Mobile phone use 2007

The Economist has published some great research on phone use. Highlights:

* 60% of men carried their phones in their trouser pockets, whereas 61% of women carried their phones in handbags

* A typical person spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people

* Various communication methods are used for different purposes–land lines for shared communication in a home, mobiles for last-minute planning and co-ordination, texting for intimacy and emotions, email for administration and file exchange, IM for background chatter

* Even when people are given unlimited cheap or free calls, the number and length of calls does not increase significantly

* Private communications are invading the workplace more than the other way around

* Mobile workers generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks.

Like video, but without the picture

At [Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day](http://www.daughtersandsonstowork.org/wmspage.cfm?parm1=485) yesterday, a radio reporter was asking kids if they wanted to do an interview with him. Apparently some kids expressed confusion about what radio was. His pitch? “It’s like video, but without the picture. There’s only sound.”

I guess for a generation raised entirely on video (even I had significant radio exposure), such an explanation is apropos…but it still seemed strange to describe a simpler technology using a more complex one.

The new news

Today was the first time [Facebook](http://facebook.com) was my source of (unfortunately sad) [news](http://news.google.com/?ncl=1115426346&hl=en). Then I read in Fast Company [Mark Zuckerberg’s comment](http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-hacker-dropout-ceo_3.html) that “We’re actually producing more news in a single day for our 19 million users than every other media outlet has in their entire existence.”

Who needs the AP when you have social networks?

Sony Ericsson w810i memory stick full or will not delete images

[Writing this for Google](http://daringfireball.net/2004/05/writing_for_google)…

If your Sony Ericsson w810i won’t delete images, or if your memory keeps getting full despite your deleting all images and files, it’s likely because they’re not really being deleted from the phone.

Try connecting the phone to a Windows PC, choosing “Show hidden files and folders” under “Tools->Folder Options->View->Advanced Settings”, and look for a folder entitled “.Trash” (unfortunately this didn’t show up for me on my Mac, but maybe you’re smarter than I–UPDATE: apparently you can find this folder by searching for it using the Finder search keyword “.trash”). Delete that (and empty the recycling bin) and your memory will be yours again.

Alternatively, you might find success using the bundled software management suite, but since I’m all over different computers and devices, that didn’t seem very sustainable. One thing that did, actually, was using iPhoto to import the photos and telling it to delete the photos after importing. Somehow that manages to do the right thing.

I was down to one photo capacity on my 128mb card, which didn’t seem right at all. Every time I took a photo, I’d have to delete it to make room for the next one.

Google searches that failed to find this information for me: “memory stick full” w810, memory stick full w810, w810i “phone memory full” “memory full”, w810i “phone memory full”, w810i not deleting pictures, w810i not deleting, w810i card delete, w810i force delete, w810i memory full, w810i memory, w810i deleting images, w810i not deleting images, w810i not deleting

Notes from “Bridging the Digital Divide: Smart Tools for Addressing Health Pandemics in Emerging Economies”

A conference at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, April 7-8, 2006

### Michael Free, PATH

* Prevention -> Detection -> Treatment

* Focuses on Prevention

* Vaccines are slow to grow -> Thermostable vaccines

* Vaccines are limited -> New ways of delivering vaccines that are more efficient

* Detection slow -> Point-of-care tests

* Today, action often depends on the threat a disease poses to the developed world…

### Aimee Gauthier, ITDP (transport policy for africa for health group)

* Transport is a bottleneck of health care

* Focus on HIV/AIDS but better transport is common solution to many diseases

* Repair/Maintenance toughest/$$ part of supplying cars

* Bicycles appropriate up to distances of ~20k

* “California Bike Coalition” bikes are used

* Plus non-motorized ambulances (e.g. bike trailers)

* “DOTS” program–people visit patients to make sure they’re taking their meds

* Hospital ~50k away from average patient

* Regional post ~23k

* Pharmacy ~5k

* Bicycles could bridge gaps between these levels

### Prabhu Kandachar, Design Engineering, Delft University

* “Distant diagnostics” – Delft student project, patients can transmit their sugar level 400mi to hospital for advice

* “Infoproduct for pregnant women” – for illiterate women to self-diagnose and medicate

* “Oral cancer screener” – portable laser screener for mouth/throat cancer (caused by lots of tobacco chewing in starvation-prone areas)

* “Tele-diagnosis system” – Udupi district, south India; patient meets with local nurse, who takes pictures of wounds and sends to specialists: “teledermatology”.

* needs standard documentation format

* specialists got annoyed because they no longer had direct patient contact; tough to stay motivated

### Joanne Dunaway (UC Berkeley)

* “Pandemic” doesn’t mean “infectious” or “contagious”–just “widespread”

* 2.7% of global illness is due to indoor smoke from fires -> 1.6M deaths per year

* Smoke-free or smoke-limiting cooking stoves to address this problem

Notes from The Second Coming – A Manifesto

David Gelernter has been through a lot, from inventing computer languages and forecasting the WWW to suffering a misguided Unabomber blast. This manifesto, written in 2000, is already beginning to come true…

* Google’s on the right track, basing their model on the world’s best “collection of information”.

> 9 The computing future is based on “cyberbodies” — self-contained, neatly-ordered, beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.

* Browser == “tuner”?

> 11 Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it to any tuner at any time.

* This reminds me of Google’s “Turn OFF personalized results”:

> 13 Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a “Disable Omniscience” button.

* Yet he likes the desktop model for computing; what about “tuners”?

> 19 The power of desktop machines is a magnet that will reverse today’s “everything onto the Web!” trend. Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remote servers onto desktops.

* The idea behind BitTorrent?

> 20 If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn’t that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination.

* Ha ha, David Kelley!

> 23 The computer mouse was a brilliant invention, but we can see today that it is a bad design. Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought to provide tactile feedback; it doesn’t.

* Why “files” and “folders” (even in email) are a bad idea:

> Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action.

* Proposing autonaming? Sort by attribute? Or (gasp!) search?

> 30 If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.

* Well, [_I_ could have told you this](http://ryskamp.org/brain/technology/life-blogging):

> 34 In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. Chronologies and timelines tend to be awkward in the off-computer world of paper, but they are natural online.