wirelessZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG

I was reviewing a book this week (An Analog Electronics Companion: Basic Circuit Design for Engineers and Scientists, by Scott Hamilton) and it reminded me, very forcefully, why it was that I wanted to be an engineer.

Far from being one of those people who go to college to “find themselves” and start on one track and then move to another, I knew from age maybe 11 that I wanted to be an electronics engineer and that I wanted to work in the BBC. At that age I was taking TVs apart – and putting them back together again – and I started building projects from scratch, including power supplies with lethal output voltages for my valve (tube) radios.

By the time I was 17 I held the third amateur TV license issued in the UK (G6AAC/T) and I was still determined to go the techie route.

I didn’t lie abo...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

People who know me, or have read any small amount of my work, understand my extreme concerns about long-term cell phone use. My last Editorial on the subject was driven by work out of Israel that saw cell division taking place in heavy users of the technology.

Israel is a good location for cell phone investigations. The country, as a whole, was an early and heavy adopter and we should certainly expect any affects of long-term phone usage to first emerge out of such a territory.

And that is what may now have happened.

The February 15, 2008 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology published the work of ten researchers in Israel, led by Siegal Sadetzki (Gertner Institute, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer and the Sackler Sc...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

About ninety minutes ago my laptop was hit by a Trojan; a series of impossible-to-close browser windows offering free malware software (which it itself was!) looking like the kind of thing that you get if you accidentally typo a URL and get taken into a near-name-clone porno site. Fortunately, McAfee was on the ball and deleted everything within seconds. I would have started this Editorial immediately afterwards, but the delay was how long it took for McAfee to run a complete scan of my machine.

I'm not running Internet Explorer: I'm currently on Firefox, where this kind of stuff is not supposed to happen and which is, supposedly, a great deal safer than IE. If I was going to stay around the environment maybe I should probably go back to Netscape -- used, for example, by about 0.2% of the visitors to EN-Genius; but there are so many sites now which simply won't load properly, or at all, in Netscape. It's probably now too deep in the noise floor for anybody to be bothered to ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

My daughter sat her very first real exam at school today. A momentous occasion, tackled like a professional with a major reward being that when the exam was over she was free to leave for the day. More exams tomorrow and the next day and then, on Friday, her grade will have their bikes carted off to part of the Galloping Goose Trail, a 55 km multiple-use trail, where they themselves will arrive on a school bus. They will cycle about 10 km to a lake where they can swim, picnic and jape around until it is time to cycle back to the bus.

A good way of letting off steam after a grueling week for them all.

Now she will take exams every year until she goes to college -- when she still will get little relief. But she is luckier than I was. My first exams were at age eleven when it was decided what sort of secondary education you were best suited for. She is also lucky that until she does her Prov...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

A few years ago I had the wonderful experience of being at home when a once-in-a-generation windstorm hit on the Oregon Coast. It was never classified as a hurricane but my anemometer clocked the circular winds at +120 mph. After the terrifying fifteen minutes of this event -- a scene right out of Hitchcock's The Birds -- I was able to take stock of the outside world. We had lost a large section of the roof and there were shingles absolutely everywhere. Their nails would turn up around the yard for months afterwards.

I first checked on an elderly neighbor who had also lost a lot of her roof; after I had found she was OK, I walked past -- and through -- the downed power and cable TV lines the mile or so to my daughter's elementary school where they were all huddled down safely. The only noise in the streets was the emergency generator at the hospital…

After finally getting the insurance adjuster onto the premises (they were rather busy) he cut a check ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There are all sorts of reports about the psychological effects of video gaming on children and young adults -- and some not so young. Most of them point out the antisocial behavior that is developed, the creation of unhealthy children because of the sedentary time in front of a screen, and so on. But now a study project reported in the February issue of Archives of Surgery develops a new line of thinking.

Drs Rosser, Lynch, Cudding, Gentile, Klonsky and Merrell from prestigious medical institutions like Beth Israel, NY University Medical School, Montefiore Medical Center, Brookdale University Hospital, Iowa State University and the Virginia Commonwealth University spent three months in 2002 studying various surgeons (33 residents and attending physicians) in their performance in laparoscopic surgery -- that's where tools are inserted through tubes, and the like, and the surgeon uses...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Since the very first radio transmitters went on the air at the dawn of the twentieth century, we have been rather obsessed with control of the RF spectrum. Rightly so in terms of potential interference; wrongly so in terms of political control. Governments in the 1920s through the 1950s were terrified that radio would become a subversive force that could be turned against them.

Licensing started early on and was given out for transmissions of a particular modulation, at a particular frequency, at a specific power, at a specific location. As technology evolved, the spectrum effectively increased, as we were able to go to higher and higher frequencies. But the licensing model changed little.

I am personally in favor of anarchy in the spectrum; it has been shown to work time and again. In the UK it worked when stodgy BBC radio programming failed to cater to teenage music pressure. Radio Luxembourg filled the gap and, most evenings, you could get a clear AM signal in the...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I'm writing this while half listening to a bunch of pundits guessing early results in the 2006 mid-term elections. And some of this strikes me as bizarre.

We have the lawyers already involved in getting injunctions to extend voting hours because of machine problems; voting stations running out of ballots; candidates' names disappearing or truncated on voting machines. Any real overall result this evening seems to be extremely unlikely, and any long-term decisions in states where voter fraud and machine fraud are alleged could stretch the whole process out for a week or more. There are, no doubt, a lot of lawyers sitting in VIP lounges at northeastern airports ready to be scrambled in corporate jets to fly anywhere in the country.

I don't hold any real political position in the US; heck, I don't even have a vote! But the democratic process just isn't working properly.

Take the situation where Latino voters were harassed outside a polling station by two men -- ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

A funny thing is happening on the way to the (consumer) Forum: the PRC is imploding in business terms.

The basic posit that communism and capitalism are incompatible is finally coming to a head. It's not because of the number of millionaires who are building castle-like mansions outside cities such as Shanghai. It's not about the difference between those (now many) very well-off people and the peasants who are hounded by corrupt local party officials: no, that is a revolution that is further down the road when it really hits home to the poor farmer exactly what the more equal people are getting.

No, this is a trade battle.

Inside the PRC, the manufacturers of consumer products are running out of customers, and the competition is so intense their margins are razor thin. That is not good, of course, for the sweat workers who are producing the products. The manufacturing costs are still mostly dependent on labor costs -- they will need to be cut even fu...  -- Click Here to Read More >>