Tag: Smartphones

A Pitch Too High

 

In trying to specifically target their advertisements and therefore get a higher return per ad, companies like to know as much as possible about the consumer, and lately some of them have resorted to using ultrasonic beacons embedded in their ads. Say you are at your desktop computer reading a news story from the online version of your local newspaper, and nearby on your desk is your smartphone, which is on but currently idle, or so you would assume. Unknown to you, one of the ads on the webpage you are looking at emits an ultrasonic beacon lasting about 5 seconds through your computer’s speakers. Most likely also unknown to you (because like most people you probably don’t bother to read all the permissions you grant an application when you install it), one or more of the applications on your smartphone pick up that ultrasonic beacon through the phone’s microphone and, through various commercial agreements also done without your knowledge, relays the packet of information encapsulated in the beacon, along with information contributed from the smartphone application, back to the advertiser on the webpage as well as to anyone else who has an interest in information about you.

 

The more advertisers know about you, the better, as far as they are concerned. The problem here is how sneaky they are being about collecting information. It is even possible for advertisers to embed ultrasonic beacons in television advertisements, though so far there is no proof any of them have done that. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates deceptive advertising practices, nonetheless recently warned 12 smartphone application developers about deceptively implying they were not monitoring users’ television viewing habits when in fact they were capable of doing so. Researchers recently discovered that as many as 234 Android applications are capable of using beacon technology. Unfortunately, it appears the FTC is reluctant to force the developers to divulge this capability to Android smartphone users. There is even less information available from Apple application developers.

 

Statue of Liberty, NY
The Statue of Liberty, also known as a beacon of freedom, on Liberty Island in New York Harbor; photo by William Warby.

 

This cross-device tracking, as it is known, is as invasive and sneaky as it gets, yet there seems to be little political will to either outlaw it or regulate it. A warning letter? That’s all? In the 1950s and 60s there was a public outcry about subliminal messages in print and television advertising. While the effectiveness of subliminal advertising has always been dubious, people were nevertheless upset they were being manipulated in such a sneaky, underhanded way. Because of the public outcry, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was moved to state it would revoke the license of any broadcaster who used subliminal messages in programming or advertising, and the FTC stated that it would prosecute advertisers under Sections 5 and 12 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, which governs deceptive practices.

 

Given the remarkable similarity of ultrasonic beacons in electronic devices to subliminal messaging, in practice if not in usage, it’s difficult to understand why the FCC and FTC have not come down harder on the commercial use of this technology. The practice is the same because both seek to take advantage of consumers without their knowledge, and certainly not with their explicit approval; the usage is different because subliminal advertisers cast a wide net to boost sales, while companies employing beacons gather information about users in order to more specifically target them, like fish in a barrel. Until federal regulators take stronger action against the use of ultrasonic beacons, people upset by the practice will apparently have to rely on the more acute hearing of their dogs to alert them.
― Techly
His Master's Voice
His Master’s Voice, an 1898 painting by English artist Francis Barraud (1856-1924) of his brother’s dog, Nipper. The Victor Talking Machine Company began using the painting in 1900, and in 1929 the painting became the symbol of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), aka RCA Victor.

 

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10 Reasons Your Mind Is Not a Waste

 

“When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
― Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking at a luncheon for the United Negro College Fund on May 9, 1989, mangling the Fund’s slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

 

Is the internet making us dumber? stupider? how about less bright? Listicles like this one could be one reason why we might not be that smart anymore. Maybe they’ve helped make us smarter than we used to be. Did listicles ever exist outside the internet, meaning a long, long time ago? Maybe in magazines, most of which were not meant for serious people, the way newspapers were, way back when.


Mel Brooks shows us an alternative past involving lists and tablets in his 1981 movie History of the World – Part 1.

Anyway, enough history. Here we go ―

  1. Before the internet, you needed to know and remember stuff, because you couldn’t just look it up online at the drop of a hat. You maybe could find out from a book, if you knew where to find one.
  2. Because you can look up practically anything now on the internet, some people think it’s making us smarter, especially about what our favorite celebrities have been up to lately.
  3. Without the internet, we couldn’t check on what our friends had for dinner and all the cool places they’ve been out to eat, unless we called them, which we don’t want to bother with, just text. Everything would have to be texts, which is probably okay.
  4. Spending lots of time playing computer games is good because it trains you for a good job with the military remotely piloting drones to drop bombs on terrorists over in their country from an undisclosed location somewhere else, and that’s really smart because otherwise they’d be over here blowing themselves up.
  5. Knowing a lot of internet and computer stuff is also a smart way to get a job with the National Security Agency (NSA) looking into everybody’s business.
  6. There’s no need to develop social skills when there are social media networks like Facebook and Twitter around.
  7. The internet is also good for getting things off your chest by commenting online, and you don’t have to worry about being nice about it, because on the internet no one knows who you are, unless they’re with the NSA.
  8. It used to be that before the internet you could be bored a lot. Now with smartphones and tablets that you always have with you, you don’t ever have to be bored and think about stuff, because you can do other things online, like Facebook or Twitter again.
  9. According to Hebb’s Law, which you can look up online, when your brain spends a lot of time doing something, it gets smarter doing that thing. Even though the brain is mostly fat, it’s like a muscle that way.
  10. Your brain is wired just like the internet. Well, actually, since your brain was here first, especially if you were born a generation or more ago, the internet is wired like your brain. Not that any central authority planned it that way, it just happened. If you’re an old person, that’s probably why you might not understand everything about the internet, because you have to think about it, instead of being wired up ready to go from early on.


Mike Judge shows us a possible future in his 2006 movie Idiocracy. Okay, it might be more than just a possible future and might be closer to now than is comfortable. Warning: foul language.

Okay, that pretty much wraps it up. It was fun. Now you know the internet isn’t necessarily making us any dumber, just different, but don’t think about it too hard or your brain’ll seize up and crash like you drank something really cold really fast. You can’t email Microsoft tech support about that.
― Techly

 

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We Are Controlling Transmission

 


“It seems odd that every day we hear about a new smartphone app that lets you do something innovative, yet these modern-day mobile miracles don’t enable a key function offered by a 1982 Sony Walkman.”
― Ajit Pai, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in a speech he gave at a North American Broadcaster’s Association symposium on February 16, 2017.

 


If you have a smartphone, you might not be aware it has a chip in it that allows it to receive FM radio broadcasts. The phone manufacturers include the chip as a matter of course for all phones worldwide, and then coordinate with the carriers about activating it or not. In the United States, only about 44% of smartphones have activated FM radio chips, according to Mr. Pai. There are smartphone applications available that take advantage of the FM radio chip in the phone, and downloading and trying to use one of those applications is a way of determining if your carrier has activated the chip. Most likely, though, if you don’t see an application for “FM radio” already installed on the phone, then the chip is not activated.


5.6.2014 E-Rate Modernization Workshop (13959900047)
Ajit Pai at an FCC workshop on May 5, 2014.


Since the chip is already in the phone, why would the carriers not want it activated for their customers? Activation costs them nothing, after all. The carriers are suspiciously silent on this issue, which allows the rest of us, their paying customers, to speculate on their motivations and judge them harshly. Cellular phone companies are in the business of selling internet access along with phone service. Even though their phone contains a chip capable of receiving FM radio, most smartphone users can only access FM radio stations through an application such as TuneIn, which uses the internet to tap into a station’s streaming service, if it offers one. That sells data for the carriers. If your phone could access FM radio directly, your carrier would get nothing.


“We are controlling transmission.”


Besides saving data when accessing FM radio without using the internet, smartphone owners can expect longer battery life because their phone is not constantly using its transmitter to talk to the nearest cell tower the way it does when streaming media. The screen and the transmitter of a smartphone are the two biggest battery drains. Ownership of the phone brings up another issue – if it’s your phone, and it has the capability of receiving FM radio, your carrier should not be able to prevent you from using that feature. It appears the motivations of the carriers come down to greed and arrogance. Shocking!

To be fair, not all carriers disallow FM radio service and some of them disallow it only on some of their phones. No one understands why, because the carriers, who are in the communications business, are not talking. Some carriers don’t even bother to acknowledge there are public safety benefits to their customers of having access to FM radio outside of internet or cellular service during and immediately after a natural disaster, when those two services might be out of commission. The best course of action for smartphone users is to bring pressure to bear on their carriers, who up until now have been relying on the ignorance of their customers to get away with their policy. When you bought your phone, did your carrier advise you that it contained an FM radio chip? Most likely not, because then they would have had to explain why they wouldn’t let you use it. Take back control and make them explain themselves to you here and now.
― Techly


Motorola Transistor Radio 1960
An early transistor pocket radio by Motorola. The first Motorola brand automobile radio was produced in 1930. Motorola began the commercial production of transistors at a new $1.5 million facility in Phoenix in 1955. This advertisement is from the May 23, 1960 issue of Life magazine (page 13). The 1960 price of $24.95 translates to a little over $200 in 2017.

 

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Nomophobic No More

 

Nomophobia is a term coined in 2010 by the United Kingdom Post Office, which commissioned research into the anxieties of mobile phone users. It stands for no-mobile-phone phobia, or the fear of not having access to a phone or phone service.

On February 3, 2017, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton, responding in part to the antics of Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, who streamed a post-game speech by his head coach, Mike Tomlin, on Facebook Live from his smartphone, vowed to “scramble” social media sites in the Saints’ locker room in the future. It was unclear what Payton meant exactly by “scramble,” but perhaps he was referring to using a filter on the locker room wi-fi service. Players could still access social media sites using the signal from their cellular service, however, making the overall effectiveness of Payton’s ban doubtful. A cell phone signal jammer would be an option if it were legal.

Payton’s proposed ban was his response to players’ increasing inattention as well, since they itched to check their phones for distractions instead of devoting their full attention to the business at hand in locker room meetings. These are men in their twenties and thirties, some of them making millions of dollars a year, and they cannot be relied upon to disregard their smartphones for more than forty minutes at a time while their head coach conducts a meeting. But then, considering the behavior some players exhibit during games, perhaps it should come as no surprise they are selfish and immature in other areas of their lives. We would more usefully order our priorities to not give the players and the game as much attention as we do.

 

Arrecife - Iglesia de San Ginés in 18 ies
No cell phones sign at a church in the Canary Islands.
The message in English reads “Sacred Place – Silence Please”.
Iglesia de San Ginés in Arrecife, Lanzarote, Canary Islands;
photo by Frank Vincentz.

 

Whether it is a compulsion or an addiction that many people have to constantly check their smartphone for text messages, emails, or social media posts, is something they need to examine for themselves. The rest of us just wish they would stop checking, checking, and checking again, because it is costing us time and frustration, and in some cases our lives. Besides the everyday annoyances caused by compulsive smartphone users disrupting the enjoyment of theater-goers and patrons at restaurants and shops, there is the now nearly constant problem of being held up at a traffic light by the driver in front being too engrossed in their smartphone to realize the light has turned green. Such drivers build up road rage in others, and that’s minor considering the dangers they pose once they get their car moving.

A majority of drivers sensibly acknowledge that texting and driving is dangerous and are in favor of state laws prohibiting it, yet many of them continue to do it. You can see these drivers everywhere on the roads, bobbing their heads up and down like mechanical dipping birds as they look up and down from the smartphone they hold down just out of view of others – as if they’re fooling anyone – to the road and back again. The danger comes not only while they are looking down, but also for the first few seconds after they look up, because in that time their minds are elsewhere.

The Green Eggs and Ham Cafe - panoramio
The Green Eggs and Ham Cafe at the Seuss Landing attraction
of the Universal Islands of Adventure theme park in
Orlando, Florida; photo by Panoramio user BihnX.
Since some people can’t seem to stop themselves from texting and driving, and since enforcement is lax, it appears the only thing that will get at least some of them to stop is the kind of social disapproval that has built up around smoking in public over the past twenty years. It’s incredible now to recall that up until twenty or thirty years ago smoking in most public places was not only acceptable, it was the norm. People smoked in theaters, restaurants, and on planes and trains. Like enjoying green eggs and ham, people had a cigarette pretty much anywhere they liked. Speaking of green eggs and ham, now there’s an excellent idea: shut off that phone, smart or otherwise, and enjoy an attentive meal with friends or family, put the phone to sleep in the glove compartment while you drive to the theater, and then leave it in the car when you go in to relax and enjoy the show. Your dinner companions, the drivers you share the road with, and your fellow patrons at the theater will appreciate it, and it won’t kill you.
― Techly

 

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Fired Up and Ready to Go

 

Samsung recalled their new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones last year after some of their lithium ion batteries overheated and either caught fire or swelled and caused other damage. The amount of batteries having problems was quite small in proportion to the amount manufactured, but once the reports got out, the resulting bad publicity constituted a fire of its own that Samsung needed to extinguish. Lithium ion batteries overheating and causing damage or dangerous fires is nothing new, and the problem is not limited to the batteries in Samsung smartphones or particularly in the Galaxy Note 7. What is relatively new are the quick charging and wireless charging features of some newer smartphones, including the Galaxy Note 7.

 

2011 SEMC BA750 back
Back of lithium ion battery,
showing safety warnings;
photo by Solomon203.

 

As batteries go, lithium ion types are particularly volatile and susceptible to malfunction from mishandling or careless manufacturing. That has been the trade-off for batteries that are lightweight, relatively energy dense, and capable of going through hundreds or even thousands of charging cycles without suffering from the memory defects of previous compact battery types like nickel cadmium. Consumer demand is for long battery life combined with quick charging, in a phone that is slim and light, and in the past few years cell phone manufacturers have responded by including quick charging and wireless charging features, while maintaining or even increasing battery capacity.

 

Wireless charging, while it has many benefits such as the capability of being a universal method of charging that eliminates dependence on proprietary wired chargers, is relatively inefficient and therefore loses more power to heat than wired chargers. Heat is bad for batteries, particularly lithium ion types. Quick charging technology that can add a 50% charge to a phone’s battery in 15 minutes requires strict attention to software design in both the charger and the phone to monitor the process, lest it cause overheating. Think of how it is possible for a NASCAR pit crew to dump over 20 gallons of fuel into a race car in less than 10 seconds using only gravity and special attention to venting, and do it safely, and then think of how complex the monitoring system must be for quickly charging a smartphone battery – which includes a flammable electrolyte – when you consider that charging introduces electricity into an essentially chemical process. It’s a wonder the proportion of failures isn’t higher than it is.

 

It turns out the defect in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was largely a design error of squeezing too large a battery into the phone. Or the compartment in the phone was too small for the battery. Either way, because of the tight fit the positive and negative plates within the battery got closer to each other than they should, overwhelming the separators meant to keep them apart, and causing some of the batteries to overheat to a disastrous degree. No doubt Samsung’s corporate culture is to blame for this, because unlike other manufacturers they test their batteries in house, and in this case they were rushing to compete with Apple’s impending release of the iPhone 7. The design error was either overlooked in the rush or considered not serious enough to warrant a redesign delay that might keep Samsung from beating out their chief competitor in the smartphone market, Apple. Whatever the issue was, this time Samsung’s attempt to get a jump on Apple backfired.
― Techly

VoltaBattery
Alessandro Volta’s battery on display
at the Tempio Voltiano Museum
in Como, Italy; photo by GuidoB.

 

 

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Don’t Call Me “Stupid”

James Madison by Gilbert Stuart 1804
James Madison, portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
― James Madison

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes in his latest book, Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White, that low information voters would do better to stay away from the polls on election day rather than cast their vote based on an inadequate understanding of the issues. This is sensible advice and in an ideal world those low information voters would heed it in order to benefit everyone. No one buys a car, after all, without at least kicking the tires and pretending some knowledge of what’s under the hood. But aside from safety considerations on the public roads, buying a car is largely a personal choice, affecting solely the owner. The effect of a person’s vote, however, amounts to a civic responsibility because it is a decision which affects everyone. This much seems obvious, yet it is amazing how much more effort some people will invest in researching a car or stereo system than in how politicians stand on the issues. In that case, Mr. Abdul-Jabbar makes a valid point.

Are low information voters stupid? Not necessarily. Some feel obligated to vote yet lack the time or desire to get up to speed on the important issues at stake. Others are deluded by questionable sources for their information, such as major media outlets which give a one-sided slant to the news and are often obsessed with sensationalism and trivia. Still others are blinded by party loyalty to information about defects in their preferred candidate. If anything, all of these attributes describe laziness rather than stupidity.

In this age of Standards of Learning testing in the public schools, it appears social studies education generally, and civics education particularly, are getting squeezed in favor of the three Rs, which are more readily documented to show results. Elementary and secondary school education in civics instills in future voters not only knowledge of the structure of government and how it works, but more importantly why that matters to them in their daily lives. That is the vital aspect of civics education which needs to remain with people throughout their lives, and which they are apt to lose sight of in the noise and confusion of earning a living and raising a family.

This is also the Age of Information, when sources of information are more widely available to the common person than they have ever been. Some sources are worthwhile and some are not. Some people view sorting through it all an engaging experience and some view it as drudgery. But it is there for people if they choose to look for it and choose to exercise a capacity for critical thinking which they ideally would have learned from their civics education. Today, for most people in a relatively affluent society, there are fewer excuses than ever for ignorance when easily the equivalent of the ancient Library at Alexandria is available to them in their computers, in their tablets and smartphones, or in the computers and book stacks at an institution usually somewhat less grand than the Alexandria Library – their local public library.

― Ed.


Ancientlibraryalex

The Great Library of Alexandria, drawing by O. Von Corven.

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