November 2007 Archives

I originally posted article this on the Orlando Sentinel's Sanford Community blog:

Fear and ignorance. If you don't understand something, it must be evil and sinister. Fear and ignorance. What better place to teach this system than in Seminole County Schools?

The problem was clear. Kids only have a limited amount of time to go through the lunch line and eat before they get back to class. The line sometimes takes too long as kids fiddle around punching in their PIN number to draw payment access for lunch. Sometimes a kid forgets his PIN, so the line slows down. The intended solution was to use a fingerprint scanning device. No memory required, just bring your finger.

It would be a perfect solution, if not for the fear and ignorance of the parents of these kids. To many minds, fingerprints have a negative stigma because they've been used so long by law enforcement to identify criminals. They also fear the theft of their child's identity by use of these systems. Their fears wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so ignorant of the way biometric systems actually worked.

Law enforcement agencies have used fingerprints to successfully identify people for more than a century. Let's face it, police wouldn't still use fingerprints if they weren't more than reasonably accurate at identifying an individual. Law enforcement isn't the only use of fingerprinting, but it's prominent enough that people still feel a stigma when asked to submit their fingerprints.

Biometric systems like the fingerprint readers use in schools, or at Walt Disney World, don't keep an image of a subject's fingerprints on record. There's no way for someone to steal your fingerprint from the system and use it elsewhere to impersonate you. Instead, the biometric systems only store a pattern known as minutiae - the specific points on a fingerprint where the lines diverge or converge. When fingerprint scanners look at your fingerprint, it's only searching to see if those points on your fingerprint match an existing record. No other fingerprint will match the same set of minutiae, and you cannot use minutiae to build an image of a fingerprint.

While the parent's fear of identity theft from a collection of minutiae are unfounded. Their fear is from ignorance. That's where our Seminole County Schools truly failed. In order to implement this system, the school system should have educated the parents to alleviate their fear. Now the parents may rightly feel distrustful of a school system that didn't communicate details about a sensitive topic. As a result, the lunch lines will still move slower than necessary. Equipment and systems procured by the school system for fingerprint scanners will probably sit unused as a minor monument to tax dollar waste, all because of a failure to alleviate fear and ignorance.

A few days ago, I wrote a post based upon an original statement from Miceage.com claiming that the boats on the It's a Small World ride in Disneyland were bottoming out and getting stuck due to the growing size of the average American visitor. The concept was that the ride, designed for the 1964-1965 World's Fair, could not accommodate the greater weight of visitors 43 years later. It sounds reasonable.

However, I wanted to dig into this idea a little more. Were there similar concerns for boat rides in Walt Disney World, such as the version of It's a Small World or Pirates of the Caribbean here in Orlando?

I contacted representatives from Walt Disney World to pose the question and received the following answer. Although the Disneyland ride It's a Small World is closing down, it is not because guests are weighing down the boats. The boats are 43 years old and have had repairs throughout the year. Per the Walt Disney representative, the repairs had a cumulative effect to correct wear & tear on the bottom of the boat that essentially increased the depth of the boat. Think of it as one layer of repair upon another.

One of the questions still on my mind is how Walt Disney World deals with the growing size of the average visitor and some of the aging attractions that may not have been designed for additional wait. The short answer is that Disney Engineers regularly inspect the attractions to maintain a safe environment for guests. Many aspects of Walt Disney World were designed with accessibility in mind to accommodate all guests.

So what about the issue of an aging infrastructure and changing guest sizes? We'll have to find out in another post, as the Disney representative promised to ask a few more questions and get back to me with an answer.

Whether you believe that guests are too larger or the repairs have added depth to the boat, it's undeniable that Disneyland is taking action to correct a problem.

Orlando Magic fans are up in arms at the start of the NBA season this year. Why? Due to a string of actions, they can't watch 35 Magic games on the local cable provider - Bright House Networks. Local fans with Dish Network & DirecTV subscriptions aren't affected, so they're gloating - at least on game days when it doesn't rain.

Here's how it all unfolded. The Orlando Magic sold the rights to televise their games. Unfortunately for fans, those rights did not include any stipulation that the games would get aired locally. FSN Florida bought the rights to the Magic games. About a week or so ago, FSN made a deal with Dish and DirectTV to broadcast Orlando Magic games.

Bright House already carries Sun Sports, which has rights to broadcast 40 Magic games that will air on the cable provider's networks. Bright House would like to add FSN for its Sports Tier, which would add to the cost for subscribers. FSN doesn't want to be part of a tier, it wants to be in the overall channel line-up available to all Bright House subscribers. Bright House claims, correctly, that doing so would raise the cost of service.

So it comes down to whether a few Magic fans are willing to pay more to watch those games at home on a Sports Tier, or whether Bright House will raise the subscriber cost to ALL of its customers in order to carry the Orlando Magic games. After all, you know Bright House isn't going to take the hit on that expense without passing it along one way or another.

Personally, I don't care one bit about watching sports. Maybe it'd be different if I attended a college and had some vested interest in the game. Otherwise, what's the point? It's entertainment, nothing more. There's no way I'd want to pay a higher cable cost so Oprah fans could watch additional content, and I think the same thing about the Magic fans. If you want it, pay for it. Here's another idea. Buy a ticket and go watch the game in person. I'm not totally convinced that concept didn't enter the minds of the Orlando Magic administration when they sold the rights without a guarantee to have games air locally, but that's just my own speculation.

Now the town is full of sports fans whining that they can't watch their games at home on TV. Some will abandon Bright House and buy a satellite service. Others will end up going out to Hooters or Ale House to drown their complaints in pitchers of beer while yelling at the TV set. That's all fine with me. Just don't raise my cost in order to provide for these folks.

Pretty soon, they're going to be glad to get out of the house and have a beer, anyway. The writers strike is about to end the soap opera shows, so there are going to be some cranky housewives pretty soon.

It's a Small Small World., originally uploaded by Chris the Fish.

There's an interesting blurb on Miceage about the Small World ride at Disneyland. It seems our west coast friends plan to shut down the ride for 10 months starting next January for some major refurbishment. Why?

The people riding it are just too damn big and the boats keep bottoming out.

According to the article, the boats used in the ride are 43 years old and originally served in the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. They've come to the end of their useful lifespan and need replacement. Wear and tear is part of the reason, but another aspect simply has to do with the size of the average park visitor. When the boats were designed in 1963, the average adult male weighed 175 pounds and the average adult female weighed 137 pound. Fast forward to the present time and it's not hard to conceive that a boat filled with multiple adults weighing more than 200 pounds each is going to hit bottom and stop.

The only notice that a cast member has about a stuck boat is when the everything starts getting backed up and jammed. Some poor soul has to run forward to unclog the overloaded boat and get things moving again. It also means that cast members have learned the art of sizing up visitors and loading them appropriately to avoid potential problems. Unfortunately, it's not something that they can easily explain to guests without hurting some feelings.

"I'm sorry that I can't accommodate your entire family reunion on this 43 year old boat, but you're all just too heavy to go anywhere."

So how does this issue affect boat rides at Walt Disney World like It's a Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean? Both of those rides are newer and have already been through refurbishments. Good thing, because I doubt DIsney visitors in Central Florida are magically lighter than their California counterparts.

I'm constantly amazed of our society's fear of women's breasts. Unless you're a beautiful model suntanning in South Beach, a woman just doesn't get any respect for her breasts being exposed in public. In keeping with the notion that bare breasts are bad, Universal Studios Orlando humiliated one of its guests, Cheryl Cruz, when she whipped the puppies out to nurse her baby.

Cruz is Canadian. It appears our neighbors to the north really don't have a problem if a mother decides to breastfeed her baby. Not so at Universal Studios Orlando, though. After Cruz refused to cover up at a park employee's request, she was surrounded by security guards ready to escort her off property. Never mind the fact that it is legal for a woman to breastfeed publicly in Florida.

What exactly is so horrible about a mother feeding her child? Pretty much every one of us nursed a nipple as babies. It's nothing sexual, it's just life. Lighten up, people. Stop being boobs.