Geek stuff – Page 88 – a sibilant intake of breath

Preliminary review: smartphones and the Nokia E71

Since the E71 is my first smartphone, I am inevitably responding to both the general medium and the specific device. So far, my experience has been mixed. The phone doesn’t do anything as well as a real computer does – obviously – nor as well as I was hoping when I purchased it. While usable, the keyboard is awkward. The OS is a bit finicky and annoying. The web browser lacks capability and fluidity of use, and even voice calls seem to be of a worse quality than on my cheap old Nokia 6275i.

All that being said, the E71 has the considerable advantage that it puts the internet into a form that fits in a pocket and can be accessed from anywhere. The email and messaging features are those I use and appreciate most, with web browsing and maps following next. The media features are very basic, and I never use them. Coupled with a bluetooth keyboard, the phone is extremely capable for email, texting, and instant messaging. Even without, you can maintain one conversation at a reasonable pace, without needing to strain yourself excessively. Another feature that is surprisingly good is the speakerphone, which can be used quite effectively while cooking or sitting at a desk. The battery life is also good: enough to cover about eight hours of very active internet use. The built-in email app is ok, but limited. Annoyingly, the installable GMail application is only a bit more capable. It cannot, for instance, apply labels to messages. As such, they clutter up my inbox instead of being slotted away into appropriate places. Managing multiple streams of emails is far less intuitive with this interface than with GMail’s excellent online version (not fully usable with the E71 browser). Thankfully, Microsoft’s Mail for Exchange application allows perfect syncing of contacts and calendar items between GMail and the native Nokia apps. Never mind the oddity of using Microsoft software to help Nokia hardware and Google software work well together.

My specific complaints about the E71 include:

Annoyingly often, you need to tell the phone to connect to the internet, then using what protocol. For me, the answer is always ‘yes’ and the network is WiFi if available, GPRS otherwise. I dearly wish I could just lock those choices into the whole OS, rather than being forced to enter them literally every five minutes of use.
The keyboard is annoyingly small, though that comes part and parcel with a device smaller than an iPhone.
Copying and pasting requires an acrobatic manoeuvre: pressing three keys simultaneously, releasing, and then pressing three more.
The web browser doesn’t work with a lot of the menus at the back end of WordPress and can be very finicky about posting comments. It also has a viewpoint that lurches around violently as new portions of pages get loaded: super annoying if you are filling in a number of fields.
Even with a WordPress-specific app, the phone is not adequate for posting to the blog. For instance, it cannot interact with the WordPress media library, so as to include images in posts.
The device won’t download the full content of even small text-only emails. Each time you open one, it goes to a ‘retrieving’ screen that lasts 5-20 seconds.
Unlocking the keypad requires pressing two small keys in order. A dedicated lock switch would be better.
The camera is rotten, and the video recording is even worse.
Bluetooth connections go idle after an absurdly short period of time: maybe 60 seconds. There is no option to alter this.
There is no way to use the built-in read LED as a flashlight, as you can on the 6275i.
It lacks the super-useful automatic calling card dialler from the 6275i.
The voice quality isn’t great. If often sounds a bit like a VoIP phone without enough bandwidth.
Both applications and the whole OS crash pretty often, even when you are running programs one at a time. Sometimes, the only way to resolve it is to turn off the device and turn it back on.
For some reason, my unlocked E71 can only find a handful of applications in Nokia’s ‘Download!’ area.

Given how well reviewed the E71 is among smartphones, I can only guess that others have even bigger problems. I will admit to wondering whether the iPhone would have been a better choice. For web browsing and media, I would say ‘certainly yes’ since the demo iPhones I have tried are enormously better than the Nokia in both regards. In terms of messaging – which is my number one use – I still think that even a cramped physical keyboard is better than no keyboard at all.

At this stage, about two weeks in, I am less impressed than I expected to be with both smartphones and the E71. That said, it is a useful thing to have when computers are not readily available, and I may grow more accustomed to it as more time passes. One thing I mean to try but haven’t yet is tethering it with my G4 iBook.

Latent heat

This blog’s focus on matters of energy and climate frequently leads to discussions of thermodynamics. One aspect of that not yet mentioned is latent heat: the energy involved in phase changes of matter. While it takes 1 calorie (not one kilocalorie, as what people call food ‘calories’ are) to heat 1 ml (1 gram, 1 cubic centimetre – don’t you love metric) one degree Celsius, it takes a lot of energy to change that 1 mL of 100˚C water into 101˚C water vapour. Indeed, it takes 540 calories to induce the phase change (turning 1 g of ice into 1 g of water takes 80 calories).

An entertaining way to see this demonstrated is to watch Julius Sumner Miller (mentioned before) talk about temperature. Another is to watch an episode of James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed: Credit Where It’s Due. As a bonus, it explains how religious dissenters helped to kick off the coal-fired Industrial Revolution in England, eventually generating the climate change problems that confront us so dauntingly now. There is also a fair bit of talk about banking, and the role it played in industrial development.

Electricity from evaporation

Previously, I tried to categorize all possible basic mechanisms for producing electricity. While I don’t think a recent invention by scientists working at Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Michigan uses any new principles, it is certainly a novel combination. Their artificial glass ‘leaves’ use ambient heat to move water, then exploit that to generate small amounts of electricity:

The leaf is transformed into a source of power by periodically interrupting the water flowing into the leaf with air bubbles. Thanks to the different electrical properties of air and water, every time a bubble passes between the plates the capacitance of the device changes and a small electric current is generated, which passes to an external circuit where it’s used to pump up the voltage on a storage capacitor.

While their prototypes produce minute amounts of energy (2 to 5 microvolts per bubble), the inventors hope that large trees made of these materials could generate electricity on the basis of changing humidity: something that could nicely counterbalance some of the variable output from wind or solar farms.

The research was published in Applied Physics Letters: Charge-pumping in a synthetic leaf for harvesting energy from evaporation-driven flows, Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 013705 (2009); doi:10.1063/1.3157144, Published 7 July 2009.

Problems with revocable media

One of the biggest problems with the way information is now distributed is the increasing limitations on how you can use it. With physical media like books and CDs, you had quite a few rights and a lot of security. You could lend the media to friends, use it in any number of ways, and be confident that it would still work decades later. There is much less confidence to be found with new media like music and movies with DRM, games that require a connection to the server to work, mobile phone applications, Kindle books, etc. Companies have shown a disappointing willingness to cripple functionality, or even eliminate it outright, for instance with Amazon deleting books off Kindles. Steven Metalitz, a lawyer representing the RIAA, has stated explicitly that people buying digital media should not expect it to work indefinitely: “We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.” Of course, the same people argue that they should be able to maintain their copyrights forever.

The solution to this, I think, is to make it legal for people to break whatever forms of copy protection companies put on their products, as long as the purpose for which they are being broken is fair use. It also wouldn’t hurt to clarify the ownership of such materials in favour of users. A Kindle book should be like a physical book – property of the person that bought it, and not subject to arbitrary modification or revocation by the seller.

Of course, politicians are under more effective pressure from media companies than from ordinary consumers. Perhaps a strong Canadian Pirate Party, asserting the rights of content users over content owners, would be a good thing. Of course, stronger support from mainstream parties that actually hold power would be of much more practical use.

Spy photos of Arctic ice

A number of sources are reporting that the Obama administration has made public spy photos that show the effects of climate change in the Arctic. The photos have a one metre resolution, and were provided through a program called Medea which allows scientists to request intelligence images of environmentally sensitive areas.

With luck, the photos will allow climate models to be further refined: for instance, by better incorporating the positive feedback associated with changed albedo when white ice melts and is replaced by darker water. Other scientific information that could be derived from the photos includes: “the relationship of snow to ice-surface topography, the initiation and development of meltwater ponds in summer, and the relationship of stress and strain and how they are reflected in the pattern of cracks and other features in the ice.” Thorsten Markus – at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre – has said that the key value of the new images lies in their high resolution, compared to those that were previously available.

Mistaken assumption about the politics of scientists

An interesting study reveals a disjoint in the United States between how scientists rate their political views and what the general public expects them to be. Whereas 56% of scientists describe themselves as liberal, along with just 2% as conservative and 42% as ‘neither,’ members of the general public surveyed expected 64% of scientists to answer ‘neither,’ 20% to be liberal, and 9% to be conservative. The study also found that scientists are less skeptical of government and more critical of business than members of the population at large.

The blogger commenting on the study predicts that two things would happen if people learned the truth:

“The public would consider scientists to be less authoritative as a neutral source on policy questions, and
Since scientists are respected, the public would become less conservative and more liberal.”

This raises some interesting questions about the relationship between expertise and legitimacy, in relation to the roles of scientists in decision making – the central topic of my M.Phil thesis.

Scan this with your camera phone

The above is an example of QR Code: a kind of two-dimensional barcode that can be used to encode any sort of textual data. As cameraphones and smartphones become more common in North America, you may see more and more of these. They are already common in Japan. Nokia has a website that lets you make your own mobile codes. You can make a simple business card like this:

URLs, phone numbers, and other sorts of information can be similarly encoded.

CRTC public submissions and privacy

Quite conveniently, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission allows citizens to comment on ongoing matters through their website. Unfortunately, the privacy protections employed in relation to the submissions are lacking. Their website says the following:

The information you provide to the Commission as part of a public process (i.e. comments, interventions or observations) is entered into an unsearchable database dedicated to that specific public process. This database is accessible only from the webpage of that particular public process. As a result, a general search of our website with the help of either our own search engine or a third-party search engine will not provide access to the information which was provided as part of a public process.

This doesn’t seem to be true. Searching for my own name in Google brings up the submissions I made to them opposing Bell’s efforts to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB). The submission includes my full name, personal email address, and phone number.

I complained electronically to the CRTC about this, but got no response. I then sent a letter to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, with a carbon copy to them. At the very least, the CRTC should obscure email addresses and phone numbers in a way that prevents robots from harvesting them. For instance, obfuscated email addresses can be made to look normal for standard browsers, but like gibberish for most robots. Alternatively, the CRTC could provide a web contact form that lets people contact submitters, without learning their email address. I have no problem with submissions being made public, in the interest of transparency. If it is going to happen, however, people should be clearly informed about it on the page where they submit the information (not some separate privacy information page) and reasonable efforts should be taken to prevent the inappropriate collection of personal information by either people or automated systems.

[Update: 7 August 2009] The CRTC responded to my complaint, and it seems they have come into compliance with their privacy policy.

Defining timeframes

For the sake of clarity, I am going to try to use the terms ‘near,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘long’ term in a consistent way in future posts about climate change:

Near-term: within the next ten years
Medium-term: within the next fifty years
Long-term: within the next hundred years

For instance: developed states need to establish strong domestic carbon prices in the near term. In the medium term, they need to get very close to carbon neutrality (perhaps with emissions 95% below 1990 levels). In the long term, the entire planet needs to be basically carbon neutral.

When referring to phenomena where the relevant timescale is different (shorter, for politics and quantum mechanics; longer for geology), I will try to use numerical estimates rather than the near-medium-long descriptions.

Sci-fi as a prescriptive genre

Science fiction may be the most prescriptive fictional genre. Firstly, it forces people to consider the consequences of actions and choices across a long timespan. Secondly, it helps to reveal the core ethical values people have: it presents both our aspirations and things that inspire fear, disgust, and outrage. Finally, it makes statements about contemporary ideologies by presenting them with false hindsight.

As such, though sci-fi has a sometimes deserved reputation as an escapist genre, it can also be among the most directly ethically and politically engaged. It also serves a historically valuable purpose, by revealing how those in the past imagined the future. For instance, look at Asimov’s projection that everything would be nuclear-powered in the distant future, even small toys for children. It is no surprise that today’s sci-fi has ecology as a key focus. It would be fascinating to know how it will be read in a century.