that already, as numbers from the Fed indicate.

According to the most recent delinquency data from the Fed, the 30-day delinquency rate (or the percentage of total outstanding credit card balances currently at least 30 days overdue) rose from 2.25% to 2.43% in the first quarter of 2023. That’s the sixth straight quarter of increases, keeping rates above 2% for the third straight quarter.

That’s Bidenomics.

By Divemedic, ago