I will admit that the iPhone was one of the sexiest looking pieces of technology to come along in recent years.  After the first time I saw the ad on TV, I thought “I must have that!”

However, after a little reflection, I realized that I need a phone.  I don’t need a multi-tool.  I need a phone that actually works.  One that gets reception in my apartment and at my workplace.  A phone that does not filter the incoming sounds to the degree that when we have colds, our voices are filtered out as noise!  I just want to be able to call someone, and have them call me.

Rather than focusing on one thing and getting it right, the phone companies are aiming to do many things poorly.  I guess in someone’s cost function that adds up to something favorable.  Most products now-a-days are optimized, not for functionality or reliability, but for profit.  And we still buy them.

My friend Don just got a new cell phone.  He walked into the store and said, “I want a phone.  Not a camera.  Not a web browser.  Not a videocam.  Not a text messager.  A phone… that works!” 
It sounds ridiculous when put that way doesn’t it?

I have worried about the internet capabilities of my current phone.  I get unwanted text message ads from my service provider.  And have gotten some messages from websites on the internet.  But what about viruses?  Or what about hackers?

It appears that these concerns have come to fruition with the new iPhone.  Several people saw this one coming.  And, well, here is how the first exploits were performed.  Have fun!

The rules of your new phone are simple:
1. Visit only sites you trust.
2. Use only WiFi networks you trust (your local coffee shop is not secure)
3. Don’t open web links emailed to you (they could point to a malicious site)
4. Make sure your software patches are up-to-date

I am reminded of Kyle on South Park during the 9/11 conspiracy episode: “Really?”

Look.
Not EVERYTHING is meant to be interconnected to everything else.
Systems don’t work that way.  Dense interconnections are important in complex systems, but these are not random interconnections.  The phone network is a dense interconnection, which is great.  But to use the same system for other means of communication defeats the purpose of having different forms of communication.  Multiple forms of communication introduce redundancy, which in a complex system is essential in maintaining a system that is robust against accidents or interventions.  To tie these communication systems together introduces severe vulnerabilities. 

Consider your cable television company, which provides television service, internet service and phone service.  When they have a problem, you will lose all three services.  And who are you going to call?  No one, because your phone is out!  And forget staying tuned to that all-important channel for breaking news.  This is why it is still important to keep a radio on hand for emergencies.  Redundancy.

Biology doesn’t even make this mistake.  As an extreme example, you are disallowed concious control of your own heart rate and bowel function!  Your own body does not even trust these systems to potential intervention by your conciousness!  There exist distinct systems with distinct purposes.  This is what provides them with both functionality and robustness.

The brain uses several systems for communication.  There are action potentials that send signals from neuron to neuron.  The connections are mediated by neurotransmitters that enable a wide variety of interactions, which include excitation and inhibition.  There are volume conducted currents that send signals to large regions of neural tissue simultaneously, which are then enhanced by the geometry of the tissue as well as the electrical conductivity.  There is the hormonal system which relies on chemicals to be transported as signals through the blood stream.  These are only a handful of the distinct signaling systems that are used in our nervous system.  They do interact, but with neurons as the mediators.

This is analgous to our society, where we are the mediators receiving signals from telephones, radio, television, the internet, newspapers, personal conversations, body-language, etc.  The fact that these are distinct forms of communication add a richness that is unparalleled.  Uniting them can only reduce the diversity of interactions and introduce vulnerabilities to the system. 

Your phone should not do everything. 
Nor should any one company control access or content.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

This morning I was surfing the web for LEGO Arm designs to try to come up with ideas for stabilizing the pretty mediocre arm I built last night for our upcoming demonstration at MAXENT 2007.  I came across a blog called the Open Prosthetics Project featuring a piece titled “Articulated Hand: Low Cost Prototyping with LEGO“.  where they described the work of John Bergmann who has prototyped a prosthetic hand using LEGO technic parts.  They even posted building instructions.

The subtitle of the blog is “Prosthetics Shoudn’t Cost an Arm and a Leg”.  I agree, and neither should robotics.  The fact is that LEGO’s prefabricated plastic parts are ideal building blocks.  Why spend $100s of thousands of dollars and several months to develop laboratory prototypes when you can do it for hundreds of dollars and several days.

Its amazing, but real people are doing real things with LEGOs.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

I looked into this and found a paper by Grant, Wassenhove, and Poeppel titled “Discrimination of Auditory-Visual Synchrony“, which describes that time delays in the auditory stimulus with respect to the visual stimulus of -40 milliseconds to 240 milliseconds were not noticed by the subject.  Apparently a visual speech stimulus (lips moving) and its associated auditory speech stimulus do not have to be so precisely timed for a person to perceive them as synchronous.

When you think about this, you realize that our perceptual processing must be this way.  Light travels about one million times faster than sound.  More specifically, light travels about 1 foot per nanosecond, whereas sound travels about a foot a millisecond.  If a person is 20 feet away from you, the sound is delayed by 20 milliseconds with respect to the visual stimulus.  This effect is more pronounced when the subject is 100 feet away, which leads to a 100 millisecond delay.  To accomodate the slow speed of sound with respect to the speed of light, and the fact that sound sources can be located at varying distances from the perceiver, the brain must be able to accomodate sound delays on the order of hundreds of milliseconds.  This reasoning explains why the brain works this way.   However. it now remains to explain how this dynamic processing is implemented.

Last, the time delay in the other direction (-40 milliseconds) can be understood by realizing that a speech syllable is on the order of 40 milliseconds in length.  Since a syllable is a basic unit of speech sound, it would make sense that some processing time on the order of the duration of a syllable needs to be accomodated.

Kevin H Knuth
Albany NY