William Flew and Imaginary Phone

Sean Gustafson unlocks his iPhone by swishing a finger across its screen and pecking out a four-digit PIN on its keypad. It's unremarkable save for one small thing: there is no phone in his hand. Instead, he's pressing invisible "buttons" on his palm – to operate an imaginary cellphone. And, astonishingly, it works.

Imagine you cannot find or use your phone when it starts ringing. Perhaps it's fallen into the depths of your sofa, or your hands are wet from washing up or greasy from baking. To decline the call and send it to your messaging service, you press the area of your palm corresponding to the position of the relevant button if you had the phone in your hand. Or you could press the buttons to answer the call and turn on the speakerphone.

The idea is certainly strange, but Gustafson and his colleagues Patrick Baudisch and Christian Holz at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam University in Germany think there is a gap in the market for phones and TV remotes like this that don't actually exist.

For it to work they reason you'd need two things: people who know precisely where the apps are on their physical phone, and a technology that can sense where they are pressing on their hand so a computer can respond and send commands to your phone – wherever it is.

From iPhone to iPalm

To find out how well people know their modern touchscreen phones, the Potsdam trio recruited 12 volunteers from among the iPhone users they spotted in their cafeteria and tested how well they knew the position of their favoured apps without their phone. "We found 68 per cent of iPhone users can locate the majority of their home screen apps on their hand. This means that iPhone use inadvertently prepares users for the use of an imaginary version," says Baudisch.

Having established a reasonable chance of successfully finding an app's position on someone's palm, they then decided to use "depth cameras" – similar to those at the heart of Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing gaming system – to detect where someone is pressing on their palm.

The depth camera they used in their tests is a "time-of-flight" device that flashes an invisible infrared pattern on the scene and which uses ultrafast receiver circuitry to time how long it takes the light bathing different parts of the scene to be returned to a sensor. That way, it knows how far all the objects in the scene are from the camera – so when a users' finger presses on their palm, it registers where and when it does so. The signal is sent to a computer which processes it and then sends the relevant command to your cellphone.

Going 'all-imaginary'

In their tests, the depth camera was a clunky head mounted device. "But ultimately, we envision the camera becoming so small that it integrates into clothing, such as the button of a shirt, a brooch, or a pendant. So people would not even notice if someone carries an imaginary phone," Baudisch told New Scientist.

"We envision that users will initially use imaginary phones as a shortcut to operate the physical phones in their pockets. As users get more experienced, it might even become possible to leave the device at home and spend the day ‘all-imaginary'."

Answering calls on the phone would still require the physical device – but it would be possible to access apps and forward calls to voicemail with the imaginary version.

It's not all about phones, however: Gustafson is now working out how a TV remote control could be replaced by an imaginary zapper. The team hope to present their work at a conference on user interfaces later this year.

"For quite simple interactions this is probably going to work well," says Nick Bryan-Kinns of Queen Mary, University of London. "But for more complicated functions it's difficult to know how you'd do it without using audio feedback from the device, telling you which function you've activated."

William Flew on Cellphone Ettiquette

Anyone who has been forced to endure a stranger's loud and public cellphone conversation in a supermarket line or a restaurant will understand this story:

A woman boarded an Amtrak train in Oakland last Saturday night and proceeded to talk loudly on her cellphone for much of the rest of her 16-hour voyage. Repeated pleas from her fellow passengers — and the conductor — to be quiet fell on, um, deaf ears. Things got so bad that Amtrak officials stopped the train between stations Sunday afternoon in Salem, Ore., and had local police escort her off for being an "unruly passenger." (Usually you have to be a ranting drunk on the train to get that designation.) As a wit on Gawker.com wrote, "She was later charged with unspeakable crimes against humanity and sentenced to life on some distant planet where there are no reception bars, ever."

The question of how to cope with cellphones in public has been a thorny issue for more than a decade. But what's heartening here is that Amtrak officials did something assertive on behalf of the suffering passengers after the woman broke the rule forbidding cellphone use in coach cars at night.

Increasingly, there are rules to limit cellphone use everywhere. On some shorter lines, Amtrak has "quiet cars" where noise from phones, laptops and other devices is prohibited. Gyms often outlaw cellphones in workout areas, and restaurants sometimes nix them. The Los Angeles Public Library system restricts use to lobby areas.

But often rules are unenforced or are not posted or don't exist at all. In fact, L.A.'s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is working on providing cellphone access on subway trains, not taking it away. (Loud radios are still prohibited on buses and trains.)

A sense of entitlement pervades our public areas — a kind of "I want to talk, therefore I will" attitude. And cellphone use is just one example. If only those police officers who took the woman off the Amtrak train could come cart away the people who yak loudly on their townhouse patios on Saturday at 8 a.m. or crank up their stereos at 3 a.m.

But short of a rudeness police — hey, is there a ballot initiative there? — it would improve social well-being if librarians, bus drivers, gym staffers and apartment building managers were more aggressive about quieting irresponsible noisemakers. Wouldn't it be great if you could get your entire apartment building designated "quiet," like the Amtrak cars? Until that happens, we can all start by being aware of the people around us and reminding ourselves of what we tell children: Use your indoor voice.

Harold Camping Excuse Bingo

An Unusual Incentive (With a sting in the tail)

Insurance agents, it is said, are premium lovers. This was certainly put to the test when a hundred intrepid German sales reps were offered 20 Hungarian prostitutes at a steamy evening in Budapest’s Gellért Baths as a reward for a successful year of selling policies.

Attaché cases and mobile phones were surrendered by the high-performing insurance experts at the entrance to the orgy. But even after they had stripped off their suits, the men from Hamburg-Mannheimer International — now part of the Munich Re group, the world’s biggest insurer — could not quite shed their office habits. As soon as they had made use of the services of one of the women, she would have her wrist rubber-stamped.

“That was how we established how popular each of the women was,” one of the participants told the German financial daily Handelsblatt. “Some ended the evening with more than a dozen stamps on their arms.”

As befits reps from Germany, Europe’s most insured nation, it was a rather orderly orgy. They queued for up to an hour in front of four-poster beds. Those who did not have the patience to stand in line were allowed to make love in the baths, providing that showers were taken before and afterwards. “Women were also made available back at the hotel,” one participant told the newspaper.

Handelsblatt became suspicious when the economist Leonhard Knoll posed a question about the purchase of prostitutes at the recent annual meeting of Munich Re, not normally an occasion for talking dirty.

The baffled chief executive, Nikolaus von Bomhard, asked his minions to research the matter. Soon it was confirmed that in 2007 Hamburg-Mannheimer had indeed paid for an “annual incentive trip for the very best salespeople and executives”.

The company was swallowed up three years later by Ergo, a subsidiary of Munich Re, so the top management could claim to be squeaky clean. But even the company’s in-house magazine had made sly references at the time to “a night not easily forgotten in Budapest”. Ergo admitted the jaunt and said that it had parted company with two senior executives responsible for the trip.

Unusually, the reps failed to read the smallprint. Most ended up having to pay an extra €3,000 (£2,600) to the German inland revenue for taking advantage of taxable pecuniary benefits.

Post Apocalyptic Excuses (Get Your Popcorn Now)

May 22 Copouts


1) My math was wrong. It will actually happen on this specific later date.
2) God is forgiving and gave people more time to be saved.
3) It actually happened it just looks like it didn't.


you were an unbeliever wern't you? Great, everyone thank this guy for screwing it up for the rest of us.


I bet we don't see "it actually happened but I didn't get taken".


it'll be what it always is: Good work my flock! Your prayers have forestalled the inevitable.


God is dyslexic. The end cometh 2101.


Harold Camping will say, "Oops, I forgot to carry the one....the actual date is November 16, 2028."


God works in mysterious ways. He was just testing the faithful.


Same as always. Their complete lack of being right is actually proof that they are fundamentally correct in all of their beliefs.


Maybe he invoked the letter of the law ...
Revelation 14:3-5
And they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No man could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. For it is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.

William Flew Reprint 21 May 2011

On the day that a chief executive of an international company became an instant billionaire, it emerged that he had failed to reply to ten African children who had written begging him to stop the pollution from a mine that was blighting their lives. Ivan Glasenberg will be catapulted into the ranks of the world’s richest people by the listing of Glencore International on the London Stock Exchange, with his personal holding worth $9.5 billion (£5.8 billion).

But his celebrations will be overshadowed by the revelation that Glencore has been exposing thousands of Zambians to dangerous levels of sulphur dioxide emissions, which cause premature deaths from respiratory diseases and destroy crops by creating acid rain.

Last May, Mr Glasenberg received a bundle of letters from children at a school exposed on a daily basis to sulphur dioxide pollution from the nearby Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) complex. In the letters, obtained by The Times, the children described how clouds of toxic particles made them choke, burnt their throats, poisoned the school’s fruit trees and forced teachers to close windows, leaving them sweltering in their classrooms.

They pleaded with him to give them the same protection from pollution that has been accepted for decades as standard for communities near copper plants in the developed world.

Rabecca, 14, wrote: “The emissions are so powerful and irritating to the eyes, nose, throat and lips such that you always have to cover the face each time the emissions are released. We would like to here [sic] from you soon.”

Tumpoka, 13, wrote: “The emissions have so far destroyed our flower beds and the school garden.”

Another pupil, Nchimunta, 14, wrote: “We get sick of different types of diseases such as coughing and sneezing. Learning is also disturbed when sulphur dioxide is released, sometimes windows have to be closed. When we grow crops, flowers and trees they all get burnt.”

MCM, 73 per cent of which is owned by Glencore, received a €48million (£42 million) loan in 2005 from the European Investment Bank to invest in equipment that would capture sulphur emissions. The company claims it is now capturing half the plant’s emissions but it refused to respond when asked yesterday why its emission reduction programme would not be completed until 2015, 15 years after it took control of MCM. A minerals expert who advises Glencore told The Times that the equipment could have been fully installed within five years.

The Environmental Council of Zambia reported in 2009 that sulphur dioxide emissions from parts of the plant were up to 70 times the maximum healthy limit set by the World Health Organisation.

The company’s listing prospectus, published this month, confirms the environmental breaches. A mineral expert’s report, which Glencore was required to publish to explain the risks investors would face, said sulphur dioxide emissions from MCM were “consistently exceeding” environmental limits. It said that the breaches were a “significant risk” because MCM had missed even the extended deadline for reducing the pollution. Three monitoring stations outside the plant repeatedly recorded breaches of air pollution limits.

The report described various illegal discharges of hazardous fluids into rivers, including an acid leak that had contaminated the town’s water supply and resulted in “hospitalisation and treatment of a number of people”.

Anthony Lipmann, a Surrey-based metal trader and former chairman of the Minor Metals Trade Association, visited Mufulira, the town next to the plant, last year. He said: “I was caught in a sulphur storm and immediately began to gag and struggled to breathe. The children are exposed to these clouds several times a day. They try to cover their mouths but they still inhale the sulphur,” he said. “I also saw the bleached earth, reduced crops and corrosive effect of acid rain on roofs, paint and lungs.”

Mr Lipmann gathered letters from the children at the Mine Basic School in Mufulira and sent them to Mr Glasenberg. In his covering letter he wrote that the pollution was blighting the lives of 300,000 people.

“The sulphur emissions from MCM are much higher than would be acceptable in any Western European country. Such behaviour lies ill with your company’s professed policy of ensuring that your operations are not harmful to the environment,” he wrote.

Mr Lipmann said he sent the letters twice by DHL to ensure that Mr Glasenberg could not overlook them. “Neither Glasenberg nor anyone from Glencore replied, to my knowledge, to the children’s letters.

“Why is it that the places in Africa from where copper is taken see so little benefit? We need to shine a light on bad practice which takes place far away from the view of investors on the London Stock Exchange,” he said.

Tony Simmonds, a GP from Somerset who has visited Mufulira five times, said: “You could feel the acid attacking your lungs. It was clear it would be bad for the health of the local population in terms of respiratory diseases. It would be precipitating asthma.”

He said Glencore had been failing to invest in the local community and local roads and the mine hospital had deteriorated since it took over the mine. The hospital no longer had the capacity to deal with serious cases, meaning patients had to travel 40 miles to another hospital.

The mineral expert’s report in the company’s prospectus refers to the need for Glencore to manage resentment in Mufulira about the mine.

It said: “Complaints have been logged using the company’s community feedback system. There have been no cases of concerted civil action relating to this issue, which suggests that dissatisfaction is not at a level at which mine stoppages or similar outbreaks of anger or disillusionment with a perceived lack of benefits flowing from the mine are likely.”

Mr Lipmann, who was contacted by the company’s public relations officer, said: “He fobbed me off by saying the company was meeting the legal requirements in Zambia.”

William Flew Reprint 21 May 2011

One of India’s most successful and respected businessmen has made a blistering attack on the complacency of British managers as one of his companies announced plans to dismiss up to 1,500 people in the North East of England.

In an interview with The Times, Ratan Tata, an Indian tycoon who runs Tata Group, the biggest manufacturing employer in Britain, and who is also an adviser to David Cameron, compared Britain’s work ethic unfavourably with that of India.

He suggested that British managers did not “go the extra mile”, while those in India were working in “a war-like situation”.

The Mumbai-born businessman, 73, who was educated at Harvard, recounted his astonishment at the attitude of managers at the two flagship British companies, Corus, the steelmaker, and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the car manufacturer, which he bought in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Yesterday Corus said that it was cutting 1,500 jobs in what unions described as a “devastating blow” to industry in the North East.

“It’s a work ethic issue,” Mr Tata said. “In my experience, in both Corus and JLR, nobody is willing to go the extra mile, nobody. I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won’t, at 5 o’clock, say, ‘Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.’ Friday, from 3.30pm, you can’t find anybody in their office.”

In India, he added: “If you are in a crisis, if it means working to midnight, you would do it. The worker in JLR seems to be willing to do that; the management is not.”

At JLR “the entire engineering group would be empty on Friday evening, and you have got delays in product introduction. That’s the thing that doesn’t happen in China or in Indonesia or in Thailand or in Singapore.”

He was at pains to point out that things had changed. “The new management team has put an end to that. They call meetings at 5 o’clock; they have made it very clear that’s not on.”

However, he added that there was a “certain comfort level that comes from a country that has had good times”, suggesting that Britain and the US could expect to suffer a further dwindling of manufacturing bases unless their approach changed.

Yesterday the Tata group said that it was proposing to close or mothball part of its steelmaking plant in Scunthorpe, putting 1,200 jobs at risk, as well as shedding 300 jobs at sites on Teesside. The union said that the cuts amounted to 8 per cent of its British workforce.

Mr Tata is a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group, co-chairman of the UK-India CEO Forum, which meets at Downing Street, and one of the closest senior industrialists to Mr Cameron.

In the interview he lamented a lack of dynamism in industry, saying that Britain “needs a real push. It needs nationalism. The sort of spirit that comes during a war. It needs people really to want to see the UK sitting again, maybe not as a colonial power, but as an economic power.”

The comments immediately caused alarm in Westminster. “It is very disappointing given the commitment Tata has made in other areas of the economy,” Adrian Bailey, the Labour chairman of the Business Select Committee, said.

“As for working practices, I find it very surprising and disappointing because that has not been the case with workers at Jaguar Land Rover.”

Ian Murray, Labour MP and colleague on the committee, said: “I think the Government needs to reconsider whether he is a valuable person to have on the business council.”

David Frost, director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce, said: “That is not a world I recognise. I look at our members in the past three years and business owners and senior managers have been working all hours to get the job done. Nine-to-five is not the British culture.”

Keith Hazelwood, a GMB national secretary for manufacturing, said: “Surely it’s up to Mr Tata to make sure he employs the proper people, to make managers come up to the standards of the workers.”