why am I anxious?

Where does it come from?

Like many of the states of mind which are central to how I experience my life (happiness, hope, depression, sexual appetite) my anxiety comes in waves. That’s not to say it ever really leaves me. Like those other states it’s always there, and even when it’s lying dormant I can sense it below the surface, wanting, needing to make itself manifest. When I’m strong or just very preoccupied with living, anxiety stays down there: the monster under the bed. At other times I lose the battle and it overtakes me.

Are there triggers for my anxiety?

I experience it very physically. Somewhere along the way I’ve learned to repress the particular cause of the anxiety. I tell myself that whatever it is that’s worrying me isn’t really a cause for worry and the anxiety gets repressed and comes back as something physical. This action has become so automatic down the years that it’s a real effort of will for me to go back and try pick out what might be worrying me.

What does it feel like?

It migrates around my body. It collects in my throat and causes me to swallow and clear my throat all the time. I feel it in my chest and it bothers my breathing. I feel it in my head and shoulders as tension. I feel it in my stomach as nausea. These physical symptoms provoke further anxiety as I begin to obsess over my health. I become consumed by the thought that there is something wrong with me. My health ultimately becomes the main focus of my anxiety.

My fear of death

Hypochondria runs in my family – I often joke with my brothers about my mum’s at least bi-monthly visits to the doctors with some new ailment. There’s a good reason for my mum’s hypochondria. She had cancer when we were kids and this brush with mortality understandably scared the shit out of her. My hypochondria is also based on a fear of death. The Swedish children’s writer Astrid Lundgren apparently used to begin all her phone conversations with her sister with the words, “death, death,” so as to get the subject out of the way. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that a popular children’s writer would be preoccupied by death. Children are very concerned with death. I know I was. I remember we used to go for walks with my family along the cliffs that skirt the northeast coast of England where I grew up. As a child I was terrified one of my family would fall to their death and I remember I used to admonish them for walking too close to the cliff edge.

This childhood preoccupation with death is natural when you think about. Children always want to know why things are the way they are. That’s the question I remember asking all the time as a kid. But why? But for death there is no answer. And the questions for which we can find no answer become, I think, the enduring questions of our life.

As a child the unknown aspect of death scared me. In my twenties I travelled a lot to far flung, sometimes dangerous places. I wonder now if these physical journeys to unknown places were part of a subconscious effort to stare this fear of the unknown in the face? Perhaps. I’m in my mid-thirties and my fear of death has returned. But unlike when I was a child, now it’s my death that fills me with dread.

Can I overcome my fear of death?

In a way I think the more important question here is: do I want to? I’ll be honest; sometimes I don’t. That childhood concern with death contained within it – still does – a morbid fascination. Like Keats, I sometimes find myself “half in love with easeful death.” I love the darkness. Why is Goya so much more interesting to me than Renoir? Why has a graveyard in winter always held a far stronger pull on my imagination than a summer wedding? I was born at the end of November, the dawn of the season of decay. Does that explain it?

I don’t want to be anxious and I don’t want to spend my days consumed with thoughts of my own mortality. To do this, I must get out of my own head. I must do more for others. I must stop my every waking thought being about I, me, mine. I must kill the ego – that is the only useful death I can think of. I must see, understand, feel the reality of that idea spoken about in the Bhagavad Gita that duality is an illusion. That life and death are one and the same. I must learn to embrace no thing.

I have a lot of work to do to overcome my fear of death. The good news is: I think I still have time to do it.

a version of me died in the congo

One of the jobs I do in this city where one job is never enough is I work on a website. The website covers news from all over the world and sometimes I get a story from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The stories from the DRC – just as an FYI news media love acronyms – they’re usually quite depressing. The DRC has had civil war on and off for the last two decades. Millions have died.

A photo of me on the Congo River taken in 2006.

As you might imagine this means DRC is a pretty crap choice for a vacation.

I know this because I holidayed there a few years ago. Whenever I see DRC news stories I’m reminded of this visit and of the end of the trip in particular, when I burst in to tears in front of a room full of strangers.

The strangers were immigration officers and a couple of cops. Aside from the odd dewy-eyed moment in the darkness of a movie theater I don’t cry in public. Yet this was second time that day I’d cried. The first was a few hours earlier at a cafe where I’d been trying to collect myself after some wild-eyed kid pulled a knife on me in the street.

Because of the shock the tears came uncontrollably. The locals saw this and word got around and pretty soon a couple of “cops” turned up. (FYI – in DRC you must put inverted commas round the name of any public official). The “cops” asked me to accompany them to the precinct. I went because I thought they wanted me to fill in a crime report. But it soon became clear they weren’t interested in the crime. I was led to an office where I met some “immigration officers”.

The men wanted to see my passport. I might be here illegally, they said. When I tried to protest that maybe the recent knife crime should take precedence over my immigration status they got very angry and began shouting. That’s when I started crying.

My memory is of some pretty major league blubbing. Crumpled, wet face. Loud sobs. The whole nine yard. The men in the room were not impressed and if anything their treatment of me grew even harsher after my breakdown. I was escorted back to my hotel and had my passport taken from me. I was taken to a police precinct and forced to sleep on a moth-eaten mattress. The next day I got my passport back and that same afternoon booked a flight out of the DRC and a few days later left and never went back.

That episode left a big mark on me. It shattered an illusion I’d had about myself till then. Till that point I’d wanted to see myself as the adventurous writer, bringing reportage from far flung places, cool-headed in the face of danger. A modern-day Hemingway. But this episode showed me that this larger-than-life person didn’t exist and that the truth was someone much smaller.

For along time after the DRC trip I felt humiliated by my breakdown and I hated the small person I’d revealed myself to be. I couldn’t really talk about it but I know it prayed on me. I got involved in a series of relationships that looking back on it now were quasi-abusive and quit working and got fucked up a lot. I think I was punishing myself. I think I wanted to forget.

In the last couple of years I’ve started to understand the truth of that episode. The main thing is that I’ve begun to come to terms with that smaller person who inhabits me. I see him now as the little boy I once was and the vulnerability he reveals in me I realize is the heart of my humanity and without it I would be just another dead man walking.

I realize too that the truly shameful fear on show in that room in Kinshasa wasn’t mine. It was the men’s. They were afraid to see another man cry because it reminded them too much of their own vulnerability. They had grown used to the idea that they had to stay hard to survive. They had grown used to the idea that a man never lets his guard down, that to show weakness is to be less than human.

Because of this terrible fear men do terrible things. At least in part, this terrible fear is why millions have died in the DRC.

A version of me died in the Congo and, on the whole, I’m glad he’s gone.

what art means to me – a poem

Shall I say first what art is not.

Art is not a movement

Not exclusivity or bragging rights

Not diamond-studded death,

Talking points in the press.

Art is not storms in teacups

Explanations of my own artwork

‘Saying something’

Art is not instant gratification

Not: my idea but the student on slave wages made it.

Art is me

This is my truth

Now tell me yours.

My pain and joy

My fluid soul and stubborn will

The burning embers of faith

The blood and guts.

Caustic soda poured on a wound of 30 years

Four and a half billion years of Earth’s history distilled into a whiskey tumbler. Taken neat.

The heartbeat in utero

The drum roll before oblivion,

The things I am

The thing I’m not

The questions that will never let me be.

E was not for England – a poem

When I was 22, E was not for England.

The country I grew up in wanted me inside a Pink Floyd lyric
Wanted decorum and a pulling up short
It said “that’ll do” and “that’s quite enough”
And “don’t you think you’re overreacting”
And “there’s no harm in giving up.”

And my generation wanted out of that
Were bursting to exhale
To taste, sense, see with new sensation.
My generation had an idea too
Had a quiet feeling that things might break open

I suppose every generation do.

In England in the 90s something happened that was akin to America in the 60s.
We didn’t have Dylan or King or Kennedy
Or counter culture or civil rights or even rock and roll
We had dance music.
And if that doesn’t sound much, consider:
All it takes to turn a strip of dead metal into a blinding white ball of light is this:
A catalyst.

When I was 22 E was not for England.

I took ecstasy for the first time with Aaron Johnson at the Empire nightclub in Teesside at 10.30pm on a Thursday. That was important, Aaron said. Because that way you’d be coming up before midnight and if you were enjoying it you could add another dose, before the club closed.

And first, he said, just try a half. Else you might vomit everything up and we’ll have wasted five quid. And don’t drink too little; you’ll get dehydrated and pass out.

And don’t drink too much; because you’ll end up like that girl who died because she kept on drinking water and forgot to piss.

Leah Betts, she was called. And her parents agreed her death should be used to warn about the dangers of drugs and so the papers were full of it. Showing photos of her lying their in hospital fighting for her life, tubes shoved down her throat and up her nose and her face swelled up so much her eyes were pushed closed.
Her skin was ink blue and red and for all we knew she was already dead.
And over it the headline:
“It could be your child!”

When I was 22 I was doing a dead end job; data entry at an insurance company, indexing cards with customer records on them in a windowless room with a dozen others.
And there was an old guy worked there was a narcoleptic and 20 times a day he’d fall asleep.
I’d listen to him snore
Thinking how that crackle of breath was like the sound an engine makes
When it’s out of fuel and stutters to a stand still
Makes one last revolution before it admits defeat.
And I didn’t want to give in to sleep.
Be like the sleepwalkers I saw each day under nicotine skies
Their faces unwell; their eyes filled with silent rage; suffocating inside
Trying not to think about how or when or why they’d thrown in the towel.
I wanted something more for me
I wanted ecstasy.

I came from a post-industrial landscape
The remnants of dark satanic mills
Replaced by petro-chemical plants.
And I would take the bus (just one an hour)
Past 60s housing and tower blocks that stacked like cigarette boxes in corner shops
And get out at the cinema and watch American movies:
See technicolour heroes always win the day
And sitting in the darkness feel the bitter-sweet longing
Knowing that romance did exist in life. Just somewhere far away.

And you would go each week to your grandparents
Who sat all day in front of TV sets turned low
Like ancient Salamanders basking in the glow
Of halogen suns.

And grandma took wulferin for her heart
And a couple of brandies to take the edge off things at night
And Aunty Mary smoked 40 Benson and Hedges
And Uncle Jim drank seven pints a day all his life.

And I played football with Aaron Johnson
On grass pitches underneath pylons in our hometown,
Which sat in the loop of a river
Like a condemned man in a noose.

Then grandma died and mom got cancer
And a kid from the town threw himself in front of a train
And for me and Aaron Johnson escape was only answer
Because no one had ever taught us how to deal with pain.

So at the age of 22 I stood in the dark recesses of the Empire nightclub
And Aaron laid the half into my palm
I washed it down with a mouthful of beer
Like a Christian taking secret communion
And waited to see water turn to wine.

Maybe you know what happened next
Maybe you’ve been there too
Bought a ticket for a lottery
Asked yourself in the darkness: is this the stupidest decision of my life?
Will I be dead in an hour?
Will I be a poster boy for a government awareness campaign
My parents standing shame-faced round the grave
And all the kids from my old school
Fidgeting on church pews, wanting out,
Like animals in a zoo?

Maybe you’ve been there too
When the floodgates open
And serotonin soaks you like a summer shower
And everything is Technicolor
All is love
And you can’t believe you’ll ever get higher
(And you won’t)
And just for those few hours
It’s as if God reached down from heaven above and said to you:
My boy, you must never be afraid or give up hope
You must know that I am with you
That I walk beside you every step of the way
And the people you share this grim northern town with are your brothers and sisters,
And the world around is beautiful and bountiful and will give to you, and keep on giving
So long as we all shall live.

And here was Aaron beside me,
Hypnotized by the beat
And in the darkness I grabbed him, and called ‘I fuckin’ love you man!’ in his ear.
And he turned to me and grinned
And at that moment it was as if we had found each other for the first time;
Had met in some new way.
Like creatures living in the abyss of deep sea
Who looking across the expanse of eternal night
See one another as specks of colour illuminating the blackness.
Bioluminescence.

We bioluminesed that night.

I took ecstasy once more with Aaron. At 70s night at Club M. 15 quid in and all you could drink.
But the law of diminishing returns is writ large over every addict’s grave and that night Aaron threw up in the bushes after necking four pills and swore off it and cleaned up and got a job in a call center
And, a few years later, a wife and two kids.

And I kept wandering; unable to settle down.
Because something had changed in me after ecstasy.
A filter had been removed; a veil had been lifted.
In some strange, nearly imperceptible way my vision had been shifted
And the real world was never quite the same.

And on I went and in the distance saw the lights of New York
Like a million souls before me stepped onto Broadway.
Looked around the movie sets of my youth.
Thought to myself: In a world of shifting perspectives,
I could get used to this view.

So I stayed. And now I’m old enough to feel morning aches,
And heartburn and to empathize with period pains.
And I go running in the park at twilight when the fireflies are out on summer nights.
The fireflies, who long ago learned to feed themselves a chemical
That breaks down in them and makes light.

So this is where I’m at in my story.
And now I’ll tell you where I hope to be.
I want tell my friends I love them without shame.
And fill a room with the warm glow of communal bliss
That touched me that Thursday night
And do it using only heart and mind
And no trick of chemical binds.

I want to face my troubles down
Risk a burn or two to wake myself up
Because discomfort is better than numbness,
Numbness is giving up.
I want to shine my light
I will not fade to grey like grandad in his chair
I will search for the lights of others in the darkness
For there is life in knowing someone else is there.

get airport check-in on the same page

A version of this story appeared in the November 2012 edition of Airport Terminal World magazine.

The world’s airports are getting larger and the number of carriers they host is growing year by year.

To deal with this proliferation in airlines and passenger numbers, a long-term goal of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has been to see a single passenger processing system put in place that can be used at all airport check-ins and boarding gates around the world. This industry-wide system has become known as “common use”.

Nearly a decade in its development the Common User Passenger Processing System, or CUPPS, was meant to answer the IATA’s goals when it was unveiled in 2008.

Four years on, enthusiasm for CUPPS is still muted.

Las Vegas’ McCarran was the first major hub to switch to CUPPS, meanwhile South Korea’s Incheon Airport has invested 2.5 million GBP in a CUPPS conversion for its Korean Air and Asiana Airlines terminal and Berlin’s recently-opened Brandenburg airport has been completely fitted out with the system.

Elsewhere however there has been a lukewarm reaction to the new system. According to the IATA, about 350 of an estimated over 2,000 medium- to large-sized airports around the world have a common use system in place. But most of them operate using CUPPS predecessor, CUTE.

In spite of a relatively low take-up the IATA remain confident that CUPPS is on track to become the industry standard. Paul Behan, the IATA’s Head of Passenger Experience, said that he expected the figures for common use airports to rise to 400 in the next 12 months with most of these new conversions likely to upgrade to CUPPS. Although only a small proportion of airports have fully adopted the new system Behan said there were over a hundred airports that were “CUPPS ready.” In other words they can support airlines with a small number of CUPPS applications.

The change to CUPPS will not happen overnight,” said Behan. “Most airports are locked-in to business cycles that committ them to their current passenger systems. These cycles typically last five to seven-year but we predict that when these cycles come to an end a lot of them will be switching to CUPPS.”

CUPPS, like its predecessor CUTE (Common Use Terminal Equipment), is a set of technical standards that allows airports and airlines to develop passenger services that are compatible with one another. In practice this means that a CUPPS-compliant airline can use the check-in and boarding systems of any CUPPS airport around the world. The same is true in reverse. In other words, a CUPPS airport can host any number of CUPPS carriers.

The concept of common use goes back to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. At that time the city’s main airport, LAX was only set up to host a small number of carriers and found itself overwhelmed by the sudden influx of international airlines resulting from the Games. These carriers had their own check-in systems that were incompatible with the systems in place at LAX.

At this time the airline industry began to moot the idea of a standardized system which could be used interchangeably by different airlines operating at different times from the same check-in desks. As a result of these discussions CUTE was created.

Although CUTE has performed a valuable service in bringing common use to the industry, Behan said there are certain systemic problems. One is that much of the hardware associated with CUTE is specialized for the airline industry and therefore expensive.

Another issue is a cumbersome certification process. Although CUTE is meant to provide a common standard in reality there is still a lot of variation. Since none of the platforms developed by software companies to host the various airlines are compatible with one another, this means airlines have to create multiple versions of their own applications that will work with the different platforms. It is rather like recording a song on to an MP3 and then having to convert it CD, vinyl and tape cassette.

This situation was complicated further by the fact that the CUTE system mandated airlines to re-certify on every platform each time an application was changed.

As a result of these shortcomings discussions about a possible follow-up to CUTE first took place at an airline industry summit in Seattle in 2000. Discussion and development went on several years and resulted in the first pilot program for CUPPS at Orlando airport in 2009 run by air transport communications firm SITA.

Behan said the new system had a number of important advantages over CUTE.

One of the main improvements is that CUPPS has been designed to work with off-the-shelf products,” said Behan. “This means that instead of using a printer costing several thousand pounds to print boarding passes you can use a big brand printer that costs less than a tenth of that. So that while it’s true that a conversion to common use requires a significant investment for airlines and carriers, with the new CUPPS standard the price has come down dramatically.”

In addition to this CUPPS mandates software providers to create platforms for airports that conform to a common interface. This means airlines only need develop a single version of their own application which will be certified once and will work at all the airports where CUPPS has been deployed. CUPPS platforms are also designed to work with airlines still operating on the earlier CUTE applications.

Both the CUPPS platforms and applications undergo testing and certification by external approved bodies. To achieve full certification after the testing process is done, the CUPPS compliant platform must then be put into service with two separate CUPPS-certified applications.

It’s a more rigorous certification process but it gets rid of all the red tape associated with re-certification and means, in the end, CUPPS is much simpler to maintain than its predecessor,” Behan said.

The CUPPS technical standard does not only relate to boarding and check-in. Via its Aviation Information Data Exchange (AIDX) there has also been an attempt to standardize flight information displays. The AIDX, which allows for the simple, direct communication of flight information to the displays by air carriers, is already up and running at several airports, including Denver and Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport.

McCarran’s CUPPS platform was installed by Maryland-based systems engineering specialist ARINC.

So far ARINC has installed, or is in the process of installing, its new vMUSE CUPPS platform at seven other airports in the Europe, Africa and Middle East business region, including Manchester Airport, Berlin Brandenburg, Brussels, Nairobi and Dubai.

Tony Chapman, ARINC senior director, Integrated Travel Solutions, said their software can be customized to suit a particular airport’s needs.

For example, ARINC recently signed a multimillion dollar contract with Ras Al Khaimah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates to supply a version of its vMUSE CUPPS platform that has been customized to allow for innovations like off-site hotel check-in and bag drop.

CUPPS is essentially a platform that allows the airlines to run and support a range of peripheral devices that are required at an airport,” said Chapman. “It can be deployed in multiple ways – from local servers, to cloud-based in the case of ARINC – to suit the size and operational requirements of the airport. The selection of peripheral devices is made by the airport customer and is a requirement of the specific needs.”

According to Chapman many of the peripheral devices, including printers, scanners and boarding gate readers, remain unchanged under the CUPPS conversion since “it mandates minimum workstation specification in terms of CPU processing power, hard disk space and internal memory”.

ARINC’s roll out of vMUSE at Berlin Brandenburg was incorporated across 153 workstations for check-in and back office desks and 188 boarding gate workstations for use by 31 airlines and handling agents.

South Korea’s Incheon Airport has invested in its own CUPPS compliant system developed to work alongside the airport’s existing internal check-in system.

The CUPPS conversion, which the airport has branded AirCUS, was funded 50/50 by Incheon and the South Korean government. Although a total of 68 carriers operate out of the airport, AirCUS is only operational in the boarding and check-in systems of Korean Air and Asiana Airlines. The technology developed for AirCUS has been designed to read boarding passes and machine-readable passports.

According to Mi-Kyoung Sun, who oversaw the AirCUS installation at Incheon, the deployment has led to a reduction in check-in times of 22 percent and has cut boarding times in half.

The conversion also made it possible to adopt lower cost peripherals since we collaborated with local manufacturers to make cheaper devices,” said Mi-Kyoung Sun. “It is a faster system. It can offer prompt reaction and system troubleshooting support is made easier since many of the devices were locally developed. It also gives airlines increased work efficiency with optimized customer-oriented functions. Using CUPPS, Incheon can maximize the overall airport process.”

Much of the recent take-up for CUPPs has been in the U.S. and Asia.

Behan said that in the U.S. this can be explained in part by a change in the outlook of many state-run regional airports which, in an effort to attract more business, have switched over from single carrier terminals to terminals hosting a number of international airlines.

In the context of their previous business models common use didn’t make sense, but it does now,” Behan said. “The reality is that more and more airlines are spreading to more destinations around the world. In this context everyone in the industry has a vested interest in creating a standard system that can work across the board. That’s why we believe CUPPS has a key role to play in the future of air travel.”

a scanner darkly

A version of this story was published in October 2012 edition of Passenger Terminal World magazine. 

There’s no doubt about it. Look around the world these days and you see biometrics everywhere: iris scanners used to keep tabs on prisoners on probation in the US; fingerprint verification in laptops and cash machines as far afield as Vietnam and South Africa. Even the world’s top athletes had to submit to face and fingerprint scans in order to take part in this year’s London Olympic Games.

But nowhere is the use of biometrics more prevalent, and more contentious, than in border control.

A decade ago biometrics at airports barely existed. Now the issuing of e-passports – travel documents containing a degree of biometric data (usually a photograph containing biometric markers and, in the case of the EU, fingerprints too) — is the default in most countries around the world.

Many major airports boast e-gates (or SmartGates as they are known in Australia and New Zealand) that use facial recognition to speed travelers through the security process. Facial recognition compares the digital photo stored on the e-passport with images taken by cameras at the gate, noting discrepancies in such things as bone structure, nose length, and the distance between your eyes. E-gates at Manchester and London Stansted already accommodate the latest generation of passports and plans are underway to install them at all five Heathrow terminals.

On top of this there are myriad trials going on testing out new, and sometimes frankly bizarre-sounding, methods of biometric technology that include avatars that monitor speech patterns to detect lying, a device that recognizes a person from the way he walks and brain scanning equipment.

Reading this you might be forgiven for thinking the biometric future is a fait accompli but as any traveler knows, aside from e-passports and a smattering of e-gates, security in most terminals around the world looks relatively unchanged from a decade ago and is still presided over by humans, not machines.

Jean Salomon, who runs JSalomon Consulting, his own border control security consultancy, has been in the business for 20 years. He said that there was a “quantum leap” forward in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks which helped usher in e-passport, mainly as a result of the intense lobbying of the International Civil Aviation Organization. But the momentum gained after the terrorist attacks has not sustained, he said.

“These days most of the booming and money-making biometrics business activity is centered on criminal data bases,” Salomon said. “The focus has been on developing biometrics for security reasons only, with no real intent to develop its associated seamlessness counterpart in airport facilitation.”

As a result he said a number of small and medium-sized biometric start-ups have folded in recent years and the production of the hardware used in biometric systems at border controls worldwide has concentrated in the hands of just three companies. These are the French firm Morpho, the U.S-based 3M Cogent and the global electronics giant NEC. All these companies have a stake in e-passport programs, in national biometric ID’s and in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), the technology used in biometric fingerprint scanners.

A number of other businesses exist to help integrate these technologies for specific airport’s needs. They include Liverpool-based Human Recognition Systems (HRS).

Jim Slevin, Business Unit Manager at HRS, is keenly aware that the biometrics market remains a relatively small part of airport security. Nor is this state of affairs likely to change any time soon, he said.

“A fully automated border solution may not be accommodated in mine or the reader’s lifetime,” Slevin said. “This is because the level of deployable artificial intelligence is not yet ready to deal with the complexity of situations that we, as humans, can create or deal with.”

Slevin said the take up of biometrics was also hindered by those in control of borders who were neither “technology centric, or indeed technology comfortable.”

He said the adoption of a fully automated system was dependent on completely rethinking the processes by which airports monitor the movement of passengers.

With this in mind HRS trialled a technology at Manchester Airport in 2010 capable of recognising passengers’ irises as they walked around the terminal, thanks to a remote camera set up in a security area. The camera took a photograph at a distance eliminating the need for the individual to stop and stare into the recognition camera.

The technology, called Biometrics In Motion, raises the possibility of airport security checks of the future taking place as the passenger moves around the terminal via the use of remote cameras, thus obviating the need for security gates and making for a much more fluid movement of travelers.

Aware that some travelers are put off by the idea of staring into cameras or pressing their palms onto fingerprint scanners, the security industry wants to find a fast and non-invasive biometric technology that will go over well with the public.

There have been a number of trials both in Europe and America of devices using gait recognition, a system which takes account of the unique way people walk and which, it is hoped – like Biometrics in Motion – can eliminate bottlenecks by reducing queuing times. Although most acknowledge the technology is not a significant enough marker on its own, gait recognition could be used in collaboration with other biometrics.

EU researchers in Greece, under the auspices of the Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis) project, conducted pilots using gait recognition as well as a number of other nascent technologies.

Security experts are moving increasingly towards developing systems that use a variety of physiological characteristics to identify people, largely because this lessens the chance of mistaken identity. The Humabio pilots included devices that distinguished individuals by brain patterns and heart rhythms.

The risk of relying too much on one physiological marker was brought home in Manchester in February last year when a couple managed to pass through facial recognition scanners using each other’s passports. The incident, which led to the scanner’s being temporarily withdrawn from service, was as noteworthy for the stir it caused in the press as anything else.

The reaction is symptomatic of just how divisive the use of biometrics in border control remains.

To their supporters, biometrics signal a brave new world of sleek efficiency and an important line of defence in the ongoing war against global terrorism. To their detractors they are further evidence of the Orwellian tendencies of modern states to increase surveillance of their citizens as well as leaving large swathes of the population at risk from identity theft.

Media debates about the ethics of biometrics can often drown out more prescient questions about whether the technology is actually effective in making airport travel quicker, safer and more convenient.

Facial recognition, for example, is not considered to be a very robust technology by many security experts, who say its continued application is down to the fact that the widespread availability of passport photos means it’s easy to get hold of the raw data.

As Jim Slevin points out, in the popular media biometrics are frequently compared with their predecessor, which in most cases means humans, and found wanting. In these comparisons humans are often considered to be 100 percent accurate and any error on the part of the biometric replacement shows it not matching up to its human counterpart.

Yet this suggests humans are infallible, and there have been more than enough security breaches down the years for us to know different.

Slevin calls this tendency, “the ex-partner in the marriage” syndrome.

“Through thorough mathematical and empirical data collection we have a very exact understanding of how well biometric systems perform in terms of false positive matching,” said Slevin. “In almost all circumstances the same transparency in the relationship between aviation and human operators is not available.

“The general publics’ perception of biometrics in airports will usually be through popular media; and rarely does one expect a story with a strapline of ‘Biometric System Implemented At XYZ Airport Without Issues And Performing In Line With Expectations’ to make headline news.”

As for another issue about biometrics commonly raised in the media, that they increase the risk of ID fraud by placing more of our sensitive personal details on databases that could potentially be hacked in to, Jean Salomon believes this concern is somewhat over egged. Salomon said that in reality there was greater risk of ID fraud from paper documents, such as birth certificates.

He said that details kept on databases associated with e-passports had much more rigorous security — they were systematically stored and electronically encrypted – whereas in most countries no such electronic backup existed for birth certificates, making them much easier to forge.

Even so, Salomon said inevitable mistakes would ensure that “civil liberties organizations will grow more white hair; simply because of nature’s inherent fondness for entropy.”

In the meantime, love it or hate it, biometric technology continues to advance and while the fully automated airport may be a long way further off than many advocates had first predicted, there’s little doubt that it’s coming, and that the sci-fi fantasies of the past will become the reality of the air travel experience of the future.

o heart be strong (a poem)

O heart be strong

For the pain you must suffer is your pain alone
But if you reach out a hand
When it gets too much
There will be friends to carry you along
But you must not be afraid to communicate your pain
For otherwise they’ll not know to help.

O heart be strong

When the ache of life is overwhelming and you feel ready to burst
Know that you can and you will absorb this ache
For it’s the ache love makes
And your pain is your passion
And true passion, in the end, transforms to grace.

O heart be strong

Take comfort from the great hearts of the past
The hearts of poets and lovers
The hearts of seer and sage.
The courage of these sacred mothers and fathers to lay bare the contents of their hearts should be your example
And the trail they blazed is lit by the light of truth.
Dostoyevski, Samual Taylor Coleridge
Patti Smith and David Foster Wallace
James Joyce and Albert Camus
Mos Def and Morrissey,
Your hearts are strong.

O heart be strong

For the house is laid with trapdoors that lead nowhere
Or to those who have misplaced right and wrong
And while the man with the microphone
Claims to have the answer
It’s the voice inside you must rely on.

O heart be strong

Against the fads and the fakery
Against the dangers of blind lust
Against the stupid insensitivity of naked profit
Against the carelessness of action without cost.

O heart be strong

For fear of failure is only the refuge of vanity
And there’ll always be those who don’t care for what you do
But if you allow wounded pride stop you unfolding your humanity
Then you’ll be letting ego obscure your true self
And if you don’t find the courage to fight your corner
Why would anyone else?

O heart be strong

Because the only failure comes in not trying
So be a light to those around and don’t give in
Become a brother to all human beings
A universal human in your actions
And let yourself unfold, like a flower,
The beauty that lies within.