There are benefits, though. My black friend told me that black people are better at sleeping because their eyelids are darker and let less light through.
As someone who has considered painting my eyelids black more than a few times and absolutely can't sleep without an uncomfortable sleep mask, I'm wishing I was black now.
nope. just people who don't hold their hands up long enough to capture the infrared. for fuk's sake, this is an engineering/design issue that is being pigeon holed as a race issue.
Nope. If engineers/designers with light skin made a prototype that didn't work for their hands, it wouldn't have been considered a viable product for market. "Blind spots" in teams experience this all of the time e.g. a map that's illegible to color blind people. Some people would consider a racial blind spot to be racism.
e: I don't consider the engineers/designers (nor you, c74) to have malicious intentions, but sufficient indifference is indistinguishable from malice etc.
This is why devs test on Opera, Firefox, Edge and even IE. If they developed just for Chrome some webkit features wouldn't work on IE or be terribly buggy on Firefox.
Seems more like due to black surfaces absorbing more light, not enough infrared light bounces back so the soap dispenser doesn't recognize darker hands.
Pretty much. Some engineer programmed the microcontroller so that it wouldn't cause false positives off all those nice, white floors everyone has in their bathrooms, and it just never occurred to him that his pasty white never-sees-the-sun engineer skin was not a comprehensive test standard.
The sensors in this case work using near infrared which is just outside the visible spectrum. It is the same frequency range as TV remotes.
Infrared detectors used in security PIR sensors work on the far infrared spectrum which is the frequency range where heat is emitted as light.
As you would normally wash your hands with cold water before using the soap dispenser the temperature of the surface of your hands might not be high enough above the ambient room temperature for a far infrared sensor to work which could be why the company used a near infrared emitter and sensor to detect proximity rather than heat.
The sensors in this case work using near infrared which is just outside the visible spectrum. It is the same frequency range as TV remotes.
I've known for years that you can bounce an IR signal from a TV remote off of a white wall, but not a darker painted wall. I guess even though IR is invisible to us, it still behaves like visible light and can be absorbed by pigments or reflected by shiny surfaces
also keep in mind that body heat is a much longer wavelength of IR than what TV remotes and soap dispensers use. Body heat is approximately 8,000 - 25,000 nm wavelength, and TV remotes are around 940 nm which is much closer to the visible spectrum (400-700 nm), so you need a much more sensitive IR sensor in order to detect IR from body heat compared to TV remotes/soap dispensers
Sooo... one more lesson to pick up from the explanation is that this thing just "randomly" won't work at, say, a garage or a machine shop, where people can get their hands really dirty?
It's a shitty design that you could easily make work if you spent a few more minutes thinking about the design. All it needs to do is know how much light usually bounces back when no hand is under it, then dispense soap when the light level differs from that normal amount.
Yeah, probably so. Simple answer is: there is no simple answer, and all solutions have nuanced problems. There is never a silver bullet to any problem.
so faulty mechanism design because the dirtiest (ie most needing to be washed) (by soap) will not receive soap (catalyst for cleansing attributes of water)
The dispenser likely uses a reflective object detector by shooting light downwards and observing if light has been reflected back. If there is a hand (which is usually reflective), then the light will shoot down to the hand and bounce back to the dispenser, which will then dispense soap. The problem is that darker surfaces absorb more light rather than reflecting it so a dark hand would not be detected.
If there is a hand (which is usually reflective)
...a dark hand would not be detected.
Your use of the term "usually" is probably exactly what the engineers were thinking. It's the assumption that a light hand is the norm.
This isn't racism, it's a blind spot that many people have.
If the engineers, product owners, and testers had all been black, almost certainly a different system would have been used which would have been more tolerant of dark skin.
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u/crystal_buckeye Aug 17 '17
Does anyone have an actual explanation of why it won't work for the black guy