At The Johnston Gate
Semester's over - I'm outta here!
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More iPhone Overload
by Melissa Perenson
Now in its third generation, the iPhone handset has made improvements with each successive model. This year, though, the improvements are less about what you see and more about what’s packed under the chassis–and what’s available in the iPhone OS 3.0 software update (accessible to current iPhone owners and on new iPhone 3G S units).
That’s not to say that the iPhone 3G S isn’t good. In fact, this new model is among the best handsets on the market today. Still, the 3G S’s combination of hardware and software continues to miss the mark in a few critical areas, and these deficiencies prevent the iPhone from leaping far ahead the competition.
1. Mass Storage Connectivity
Why can’t I connect an iPhone to my PC and then drag and drop files onto it? Apple says that it has considered introducing a disk mode, of the type found on all iPods, but feels that the iPhone’s audience doesn’t require one. I disagree. Early adopters and the enterprise workers that Apple is targeting (now that iPhone 3G S has hardware encryption and other enterprise-friendly features) would greatly appreciate direct-to-device file transfers. Plus, the capability would simplify transferring photos and other relevant data files (such as Excel spreadsheets and PDF files) to the device. The latter feature is especially important as the iPhone grows ever closer to converging with netbooks (a couple of office productivity apps are already available for the iPhone). Right now, to read a Word or Excel file or a PDF, you’ll need to e-mail it to yourself, and read it from within your e-mail. (Some files are supported over Google Docs, as well.)
I recognize that Apple hopes we’ll all subscribe to its $99-a-year MobileMe service, and give its cloud iDisk storage a try. But that isn’t going to happen across the iPhone’s mainstream market, nor is it going to happen with the tech-savvy audience. The sooner Apple realizes this, the better.
With the iPhone 3G S available in capacities up to 32GB, it makes more sense than ever for Apple to allow users to transfer raw data to the device. In some cases, users may want to access the data from the device; in others, they may want to use the storage to move files from PC to PC (why carry a tiny, easily misplaced USB flash drive for your important work files, when you can store files on your phone, which is less likely to disappear–or go through the washer).
2. Broader Data Handling
Why is there no way to save text messages on an iPhone? (At least with the 3G S you can copy and paste a message into a note or e-mail message; but that’s not the same as being able to archive an entire thread or to e-mail all or part of a thread to yourself.) And what’s with the antiquated Notes app, which limits you to exporting a Note by e-mailing it to yourself? That restriction is ridiculous at this stage of the iPhone’s development. A simple yet substantial improvement would be to make such notes appear as text files that users could open in Windows Explorer. Better still: Give iPhone users direct access to the files, and back up the files within iTunes (currently, you can sync Notes into Outlook and nothing else).
3. iTunes Reconstructed for Data Management
Apple’s iTunes began life eight years ago as a music jukebox that interfaced with the first iPods and later with the iTunes Music Store. Fast-forward to 2009, when iTunes has gone far beyond its original purpose.
At this point, working with iTunes’ tabbed data management interface is akin to using Windows 3.1’s File Manager in a Mac OS X Snow Leopard environment. ITunes’ cluttered interface contradicts Apple’s minimalist design aesthetics, and the menus for syncing Info, Ringtones, Music, Photos, Podcasts, Video, and Applications are a text-and-check-box travesty.
ITunes is long overdue for an overhaul, given the multifaceted functionality of the iPhone (and of the iPod Touch, for that matter). Why can’t I drag-and-drop into iTunes? Why can’t I import specific photos into iTunes? Or view applications by their icons, instead of having to resort to a text name that I might not even recall? How about making it easier for me to import self-generated video–from within the tabbed syncing interface?
If Apple were to shake up and reshape iTunes with an eye toward simplicity, it could also make the service far more powerful and compelling. And that, in turn, would make the iPhone platform even more attractive than it is today.
4. Improved Integration With the Web
The iPhone’s hooks into calendars feel fairly archaic. Calendar syncing is limited to Outlook and CalDAV; but if Palm’s WebOS and its Pre smartphone can extend this process seamlessly across multiple calendars, why can’t Apple and the iPhone do so in Gen 3? Granted, with an iPhone you can sync contacts with Outlook, Yahoo Address Book, Google Contacts, and Windows; but why can’t you access those contact lists directly from the iPhone’s Contacts app to begin with? Stronger ties with existing, established Web services would help make the iPhone a more Web-centric communications handset.
5. A Better Camera–Really
Yes, Apple has bumped the camera in the iPhone 3G S up to 3 megapixels and added tap response to focus/expose and macro functionality. But the camera needs more work to improve its standing in today’s vigorous camera phone competition.
Let’s start with the megapixel count. The iPhone 3G S’s 3 megapixels feels almost entry-level in comparison to the offerings of today’s high-flying phones. Such models as the Nokia N97 have already reached 5 megapixels, and higher megapixels are appearing with greater frequency on pricey camera phones. Bump up the megapixels and the image quality, Apple, and you bump up the device’s functionality–and its ability to fill in for a point-and-shoot camera for casual snapshots.
Also high on my list: Allow one of the existing buttons (the volume control or the home button) to act as the shutter. I find I can’t steady the camera adequately when I have to push on the screen to snap the shutter. A physical button would solve that problem–and make the phone’s camera much easier to use one-handed. For example when you’re snapping a picture of yourself and a friend at a party, with the phone’s screen facing away from you, pushing a physical button is a lot easier than finding and pressing a virtual button on the display.
Software image stabilization would be another great feature, as would better light-sensitivity capabilities and an LED flash (another increasingly common feature on camera phones). Include the ability to shoot multiple frames rapid-fire, and suddenly the iPhone 3G S’s camera could be a very powerful tool.
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Reasons NOT To Buy The iPhone Right Now
by Andrew R Hickey
Hurry Up And Wait: 5 Reasons To Hold Off On Apple iPhone 3G S
As expected, Apple sent shockwaves through the smartphone industry this month when it pulled the curtain off of the latest iPhone hardware, the iPhone 3G S. Heads exploded, orders flowed in and Apple yet again released the feel good hit of the summer, for smartphones anyway.
The Apple iPhone 3G S is expected to be available later this week, though its release may never capture the luster of the release of the first-generation iPhone and its 3G predecessor in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
Still, the world is buzzing at the prospect of a new iPhone. But here are five reasons you might want to hold off on dropping the coin on the Apple iPhone 3G S and wait a few weeks or months before picking one up.
Hurry up and wait.
1. MMS capabilities aren’t ready yet
One of the big selling points for the Apple iPhone 3G S is the ability to send video and picture messages via MMS, a capability prior iPhone models lacked but is expected to be added as part of the iPhone OS 3.0 software upgrade, which hit iPhones everywhere this week. Problem is, AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., has said that MMS capabilities won’t be ready until later this summer. Bummer, right? So if you’re a member of the Apple or iPhone faithful and have an itch to send the videos you record and photos you capture on the new iPhone, it might be wise to wait a little while until the MMS service is up to snuff, lest your frustration will get the best of you.
On the bright side, however, AT&T has said that once MMS is up and running, it won’t cost extra to use it.
“Later this summer, as part of the 3.0 software, AT&T will make multimedia messaging (MMS) available at no extra cost to customers with a text messaging bundle,” AT&T said.
How generous of them.
2. Remember what happened last time?
Last summer, when Apple and AT&T launched the iPhone 3G, there were a host of network problems. Users were plagued by slow response times, dropped calls, unreliable Internet speeds and an iPhone that sometimes reverted to the EDGE network, not 3G. AT&T’s network just wasn’t ready to support the smartphone, a problem that was fixed more than a month later with a software update.
Now, Apple and AT&T are promising even faster 3G speeds, up to 7.2 Mbps, with the Apple iPhone 3G S. There are bound to be issues at the offset. Why not wait for the bugs and kinks to be worked out before shelling out the $200 or $300 on the new iPhone?
3. There may not be enough to go around on June 19
Word is Apple hopes to sell about half a million iPhone 3G Ss this coming weekend, leaving many expecting that there could be a shortage come the official June 19 release date, or at least delays before the smartphones hit users’ hands. Taking into account that the vast majority of new iPhones will be sold online, that will leave fewer in AT&T and Apple Stores.
Do you really want to wait in line and get the saliva flowing only to be told there are no more left? No, you don’t want that. And you also don’t want to be around for the riots that ensue when Apple fanboys are turned away empty handed. Wait a few weeks for the hype to die down and stroll into an AT&T or Apple Store then. It’ll mean less time and aggravation.
4. Do you really want to pay full price?
Odds are, if you’re excited about the iPhone 3G S, you already have an iPhone. iPhone users are a loyal lot and like to grab the latest and greatest as soon as it hits the streets. But if you decide to hold off on an upgrade there could be some cash in it for you. Granted, the official price isn’t likely to budge anytime soon, but AT&T has come around to the idea of a hardware upgrade program in response to iPhone user outcry. Users are miffed that they already paid full price for their current iPhone, so why should they have to pay full price again for an upgrade? At the same time, upgrading from an iPhone 3G to a 3G S would’ve resulted in substantial penalties.
Now, AT&T said it will offer iPhone 3G users that are eligible for an upgrade in July, August or September, its “best upgrade pricing” starting June 18. AT&T could further expand that program too, offering a subsidized iPhone 3G S to users whose upgrade eligibility kicks in later in the year. In this economic climate, it’s nice to get a break anywhere you can.
5. Let’s wait and see how the App Store evolves
With the release of the Apple iPhone 3G S and iPhone OS 3.0 software, there are bound to be advancements in Apple’s App Store mobile application marketplace. With the addition of video in the 3G S, the upcoming MMS capabilities and other new features like copy and paste, developers are sure to take advantage, but it might take a while for those applications to actually hit the App Store. Why buy an iPhone 3G S now when there aren’t any applications taking advantage of the new functionality? Hold off, see where application developers flex their creative muscles and then reap the benefits of having myriad new applications at your fingertips, instead of buying now and waiting impatiently for the applications to roll in.
Posted by Andrew R Hickey
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Even More iPhone Revelations – cheaper, faster, video
By DAVID POGUE
Your emotions were swept away by everything Apple does so well: beauty, polish, elegance, simplicity and the thrill of interaction. (Those were not, ahem, phrases typically used to describe existing cellphones.)
Meanwhile, your brain kept waving its little hand in the back of the classroom. “But the camera’s terrible!” it would say. “It can’t record video! There’s no voice dialing! No Copy and Paste! The iPhone can’t even send picture messages — even $20 starter phones can do that!”
But 21 million iPhone sales later, it’s become clear that the heart usually manages to shut the head up.
With the iPhone 3G S, in stores Friday, Apple is finally throwing your head a crumb. After two years, the iPhone’s designers have finally gotten over whatever weird objections they had to providing those basic functions.
Better yet, Apple intends to give many of those features, and dozens more, to everyone who’s ever bought an iPhone.
If you do buy the iPhone 3G S, you get twice the storage — 16 gigabytes — for the same $200 price as before. For $300, you can even buy a 32-gigabyte model, enough to hold the entire “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the DVD extras and 75 gazillion songs.
(These are new-customer prices. If you bought last year’s iPhone relatively recently, you’ll have to pay $200 extra for the new one, a point of outrage among the Apple faithful. Unfortunately, that’s just the way the subsidized-cellphone business works. On the other hand AT&T has just announced a special offer: if your existing iPhone will be “upgrade-eligible” this July, August or September — find out at AT&T.com/iphone — you can get the new iPhone now, for the new-customer price.)
You can still buy last year’s model, the iPhone 3G, for $100. But find a way to afford the new one. It looks identical to last year’s iPhone, but its faster circuitry makes a huge difference. (The S stands for speed, says Apple.) If you’re used to the old iPhone, the speed boost hits you between the eyes, especially when you’re opening programs, playing games and loading Web pages.
The built-in 3-megapixel camera is much better, too. It still tends to blur moving subjects, and even still-lifes aren’t as crisp as what you’d get from an actual camera. But the color and clarity are definitely improved, especially in low light.
The new autofocus feature lets you tap the screen preview at the spot where you want the exposure, white balance and focus to be calculated. Except when the subject is a few inches away, you don’t see much difference in the focusing — but your tap location can make a big difference in the brightness and color (exposure and white balance) of the finished photo. (You can see sample photos at nytimes.com/personaltech.)
Better yet, the 3G S now captures video. It’s the real deal: sharp, smooth, 30 frames a second. Once again, it’s not quite what you’d get from a proper digital camera or a Flip camcorder—it tends to “blow out” the bright areas — but it’s darned close. You can’t beat the capacity, either; in theory, the 32-gig iPhone can capture 17 hours of video — just enough for the elementary-school talent show.With a fingertip, you can trim the ends of a captured video and then upload it to YouTube or MobileMe, right from the phone. (That part, it does much better than a digital camera.)
The new voice-control feature may be the most useful change of all. Hold down the iPhone’s Home button for a moment, say “Call mom’s cell” or “Call 800-555-1212,” and the iPhone places your call, crisply and accurately. (Yeah, I know: welcome to 2003.) This feature goes a long way toward addressing what’s always been the iPhone’s weakest feature: the number of steps required to place a call.
The iPhone also recognizes spoken iPod commands like “Play songs by Abba” or “What song is this?”
The new Compass program looks like a classier version of a regular Cub Scout compass — great when you emerge, disoriented, from the subway. In Google Maps, it adds an indicator beam, showing which way you’re facing on the map. No longer must you walk in a circle, staring at the iPhone map like an idiot, just to figure out which way is up.
The iPhone 3G S also gains what Apple calls an oleophobic screen. It may sound like an irrational fear of yodelers, but in fact, it’s a coating that lets you wipe away fingerprints with a single rub on your clothes. It really works to keep the iPhone looking new longer. Maybe fewer people will now bury the iPhone’s gorgeous, slim shape in a homely, bulky case.
Finally, the iPhone 3G S harbors a better, beefier battery, thereby confronting another chronic complaint. It gives you about 25 percent more life a charge (5 hours talk time or 30 hours of music), easily enough to last at least a day of moderate use. As Palm Pre owners know, that’s rare on a 3G superphone.
There are dozens more new features on the iPhone 3G S — but the really exciting part is that older iPhones can get them, too. They’re part of a free software upgrade called iPhone 3.0. (For $10, the iPod Touch can get this upgrade, too.)
Chief among them: the long-awaited Copy and Paste commands, which appear at your fingertips when you double-tap text in any program. Now you can paste text and graphics from a Web site into an e-mail message, for example, or copy an address from a text message into your calendar.
There’s Bluetooth stereo audio, too, meaning that you can listen to your music with cordless headphones, leaving the iPhone itself in your pocket or backpack. (It’s available on the iPhone 3G S, 3G and the current iPod Touch.) A handy voice-recording app comes complete with trim editing and e-mailing commands, thereby turning your iPhone into a high-quality, huge-capacity a digital audio recorder.
If you have a MobileMe account ($100 a year), you can also make your iPhone beep for two minutes-and display a plaintive message on the screen — when you’ve misplaced it. How many times have you wished your cellphone had that feature?
The 3.0 software also brings, at last, picture and video messaging (known as MMS) to the iPhone 3G and 3G S — or it will, once AT&T turns on this feature later this summer.
The iPhone app store offers a staggering 50,000 instantly downloadable programs, in every conceivable category; it’s become a crucial reason, maybe the crucial reason, to get an iPhone in the first place. These programs are getting very sophisticated indeed. Documents to Go ($5) lets you create and edit Word documents right on the iPhone, for example; programs like Gokivo and TomTom will bring real, spoken, turn-by-turn GPS navigation to the iPhone.
But the more fun you have trying out these apps, the more desperately you need a way to manage them. After all, the iPhone can now hold 176 apps on 11 side-by-side Home screens.
Therefore, the new universal-search feature could not arrive at a better time. Type a few characters, and up pops a list of every match in your calendar, address book, notes, music stash, e-mail headers (subject, to/from, and first few body lines) — and apps. That’s right: you can now call up a program by typing a bit of its name.
All of these changes make it much harder to resist the iPhone on intellectual, feature-county grounds. The new iPhone doesn’t just catch up to its rivals — it vaults a year ahead of them. At this point, the usual list of 10 rational objections to the iPhone have been whittled down to about three: no physical keyboard, no way to swap the battery yourself and no way to avoid using AT&T as your cell company.
In short, the substantially improved, still elegant iPhone 3G S makes it dangerously easy for your heart and your head to agree.
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Harvard Augments GI Bill Benefits
ap
Harvard has entered into a partnership with the federal government to help veterans attend the university.
Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust says Harvard College, the Harvard Extension School and all graduate and professional schools will participate in the Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program.
Under the program, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs pays tuition expenses equal to the cost of the highest in-state tuition at a public university in the state. Private universities, such as Harvard, can volunteer to help pay expenses that exceed that amount.
Next school year, Harvard will contribute funds to help pay the tuition of veterans in the program. Faust says that could be as many as 150 people in the fall.
Faust says she hopes the program will expand.
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New iPhone Specs
by Charles Arthur
You may have heard of Gordon Moore, if only for his “law”: he was the one who looked at how large-scale integration of circuits onto chips was progressing in the 1960s, and drew a line suggesting that you’d get twice as many transistors onto the same area every 18 to 24 months. That usually translates into a doubling of processing power for the same price.
You’ll be glad to know that although Moore’s law is looking a bit troubled when it comes to desktop computers – heat dissipation turns out to be a challenge, which is why chip makers are turning to multi-core systems – it still holds true in smaller chips. Such as those used for smartphones. Such as the iPhone.
Which means – given that the first iPhone went on sale two years ago this month – that Moore’s law is still in operation.
The graph shows what you therefore should be able to expect. Thanks to Craig Hockenberry, a third-party developer, who developed a system for investigating the CPU and bus speed of iPhones and iPod Touches, we can say that the first iPhone (June 2007) ran at 400MHz, with a bus speed of 100MHz. Then there was a software update in January 2008 that saw it rise to 412MHz, and 103MHz. The memory remains at 117MB (reckoned to be 128MB of onboard memory, of which 11MB is used for video.)
You might ask: how does that work? How can a software update make a chip run faster? Simple: the chips on the iPhone are underclocked – running at well below their top speed so that they use less power (and also generate less heat). The Wikipedia page about the iPhone reckons that it has an underclocked 620MHz ARM processor. Though the number varies quite a bit: some say it’s capable of 667 MHZ () or maybe it’s 620-700 MHz. (Underclocking, and then providing extra performance through software updates, was quite a common tactic used by IBM back when it had a monopoly on mainframes.)
Underclocking the CPU by in this way gives you at least 15% more battery life (the phone has to do other things, such as run the GSM/3G radio, so the CPU isn’t the whole story). If Apple ran the iPhone CPU at full speed, you’d have a very hot phone that would run out in a matter of a few hours.
Move on to July 2008, and you have the iPhone 3G, which added 3G capability, and GPS. But the Hockenberry Query shows that it has the same CPU and bus speed as the original. Howcome? After a year you’d expect it would be about 50% faster, wouldn’t you? Yes, you might, but Apple clearly took the decision to ration battery life, especially with GPS and 3G sucking it up too.
But then came the updated iPod Touch, which turns out to have a CPU running at 533MHz, and a bus speed of 133MHz. Aha – now we’re getting somewhere. The iPod Touch doesn’t have GPS or 3G: so it shows you what Apple would be capable of if it weren’t husbanding resources. (There is a rumour that the iPod Touch v2 CPU is actually capable of 800MHz – which would again fit with Moore’s law, since that’s only a 33% increase on the maximum clock speed compared to a year previously; you’d expect about 50%.)
From that we can make a pretty straightforward, Moore’s law projection about what next week’s iPhone will contain – and thus, be able to do.
Simply, it’s this: a processor running at around 650MHz, and a bus speed of about 180MHz. And, as the top (yellow) line on the graph suggests, the CPU will be capable of about 950MHz, but will be underclocked at the same ratio – two-thirds of its top speed – meaning that battery life should be as good, if not better, than earlier versions, because the radio and GPS chips will have shrunk in the past year and so draw less power.
That will mean much faster processing: browser pages will draw more quickly. Email will display more quickly. Video will be smoother.
The next iPhone will be able to capture video: there will be enough processor power there. (Other mobile phones have had video capabilities for ages, but Apple appears to have wanted to have something special to sell, and wanted to preserve battery life.) Expect an improved camera – 3 megapixels, up from the present 2MP, is a reasonable upgrade.
We can also make a number of other forecasts based on those, and other ineluctable realities about the cost of components in computing.
1) Its Flash storage will be doubled. Prices there are halving every year, so rather than the present 8GB and 16GB models, you’ll see 16GB and 32GB. A separate data point on this comes from Darren Waters of the BBC, who says he has heard this, independently, from a Carphone Warehouse source.
2) You’ll have a lot more onboard RAM: 256MB in total, rather than 128. Again, simple economics: it costs the same for that much as it did two years ago. That will mean that applications can store more data in memory and boot faster. It might also mean that you’ll get better video quality, since there will be more available for the graphics chip.
Interestingly John Gruber, a keen observer of Apple, who has his sources – who haven’t led him wrong in any significant way that I can recall, especially on hardware – has also made a set of predictions about what’s coming: he says that
Based on information from informed sources, I believe the processor in the next-generation iPhone is going to be that kind of upgrade [comparable to the Intel Pentium’s speed against its 486 predecessor).
The original EDGE iPhone and iPhone 3G use the same 400 MHz processor. Let’s say the rumors are right — and I believe they are — that the next-generation iPhone’s CPU will be running at 600 MHz. In the same way that, say, a 90 MHz Pentium was more than 1.5 times as fast as a 60 MHz 486, the 600 MHz CPU in the next iPhone will be more than 1.5 times as fast as the current 400 MHz iPhone CPU.
He then makes the interesting point that
Much of what the iPhone does now is constrained by its CPU. App launching speed, for one thing — faster app launching should make it feel more like switching between apps and less like quitting/relaunching them. Web page rendering is also significantly constrained by the CPU. When I first used NetShare I was amazed at how fast Safari on my MacBook Pro could render web pages using the iPhone’s cell network connection. Web page rendering on current iPhones is hindered at least as much, if not more, by the CPU than by the speed of the 3G network.
Two last questions remain.
First, will it be able to run Flash, so that you can look at all those pages and hunt around for the “Skip Intro” button (or, alternatively, be able to browse YouTube and Vimeo without hitting blank spots)? Last June iPhone Atlas looked at Flash performance on mobile processors. The problem is that Flash is really processor-intensive: great for grown-up CPUs, not so good for portable devices with small batteries which like the CPU to sip, not slurp, power. And despite some brave-faced talk from Adobe last summer about “getting Flash on the iPhone”, it’s not happening in a hurry: Apple doesn’t really need Flash, because the BBC and YouTube have made MP4 versions of their videos that work just fine on the iPhone/iPod Touch. In fact, Adobe needs Apple rather more than Apple needs Adobe at the moment. Conclusion: no Flash.
Secondly, what will the price be? There has been speculation about a cheaper “iPhone mini” – some of the more credulous wrote excited stories suggesting it would be released or at least announced in January. After all, Apple did start splitting the iPod into multiple products, introducing the iPod mini in January 2004.
But I don’t think it will. The iPod mini was a move to take control of a market where Apple had already led for a year; it was expanding the market. The iPhone, for all its merits, isn’t leading the market, and isn’t pulling away from the market. Apple will prefer to stick with the single product for now.
Oh, and the price? The same, I’m afraid.
The quick 5-second roundup:
-significantly faster
-will record video
-better camera
-no FM. (Uses battery, so let accessories companies fight for it)
-twice the storage of current models
-still no Flash
-will work as a modem (it’s always been able to, but networks refused to allow it)
-same price.
So – does that sound like enough, or is it still eminently resistible for you? Is a smartphone on your buying agenda, and if so, which one?
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The Wi-Fi Cops
by Christopher Null
We’re surrounded by wireless gizmos — cell phones, cordless phones, Wi-Fi networks — day and night and at home and at work. But did you know the FCC can enter your home whenever it would care to in order to inspect all that gear? And they don’t need a search warrant to do so.
Wired reports on this long-lingering policy of the FCC, which was originally designed to ensure that people aren’t encroaching on regulated portions of the wireless spectrum from way back in the early days of radio — the main idea being to knock pirate radio stations off the air and to ensure that gear isn’t causing interference in parts of the spectrum where it doesn’t belong. One can imagine this could be a big problem in areas near military installations, should a consumer decide to fire up a transmitter that garbles a critical Air Force communications band, so some measure of oversight is certainly a good idea.
But times have changed since then — the original act that allowed the searches dates back to 1934 and its constitutionality has never been seriously tested in courts — and the world of wireless is a far different beast than it was when only the occasional citizen owned a CB or a ham radio and wanted to broadcast from his car or apartment. Now, just about everything we use on a daily basis is seemingly subject to regulation by the FCC.
That has an increasing number of experts alarmed, as the FCC’s jurisdiction stretches beyond just computers and cell phones to baby monitors and remote control key fobs for your car. It’s safe to say that nearly every household in America would be compelled to open its doors for the FCC on request so the agency could investigate at its whim whether you’re breaking the law. Refuse to let them in, and fines can run into the thousands of dollars.
Privacy advocates are specifically worried that the FCC could become (and arguably has already become) a tool of law enforcement to gain quick and easy entry into a home, where feds can search for additional transgressions unrelated to wireless technology once they have a foot in the door, no warrant needed. A 1987 Supreme Court case suggests this has already happened at least once, and has been upheld, after officers found stolen vehicles and prosecuted while performing an unrelated wireless investigation at an auto junkyard.
A little scary, eh?
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Don’t Let Yourself Be Blindsided By Old Internet Pictures
by Christopher Null
It’s always fun to write about research that you can actually try out for yourself.
Try this: Take a photo and upload it to Facebook, then after a day or so, note what the URL to the picture is (the actual photo, not the page on which the photo resides), and then delete it. Come back a month later and see if the link works. Chances are: It will.
Facebook isn’t alone here. Researchers at Cambridge University (so you know this is legit, people!) have found that nearly half of the social networking sites don’t immediately delete pictures when a user requests they be removed. In general, photo-centric websites like Flickr were found to be better at quickly removing deleted photos upon request.
Why do “deleted” photos stick around so long? The problem relates to the way data is stored on large websites: While your personal computer only keeps one copy of a file, large-scale services like Facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks to manage data and distribution. It’s a complex system wherein data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. (Yahoo! Tech is served by dozens of servers, for example.) But because changes aren’t reflected across the CDN immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks.
In the case of Facebook, the company says data may hang around until the URL in question is reused, which is usually “after a short period of time.” Though obviously that time can vary considerably.
Of course, once a photo escapes from the walled garden of a social network like Facebook, the chances of deleting it permanently fall even further. Google’s caching system is remarkably efficient at archiving copies of web content, long after it’s removed from the web. Anyone who’s ever used Google Image Search can likely tell you a story about clicking on a thumbnail image, only to find that the image has been deleted from the website in question — yet the thumbnail remains on Google for months. And then there are services like the Wayback Machine, which copy entire websites for posterity, archiving data and pictures forever.
The lesson: Those drunken party photos you don’t want people to see? Simply don’t upload them to the web, ever, because trying to delete them after you sober up is a tough proposition.
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Mother Harvard Wants You!
By Tracy Jan
At 5 p.m. Tuesday, thousands of high school students will check their e-mail to learn whether they got the nod from Harvard University. Only 7 percent will get in, school officials said today, the most selective year yet at one of the world’s most selective universities.
Last year, 7.9 percent of Harvard applicants were admitted. The stiffer competition is not surprising, given the record 29,112 applications this year for the Class of 2013, a 5.6 percent increase from last year that Harvard officials attributed in part to its financial aid initiative. The university announced it has admitted 2,046 students for the 1,655 spots in next year’s freshmen class.
The applicant pool reached an unprecedented level of achievement, university officials said. More than 2,900 scored a perfect 800 on their SAT critical reading test, and 3,500 scored perfectly on the SAT math test. Nearly 3,700 were ranked first in their senior class.
’’We had never had so many good choices,’’ said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. ‘‘Our new financial aid program encouraged so many people who might not have ever thought about applying to get into the pool.’’
Members of the incoming freshman class come from diverse backgrounds. A record 10.9 percent are Latino, Fitzsimmons said; 10.8 percent as African-American; 17.6 percent are Asian-American; and 1.3 percent are Native American. Another 8.9 percent are international students.
About a quarter of the admitted students come from families earning less than $80,000, making them eligible for a nearly free ride at the university.
Two years ago, Harvard instituted one of the most generous financial aid initiatives in the country waiving tuition, room, and board for students whose parents earn less than $60,000 and capping tuition, room and board at 10 percent of income for those whose families earn up to $180,000.
Nearly 60 percent of the incoming class will receive aid, Fitzsimmons said.
In response to increased demand from families struggling through the recession, Harvard plans to boost its undergraduate aid program to $147 million — an 8 percent increase over last year.
‘‘Certainly, it’s a measure of the pain in the economy, not just among the families of the incoming students but of the families that are here now,’’ Fitzsimmons said. ’’This has been a very tough year for people to think about college. Parents have lost jobs and houses.’’
The average financial aid package is likely to total more than $40,000. The cost of a Harvard education, including room and board, will be $48,868 next year.
Fat envelopes congratulating students on their selection will arrive by snail mail in the coming days. Those who ended up on the waiting list should not fret, as Fitzsimmons anticipates taking more than 200 students from the list.
It remains to be seen how many students will choose Harvard now that Harvard has chosen them. Last year, 76 percent of admitted students decided to enroll.
The university will now dispatch an army of students, faculty, and staff to encourage the chosen to commit by May 1. Professors will personally call as many students as possible. Current Harvard students and alumni will too. The admissions office will also host on-line chats to connect admitted students to current undergraduates.
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The “Study” Drug, Provigil, May Be Addictive
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
A so-called “smart drug” popular with young people may carry more of an addiction risk than thought, a small government study suggests. Scans of 10 healthy men showed that the prescription drug Provigil caused changes in the brain’s pleasure center, very much like potentially habit-forming classic stimulants. Modafinil, the drug’s generic name, is sometimes used as an illegal study aid by college students.
“It would be wonderful if one could take a drug and be smarter, faster or have more energy,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who led the study with a Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist. “But that is like fairy tales. We currently have nothing that has those benefits without side effects.”
The study, appearing in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association, may bust the myth that the drug is safe for healthy people, experts said.
Provigil is approved to treat excessive daytime sleepiness caused by narcolepsy. On the market since 1999, it’s the flagship product of Cephalon Inc. of Frazer, Pa., and its sales approached $1 billion last year. The company is developing a spin-off called Nuvigil.
Modafinil’s reputation as a brain enhancer stems from an Air Force study that found it improved the performance of sleep-deprived fighter pilots. College students buy and sell it illegally, as they do Ritalin and Adderall, to stay alert while studying.
Several scientists recently wrote in the journal Nature that healthy people should have the right to boost their brains with pills like Provigil. One author of that commentary, brain scientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, said the new study “goes to show that we need a little caution and a little humility when we’re messing around with our brain chemistry.”
“But even now, after all the years that it has been on the market, we are still learning things about it that are relevant to its safety,” Farah said.
The men in the study were 23 to 46 years old. They received either a dummy pill or modafinil. Effects were measured by PET scans, which showed that the drug increased dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitters.
Modafinil once was thought to be safer than conventional stimulants because it was believed that it did not engage the brain’s dopamine system, which is linked with addiction. Studies in mice and monkeys suggested otherwise.
The new study is the first human evidence that a typical dose of modafinil affects dopamine in the brain as much as a dose of Ritalin, a controlled substance with clear potential for dependence.
Volkow said modafinil acts slowly when swallowed and is difficult to inject, making it less likely to be abused. Its high price, about $10 per pill compared to Ritalin at $2 per pill, also makes it less attractive to people seeking a high. That may change when generics become available in 2012, Volkow said.
Jeffry Vaught, chief science officer for Cephalon, said the company has seen no evidence the drug is highly abused.
“If abuse is a problem with modafinil, it’s minimal at best,” Vaught said. “We’re not seeing it used at rave scenes.”
Prescribing information for the drug warns of severe rashes and other side effects such as headache, nausea and anxiety. Cephalon doesn’t support the drug’s use as a cognitive enhancer.
“There’s no substitute for sleep,” Vaught said.
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Chinese Applicants to Harvard Have a One Percent Chance
by Tracy Jan
The book spawned a genre, selling more than two million copies in China on the premise that any child, with the proper upbringing, could be Ivy League material.
Now, eight years after the publication of “Harvard Girl,” bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like “How We Got Our Child Into Yale,” “Harvard Family Instruction” and “The Door of the Elite.”
Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation – some might say a single-minded national obsession – of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America’s premier universities.
Because government policy allows families only one child, many parents feel immense pressure to groom their sons and daughters for success and, in the process, prepare a comfortable retirement for themselves. They fervently mine the expanding volumes of child-rearing manuals – “Stanford’s Silver Bullet,” “Yale Girl,” “Creed of Harvard” – for tips on producing what the Chinese term “high-quality” children.
“Harvard Girl,” written by the parents of one of the first Chinese undergraduates to enter the university on a full scholarship, chronicled Liu Yiting’s methodical upbringing, which the book says instilled the discipline and diligence necessary for academic success. The tome has a place in many urban households with high school-age children, and new parents receive the book as a present from family and friends.
“Going to Harvard means that the way they raised their child was successful,” said Yang Kui, publisher of the best seller. “People are willing to copy and learn how they did it.”
The book, which features a photo on the cover of Liu posing with her admission letter to Harvard, espoused unconventional techniques for turning out an Ivy-caliber child. Liu’s parents challenged the young girl to hold ice in her hands for as long as she could bear it to improve her endurance and made her jump rope every day for increasingly longer periods until she won a school contest.
They put toys out of her grasp when she was a baby to make her work harder for them, timed the girl’s studies to the minute as soon as she entered elementary school and made her do school work in the noisiest part of the house to develop her ability to concentrate.
“It’s a very Chinese kind of method. It’s hard for Americans to understand,” said Zhongrui Yin, a sophomore at Harvard whose own mother, Sharon, is about to release “From Andover to Harvard,” which tells how his acceptance on scholarship to Phillips Academy, a residential private secondary school in Andover, Massachusetts, was a steppingstone to the elite university.
On a recent visit to Sharon Yin’s apartment in Beijing, a dog-eared, highlighted copy of “Harvard Girl” lay on the coffee table. She bought the book immediately after seeing Liu’s mother interviewed on Chinese television and, like millions of other parents, made her son read it when he was in the seventh grade.
A retired engineer, Yin, 48, hopes her book will help her start a second career as a child-development consultant. Like Liu’s parents – who prodded an entire country to dare to dream of a free Harvard education at a time when few left China for undergraduate study – Yin hopes to inspire Chinese families to consider enrolling their children in American prep schools like Andover as an alternate path to a prestigious university. In China, college placement is determined solely by a score on the national entrance exam.
Aware of the increasing pressure on China’s children, Yin is also pushing a more humane model of parenting.
“As prosperity happens so quickly in China, many parents want to see their kids surpass others, so they demand too much,” Yin said in her kitchen as she gingerly flipped an egg dumpling sizzling in a wok. “These children carry the burden of great expectations.”
She compared raising children to the perfectly browned dumplings. “You only get one chance,” she said. “You can’t turn the heat up too high or they’ll burn.”
Too many Chinese parents spend all their money enrolling children in after-school and weekend tutoring programs starting as young as first grade, with the hope they will outperform peers on school tests and academic competitions, Yin said.
Instead, she said, sounding like an American college counselor, parents should encourage children to participate in arts, sports and student council, activities not as valued by Chinese colleges but deemed to be of utmost importance by top American universities as they try to assemble a well-rounded freshman class.
Yin began documenting all aspects of her son’s upbringing in a tiny brown notebook soon after he was born. After reading “Harvard Girl,” Yin compared Zhongrui with Liu Yiting and decided her son was not as disciplined and needed to work harder in English and math if he was going to make it to the Ivy League.
“This book gave me self-confidence,” Zhongrui Yin wrote in a journal that he started in middle school after discovering that Liu’s mother also had her write in a diary. “Liu Yiting can get into Harvard. Why can’t I?”
Students all over China have started chasing the same dream. In 1999, the year Liu Yiting entered Harvard, just 44 students from Chinese high schools applied to the college; two, including Liu, were admitted. Last school year, 484 Chinese students applied; five got in.
China’s original Ivy League poster child earned a degree in applied math and economics from Harvard in 2003 and now works at an investment firm in New York. Liu, who once drew adoring crowds at her book signings, declined to be interviewed, but wrote in an e-mail message: “The driving force behind my parents’ book’s popularity is their educational theories, which consciously address Chinese parents’ growing anxiety about proper family education.”
Although many Chinese parents are grateful to Liu’s parents for penning their treatise, others have called the book boastful and incited an Internet backlash.
It’s a fate Zhongrui Yin hopes to avoid. The 20-year-old history major said he wished his mother would not publish “From Andover to Harvard.” Though his photo appears on the cover, his full name is mentioned only once in the manuscript, in the preface.
“I didn’t want to create a Liu Yiting phenomenon,” Yin said.
“Basically, just for getting into Harvard, that girl became a national superstar. I don’t want my life to climax just for getting into Andover or Harvard.”
