style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/Directions:  style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/ Can Burglars Jam Your Wireless Security System? style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[B] The most likely type of burglary (入室盗窃) by far is the unsophisticated crime of opportunity, usually involving a broken window or some forced entry. According to the FBI, crimes like these accounted for roughly two-thirds of all household burglaries in the US in 2013.The wide majority of the rest were illegal, unforced entries that resulted from something like a window being left open. The odds of a criminal using technical means to bypass a security system are so small that the FBI doesn’t even track those statistics.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[C] One of the main theoretical home-security concerns is whether or not a given system is vulnerable to being blocked from working altogether. With wired setups, the fear is that a burglar (入室盗贼) might be able to shut your system down simply by cutting the cable. With a wireless setup, you stick battery-powered sensors up around your home that keep an eye on windows, doors, motion, and more. If they detect something wrong while the system is armed, they’ll transmit a wireless alert signal to a base station that will then raise the alarm. That approach will eliminate most cord-cutting concerns—but what about their wireless equivalent, jamming? With the device tuned to the frequency, what’s to stop a thief from jamming your setup and blocking that alert signal from ever reaching the base station?
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[D] Jamming concerns are nothing new, and they’re not unique to security systems. Any device that’s built to receive a wireless signal at a specific frequency can be overwhelmed by a stronger signal coming in on the same frequency. For comparison, let’s say you wanted to “jam” a conversation between two people—all you’d need to do is yell in the listener’s ear.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[E] Security devices are required to list the frequencies they broadcast on—that means that a potential thief can find what they need to know with minimal Googling. They will, however, need to know what system they’re looking for. If you have a sign in your yard declaring what setup you use, that’d point them in the direction, though at that point, we’re talking about a highly targeted, semi-sophisticated attack, and not the sort of forced-entry attack that makes up the majority of burglaries. It’s easier to find and acquire jamming equipment for some frequencies than it is for others.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[F] Wireless security providers will often take steps to help combat the threat of jamming attacks. SimpliSafe, winner of our Editor’s Choice distinction, utilizes a special system that’s capable of separating incidental RF interference from targeted jamming attacks. When the system thinks it’s being jammed, it’ll notify you via push alert (推送警报).From there, it’s up to you to sound the alarm manually.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[G] SimpliSafe was singled out in one recent article on jamming, complete with a video showing the entire system being effectively bypassed with handheld jamming equipment. After taking appropriate measures to contain the RF interference to our test lab, we tested the attack out for ourselves, and were able to verify that it’s possible with the equipment. However, we also verified that SimpliSafe’s anti-jamming system works. It caught us in the act, sent an alert to my smartphone, and also listed our RF interference on the system’s event log. The team behind the article and video in question make no mention of the system, or whether or not it detected them.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[H] We like the unique nature of that software. It means that a thief likely wouldn’t be able to Google how the system works, then figure out a way around it. Even if they could, SimpliSafe claims that its system is always evolving, and that it varies slightly from system to system, which means there wouldn’t be a universal magic formula for cracking it. Other systems also seem confident on the subject of jamming. The team at Frontpoint addresses the issue in a blog on its site, citing their own jam protection software and claiming that there aren’t any documented cases of successful jam attack since the company began offering wireless security sensors in the 1980s.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[I] Jamming attacks are absolutely possible. As said before, with the equipment and the know-how, it’s possible to jam any wireless transmission. But how probable is it that someone will successfully jam their way into your home and steal your stuff?
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[J] Let’s imagine that you live in a small home with a wireless security setup that offers a functional anti-jamming system. First, a thief is going to need to target your home, specifically. Then, he’s going to need to know the technical details of your system and acquire the specific equipment necessary for jamming your specific setup. Presumably, you keep your doors locked at night and while you’re away, so the thief will still need to break in. That means defeating the lock somehow, or breaking a window. He’ll need to be jamming you at this point, as a broken window or opened door would normally release the alarm. So, too, would the motion detectors in your home, so the thief will need to continue jamming once he’s inside and searching for things to steal. However, he’ll need to do so without tripping the anti-jamming system, the details of which he almost certainly does not have access to.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[K] At the end of the day, these kinds of systems are primarily designed to protect against the sort of opportunistic smash-and-grab attack that makes up the majority of burglaries. They’re also only a single layer in what should ideally be a many-sided approach to securing your home, one that includes common sense things like sound locks and proper exterior lighting at night. No system is impenetrable, and none can promise to eliminate the worst case completely. Every one of them has vulnerabilities that a knowledgeable thief could theoretically exploit. A good system is one that keeps that worst-case setting as improbable as possible while also offering strong protection in the event of a less-extraordinary attack.

style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/Directions: style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/
    [A] When your elderly relative needs to enter some sort of long-term care facility—a moment few parents or children approach without fear—what you would like is to have everything made clear.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[B] Does assisted living really mark a great improvement over a nursing home, or has the industry simply hired better interior designers? Are nursing homes as bad as people fear, or is that an out-moded stereotype (固定看法)? Can doing one’s homework really steer families to the best places? It is genuinely hard to know.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[C] I am about to make things more complicated by suggesting that what kind of facility an older person lives in may matter less than we have assumed. And that the characteristics adult children look for when they begin the search are not necessarily the things that make a difference to the people who are going to move in. I am not talking about the quality of care, let me hastily add. Nobody flourishes in a gloomy environment with irresponsible staff and a poor safety record. But an accumulating body of research indicates that some distinctions between one type of elder care and another have little real bearing on how well residents do.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[D] The most recent of these studies, published in The journal of Applied Gerontology, surveyed 150 Connecticut residents of assisted living, nursing homes and smaller residential care homes (known in some states as board and care homes or adult care homes). Researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center asked the residents a large number of questions about their quality of life, emotional well-being and social interaction, as well as about the quality of the facilities.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[E] “We thought we would see differences based on the housing types,” said the lead author of the study, Julie Robison, an associate professor of medicine at the university. A reasonable assumption—don’t families struggle to avoid nursing homes and suffer real guilt if they can’t?
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[F] In the initial results, assisted living residents did paint the most positive picture. They were less likely to report symptoms of depression than those in the other facilities, for instance, and less likely to be bored or lonely. They scored higher on social interaction.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[G] But when the researchers plugged in a number of other variables, such differences disappeared. It is not the housing type, they found, that creates differences in residents’ responses. “It is the characteristics of the specific environment they are in, combined with their own personal characteristics—how healthy they feel they are, their age and marital status,” Dr. Robison explained. Whether residents felt involved in the decision to move and how long they had lived there also proved significant.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[H] An elderly person who describes herself as in poor health, therefore, might be no less depressed in assisted living (even if her children preferred it) than in a nursing home. A person who had input into where he would move and has had time to adapt to it might do as well in a nursing home as in a small residential care home, other factors being equal. It is an interaction between the person and the place, not the sort of place in itself, that leads to better or worse experiences. “You can’t just say, ‘Let’s put this person in a residential care home instead of a nursing home—she will be much better off,’” Dr. Robison said. What matters, she added, “is a combination of what people bring in with them, and what they find there.”
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[I] Such findings, which run counter to common sense, have surfaced before. In a multi-state study of assisted living, for instance, University of North Carolina researchers found that a host of variables—the facility’s type, size or age; whether a chain owned it; how attractive the neighborhood was—had no significant relationship to how the residents fared in terms of illness, mental decline, hospitalizations or mortality. What mattered most was the residents’ physical health and mental status. What people were like when they came in had greater consequence than what happened once they were there.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[J] As I was considering all this, a press release from a respected research firm crossed my desk, announcing that the five-star rating system that Medicare developed in 2008 to help families compare nursing home quality also has little relationship to how satisfied its residents or their family members are. As a matter of fact, consumers expressed higher satisfaction with the one-star facilities; the lowest rated, than with the five-star ones.(More on this study and the star ratings will appear in a subsequent post.)
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[K] Before we collectively tear our hair out—how are we supposed to find our way in a landscape this confusing?—here is a thought from Dr. Philip Sloane, a geriatrician (老年病学专家) at the University of North Carolina: “In a way that could be liberating for families.”
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[L] Of course, sons and daughters want to visit the facilities, talk to the administrators and residents and other families, and do everything possible to fulfill their duties. But perhaps they don’t have to turn themselves into private investigators or Congressional subcommittees. “Families can look a bit more for where the residents are going to be happy,” Dr. Sloane said. And involving the future resident in the process can be very important.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[M] We all have our own ideas about what would bring our parents happiness. They have their ideas, too. A friend recently took her mother to visit an expensive assisted living/nursing home near my town. I have seen this place—it is elegant, inside and out. But nobody greeted the daughter and mother when they arrived, though the visit had been planned；nobody introduced them to the other residents. When they had lunch in the dining room, they sat alone at a table.
style=margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 宋体; font-size: 14px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);/　　[N] The daughter feared her mother would be ignored there, and so she decided to move her into a more welcoming facility. Based on what is emerging from some of this research, that might have been as rational a way as any to reach a decision.