Signal loss in the iPhone is a feature that could help us lose weight

by Tobyotter

Apple is really providing a great business opportunity for someone – use the signal attenuation feature of the iPhone 4 to determine how much fat someone has on their body. Help us lose weight.

For over 20 years it has been known that different body compositions result in different electrical impedances.

Bioelectrical impedance analysis is used to determine fat content. It examines the flow of electricity through the human body. Different fat contents provide different impedance readings.

People with higher free-fat mass have lower impedance levels. More fat, more impedance and greater loss in signal. Handheld devices to measure this can cost a fair amount of money.

Impedance is how the radio signal of the iPhone is attenuated.

Someone should develop an app for the iPhone. The Death Grip becomes a positive feature not available in any other phone. Simply hold the iPhone the ‘right’ way and the loss in signal can be used to determine how fat you are. The greater the signal loss, the more fat is present.

Then use this to keep track of how well your weight loss program is doing.

See, Apple really wants to help us lose weight and become less obese. And no other cell phone, not an Android or a Blackberry, can do this as well as the iPhone.

[This is only slightly snarky. It may be that people with different impedances due to body fat affect the attenuation of the signal differently but I do not think the iPhone would be sensitive enough to be very accurate. Maybe someone with more expertise could tell me differently.]

This is why a recall is unlikely

Ed Dale on Real-World iPhone 4 Reception
[Via Daring Fireball]

Ed Dale:

Here’s the thing, out the front of my home there is a vortex of Next G misery — every time I pull my car in front of my house for the past five years, Blackberry, Nokia, First three iPhones — the call was cut mercilessly. You could set your watch by it. Regardless of phone, on the best network in the world, my call dropped.

Enter the iPhone 4.

For the first time in four years, the call kept going

[More]

Yes, the iPhone 4 is broken / No, the iPhone 4 is not broken
[Via Engadget]

The controversy over the iPhone 4′s antenna issues continues to grow, particularly after Consumer Reports confirmed yesterday that every iPhone 4 suffers from signal attenuation when the phone is held with the lower left corner covered — a report that we confirmed with results from our own custom signal metering app. At this point, there’s no longer any question in our minds that the iPhone 4′s antenna can be made to lose signal by holding it “wrong” — and we definitely think it’s more than a little silly that simply holding the phone in your left hand has been nicknamed the “death grip.”

That said, however, it’s not at all clear what the real-world effects of the antenna issue actually are for most people — as we’ve repeatedly said, several iPhone 4s owned by the Engadget staff (including our review unit) have never experienced so much as a single dropped call, while others suffer from signal issues that results in lost calls and unresponsive data in a dramatic way. What’s more, at this point Apple’s sold well over two million iPhone 4s, and we simply haven’t heard the sort of outcry from users that we’d normally hear if a product this high-profile and this popular had a showstopping defect. Honestly, it’s puzzling — we know that the phone has an antenna-related problem, but we’re simply not able to say what that issue actually means for everyday users.

So we’re doing what we can do: we’ve collected reports from every member of the Engadget staff who’s using the phone, as well as reached out to a variety of tech industry colleagues for their experiences. As you’ll see, it seems like most of our peers seem to be doing perfectly fine with their iPhone 4s, but the people who are having problems are having maddening issues in an inconsistent way. We’d say it all comes down to the network — particularly in New York City, where AT&T just completed a major upgrade — but even that isn’t a consistent factor in predicting experience. Ultimately, we just won’t know what’s really going on until Apple comes clean and addresses this issue (and the growing PR nightmare it’s become), but for now we can say with some certainty that not everyone is affected, and those that are seem to be in the minority. Read on for the full report.

[More]

If this was something seen in a very high percentage of iPhones, it would be really troubling. But there are as many or more people saying they have better reception with the new iPhone as are having problems. In the real world, it does not seem to be affecting everyone to the extent that their calls fail when the wrong grip is used.

What is interesting is that some people can not get the Death Grip to drop a call for them under any circumstance while others have a lot of problems. Most of the Engadget staff could only recreate the problem if they went to very specific areas in the city and use the death grip. Otherwise, it often worked better than any other phone.

This may be quite complex to figure out.

Could we have both a free and a fair market?

by TroyMason
‘Econophysics’ points way to fair salaries in free market
[Via Eureka! Science News]

A Purdue University researcher has used “econophysics” to show that under ideal circumstances free markets promote fair salaries for workers and do not support CEO compensation practices common today. The research presents a new perspective on 18th century economist Adam Smith’s concept that an “invisible hand” drives a free market economy to a collective good.

“It is generally believed that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. However, my theory shows that even though companies focus primarily on making profits and individuals are only looking out for themselves, the collective self-organizing free market dynamics, under ideal conditions, leads to fairness as an emergent property,” said Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a professor of chemical engineering. “In reality, the self-correcting free market mechanisms have broken down for CEOs and other top executives in the market, but they seem to be working fine for the remaining 95 percent of employees.”

[More]

Not being an expert in entropy, statistical thermodynamics or economics, I am not at a place to determine whether this guy’s theory is correct or not. At least not the math (I used to be since understanding thermodynamics of biological systems uses a lot of similar math). But it does seem ‘right.’

I do like the the PR provides a link to the paper and that it is Open Access. Perhaps I will have a chance to understand it in detail. I do find it interesting that his model predicts ‘fairness’ in a free economy by utilizing the principle of entropy.

The key here is the previous models do not say much about fairness in an efficient free market. His model produces fairness in salaries as an emergent property of a free market. HIs first paragraph is a really interesting question:

The excessive compensation packages of CEOs of U.S. corporations in recent years have brought to the foreground the issue of fairness in economics. The typical response to the question “What is fair pay for a CEO?” is that whatever the free market for labor, driven by the forces of supply and demand, determines it to be. The conventional wisdom, however, is that the free market cares only about efficiency and not fairness. Is this view correct? This is the question we examine in this paper.

There are some novel consequences of his model, which makes the simplifying assumptions that in an ideal free market, workers are free to move to any other employment that offers them better conditions. They can do this because their is also no impediment for information flow about salaries between all the employees in the marketplace.

So, easy movement between jobs based on a total knowledge of salaries. If this is possible, then a fair salary market appears – fair meaning that one’s salary is actually commensurate with one’s contribution. As he states:

Even though an individual employee cares only about his or her utility (salary) and no one else’s, the collective actions of all the employees, combined with the profit maximizing survival actions of all the companies, in an ideal free market environment of supply and demand for talent, under budgetary constraints, lead towards a more fair allocation of wages, guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand of self-organization.

I may not understand all the math but the underlying principles make sense. A company wants to minimize salaries while individual employees want to be paid commensurate with their work, if not more. So employees will leave poorly paid positions for better paying ones. The feedback loops between companies and employees push salaries around. Eventually, at equilibrium, things settle down to a ‘fair’ level.

One result from his model is that anything that prevents employees from freely moving to other employment opportunities will hamper the emergence of a fair market. An example in America would be the large number of people who really can not move because of healthcare costs, which are not included in salary. Allowing people to retain effective healthcare even as they change employment would result in a fairer economy, as I understand this model.

Also, mobility between companies must be high in order for this fairness to emerge. If people are afraid of employment, such as during something like the Great Recession we are in, then unfairness can increase tremendously as there is no longer any negative pressure on companies to mistreat employees. Their salaries become more unfair.

Finally, not knowing what others are making hampers a fair free market. This has been overcome somewhat in recent years because the internet helps provide this information at a much higher rate than before, but I would expect that it is still not as efficient as it should be.

This is actually a fascinating paper. I especially appreciate the heading of one section Essence of Entropy is Fairness – at the end state, when everything has reached equilibrium and no further changes are made, the economy is then inherently fair and everyone is being paid exactly according to their contribution.

So, just as the Heat Death of the Universe appears when maximum entropy is reached, so too is a free and fair market. HIs model suggests that striving for maximum entropy in a free market will more likely produce a fair market.

We believe that by recognizing entropy as really a measure of fairness, which is a fundamental economic principle, and showing how it is naturally and intimately connected to the free market economic environment, our theory makes a significant conceptual advance in revealing the deep connections between statistical thermodynamics, information theory, and economics.

Hope it is true.

His work indicates that, while the free market seems to work to provide fair salaries for employees, we are not seeing the same thing with the salaries of CEOs. They are making up to 130 times what they should be making under a fair and free economy.

By his model, CEOs are abusing the fairness of a free economy. Something I think we can all agree with. Just nice to see a theory that demonstrates this.

Now if his model could only tell us how to correct this. It makes some very important simplifying proposals that may be very hard to actually implement in a real world. Perhaps, if it really is a robust theory, we could use it to accurately determine what the salaries should be.

However, I think that either by theory or commonsense, the salaries of CEOs must be brought back under control and placed much closer to the levels that they used to – and, by this model, should occupy.

Apple will be tracking Santa Claus?

by Matti Mattila

Apple boosting mapping mashup skills with Poly9 acquisition
[Via Ars Technica]

Apple is continuing its recent acquisition spree, this time buying Québec-based mapping mashup firm Poly9. According to Le Soleil, Apple quietly acquired the company in recent weeks, and most of its employees have already moved into offices at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. The acquisition brings additional depth to Apple’s talent pool of mapping- and location-savvy programmers after last year’s purchase of Placebase.

[More]

So, I’m reading this nice report about Apple’s new purchase and run across this:

However, Poly9 is probably best known for its “Poly9 Globe,” a Flash-based clone of Google Earth. It was also behind the Santa Claus tracking site run by NORAD, and has been involved in the development of a number of Web-based mapping applications for Microsoft, Yahoo, and even Apple itself.  

OMG. So many questions. What happens now? Will someone else fill in the Santa Claus gap or will Apple now be responsible for helping NORAD track Santa?

I just love the idea that Apple would bring us Santa Claus. How would Microsoft deal with that?