Biometric Boom: How the Private Sector Commodifies Human Characteristics

Biometric technology has become an increasingly common part of daily life. Although biometrics have been used for decades, recent ad- vances and new uses have made the technology more prevalent, particu- larly in the private sector. This Note examines how widespread use of biometrics by the private sector is commodifying human characteristics. As the use of biometrics has become more extensive, it exacerbates and exposes individuals and industry to a number of risks and problems asso- ciated with biometrics. Despite public belief, biometric systems may be bypassed, hacked, or even fail. The more a characteristic is utilized, the less value it will hold for security purposes. Once compromised, a biome- tric cannot be replaced as would a password or other security device. This Note argues that there are strong justifications for a legal struc- ture that builds hurdles to slow the adoption of biometrics in the private sector. By examining the law and economics and personality theories of commodification, this Note identifies market failure and potential harm to personhood due to biometrics. The competing theories justify a reform to protect human characteristics from commodification. This Note presents a set of principles and tools based on defaults, disclosures, incen- tives, and taxation to discourage use of biometrics, buying time to streng- then the technology, educate the public, and establish legal safeguards for when the technology is compromised or fails

Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning

Portraits of school inclusion: a qualitative study of the experiences of students labelled with severe learning disabilities

This thesis explores the educational experiences of eight disabled students in one city in the North of England. It interrogates and updates current research and literature in relation to barriers to inclusion in mainstream schools, deriving from pressures such as the standards agenda (Alexander, 2010)and resulting in disabled students transferring into special educational provision (Tomlinson, 1982; Pijl et al., 1999). These students, labelled with a Severe Learning Disability (SLD), all started their education in mainstream schools but now attend a special school referred to as Special Secondary; they have a unique perspective on barriers having experienced them first-hand. It is one of the first to use a Portrait Methodology approach (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1983; Bottery et al., 2009)with disabled students in England, contributing new participative methods to the methodology’s development. This study, underpinned by a conceptual framework joining the social model of disability with student voice, explores barriers to presence, participation and achievement (Ainscow, 2005:119), finding that special educational teachers and mainstream TAs played a more significant role in the social engagement of disabled students than agency or peers; although mainstream TA support allocation seemed linked to risk rather than educational need. One student had not been assessed for special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream; indicating that other unassessed disabled students might also be present there. It indicates that the low value of disabled students implicit within the normative standards of the English mainstream educational system (Slee, 2019)has evolved into an exclusionary discourse (following Harwood & McMahon, 2014)experienced by disabled students across their mainstream education. Choosing an inclusionary position requires educators to intervene through a commitment to professional love (Page, 2017; 2018) and ethical subversion (Morris, 2021).These findings problematize the mainstreaming of disabled students while normative standards persist