My posts are always intermittent, but they’re a bit less frequent as I’ve been posting on my book project in a Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/sphone4all. I’ll create some ‘check it out’ posts in future for people who don’t do Facebook, but if you’ve been assimilated there you might “Like” that Page.
Here are some recent posts of possible interest to people reading this blog. You don’t need to login to Facebook to read them, just dismiss the annoying dialogs that might appear:
A few weeks ago I wrote about trying residential-urban (Saint Paul, MN) bicycle commute with #2. I realized he wasn’t ready, so we’re focusing on his mountain biking. He rides with a team I manage. It’s hard work for him, but he keeps persisting. I now do a scaled practice with him — about 50-70% of our novice rider practice routine. I got the scaling idea from my own CrossFit hobby — where I’m about 50% of the male athlete standard.
At that time I wrote that #1 was doing relatively well with his bike commuting. He has quite different cognitive traits; the two boys have complementary strengths.
Then, on a family outing, #1 took off on a 4 lane (2 each way) 50mph+ roadway. I’m pretty sure he knew I would not approve, but he wasn’t just yanking my chain. He was also showing off how fast he is, specifically much faster than his father. (I already knew that!). I didn’t say anything at the time, but his bike was grounded when we got home.
It took a while to figure out a good approach to letting him ride streets again. I started out investigating local traffic skills classes; I thought I’d adopt that curriculum for him, maybe do a hands-on course together. I decided it was the wrong fit though. Many of the skills he already did well, some of the curriculum wasn’t relevant to real world commuting, and many of the topics were too abstract.
I realized we had two issues that were relatively unique to #1. One is long term hard. He has had words with people in bicycle trails/paths [1] and, as is typical when he experiences conflict, he now avoids all bicycle paths.[2]
The other is a simpler problem. He can’t easily classify roads into relatively safe vs. relatively dangerous. This isn’t obvious — try making up the rules! It took me a while to come up with a set of ‘safe riding places’. The current list with some familiar examples is:
It has a bike lane - like Fairview or Summit
It has a bike path - but you have to use the path (Shepherd bike path)
It is a "bike avenue" with bike pictures - like Jefferson
Speed limit is 35mph or less (NOT 45, 50, 55) AND has one lane (on each side if two way)
We’ve been over the list several times; he sometimes forgets the magic speed limit. It has helped to go over how few people survive being hit at 40mph (basically nobody, not that 35mph is so great). I put these rules, together with a checklist of essential ride items [3], into a note on his iPhone (using a browser interface to his iCloud account, as described in my Smartphones for All book).
Being as he is, it doesn’t work to get a simple agreement on these things. I keep his road bike locked, before I unlock it, he has to show he’s carrying the necessary gear, then he has to review the safe ride place rules (using is iPhone if needed). Only then do I unlock and wish him well.
He’s starting to transition to a routine. That’s a good sign; once he has a routine it tends to stick.
Wish us luck.
- fn -
[1] I suspect this is mostly his fault, but addressing that is part of a long hard slog
[2] It is annoying to have pedestrians in the dedicated bike trails instead of the neighboring walking trail, but well tempered adults know to live and let live. #1 perseverates about these conflicts, I think they replay visually like a tape loop he can’t purge.
[3] He has quirks about carrying things. Nothing can be attached to his bike. He can’t explain why he dislikes taking his ID card or something with my number on it. His iPhone has his medical info, emergency contact and the like. I’m going to get that information written on back of his “must-carry” State ID. His iPhone shares his location using Apple Find Friends so we can track his long rides.
[4] As a teen and even as an middle-aged adult I’ve ridden more dangerous roads than the one he got grounded for. One of the unfair features of a monitored special needs adult is that you don’t get to do the stupid things your father did.
“Pride goeth before the fall” doesn’t mean first you lose your pride then you fail.
It means “the famine goeth before the plague” or “the herald goeth before the king”. Get cocky, hit the wall. The sin of Hubris.
Did that one this weekend. Asked too much of my guys.
It could have been worse. Ended up being a lot of driving for me and a lot of stress and yelling for #1, but there was nobody around but his brother. I could have handled my own frustration better, but I think we all survived with minimal scars. The car didn’t crash. Nobody rode their bike over a cliff.
The morning after I did my retrospective. What was I thinking?! I should have done the math. On an event that combined a new setting and not one but two novel and high stress activities all of which were weather dependent… what were the odds it would work out? Maybe 1/5.
That’s hubris. We’d had a string of successful adventures and I got cocky.
I should have had more contingency plans and I should have had at most one novel and stressful challenge to meet.
I get to try again this weekend …
I wrote the first ‘best you can be’ post almost 12 years ago. #1 was 7 then, #2 was 5. E and I already had years of experience with cognitive disabilities, autism spectrum, and atypical minds. We already understood how worthless the classifications we’d studied in medical school were. Autism, ADHD, Asperger’s (defunct now) — very rough labels that are primarily useful for obtaining services and perhaps for initial medication selection.
We thought there would be progress.
There really hasn’t been much that we’ve seen. We still have most of the original classifications (frozen in DSM V) and I haven’t seen any useful research emerge. We’re going nowhere.
If someone were to drop a few million dollars on me I’d start by defining 5-8 axes of thinking/feeling — measures of things like external-word vs. internal-world orientation, spatial processing, impulsivity, short-term memory, etc. Things that can be tested and measured.
I’d mine the existing literature for axes to study, but otherwise I’d toss out most of it. Test a few thousand late teens/early adults and plot them on a “spider graph”. Run the analysis to see if there are any useful clusters. If there are useful clusters, then name them. Use that as the basis for future research.
Basically, start over.
This is probably more obvious to most people than it was to me. My judgment is distorted by a lifetime of urban bicycling.
It was very difficult to teach #1 and #2 to ride a bicycle (it would be easier today - we know more). Almost as hard as teaching them to swim. They did well in the end though. #1 competed in high school mountain biking and I think he is a relatively safe urban cyclist. His impulsivity and rigidity are balanced by native caution and seemingly strong visual processing.
#2 has a substantially higher IQ than #1, but he’s a weaker bicyclist. We did a trial bike ride to school today; he did well with guidance but he was exhausted. I think the relatively simple ride was cognitively draining. #2 is closer to the classic Asperger’s pattern — persistent attention to the external world is very difficult. He may never be able to bicycle commute safely, though he does well mountain biking (and inline skating - remarkable balance there).
In retrospect I’m not sure urban bicycle commuting is cognitively less demanding than urban driving. There’s more time to plan actions, but there’s a lot more judgment involved. By comparison car driving is more rule-bound.
Special needs mountain/gravel biking, or bicycling on separated trails, works for #2. Bicycling on city streets - not so much.
We’re renewing #1’s passport. Should be routine, but he is now in guardianship.
The post-guardianship passport process is currently undocumented. Our local passport office didn’t know the process. We’re now told we need not only the letter of guardianship but also the court order. All certified. The letters we’ve received on this have been misleading or incomplete.
It is an amazing mess going on for 2-3 months now. Our next stop will be to contact the office of our local Senator.
Be warned.
The NYT has another “digital divide” article, this time using Detroit. I think they might be doing a series on this topic.
The problem of net access isn’t unique to Detroit, it applies to every low income American, which includes pretty much every special needs adult. A smartphone (net phone?) isn’t an option, it’s a necessity for modern life [1]. That’s one the reasons I’m writing my book on smartphones for special needs teens and adults.
It’s not hard to give everyone a smartphone. We’ll be drowning in cheap Android devices soon. The problem is data access. Home WiFi, which is notoriously unreliable and complex, costs at least $35/month in most markets. Home WiFi is too complex for most people to maintain anyway. Cellular data costs about the same per month, but it’s tricky to meter and it’s per-person, not per-family. For a family of five we’re looking at $175 a month — too much for a low income family.
So we need some universal mobile data access that everyone gets. Something around 1GB a month. That’s enough to support essential interactions, but not enough for streaming video.
I’m thinking we’ll either end up with something that’s funded by advertising (Facebook, Google) [2] or a public mandate. It might be a good idea to do both. Either way it will need to incorporate some kind of intelligent data use and filtering.
Whatever happens supporters of special needs adults should be engaged.
[1] Many government programs still have ancient web sites that don’t work well on a smartphone browser. The good news is that hackers are tearing those web sites apart, so they’ll need to be upgraded. In time we may need to bring ADA suits against government web sites that are not smartphone accessible.
[2] Low income advertising, best seen on daytime TV, is often predatory. That is, it’s advertising for services and products that are largely harmful scams. That will be a problem.
Yesterday I wrote about using MMGuardian with an Android device. Today I’m continuing research for my book project and my upcoming local (St Paul, MN) presentation on May 25th by reviewing MMGuardian on an iPhone.
Google and Apple have taken very different approaches to remote restrictions on mobile devices. Google has almost no built in restriction capabilities, but third party products like MMGuardian or Screen Time can dig deep into the operating system. They can monitor and disable SMS or phone services and they can lock the phone on a schedule. I haven’t used MMGuardian enough to know if this affects battery life or Android stability; that probably depends on how much support Google has built into Android.
For a parent, or a Guide working with an adult or teen with a cognitive disability, the iPhone restrictions are a big improvement on what Android provides. On the other hand, if you pay the $35-$60 a year for a 3rd party service, Android pulls ahead.
So how does an iPhone plus a third party service compare?
The short answer is that Android plus a third party service is better than an iPhone plus a third party service. At least if the service is MMGuardian, but as I’ll explain below I think it’s the same for all vendors. Compare this iPhone screenshot on the control portal (family.mmguardian.com) to the one I did for Android yesterday:
iPhone
Android
MMGuardian provides identical web filtering options for both platforms, but on Android phones MMGuardian provides fine grained control of app behavior. Individual apps can be turned on or off including apps that access media. For iPhones the only option is to disable access to video (movie and TV but not music video) and any apps purchased from the App Store [1]. Apple’s native apps, including Music, are not affected; a different control allows remote disabling of Safari, FaceTime and the camera.
I’m sure MMGuardian’s iPhone limitations are actually Apple’s limitations. I’ll go over that in a technical appendix, but I did find one problem that belongs to MMGuardian:
Both of these drop downs have the same options. So what do you do if you want to undo a Disable action? When I clicked Disable a 2nd time I got an error message saying the phone could not be reached. That’s a bug of some kind.
When I clicked Enable for 30 minutes everything returned — but what happens when the 30 minutes expire? Does it return to disabled? (It stays enabled — this is just a poorly structured UI. The options shown in this screen should change based on the Time Limits screen.)
MMGuardian for iPhone costs $20/year and there’s no family plan. MMGuardian for Android costs $35/year but there’s a $70/year family plan. I think MMGuardian (or something like it) is a necessity for an Explorer’s Android, but for an iPhone Explorer it’s not as simple. Most of what MMGuardian does, except for the web filtering, can be managed through the iPhone’s native restrictions.
Even so, I would have said MMGuardian is worth it for many Explorers — but I give the vendor two demerits for failing to document the uninstall procedure! This is particularly odd because it is well documented for Android devices.
Perhaps it is not documented because, unlike Android phones, there’s nothing to stop the restricted user from doing the uninstall themselves. In Settings:General Scroll down to find a Profile or Managed phone setting. Tap on it until you get the remove icon, then remove the profile. Now delete the MMGuardian app. Deleting the Profile will cause MMGuardian to send a notice to the Guide’s email address.
Once you’ve done this (but not before), you can go to family.mmguardian.com Settings and Delete the number from the MMGuardian account.
I get that MMGuardian doesn’t want to admit that device management can be so easily circumvented, but hiding the documentation is doing them no favors. It’s not something they can fix by the way, Apple has historically required ‘the consent of the governed’ for Mobile Device Management (they are changing that for schools, where, shockingly, the governed are rather rebellious).
In practice, for the Guide/Explorer relationship, “consent of the governed” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even in the parent/child setting, the removal of this kind of protection can lead to a productive conversation on the relative merits of a $50 flip phone.
Beyond the missing uninstall documentation it’s frustrating to be unable to block access only to iTunes movies and TV shows (blame Apple!), but it’s very helpful to be able to manage restrictions without physical control of the iPhone. The web filtering and reporting options, which (as with Android) require use of the MMGuardian browser, are a big improvement on Apple’s built-in controls. What we really need, of course, is for Apple to provider more options for MMGuardian and others to use.
The Technical Addendum
I’m going to get more technical here than I usually do in a Best You Can Be post. I mentioned that Apple is responsible for the gap between what MMGuardian can do on an iPhone vs. an Android phone, here I’ll explain why that is.
Apple and Google took very different approaches to phone design. Apple’s focused on security, privacy, reliability, usability and control, including directing phone revenues and services through Apple. Google has focused on maximizing advertising revenue and extracting behavior data while minimizing overhead.
These different approaches have produced quite different devices. Apple’s approach means there’s effectively no malware on Apple iPhones, but developers can only do what Apple allows. Internal security is strong and developer violations are punished. Google’s approach means Android malware is now common, but developers have a lot of freedom for good as well as evil.
In the case of remote restriction what Apple allows is determined not by the needs of Guides and parents, but by the needs of corporations and, to a lesser extent, schools. The smartphone industry, including Apple, calls this set of capabilities “Mobile Device Management” or MDM. To a large extend Apple’s Mobile Device Management options for remote management use the same software infrastructure as the iPhone Restriction settings.
Apple provides Mobile Device Management through an application called Profile Manager that runs on their low OS X server software or through Configuration Profiles managed by Apple Configurator. Other vendors do similar things (and usually manage Android phones too), including JAMF Software’s Casper Suite, Cisco’s Meraki Systems Manager, and Mobile Iron’s Enterprise Mobility Management.
MMGuardian is providing a simplified from of MDM for Guides and Parents, and they’re adding in some custom built web filtering (which also works on Android). Unfortunately, like everyone else in this iPhone space, they’re limited to what Apple supports. Apple, so far, has been mostly supporting what corporations are asking for, not what we might want.
- fn -
[1] After writing this I learned that one can disable TV, Movies or Apps separately in manual restrictions. I thought one could only set age limits. I would like MMGuardian to provide separate controls, not an all or none setting.
One of the last pieces of my book project, and a part of my upcoming local presentation on May 25th, is a discussion of smartphone restrictions and controls.
I’m familiar with iPhone on-device restrictions, but Google didn’t build anything like that into Android for phones. Android users need to find a 3rd party solution.
Finding that solution isn’t easy. This isn’t the 1990s; most of the journalists that used to write about these things are out of business. I used geek-power to narrow my options to two products - Screen Time and MMGuardian. This post has my initial impression of MMGuardian, I’ll do another one on their iPhone product then I’ll try Screen Time for Android.
MMGuardian is easy to setup. You start by installing their app on the target Android phone (typically an Explorer or teen’s phone); you can find it on Google’s Play Store or from the MMGuardian web site. The app is called “MMGuardian Parental Control”, not to be confused with a different app that can be installed on a Guide’s phone for remote management.
There’s a free two week trial, and for once you don’t start by entering a credit card. To enroll you launch MMGuardian Parental Control and complete a short form. After initial launch a second app will be installed called MMG Browser. That’s what an Explorer will use in place of Chrome; MMG Browser.app works with MM Guardian’s Web Filter service. (I assume MMG Browser is a wrapper over Chromium, Google’s web browser platform.)
I used the online web interface to do remote management of my Android test phone. Go to family.mmguardian.com and enter the credentials you setup earlier using MMGuardian Parental Control.app. The “user name” is your email address.
There’s a good range of controls …
In my early testing the commands send from MM Guardian’s acted within a few seconds, only the very first message failed.
App Management is quite different from iOS. iPhone apps can only be installed from Apple’s store, so it’s easy to disable installation. Android apps can be installed from any source, there doesn’t seem to be a simple way for developers to block all installations. Instead MMGuardian creates a list of apps that are allowed or blocked based on what is on the Explorer’s phone; new apps are blocked until review.
MM Guardian is looking pretty good so far. It’s $35 a year for a single phone, or $70 a year for up to five Android phones.
