Fonts of Inspiration: From Spider-Man ...

Every scientist or technical innovator has had an illustrious predecessor who has paved the way and provided inspiration for some stroke of brilliance. Paul Dirac had Niels Bohr, Pasteur had Lavoisier, Sol Snyder had Steve Brodie. And David Hunter has Spider-Man. Actually, David Hunter has Jack Love, a circuit court judge in Albuquerque, N.M., who saw a Spider-Man cartoon on television in 1983 that helped paved the way for another technical advance: electronically monitored home incarceration. It seems the ol' web swinger used a homing device to track some animated bad guys and the inevitable light bulb lit up in Judge Love's mind. Why not use some sort of electronic shackling device to keep petty criminals under house arrest rather than spend huge sums of public monies to keep them in jails and prisons? And the rest, as they say, is history. A firm headed by Hunter called BI Inc. is now marketing a tamper-proof anklet that emits a radio signal which is picked up by a receiver unit. The receiver unit, in turn, is linked by modem to a computer elsewhere. Stray too far from the receiver unit—say, more than 150 feet—and WHAM! POW! BAM! (as they say in Spider-Man cartoons), the official monitoring the computer is alerted and can act. The software can be programmed to allow the prisoner to work, shop and so forth within the terms of the court sentence. Criminals are told: Wear the anklet, or head for the slammer. Is there a choice? As Hunter explained the idea at the recent AAAS meeting in Chicago, it probably has promise. Used nationwide with minor felons and misdemeanants, it could save millions in taxpayer's dollars, reduce overcrowding that now has 40 states under court-ordered plans to reduce their prison populations, and give offenders the chance to work and socialize as normal human beings. It seems to make sense that people who are not exposed to the brutal realities of the American penal system stand a better chance of staying out of trouble in the future. Prison officials in two states are already testing the program. But like all good technology, the applications are virtually limitless. Anyone with a 3-year-old (or a 16-year-old), for example, would snap one up. Keeping junior out of the street and away from the neighbor's doberman would be worth the cost. And the system's ability to keep track of a "grounded" teenager is enormously appealing ("Oh, so you were home all night, eh?"). People with faithless spouses or wandering aged parents should be similarly interested. And what of dieters with little self-control? Too near the fridge late at night and WHAM! SLAM! POW!— the diet police are on the way. But the biggest market of all may be the workplace. Some businesses are already relying on mainframe software to monitor employees' performance on computer terminals, and using their findings when considering pay increases and job retention. Now it's possible to simply shackle all employees on the day of hire, put the coffee pot 151 feet away, and watch the performance ratios skyrocket. This system may be especially useful should the much-vaunted human gene sequencing project ever get underway. It's going to take something radical to keep all those drudges hunched over their equipment for 30 years. Hunter told the scientists in Chicago that the shackling device is "real proof that the private sector can, through science, still provide meaningful answers to the public sector's problems." I think it shows that scientists and technicians can learn useful things from the damndest places. And I know what I'll be doing this Saturday morning. Byrne is the on the staff of The Scientist.

Fonts of Inspiration: From Spider-Man ...

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