Case study:exploring children’s password knowledge and practices

Children use technology from a very young age, and often have to authenticate themselves. Yet very little attention has been paid to designing authentication specifically for this particular target group. The usual practice is to deploy the ubiquitous password, and this might well be a suboptimal choice. Designing authentication for children requires acknowledgement of child-specific developmental challenges related to literacy, cognitive abilities and differing developmental stages. Understanding the current state of play is essential, to deliver insights that can inform the development of child-centred authentication mechanisms and processes. We carried out a systematic literature review of all research related to children and authentication since 2000. A distinct research gap emerged from the analysis. Thus, we designed and administered a survey to school children in the United States (US), so as to gain insights into their current password usage and behaviors. This paper reports preliminary results from a case study of 189 children (part of a much larger research effort). The findings highlight age-related differences in children’s password understanding and practices. We also discovered that children confuse concepts of safety and security. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research. This paper reports on work in progress.<br/

“Passwords protect my stuff” - a study of children’s password practices

Children use technology from a very young age and often have to authenticate. The goal of this study is to explore children’s practices, perceptions, and knowledge regarding passwords. Given the limited work to date and that the world’s cyber posture and culture will be dependent on today’s youth, it is imperative to conduct cyber-security research with children. We conducted surveys of 189 3rd to 8th graders from two Midwest schools in the USA. We found that children have on average two passwords for school and three to four passwords for home. They kept their passwords private and did not share with others. They created passwords with an average length of 7 (3rd to 5th graders) and 10 (6–8th graders). But, only about 13% of the children created very strong passwords. Generating strong passwords requires mature cognitive and linguistic capabilities which children at this developmental stage have not yet mastered. They believed that passwords provide access control, protect their privacy and keep their “stuff” safe. Overall, children had appropriate mental models of passwords and demonstrated good password practices. Cyber-security education should strive to reinforce these positive practices while continuing to provide and promote age-appropriate developmental security skills. Given the study’s sample size and limited generalizability, we are expanding our research to include children from 3rd to 12th graders across multiple US school districts

Priority Outcomes in Critically Ill Children: A Patient and Parent Perspective

BACKGROUND: Outcomes in pediatric critical care research are typically selected by the researcher. OBJECTIVES: (1) To identify outcomes prioritized by patients and their families following a critical illness and (2) to determine the overlap between patient-centered and researcher-selected study outcomes. METHODS: An exploratory descriptive qualitative study nested within a longitudinal cohort study conducted in 2 pediatric intensive care units (PICUs). Participants were purposively sampled from the primary cohort to ensure adequate demographic representation. Qualitative descriptive approaches based on naturalistic observation were used to collect data and analyze results. Data were coded by using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health Children and Youth (ICF-CY) framework. RESULTS: Twenty-one participants were interviewed a mean of 5.1 months after PICU discharge. Outcomes fell into 2 categories: patient-centered and family-centered. In the former, diagnosis, survival, and prognosis were key priorities during the acute critical illness. Once survival appears possible, functioning (physical, cognitive, and emotional), and factors that influence recovery (ie, rehabilitation, environment, and quality of life) are prioritized. Family-centered outcomes consisted of parents\u27 psychosocial functioning and experience of care. Patient-centered outcomes were covered well by the selected study measures of functioning, but not by the clinical outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Functioning and quality of life are key patient-centered outcomes during recovery from critical illness. These are not well captured by end points typically used in PICU studies. These results justify the importance of patient- and family-centered outcomes in PICU research and a need to determine how these outcomes can be comprehensively measured

Living the security city: Karachi’s archipelago of enclaves

Like many of the enclaves used by elites and foreign visitors in this troubled megacity of over 20 million, the Karachi Sheraton Hotel is increasingly fortified off from its immediate environment. Blast walls, checkpoints, surveillance systems, and armies of police and security guards continually work to try and control how the hotel’s commodious internal spaces relate to an outside street deemed deeply insecure and prone to unpredictable moments of violence. Today, a widespread logic of military securitization—which Stephen Graham has termed the “new military urbanism”—exists in many of the world’s cities, even those that are not formal war zones. In those cities, an obsession with attaining total security—especially around financial centers, ports, residential areas, embassy districts, and mega events—results in the generalization of the kind of passage-point architectures most familiar from airports to everyday urban landscapes. Enclaves such as those surrounding the Karachi Sheraton Hotel have emerged in response to heightened perceptions of vulnerability within a wider city wrecked by murderous violence. But it is important to look beyond the already familiar physical architectures of enclaved cities per se. By focusing merely on the physical architectures of securitized cities—their fortified walls, checkpoints, and barriers—risks an environmentally deterministic perspective suggesting that these constructions work completely or that their effects can be assumed from their appearance. Complex interconnections between gated enclaves and the rest of the city are easily overlooked. This is especially so when it becomes clear that immense and ongoing labor is required to even create the pretense that relations between the inside of enclaves and the broader city can ever be fully scrutinized and filtered within huge, dynamic, and highly mobilemegacities. In what follows, our discussion will center on the dynamic relationships between those who perform and work the boundaries of enclaves and those who live and use enclaved spaces. We will concern ourselves with the neglected question of how the transformation of megacity landscapes into uneven patchworks of securitized enclaves work to produce novel experiences and forms of urban political life. Our question, then, is simple: How is the new security city, the archipelago of gated enclaves, lived