The gym I go to is doing away with membership cards. In many of its gyms nationwide, including all 10 locations in my city, they use biometrics to let you in the door. Instead of swiping a card, you type in a 10-digit identification number and scan the tip of your index finger.

Although privacy advocates have expressed concern at this approach, there has been no major backlash so far against 24 Hour Fitness for using biometrics to identify its customers. The system has been implemented in what seems to be a reasonable and gradual way, and members may continue to use membership cards if they prefer.

Using fingerprints in place of membership cards is convenient, reduces waste, and impedes sneak-ins.

• Convenience. I dress in my exercise clothes to get to the gym, so it’s nice for me to not have to stash a membership card when I often don’t have any pockets. Plus, it’s one fewer item to lose and get charged $25 for, which I’ve done with my workplace badge twice in three years. And after all, convenience is a selling point in a gym—location, hours, parking or bike racks, and classes help us choose the right fitness center.
• Reducing waste. Biometrics are kinder to the environment, as there is no need to print membership cards or use up envelopes mailing them out. With 3 million members nationwide, 24 Hour Fitness alone can eliminate a great deal of wasted paper and plastic—and imagine how much more if other gyms and companies adopt a similar approach.
• Impeding sneak-ins. Without a membership card to beg, borrow, or steal off a friend, it’s hard for a non-member to gain access to a club. It’s awfully difficult to fake a fingerprint.

The downsides of biometrics include identity theft and privacy concerns.

• Identity theft. It is awfully hard to fake a fingerprint. It’s not impossible, however, and once someone has forged your print, it’s probably pretty tough to rectify. You can always get a new membership card. How would you get a new fingerprint?
• Privacy concerns. Officials say that the biometrics system used by 24 Hour Fitness doesn’t store fingerprints in a way that law enforcement personnel could compare to the prints left at a crime scene, but I’m not thoroughly reassured. Since I don’t have a criminal record, my fingerprints aren’t in the possession of the authorities (as far as I know). But now they might be able to track me down through my gym if I decide to pull a big jewelry heist or something.

All in all, I think there’s no reason to be too concerned about scanning in at 24 Hour Fitness. I’m glad I don’t have to tote around a membership card (or worry about losing it), and, for now, I’m not too worried about privacy. As long as we still have the option of saying no, and as long as they’re not selling our fingerprints, this approach raises no big red flags for me. Does your gym or workplace use biometrics? What do you think of it?

The principle of net neutrality, once it’s codified and enforced, will give us a free and open Internet. Following net neturality’s ideals, a deep-pocketed company can’t pay an ISP to give its site higher priority for access and downloads. Furthermore, an ISP can’t block sites or media that are offensive or owned by a competitor. Everything you can get online, you get can in equal measure.

When Google and Verizon issued a joint statement last week about their shared vision of an open Internet, we all had a collective mini-freakout. It wasn’t the full-throated, unequivocal support for net neutrality that Google has embraced in the past. Instead, it felt more like two companies scheming to get what they want.

Although it received some tepid support, the Google/Verizon proposal has been thoroughly panned by various parties, including the FCC, TechCrunch, and even the New York Times. The critics absolutely have a point, but I think we’ve all gone a bit overboard, possibly because of the sheer scope and reach of Google and Verizon. They’re huge, and they’re everywhere. If they really wanted to, they could probably take over the world. So when they go into cahoots to stray from the no-compromise ideals of net neutrality, we feel insecure. Nevertheless, I think there’s some good and some bad to this proposal.

The good:

1. Consumer protection. ISPs would not be allowed to block or purposefully impede traffic regardless of application or service. If this idea had been adopted and enforced years ago, Comcast would never have been able to prevent its users from accessing BitTorrent, an act that resulted in the major net neutrality lawsuit of our time.
2. Non-discrimination. ISPs could not discriminate against any traffic or content in a way that harms competition or users. High-roller companies could not pay for their sites to have higher priority.
3. Limiting FCC scope. The FCC would enforce—but not create—the laws regulating the Internet. It would take an act of Congress to modify net neutrality rules. Although the FCC has so far been the good guy in all of this, protecting consumers from discriminatory download and access policies, too much power might go to their heads. What if they decide to restrict bad words, like they do with television? I’d never get to do anything online again.

The bad:

1. Wireless is exempt. The provisions above apply only to the wired Internet. Wireless is a huge part of the online world, and exempting it undermines the whole idea of an open Internet. Like 56% of Americans, I use wireless Internet regularly, in some form or another. I’m writing this blog post on the free WiFi at my local coffee shop. Later on today, I’ll surely be checking my email on my phone, which is a capability I became addicted to almost instantly after getting my first smartphone. A mobile Internet study released in late 2009 concluded that wireless access is growing faster and will be bigger than the desktop Internet.
2. Wireless is exempt!! I just can’t get over this provision. Consider the ability of the wireless to reach folks who don’t otherwise have Internet access. African-Americans, for example, lag behind whites in home-based Internet access, but they’re the most active users of the mobile Internet, with a growth rate nearly twice the national average. If we neglect net neutrality on the wireless Internet, we reinforce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. If you can get a home computer and broadband access, you’ve got a free and open Internet. Otherwise, sorry.

The wireless exemption is huge, but it’s understandable coming from these two companies. Google’s Android marketshare is growing but nowhere near Google’s search engine penetration of 72% in the US. Verizon, meanwhile, still lags behind AT&T among wireless providers. Different rules for wireless might give them an edge. No matter how “non-evil” a company is, we cannot expect that it will operate out of anything other than self-interest. Luckily, their proposal is just a proposal. It will be up to the FCC and Congress to actually set net neutrality rules.

What do you think of the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal?

I hate technical interviews. As part of a job hunt, I hate doing them. As part of my job, I hate conducting them. We can do better, in the technical community, at discovering who is well-suited for roles in our organizations.

A technical interview is an oral exam you can’t really study for. You don’t know what they’re going to ask or what you’re going to remember, but you have to put the answers in full display on the white board. Write out binary search, implement a heap, swap the characters in a string, and don’t forget the semi-colons. Maybe you screw up a solution, maybe you nail it, but either way you move on to the next interviewer and another problem to solve. Five or six such repetitions with different engineers, maybe a hiring manager, and you’re left feeling exhausted and, sometimes, defeated.

Our jobs are nothing like our interviews. What do we learn by subjecting candidates to this process? I’ve never, in my years as an engineer, been compelled to implement a heap in any language—though I’ve had to do it at least twice in interviews. I once interviewed a promising candidate who was dismissed solely because he couldn’t remember how to read a file in C. I’ve also seen candidates hired who were professionally competent but personally, well, unpleasant.

When problems have cropped up with colleagues who ultimately left a company, the issue has never been a lack of technical expertise; it’s always a question of fit or attitude. In my experience, no one minds a co-worker who struggles with a design or piece of code, as long as he or she is willing to ask questions and take suggestions. The ones who fare poorly are the ones who design arrogantly or receive advice belligerently.

We can get a reasonable sense of someone’s technical prowess by asking high-level design questions, asking about previous projects, and even typical-interview questions like how did you overcome a problem. That way, you get some insight into attitude and personality as well as competence. Maybe even ask to see a code sample, which would give you an idea of how an engineer performs with time and consideration, rather than on the fly.

Changing our perspective about interviewing might change our working lives for the better. What do you think of technical interviews?

School boards all over the country decided long ago that biology, chemistry, and  physics are vital components of a basic scientific education. I took all 3 in high school but didn’t have the chance to study computer science until college. I have long believed that computer science is just as essential a science and needs to be taken just as seriously. Luckily, Rep. Jared Polis thinks so, too. He recently introduced HR 5929, the Computer Science Education Act, intended to assess and improve computer science K–12 education.

Among other important changes, HR 5929 will help to establish computer science courses as an integral part of a high-school curriculum. Currently, only Texas and Georgia allow computer science to count towards math and science graduation requirements. Elsewhere, computer science—if it’s offered at all—is an elective only.

Low participation in high school, whether by choice or by circumstance, engenders low participation in higher education. Polis’s bill focuses particularly on underrepresented groups in computer science, especially when it comes to Advanced Placement testing. In 2008, 17% of AP computer science test takers were women and 4% of AP computer science test takers were African-Americans. These numbers are far below the representation of women and African-Americans in most AP tests.

When I walked into my first freshman computer science class, it was 1998 and only a few of my classmates had done any programming or otherwise delved into the underpinnings of computing. I felt a little behind, but I was certainly not alone. Now, with computers as ubiquitous as they are, would a student who didn’t study computer science (AP or otherwise) in high school even take the class in college? With only 17.7% of computer science bachelor’s degrees going to women, and 10.3% going to African-Americans, both numbers down from previous years, I think the answer is no.

Offering computer science courses—and accepting them as science requirements—doesn’t mean that every student will become a computer scientist. High school biology, for example, didn’t spark a love of life science in me. I have long since repressed all my memories that involved frog dissection, and so, I suspect, have many of my classmates. But the girl who shared the scalpel with me? She’s a doctor now. Offering science gives students the opportunity to love it.

I’m going to call my congresswoman this week and express my support for HR 5929. What do you think of it?

This week marked the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). When I saw the headline I was struck by a single thought: It’s been only 20 years?

I have taken for granted for as long as I can remember that there would be braille signs in elevators, curb cuts in sidewalks, and closed-captioned TV shows. In fact, I wondered whether the ADA was even necessary. 18% of the Americans have some disability, so we’re talking about a huge swath of pretty much every business’s customer base. How could they be excluded?

But the thing is, I do it, too. Since disabilities don’t affect me, I don’t always think about how others might be impacted, but I should—it’s relevant to all of us in technology, even if we don’t own a business or a building. Some accessibility issues I don’t always think about:

• Accessible web sites. A person who is visually impaired might use a screen reader that reads aloud the content of a web page. Screen readers read text, not images, so if you have an unlabeled picture or an image of text on your web site, you might be excluding visually impaired users. W3 offers tips to make your own site accessible to WCAG Standards.
• Accessible smart phones. Last year, I attended an event at Google focused on diversity in tech. One of the presentations was from a blind engineer describing his difficulties using new smartphones with slick, flat screens and no traditional raised keyboards. Now, Google offers an eyes-free Android and related apps.
• Video captioning. Closed-captioning has been required of cable operators, broadcasters, and satellite distributors since 1996. It’s not required online, however. I don’t think we necessarily can expect every lame YouTube upload to be captioned, but maybe news clips from major news networks or other important video should be.
• Accessible outreach materials. Looking at a flier or a brochure? It should be available, online or hard copy, in a large-print or otherwise accessible format. Many books are available this way, and it can be easy to overlook other printed materials as well.

If we learned anything from the ADA, it’s that accessibility issues must be mandated. We don’t implement them, or necessarily even think of them, on our own. To improve accommodations in technology, HR 3101 passed the House on Tuesday. If it passes the Senate and ultimately becomes law, this bill will, among other things, improve cable television access guides and require Internet phone calls to be compatible with hearing aids. It’s the next essential step in accessibility.

Do you consider accessibility issues in your work or life?