Sherry Chandler » 2008 » January » 18
I See Invisible People has picked up on Microsoft’s apparent scheme to turn your work desktop into an employer’s version of the HAL2000. From the Times of London:
Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.
The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.
Talk about invasion of privacy!
If I’m not to be allowed to fume quietly at my desk, it may be time for me to leave the work force.
Though, as commenter Dusty Royston remarked, I may have a little time:
By the time Microsoft gets the bugs out of this, all of those desk jobs will be done by computers anyway; so who cares?
This post was written by sherry
Friday, January 23, 1976
Twelve below zero this morning. The pipes in the kitchen and the guest bathroom are frozen. The arctic sea smoke was thick and steaming over the ocean after the sun rose. I sat down and wrote a poem very fast . . . this is what has not happened until today and always seems like a “possession.”
The amazing cat went out at eight and will not come in. How can she stand it? The gale, we were told this morning by Don Kent, makes the wind chil -50 °! That is what it is to have fur!
I have a little joke which is that only the rich can afford to stay in New England in winter . . . the poor go to Florida. My heat bill was $250.00 for December. I just paid the plumber $69.00 for fixing the hot water heater, and now, of course, there’ll be more to pay for unfreezing the pipes.
— May Sarton, The House by the Sea (Norton, 1977)
This post was written by sherry
