The Dish

The Economist flags a disturbing new report:

The study, part of a United Nations project, is the first to give a comprehensive tally of rape in several Asian countries. The researchers surveyed more than 10,000 men in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka. The men, aged 18-49, met male interviewers. They were never asked about “rape” explicitly; instead they were asked if they had “forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex”. The answer varied from 4% in Bangladesh to a staggering 41% in Papua New Guinea. Shockingly, more than one in seven rapists committed their first rape when they were younger than 15. More than half did so before the age of 20.

Olivia Solon adds to the grim picture:

The vast majority of those men who admitted to rape (between 72 and 97 percent of men depending on the location) didn’t experience any legal consequences. In fact, many men felt that they had the right to have sex with women regardless of consent — more than 80 percent of men who admitted to rape in rural Bangladesh and China felt this way. Perhaps most startlingly, four percent of respondents said they had perpetrated gang rape against a woman or girl (although this varied between just one percent to 14 percent depending on the location).

To help understand the findings, Katelyn Fossett digs up some significant research from the 1970s on factors that encourage rape:

[Anthropologist Peggy Reeves] Sanday dissected the cultural variables that made societies more or less prone to rape, arguing that ideologies of male toughness, traditions of violence, and a lack of female participation in politics were key factors in “rape-prone” societies.

Some of these variables appear to be at play in the [UN-backed] Lancet study as well. Sanday, for instance, has observed traditions of “raiding other groups for wives” in the groups she studies; the Lancet study, similarly, hypothesizes that “the high prevalence of rape in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) and Jayapura (Indonesia) could be related to previous conflict in these settings.” Sanday’s studies also find a correlation between low rates of female political participation and high rates of rape — a link that is echoed by the Lancet study’s findings. In the U.N. study, the country with the worst rape statistics by far was Papua New Guinea, which also happens to have the lowest rate of female parliamentary representation of the countries studied, with female MPs making up a mere 2.7 percent of Parliament.

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Laura Helmuth presents the two major perspectives:

One of the most fascinating debates in life science these days is between Olshansky and James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. They disagree fundamentally about whether and how average life expectancy will increase in the future, and they’ve been arguing about it for 20 years.

Olshansky, a lovely guy, takes what at first sounds like the pessimistic view. He says the public health measures that raised life expectancy so dramatically from the late 1800s to today have done about as much as they can. We now have a much older population, dying of age-related diseases, and any improvements in treatment will add only incrementally to average life expectancy, and with vanishing returns. He explains his point of view in this charming animated video.

On the other side of the ring is Vaupel, who says that people are living longer and healthier lives all the time and there is no necessary end in sight.

His message is cheerier, but he takes the debate very seriously; he won’t attend conferences where Olshansky is present. His charts are heartening; he takes the records of the longest-lived people in the longest-lived countries for each year and shows that maximum lifespan has been zooming up linearly from 1800 to today. One wants to mentally extend the line into all of our foreseeable futures.

Olshansky says the only way to make major improvements in life expectancy is to find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases of aging. And the most efficient way to do that is to delay the process of aging itself. That’s something that some people already do – somehow. Olshansky says, “The study of the genetics of long-lived people, I think, is going to be the breakthrough technology.” Scientists can now easily extend lifespan in flies, worms, and mice, and there’s a lot of exciting research on genetic pathways in humans that might slow down the aging process and presumably protect us from the age-related diseases that kill most people today. “The secret to longer lives is contained in our own genomes,” Olshansky says.

But as the above chart shows, the secret to longer lives also includes not killing each other.

A reader writes:

Your post quotes another article that states thumbprints are “convenient and, at least in theory, uncrackable.” Uncrackable? Bruce Schneier, security expert, differs:

So…can biometric authentication be hacked? Almost certainly. I’m sure that someone with a good enough copy of your fingerprint and some rudimentary materials engineering capability — or maybe just a good enough printer — can authenticate his way into your iPhone.

Another adds:

I’m sure VanHemert means well when he says a fingerprint is, in theory, uncrackable – but it’s the opposite. The phone would need to access the encrypted print data on the hard drive in order to authenticate the person unlocking the device, which provides another point of access for someone to break into the phone. With any kind of security measure, the less points of access, the better.

Readers also respond to a recent post on heartbeat-based access:

Speaking as one of the millions of people with cardiac arrhythmias, I would be out of luck if a “heartbeat recognition” system was adopted to replace passwords.

EKGs are not analogous to fingerprints. When I’m in normal sinus rhythm, the system would work as advertised and I would be recognizable. However, I have frequent, random episodes where my heart goes out of pattern. These episodes can be momentary or last for hours, and during an episode my heart rate and rhythm pattern goes all over the place. During those episodes, I would presumably be locked out of my Nymi-encrypted device because it wouldn’t recognize my EKG. A conservative estimate is that four million Americans suffer from atrial fibrillation, various tachycardias, sick sinus syndrome, flutter, heart block, or WPW. Despite our electrical problems, most of us are productive members of society. But we’d lose productivity if heartbeat recognition gained ground.

And September is Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month, so I’d like to make the healthy tech developers aware that their idea is a non-starter for this fast-growing segment of the population.

Yep, Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month is a real thing. Another reader:

Unfortunately all biometric-based authentication has a fatal flaw. This includes fingerprints, eye scans, and even heartbeats. The problem is that the data can be copied. And once it is copied there is no way to change it.

When your account password is compromised, it is possible to change it. This is impossible for biometric identification. You can’t change your fingerprint or your eye scan or your heartbeat. It is also always available to anyone who cares to copy it. There is nothing stopping your doctor from copying all of your biometric information and using it to impersonate you. This is not possible with passwords, unless you explicitly give them out at the time you type it, which is only a few times a day. Your body is available to anyone you are around all the time.

Passwords provide the strongest possible security guarantee. Which is absolutely necessary for any Internet-based service. Anything online is accessible to anyone in the entire world. That means you have to defend against the most advanced sophisticated genius level criminal attackers out there.

There is a place for biometric-based authentication. It is good to use in addition to passwords. But it can never be a solid foundation alone.  It is the ability to be completely inside your head and not stored anywhere else that makes passwords theoretically uncrackable. In practice you need to choose a good password and not re-use them nor be fooled into giving them away.