The Rogue Scholar

Anthony Benjamin Frater, RIP

Anthony Frater passed from this earth to whatever awaited him on April 8, 2001, making today roughly the 3000th day since he left. He is still missed.

Is My iPhone the Most Dangerous Cell Phone Ever?

A good friend of mine sent me this link in an e-mail recently, warning me about the dangers of my cell phone (I have an iPhone, which the video singles out as "the most dangerous" example of the gadget kingdom.) She's a good friend, very health-conscious, and very much like family to me. She means well. But she listened to a fast-talking salesman who used just enough scientific jargon to sound knowledgeable while misleading the listener.

This video is properly termed an advertisement. Advertising is not an exact science but it does utilize very well-designed tricks and techniques to get you to buy a particular product that's being offered. What the presenter does is to separate his sales pitch into two parts: 1) he tells you that you have a problem. Telling you about the problem should ideally involve generating some emotional response, often making you feel lonely, mildly freaked out or worried. The follow-up is where he 2) he tells you that he has a solution, which he also describes. This is Advertising 101: generate an emotion, then hit them with the product. 

The presenter in the linked video clip knows what he's doing in terms of following the format for an ad, but he he's either lying about or fairly ignorant of the device's shortcomings to support his claim. (I freely admit that the iPhone does have real shortcomings.) First, he says that the iPhone acts like a base station. This is wrong. A base station acts like a signal booster between a Wi-Fi node and a much larger transmitter, like a microwave tower. The iPhone can interact with such networks (Wi-Fi, Edge, 3G) but it can’t send, resend, or receive some other phone’s data, and then pass it on to a third exchange like a cell tower, which is what it would be doing if this claim were true.  Theoretically, the iPhone could do this if it was already active on an existing Wi-Fi or cellular network, but no peer-to-peer applications have been written for it yet (not that I’ve heard.) I’m less clear on whether this is due to technical limitations of the equipment/software or Apple’s legal intervention, although one developer I heard from said it was strictly a hardware limitation. Additionally, the range on a transmitter the size of an iPhone is very limited, and AT&T’s cellular network coverage is concentrated in highly populated areas with lots of cell towers and proper signal booting equipment.

Whenever someone cites a supposedly well-known fact (“Cell phones cause brain cancer!”) without providing a reference or citation to the research, I get nervous. No citation of longitudinal “X hours of exposure to 200 Hz carrier wave induces cell damage” studies are given in the written or video material, and even if it were, a carrier wave tends to be a much higher frequency than the input signal. A 1 GHz input signal cannot be transmitted by a 200Hz carrier wave although the reverse is true. (I admit I may have misunderstood what he was saying.)

(As a brief aside, the differences between signal frequencies are significant, and differ by several orders of magnitude. Imagine you're walking on the beach somewhere. The sand that shifts between your toes and gets into absolutely everything is in the gigahertz (GHz) range. The bigger pebbles, like gravel or crushed stone, is what you find in the Megahertz (MHz) range. A rock big enough to skim over the surface of a pond is in the Kilohertz (KHz) range and any stone big enough to painfully stub your toe against is in the Hertz (Hz) range. I'm oversimplifying for the sake of illustration, but keep in mind it's the proportions that are important.)

Anyway, the video claims that signals in the 200MHz range cause health problems, which is fine, but the iPhone doesn’t use any signal frequency as low as 200Hz. (I couldn’t find any type of radio transmitter that does.)  It uses a quad-band GSM (the international cellular standard range), which operates at 850, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz, generally toward the upper range in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Far East. The speaker/microphone’s audio frequency response ranges from 20 to 20,000Hz, but that is the range of sounds the speakers are capable of converting into an electronic signal, not the frequency of the carrier or the input wave.

 He also talks freely about “radiation” (the word appears 25 times in a three-page document) but doesn’t differentiate ionizing radiation from non-ionizing radiation. It’s a pretty important difference. Ionizing radiation is the type which is powerful enough to separate electrons from atomic nuclei, ionizing them (e.g., X-rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, beta particles, neutron bombardment.) This ionization damages the DNA in your body’s cells and will kill you with sufficient exposure. Non-ionizing radiation (generally the less energetic portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves, microwaves, and everything in the visible light spectrum) isn’t nearly as powerful; these waves have the ability to merely excite the electrons in the target atoms, not sever them. I’m the first to say that with sufficient power, you can probably blast an electromagnetic wave powerful enough to ionize every cell in the human body, at least in theory. But radios small enough to carry in a pocket (including cell phones and the iPhone) are too small to ionize anything.

 I was surprised to hear him even mention Bluetooth earpieces, since they use exactly the same frequency range of carrier waves that the phone does, and they sit in your ear all day, so using one would actually be worse than not (he belatedly admits this as part of the pitch).

 Finally, you’ll notice that he’s selling his new supposedly safe earpiece for $25 apiece (plus $5 for adapters) and up (i.e. the "solution" to your "problem" which is the threat supposedly posed by your continual iPhone use). The entire bottom portion of the website is devoted to making a sale as convenient for the reader as possible. (That’s Marketing 102). In short, he’s trying to make a living, not save me from brain cancer.

I’m the first to admit that we don’t know exactly what the long-term effects of persistent cell phone use might be (I suspect that the people most at risk are the yuppies and teens who remain glued to them for several hours each day over the course of many years), but I don’t think this promoter or his staff writers know either. Also, I have never used the advertised product and don't know if it does what he says it will do, or not. Finally, if there is someone out there reading this who is in a position to know more about the iPhone than I do and spots a mistake, I trust they'll let me know.

Utilizing LC's Controlled Vocabularies

I found this e-mail from Margaret Mauer's TS-LIBRARIANS listserv in my mailbox recently:

I have been experimenting with the newly opened ID.LOC.GOV web service this evening as I am thinking about pointing it out to folks via TechKNOW. It’s pretty cool. LCSH is the first controlled vocabulary that LC is opening up. The goal of the service is to “enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access…” at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/.  Type in a term like “retrievers” select the term “retrievers” and then go to the visual interface tab. It provides you with a data map of how the term “retrievers” connects to other terms in the controlled vocabulary. The search mechanism is sort of rudimentary, but the concept is terrifically interesting. Here’s the link to the about page for the new service:  http://id.loc.gov/authorities/about.html.

 I’ve been saying for a long time that we under-utilize our controlled vocabularies. Perhaps this will start to change this.

I've taken a look at the service she describes and it is indeed pretty cool. The "details" tab of the results page for any given query offers a metric ton of raw data: the URI and heading type, as well as a variety of live links to related, broader and narrower search terms. Besides that it also gives you any and every source it located the query string in, and lists those for you. Finally, you get the date the item was created and last modified and the LC classification data. Most of the data is available in multiple formats (generally including RDF/XML, N-Triples and so on). The "visualize" tab for the results gives the 2-dimensional relational  map for the term. 

Enjoy!

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed

There's a lot going on here today which is preventing me from posting more than occasionally, but I thought I'd share this:

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed
Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph
Posted June 1, 2009
 

By Ron Cowen, Science News

WASHINGTON—The muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago resemble the “wa wa” of the unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.

Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.

Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

Instead, these visual renditions of sound, known as phonautograms, languished at the French patent office and elsewhere in Paris for some 150 years. In 2008, record historian David Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and his colleagues, part of an informal group of researchers known as First Sounds, uncovered the first cache of them. Last year, he and First Sounds colleague Patrick Feaster of  Indiana University in Bloomington played what appeared to be a recording of a young girl singing a 10-second snippet of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” which Léon Scott had recorded in 1860.

But a group of thought-to-be-lost Léon Scott phonautograms was found late last year in Paris and dates from 1857. “It was immediately apparent that this would be some of the most important [phonographic] excavations to date,” Giovannoni said.

Sound historian Sam Brylawski, former head of the Library of Congress’ recorded sound division in Washington, D.C., and now affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the new findings are important on several levels. These are not only the first known recordings, Brylawski notes, but are “providing the full picture of the history of recorded sound.… This is a biography unfolding.”

Read the rest of this story here. Enjoy!