Last week I discussed how mobile phones were being used by people in developing economies. Here is a link to a discussion of another study done on the same topic, in this case in Kerala, India:

… the power the middleman holds over the fishermen due to the monopoly on price information has lessened somewhat. The free flow of information ensures the fishermen get the opportunity to drive a harder bargain than before.

Which sort of circles back to whether or not fishermen or other commodity producers have access to the same information via radio or similar communications technology.
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Last week I remarked on fingerprint identification of fliers. Today, I found something related in the announcement of a biometric e-Passport in Brunei:

Compared to the existing passport, the e-passport has an embedded 72-kilobyte chip and several security features. This complies with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) which makes it more difficult to duplicate. The chip itself will contain the owner’s facial and fingerprint images.

The assumption being that the biometric data will provide an accurate unique identifier for each individual, and naturally one of the issues to arise from such a system is the actual data security of the stored fingerprint and facial imagery. Add to that assurances that the staff on the ground are capably trained to interpret this data.

One of the main issues seems to be the desire to ensure that passports are indeed genuine. I wonder how biometric data will serve that goal better than any other random machine-generated identifier.

2007 ushered in a new era in warfare as armed robots were first deployed on the battlefield. The SWORDS robots are manned remotely by soldiers, and do not make tactical decisions on their own, so I wonder if this is any different than remotely controlled Predator drones, which have been used for years.

Naturally, the use of any new technology in the battlefield raises ethical issues, and in this case some people are concerned with the issue of responsibility when a remotely controlled robot takes a life. I would argue that it is the soldier controlling that robot. However, in the future we might see thornier issues as robots are given more independent control over their responses to threats. If an algorithm decides to take a fatal shot without human input, who is to blame then if the robot kills a friendly target or civilian due to programming error?

It still remains to be seen if robots are even an effective or reliable tool in ground combat.