Can You Get Coronavirus From Your Phone?

When I see someone at the grocery store checkout counter with fruits and vegetables that aren't in plastic bags, I want to tell them that the counter is filthier and less sanitary than a public toilet seat. So far I haven't told anyone that andI feel bad for not doing so. And the plastic bags at the fruit and veggies sections are free. There's no reason not to put your fruits and veggies in them. "The conveyor belt on the checkout line is rarely, if ever, cleaned, and can last for up to 30 years. On top of that, they’re made from petroleum-based PVC, which is porous and nearly impossible to clean. A study by the International Association of Food Protection showed that yeast, mold, staph, and coliform live and grow on the belts, and a study by Michigan State University found bacteria on 100 percent of belts tested. 

Ewwwww... right? Your phone might be as filthy and disease carrying, according to some reporting from USA Today (last year, pre-coronavirus). Dalvin Brown wrote "What's the one item that never leaves your side? It goes into the bathroom with you. You use it in the kitchen. It often touches your face, your desk and, well, just about any other surface within arm's reach. It's your smartphone, of course. And the tasks listed above are just some of the reasons it's a breeding ground for germs and a cesspool of bacteria." But don't just take his word for it:

Fecal matter can be found on 1 out of every 6 smartphones, according to a 2011 study done by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

"Mobile phones have become veritable reservoirs of pathogens as they touch faces, ears, lips and hands of different users of different health conditions," researchers observed in a 2009 study of bacteria removed from personal calling devices.

A study by the University of Arizona found the typical worker's desk, which tends to be your smartphone's home for about 40 hours a week, has hundreds of times more bacteria per square inch than an office toilet seat.

Other studies have found serious pathogens on smartphones such as Streptococcus, MRSA-- which is a type of bacteria that is resistant to several antibiotics-- and even E. coli.

So, why exactly is your phone so nasty?

"We touch more surfaces than any generation in history, from ATM machines to self-checkout counters," said Dr. Charles Gerba, a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona. "So, you're picking up germs all the time on your hands and fingers, putting them on your cellphone and bringing them close to your nose, mouth or eyes."

These germs can make you, your family and anyone else you come in contact with sick. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 80 percent of all infections are transmitted by hands, and our smartphones have basically become an extension of that.

"Mobile phones are now mobile germ devices," Gerba said. "You get a germ on your hand, and you use your phone. Then you go wash your hands later, but the germs are still on your phone."

On average, Americans check their phone once every 12 minutes – burying their heads in their phones 80 times a day, according to global tech protection company Asurion. That's plenty of opportunities for microorganisms to migrate between your fingers and your phone.

The worst culprits are teenagers, according to Gerba, whose research found that people who work in the food service industry along with adults who work with children tend to get the most contamination on their hands.

Think about all the surfaces you touch throughout the day, from subway poles and light switches to remote controls to bathroom doors. All of the bacteria picked up during your day-to-day activities ends up on your daily dialing devices, and odds are, you don't clean them often or well enough.

"All cellphones are going to have bacteria on them because we hold them up to our face," says Susan Whittier, director of clinical microbiology at New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University Medical Center.

"Normal bacteria that's being transferred from cheeks and ears isn't anything to worry about. But, if you’re coughing into your phone, those viruses can live on those surfaces for hours and can be transferred to others."

Apple advises against using liquids or disinfectants on its devices. Instead, the iPhone maker offers a detailed list of how to clean your phone depending on the model that you have.  Motorola suggests using a microfiber cloth-- the kind you might clean your glasses with-- with a little water.

As for Google's Pixel phone, the company has given the OK to use household soap if necessary.

There are other ways you can safely clean your device depending on the type of phone you have. You may need the following materials:

• Microfiber cloth
• Isopropyl rubbing alcohol
• Water
• Cotton swabs
• Cleaning gloves

If you're worried about using disinfectant, consider an option like "PhoneSoap," a device that first gained attention on the ABC show Shark Tank.

It uses UV light to kill 99.9 percent of the germs on your smartphone, according to its manufacturer. It costs about $60 and can be grabbed from Amazon. A quick 10-minute stint inside the PhoneSoap not only cleans your phone but charges it, too.

Or, you can just use a standard microfiber cloth, like the one included with some smartphones.

Gerba said that it's probably best to sanitize your phone daily. He cleans his twice a day.

Crossing the U.S. Border with Electronic Devices

(Source; click to enlarge)

by Gaius Publius

It used to be that when most people crossed the U.S. border, their electronic devices — computers, smartphones, tablets — were not routinely searched. This is no longer the case. As Murtaza Hussain notes at The Intercept, searches are up sharply, from 5,000 in 2015 ... to 5,000 in just last February alone.

It's not just ICE agents whose jobs are "fun" again, it's the men and women at the U.S. Border Protection service too.

Lawsuit Seeks Transparency as Searches of Cellphones and Laptops Skyrocket at Borders

A lawsuit filed today by the Knight First Amendment Institute, a public interest legal organization based at Columbia University, seeks to shed light on invasive searches of laptops and cellphones by Customs and Border Protection officers at U.S. border crossings.

Documents filed in the case note that these searches have risen precipitously over the past two years, from a total of 5,000 searches in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016, and rising to 5,000 in the month of February 2017 alone. Among other questions, the lawsuit seeks to compel the federal government to provide more information about these searches, including how many of those searched have been U.S. citizens, the number of searches by port of entry, and the number of searches by the country of origin of the travelers.

The obvious problem — that pesky Fourth Amendment aside — is, as the author puts it, "the wealth of personal data often held on such devices." Seizure and search of these devices puts that highly personal treasure trove in the hands of the Trump-led, even-more-muscular government and its agents, to do with as they will. (And don't discount the possibility that Trojan horse software could be implanted. Not that our government would do that, mind you — that would be wrong — but still.)

Of course, the border agents can't order you to surrender your devices and unlock codes — not exactly — though intimidation and coercion is in their repertoire. How long, for example, are you willing to put your life on hold while you defy them and they wait you out ... at the airport, with a flight to catch or a job to get to?

Hussain again:

A number of recent cases in the media have revealed instances of U.S. citizens and others being compelled by CBP agents to unlock their devices for search. In some instances, people have claimed to have been physically coerced into complying, including one American citizen who said that CBP agents grabbed him by the neck in order to take his cellphone out of his possession.

With that in mind, I thought I'd offer a few suggestions, as a partial answer to questions I'm seeing more and more, asked by people who have reason to believe they may be on the "outs" with the brave new world in Washington and its agenda.

How to Safeguard Your Data From Searches at the Border

The first set of suggestions comes from the New York Times. Brian Chen, the author of the piece, gives a nice introduction to the problems encountered by those who cross the U.S. border, closing with the admonition, Do not lie about your passwords. That would not only be wrong, it would be punishable.

That said, here are his suggestions. Note that many of them hinge on not crossing the border with your data to begin with — or not crossing the border with your passwords, even in your head. Chen:

Consider a cheap device

The best way to prevent your information from being searched is to travel with a device that never had any of your data in the first place.

It’s a wise idea to invest in a so-called travel device, a cheap smartphone or computer that you use only abroad ... So leave your fancy equipment — along with your photo album, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter apps — at home.

Which devices to buy? The Wirecutter, the product recommendations site owned by The New York Times, published a guide on budget Android phones, including the $100 Moto G4 Play that comes unlocked so that it can work with foreign SIM cards. For cheap computers, consider a $550 Acer laptop or a $430 Dell Chromebook.

When it comes to phones, you could even forego a local phone and, as an East London friend suggests, buy a cheap smartphone or even a "dumbphone" at your destination. Then load a pay-as-you-go SIM card into it and use it exclusively. You could even abandon it before leaving if you're feeling really bold. (Remember when travelers didn't feel incomplete if they didn't have a phone in their pocket? That could be you.)

If you want it back, I'm sure a friend would be glad to mail it to you after you leave — or you could simply mail it to yourself before you depart.

Three more small pieces of advice before one major one:

Disable fingerprint readers

...[In] the United States, law enforcement agencies have successfully used warrants to compel people to unlock their cellphones with a fingerprint. But because of your right to remain silent, it would be tough (though not impossible) for the federal government to force you to share your passcode. So disabling your fingerprint sensor when traveling is generally a safer move. ...

Encrypt your devices

Whether you are using a burner device or your own, always make sure to lock down the system with encryption, which scrambles your data so it becomes indecipherable without the right key.

Desktop apps like BitLocker or Apple’s FileVault let you encrypt your hard drive, requiring a passphrase to decrypt your files. To avoid surrendering this passphrase, you could jot it down and hand it to a friend and contact that person for the passphrase after crossing the border. [emphasis added]

Back up to the cloud, then wipe before you cross

...[To have access to your data while abroad] back up your data to a cloud service and then wipe, or erase, all the data from your device before arriving at the border, Mr. Zdziarski said. After passing through customs, you could then restore your information from the online backup.

I want to focus on the comment above about your passphrase for a moment. You can't surrender your passphrase (a more complex form of password) if you don't know it. So, when you encrypt your device, use a complex passphrase that you (1) don't memorize, and (2) give to someone not traveling with you.

If You Don't Know Your Passwords, You Can't Surrender Them

Which leads to the final piece of advice, a major one:

Don’t memorize your passwords

The best way to protect your passwords is to not know them. When resisting a data frisk, it is easier to say you didn’t memorize your password as opposed to refusing to provide it to border agents, Mr. Grossman said.

“If you don’t know them it’s hard to compel you to give them over if you don’t know how,” he said. “Even if somebody put a gun to my head, I don’t know it.”

Password management apps like 1Password and LastPass can automatically create strong, lengthy passwords for all your online accounts and keep them stored in a vault that is accessible with one master password.

However, Mr. Grossman said you are better off traveling without your password management software loaded on your devices so that you won’t be asked to hand over the master password to your vault. You could store a copy of the password vault on a cloud service like Dropbox and get access to your vault of passwords when you reach your travel destination, he said.

An alternative to using a password-managing app is to write your passwords down and leave them with someone you trust. After getting through customs, contact that person and ask him or her to read off your passwords.

What's really needed, of course, is for someone who can put her life on hold — and who has a great lawyer prepared to defend her — to challenge these searches and seizures in court. Some lawyers I spoke to don't think they're legal — though note the strong objections to that opinion here.

Suggestions from the CIA

The other suggestions I want to offer come from the CIA. This isn't related to carrying electronic devices per se, but to how to comport yourself during screenings. WikiLeaks has leaked internal documents from the CIA that advise its own agents how to behave when they cross the border. After all, if you're a spy with a cover story, you don't want it blown by some border cop who pulls you out of line for a random secondary check and spots your nervousness.

Those documents are here:

CIA Assessment on Surviving Secondary Screening (pdf)
CIA Advice for Operatives Infiltrating Schengen [Countries] (pdf)

Happy traveling.

GP
  

Further thoughts about Roz Chast's "HAMLET vs. AMAZON PRIME"

With updates on my New Phone Day Maybe and
Calvin Trillin's New Yorker Festival eating tour

Surely Roz Chast's "Hamlet hat" will henceforth be de
rigueur for every actor who takes on this marquis role.

by Ken

I'm still preoccupied by this Roz Chast cartoon, from the September 14 New Yorker, which I presented the other day:



I mean, there's just so much to think about here. Like that, um . . . what would you call it?, that heavenward eye roll Hamlet executes as he thinks that soon-to-be-immortal thought: "And yet: FREE SHIPPING." What subtlety, what poignancy, what hope, what inscrutability, what depth is incorporated here! Going forward, how can any actor who tackles the role fail to take it into account? How challenging it will be, though, to make this real and convincing as an expression of the prince's rich inner life.


AND THERE IS, OF COURSE, THE "HAMLET HAT"

From now on, what Hamlet director, what costume designer will feel able to send their Hamlet out onstatge without it?


THEN CONSIDER THE  TOUCH OF THE POWER
CORD SNAKING OUT FROM HAMLET'S LAPTOP

Surely this is a recognition of the historically accurate reality of the primitiveness and unreliability of the battery technology of the prince's time.


FINALLY, THERE'S THE COFFEE MUG THAT'S SO
STRANGELY DISTANT FROM OUR PROTAGONIST

Finally there's the coffee cup so strangely distant from our protagonist, as if it had perhaps been shoved out of reach. Interestingly, we can't tell whether the mug is empty, perhaps expressing the prince's resentment or even disgust at having no one in the castle to refill it, or it contains a quantity of coffee that has cooled to undrinkability, thereby reflecting Hamlet's agonized knowledge that the microwave hasn't been invented yet for convenient reheating. Looming over the whole mug question is the suggestion that overcaffeination is a contributing factor, if not perhaps the root cause, of Hamlet's considerable behavioral eccentricities.

#

SOME OTHER NOTES FROM THURSDAY'S POST

As I thought would be understood from the post title, "Nothing to read here -- go on to whatever you had in mind," readers weren't really intended to read the post, except maybe to look at the cartoons -- this one by the great Roz Chast and the "Cocktail Party Heckler" one ("You call that a bon mot?") by Dan Roe. I realize, however, that this may have been taken less as a strict injunction than as some sort of advisory, and so I can't be as harsh as I might otherwise be with readers who apparently went right ahead and read the thing.

For those readers, in the improbable event that they're wondering, I should perhaps report that:

(1) With regard to the event I was celebrating that day, my personal New Phone Day Maybe:

No, I'm no closer than I was then to figuring out what to do upon the completion of my two-year contract using a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. I suppose this qualifies, at least for the time being, as the option I described like so: "I could, of course, spend nothing on a new phone and continue 'using' (for want of a better word) my S4 -- with the same probable outcome," namely pretending that this time I'm gonna learn how to use the damned thing, déjà vu all over again from two years ago, when I upgraded from my defunct S2 to the S4.

Yeah, let's say that I'm invested in that option, while keeping my future options open. That sounds more like a decision and less like abject whiffing.

(2) With regard to the decision about whether to even try to secure a precious spot on Calvin Trillin's 14th-annual Village-to-Chinatown eating tour:

No, I didn't even try, and maybe that was just as well from the standpoint of my psychic well-being. I've just dug out a report I recalled from the Grub Street website, in which Sierra Tishgart began her "Dispatch from Calvin Trillin's Always-Spectacular 'New Yorker" Food Tour," 2013 edition:

Gaining admission to Calvin Trillin's eating tour for The New Yorker Festival is pretty much the real-life, adult equivalent of scoring a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. The 40-person event always sells out online within seconds (though several lucky attendees actually scored tickets in the last-minute standby line).

Sierra proceeded to offer a stop-by-stop account of the event, from the day before:

Trillin led everyone from Greenwich Village to Chinatown over the span of three hours, pausing to snack at his favorite shops, markets, and parks while narrating New York's culinary history. The stops on the tour have changed over thirteen years, but recent additions include Xi'an Famous Foods and Full House Cafe. For anyone who wants to re-create the tour themselves — or simply would like some recommendations for awesome places to eat — check out the full list, straight ahead. [Note: Food-source links onsite. -- Ed.]

Stop 1: Murray's Cheese Shop and Faicco's Pork Store
To Eat: Pecorino Toscano and soppressata
Trillin's Take: "I used to go to a meat shop around here where the guy would spook customers by popping pieces of raw pork into his mouth."

Stop 2: Blue Ribbon Bakery Market
To Eat: Savory matzoh cracker
Trillin's Take: "If matzoh actually tasted like this the Jews would have never left Egypt!"

Stop 3: Delivery from an unidentified store at Forsyth and East Broadway
To Eat: Greens sandwich
Trillin's Take:"I don't actually know what kind of greens are inside. Some people love it, and some people hate it. The sandwiches used to cost $1 — not that there's a big profit margin on this trip."

Stop 4: Despaña
To Eat: Tortilla Despaña
Trillin's Take: "The biggest change in eating in America was the Immigration Act of 1965. If you're excluding the Chinese and allowing English people, it's sort of suicidal. It made it okay for middle-class kids to become farmers and chefs."

Stop 5: Saigon Vietnamese Sandwich
To Eat: Vietnamese summer rolls with peanut sauce
Trillin's Take: "Most summer rolls taste like grass. These people make them as they go, so they're not sitting in the fridge for days."

Stop 6: Di Palo's
To Eat: Fresh mozzarella
Trillin's Take: "One of the other things that I used to get here is butter inside of cheese. It's an old way of preserving butter. We used to do this when we had parties: If you cut it in half, you can serve the butter and then eat the provolone cheese."

Stop 7: Bánh Mì Saigon Bakery
To Eat: Vietnamese pork sandwich
Trillin's Take: "Bánh mìs are really the only good argument for colonialism."

Stop 8: Xi'an Famous Foods
To Eat: Spicy lamb burger
Trillin's Take: "This young man [Jason Wang] is very entrepreneurial!"

Stop 9: Full House Cafe
To Eat: Soup dumplings (and a side of jellyfish!)
Trillin's Take: "I heard about this place from reading a piece by Robert Sietsema from the Voice about the soup dumplings here ... and eating jellyfish is [my] revenge for whenever they've frightened me."

Of course I have no idea whether the itinerary was changed in last year's edition of the tour, not to mention what Trillin may have in store for this year. Still, isn't this the next best thing to actually being on the tour? Belated thanks, Sierra!

Plus, for me it offers the advantage that it spares me the potential humiliation of trying to express my admiration to the tour leader for his body of writing -- and I don't mean the food writing and the humor writing, or not just the food writing and the humor writing. In his big-boy capacity as a reporter, he has probably taught me more about the way humans live and deal with each other than any living writer.

Still, as an example of the kind of question I would be apt to ask, I have it in mind to offer a demonstration ripped from history, perhaps tomorrow.

#

Nothing to read here -- go on to whatever else you had in mind

I know you won't have any interest in what follows, which is just for me. I feel bad, though, so I thought you might enjoy this Roz Chast cartoon from the same issue of The New Yorker referenced below. (Click to enlarge.) Oh, and also the Dan Roe one below.

by Ken

I know there are important things happening in the world which demand comment from me, but they'll just have to wait another day (or possibly more). Because today is 9/10.

I should explain that on the subject of this momentous date I wrote approximately two versions of a post in my head and then decided to omit them, under the influence of John McPhee's latest New Yorker "Writing Life" piece, "Omission: Choosing what to leave out" (September 14), which I read on the subway ride home from work, while I was also writing those posts in my head. McPhee's new piece is a miraculous turnaround from his last, deeply obnoxious "Writing Life" piece, "Frames of Reference" (March 9), which I wrote about here and here. My resulting omissions represent a benefit not just to readers but to the writer as well -- since those pieces hadn't actually been written yet, there is a significant saving in labor.

So, what's 9/10? you ask. Of course yesterday, 9/9, was Bridgegate Anniversary Day, and tomorrow, 9/11, is, well, you know. But 9/10? Well, for me it's New Phone Day Maybe --the day when I can upgrade my smartphone without having to pay a $50 upgrade fee (but apparently not without paying a $30 activation fee). I have a number of options, and I can make a strong case against all of them.

The smart thing to do would be just to deactivate the thing and save both the $78/month and the bargain price I'll be offered on, say, a not-quite-current model Samsung Galaxy or iPhone. (No, of course I'm not being offered one of the brand-new iPhones.) This would be especially smart because it's looking like a really tough financial year ahead, as I continue paying off a dental bill I thought I'd paid off, except that there turned out to be a whole bunch of other charges that hadn't been billed yet. By the time the thing is paid, it will have consumed, by my rough calculation, more than a third of my humble yearly take-home pay.

And it's not as if I couldn't live without a smartphone. In the two years of my current contract I've hardly ever used my Galaxy S4, which I understand even less about than its predecesor, an S2 that I'd actually started to use -- at least as a telephone -- before it succumbed to supposed water damage that the Samsung people in Texas declared beyond repair; I thought it was kind that they paid shipping both ways, though. (Based on one phone call I attempted with the then-new S4, it sucks as a telephone, except maybe if you use earphones to hear and speak right into the mic, as I notice people doing.)

Or I could instead do one of the above-hypothesized upgrades. After all, everyone insists that the iPhone is way easier to learn to use than an Android. I might actually have gone that route two years ago, except that my carrier, Credo Mobile, didn't offer iPhone service. (Naturally they began not long after I made my two-year commitment to the S4.) Now, however, I have reached the point in my mounting loathing of Apple and everything it has come to stand for (can you tell I'm an old-time Mac user?) where joining the iPhone legions is, shall we say, burdensome.

An upgrade to whatever Galaxy model Credo is offering might make sense, except that it would be based on the same theory as my last Galaxy upgrade: that this time I would learn how to use the damn thing. In my defense, I actually attended a class in Android basics at the public library, and came away knowing approximately less than when I went in. I could, of course, spend nothing on a new phone and continue "using" (for want of a better word) my S4 -- with the same probable outcome.

Before I left work today, I went online to see what's actually on offer now that my New Phone Day Maybe is here, thinking that perhaps this would make it all become clear. Instead, it became murkier, if possible -- except for the part about my having to pay the $30 activation fee this time, which I didn't two years ago. That part seemed pretty clear. (I don't know, maybe it was waived then, and might conceivably be again. This hardly qualifies as movement in the direction of clarity, though.)

So it looks like New Phone Day Maybe is going to have the accent on the "maybe," or maybe the "maybe not."

I can't think about it anymore, especially since now I have another situation to worry about. On this evening's subway ride, after I finished the McPhee New Yorker piece, I was thumbing through the issue and noticed that, along with all the other New Yorker Festival events for which tickets go on sale tomorrow, there's Calvin Trillin's 14th annual Village-to-Chinatown eating tour, which I know sells out immediately if not sooner -- even assuming I'm prepared to pay $150. I might be, partly because it's by all accounts a great event, but also because Trillin is probably my favorite living writer, and who wouldn't pay $150 for the privilege of making a tongue-tied gibbering idiot of himself in the presence of his idol?

How cool, though, that I discovered this the day before registration starts! Or maybe not. Because I also learned that there's a full day of early registration, like today, for MasterCard users, and by consulting a financial self-cheat sheet I keep, I was reminded that no, I don't have a MasterCard anymore, since CitiBank -- another of my great corporate hates -- canceled mine because I wasn't using it. So in all likelihood by the "start" of registration tomorrow the event will be sold out anyway.

"You call that a bon mot?"

#

Patti LuPone teaches a lesson in acceptable audience behavior

Patti LuPone as Irene in Douglas Carter Beane's Shows for Days

On her way to her matinee performance Wednesday, Patti called in to talk to WNYC guest host Jami Floyd (and the station's former business and economics editor, now entertainment editor, Charlie Herman) about disruptive audience behavior.

by Ken

Patti begins her conversation with Jami Floyd (and, later, Charlie Herman) by clarifying that she didn't stop that show last week. This CNN link is wrong when it says, "While doing a scene, LuPone reached down and plucked the phone from the spectator's hands." Patti says she has never stopped a show, except this one time when a flash went off as she was about to begin "Rose's Turn."

She definitely did "palm" the cell phone of the audience member in question, but it was while she was making her entrance for Act II. As she was passing through the upstage audience in the intimate, arena-style 284-seat Mitzi Newhouse Theater, shaking hands as usual with audience members, she made the grab from a woman up top who'd been visibly ("in full light") texting all through Act I. (Patti points out that during the woman's Act I textathon, she showed her phone to her husband, who failed to stop her.)

In response to a question from Jami, Patti leaves no doubt that in her mind theater audiences have become vastly and intolerably more disruptive than they used to be -- and that they're not being controlled. In most of the media coverage, including the Brian Lehrer Show Web page that includes the above podcast, reference is made to Patti giving a lesson in "theater etiquette," which is true enough, I suppose, but seems to me to suggest that it's just a matter of a wee bit of audience sauciness.

It's not. It's a big deal. Patti suggests that theater managements should be a lot freer about throwing disruptive patrons out of the theater, and she and Jami agree that audiences would cheer that.

If you're Patti LuPone, you don't shy away from dealing one-on-one with intolerable audience behavior. You go, Patti!


Unimpeded by camera flashes, Patti performs "Rose's Turn" during her 2008 Broadway run as Mama Rose in Gypsy.


And for the 2008 Tony Awards show, Patti belted out "Everything's Coming Up Roses."

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Welcome to New Tech City's "Bored and Brilliant": Part 2, Challenges 3-6

"What smartphones allow us to do is get rid of boredom in a very direct way because we can play games, phone people, we can check the Internet. It takes away the boredom, but it also denies us the chance to see and learn about where we truly are in terms of our goals."

-- Jonny Smallwood, professor of cognitive
neuroscience at the University of York

by Ken

Okay, nothing much to splain here, provided you go back to Part 1, which contained both the introduction to WNYC's New Tech City's "Bored and Brilliant" project, which seeks to help wean smartphone addicts from their addiction and into "the lost art of spacing out."


Challenge 3: Donate That App



Flurry Analytics defines a “mobile addict” as someone who launches apps more than 60 times a day. The average consumer launches apps 10 times a day, so to qualify as having an app dependency, you have to be pretty app crazy.

And the people most likely to be addicted? According to Flurry, teens, college students (skewing female) and middle-aged parents.

Even if you aren’t at 60 times a day, just about everyone has that one app — that one damn app — that steals away too much time.

Your instructions for today: delete it. Delete that app. Think about which app you use too much, one that is the bad kind of phone time. You pick what that means. Delete said time-wasting, bad habit app. Uninstall it.

This will be difficult, because app designers are pretty smart. And they are pretty good at building things we want to just keep on using, over and over and over. In this episode, Manoush breaks her cycle. She deletes the seriously addictive game Two Dots. It wasn't easy and it followed a pretty, er, dramatic confrontation with the game designer. It might be cathartic for you.

If you need a little push to take the plunge, Dr. Zach Hambrick, professor of cognitive psychology at Michigan State University, says cell phone games do just about... nothing for your brain. You don't get better at anything but playing the game, he says. And only that game.

"If you play Ms. PacMan a lot, you’ll get better at Mr. PacMan, and video games where you have to move through a maze. But you won’t get better at Space Invaders or some real task like filling out your tax forms," Hambrick said.

Listen for more. And seriously... delete that app.


Challenge 4: Take a Fauxcation



Today, you’re getting a break from email, texting, social media, or whatever means of digital communication interrupts you all day long. It's a fauxcation (or "fake-cation" if you prefer).

Your instructions: Set an email auto-reply just as you would if you were out for a real vacation, send an "I'll be back later" text out on group chat, or put up an away message status on social media.

Come up with your own. Or if you are feeling like a Bored and Brilliant Booster, use one of these badges we made for you. Whatever it'll take to give you peace of mind while you focus.

Worried about being away from work? On our podcast today, that's exactly what we take on: the role of boredom, downtime, and unplugging at the office.

Matthew Krentz is a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group. Krentz and his company let the Harvard Business School take a small team of consultants to use as time management guinea pigs. They discovered that perpetual connectivity was good in the short term — not so much in the long term. Studies say we actually perform better when we have a chance to think.

Look, we're in media. We get it. Maybe there’s no way your boss will let you be off the grid for an hour today, and maybe not until the bigger, broader system changes. But perhaps you can make an hour for yourself tonight? That's when more of you told us you want to reclaim time from your phone anyway.

When you check back in, we'd love to hear how it went. Scroll through our gallery of away messages below, and let us know what you decided to go with! Our hashtag for the day is #NTCFauxcation.


Challenge 5: One Small Observation



Social networks help us stay connected. We love social media. But how often do we swipe past strangers' selfies, baby pictures, and career updates in lieu of the actual humans around us?

For our second-to-last challenge (yes, there's a weekend project coming!), we want you to flex the creative muscles we've been freeing up all week. The first step is noticing.

Your instructions: Today, go somewhere public. It could be a park, a mall, the gas station, the hallway at work or school. You pick.

Once you get there, hang out. Watch people, or objects, or anything that strikes you. Try not to be (too) creepy. Imagine what a single person is thinking, or zoom in on an uninventable detail. Just make one small observation you might have missed if your nose were glued to a screen.

If you feel inclined, and we hope you do, record that detail using a voice memo app on your phone (yes, yes, we know, but we think this is worth a pick-up). Two good ones are the built in voice memo app for iPhone or an Android one called Easy Voice Recorder. Then, email it to us at newtechcity@wnyc.org. We always love to hear from you. And we might use it in an upcoming show.

Or you can tell us about your observation in the comments below. What'd ya see? How'd it feel?


Challenge 6: Dream House



You've spent the week picking up your phone purposefully. You've kept it in your pocket, you've abstained from photo-taking, you've considered life beyond the screen. To take our project to its logical — and admittedly weird — conclusion, boredom artist Nina Katchadourian has assigned us a group project.
We want you to get really bored, and then make something creative, introspective, and personal.

Your instructions today are multi-part:

• Put away your phone.

• Put a generous pot of water on the stove and watch it come to a boil. If you don't have a stove or a pot, find a small piece of paper and write "1,0,1,0" as small as you can until it’s full. Either way, you should get bored. Keep it up as long as it takes to daydream.

• Next, take out your wallet and empty it of all its contents. Use them to construct your dream house. It could be the place you wish you lived in all the time or a getaway. Take as long as you need to build.

• Give your house a descriptive name.

• When you're finished — and only when you're finished — go get your phone. Take a picture of the house. (Careful with your credit card numbers.)

• Email your picture to bored@wnyc.org, and tell us about your creation (put its name and location in the subject line, and tell us why it's your dream house in the body).

Then, high five a friend. Check out the submissions here. Share your favorites. They'll be uploaded over the weekend.

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Welcome to New Tech City's "Bored and Brilliant" project: Part 1, Introduction and Challenges 1-2

"What smartphones allow us to do is get rid of boredom in a very direct way because we can play games, phone people, we can check the Internet. It takes away the boredom, but it also denies us the chance to see and learn about where we truly are in terms of our goals."

-- Jonny Smallwood, professor of cognitive
neuroscience at the University of York

by Ken

Don't be overwhelmed. What I've gathered here is a week's worth of challenges in the project "Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out," presented by New Tech City, the Web project of NYC public-radio station WNYC, presided over by Manoush Zomorodi. I've been paying on-and-off attention all week, since the particular addiction at issue here, compulsive smartphone use, doesn't happen to be one of my addictions.

It's all explained in the introductory segment far better than I could try to re-explain it, so I'm not going to try. There are, in addition to the bare-bones challenges as I'm presenting them here, not only lotsa links onsite, but also a constellation of collateral supportive and amplifying posts. You are frequently exhorted to sign up and receive e-mails and goodness only knows what else. You can even "subscribe to the New Tech City podcast on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed" -- and I don't even know what half of that means.

But you don't need any further guidance from me to check all of those out. Let me see . . . um, yes, right, check -- I think that's all I need to say, except that you'll find Challenges 1-2 in this post and Challenges 3-6 in the following post, at 3pm PT/6pm ET.


Introduction: The Case for Boredom



This episode kicks off the biggest project New Tech City has ever done: Bored and Brilliant. Our goal is to get you rethinking your relationship with technology. We've partnered with the apps Moment and BreakFree for a week of podcasts and challenges.

We would love to have you join us.

SIGN UP HERE

Here's the issue: It goes back to when Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 — that's less than a decade ago. Fifty-eight percent of American adults have a smartphone today. The average mobile consumer checks their device 150 times a day, and 67 percent of the time, that's not because it rang or vibrated. Forty-four percent of Americans have slept with their phone next to their beds.

Statistics aside, all you really have to do is go outside and see how many people can't even walk without staring at a screen. We counted them!



When we asked for your stories, many of you told us smartphones make you feel like you have the power to be connected all the time, organized beyond measure, and never, ever without entertainment while you're waiting for coffee. But you've also told us they make you feel dependent, exhausted, and addicted — some of you say you're actually relieved when you lose or break your phones for a day.

There's a paradox here. But one thing is clear: Paying attention to our smartphones through so many of our waking moments means our minds don't spend as much time idling.

And that matters! We talked to boredom researcher Sandi Mann of the University of Lancashire of the U.K.

"You come up with really great stuff when you don’t have that easy lazy junk food diet of the phone to scroll all the time," says Sandi Mann.

Mann's research finds that idle minds lead to reflective, often creative thoughts (we discuss her projects in depth in this week's show). Minds need to wander to reach their full potential.

During bouts of boredom our brains can't help but jump around in time, analyzing and re-analyzing the pieces of our lives, says Jonny Smallwood, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of York in the UK. He says inspiration strikes in the shower because it's a moment when we're not really looking at or focusing on anything else.

Researchers have only really started to understand the phenomena of "mind-wandering" — the activity our brains engage in when we're doing nothing at all — over the past decade or so.

"There’s a close link between originality, novelty, and creativity... and these sort of spontaneous thoughts that we generate when our minds are idle," Smallwood said.

But when mental stimulation is a touch of the phone away?

"That’s where daydreaming and boredom intersect," Smallwood says. "What smartphones allow us to do is get rid of boredom in a very direct way because we can play games, phone people, we can check the Internet. It takes away the boredom, but it also denies us the chance to see and learn about where we truly are in terms of our goals."

And that's where Bored and Brilliant comes in. Let's do it together. Sign up here.


Challenge 1: Keep It in Your Pocket



Your instructions: As you move from place to place, keep your phone in your pocket, out of your direct line of sight. Better yet, keep it in your bag.

While you're boarding the train, walking down the sidewalk, or sitting in the passenger seat of a car, we're asking you to look at your phone only when you have reached your destination. You can do it [link = "18 Places Where You Can Survive Without Your Phone"].

And when you do pick up your phone today: Here are five basic phone hygiene tips to make that screen time really count. They come from the mind of Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of The Distraction Addiction

Phone Freedom 101
[Read about the "basic phone hygiene tips" onsite. -- Ed.]

1. Remember to breathe.
2. Turn off non-vital notifications.
3. Make sure you do get the notifications that matter to you.
4. Fight "phantom phone syndrome:" Practice not answering messages right away.
5. Carry your phone in a bag, rather than in your pocket or in your hand (this one's extra credit!)

Challenge 2: Phone-Free Day



Your instructions: See the world through your eyes, not your screen. Take absolutely no pictures today. Not of your lunch, not of your children, not of your cubicle mate, not of the beautiful sunset. No picture messages. No cat pics.

We want you to start actually seeing that phone-free world around you. 

A recent study found Americans take more than 10 billion photos every month, and mostly on our phones. The thing is, each time we snap a quick pic of something, it could be harming our memory of it. This podcast is about psychology, creativity, and perception.

Meet the man who inspired it here:


[Watch the video onsite.]

"They’re not even looking at the painting sometimes, they’re scrolling; they’re just scrolling away, looking at their phones... They’ll say I was checking and you can tell when they’re taking photos."

— Greg Colon, security guard at NYC's Guggenheim Museum

COMING UP: "Bored and Brilliant" Challenges 4-6

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A suggested new guideline for selfie-maniacs: Maybe don't do it while you're flying a plane?

NYT caption: "The wreckage of a Cessna 150 near Watkins, Colo., on May 31. Federal regulators have concluded the pilot was most likely taking photographs."

by Ken

You don't want to get me started again on selfies. As I reckon it, it's been weeks since the subject came up ("Absolutely no selfies to be taken with the rock-star-like Duke of Cambridge -- er, you know, Prince William, the bald guy"), and five months or more since I recall mounting my moral high horse on the subject ("Culture Watch: Are selfie-maniacs propelling a sharp rise in homelessness among black cats?"). It's your good luck that after spending most of the morning kicking an anti-selfie tirade around in my head, I decided to let it pass -- for now. (I mean, is this selfie-mania an expression of a widespread deficiency of self-esteem or an unaccountable surplus of it?)

For now let's just go with the facts and some reasonable surmises therefrom, as reported in the New York Times (links onsite):

Regulators Cite a New Danger in the Skies: Selfies

By JULIE TURKEWITZ and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

WATKINS, Colo. — In an age of digital distractions, the lethal risks of driving — or just crossing the street — while looking at a cellphone have been well-documented.

Now comes a new peril from mixing transportation and obsession with devices: a fatal airplane crash most likely caused by selfies.

When a light plane crashed near here on a cloudy night eight months ago, killing the two people aboard, it was probably because the pilot had been taking pictures of himself and his passenger, with a flash, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded.

“It is likely that cellphone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,” the safety board said in a report last week. Investigators found no sign that anything was wrong with the plane.

“Distractions from personal devices are in all modes of transportation — we’re seeing that more and more,” said Keith Holloway, a spokesman for the safety board. “But the self-photographs in an airplane, that’s something new for us.”

The pilot, Amritpal Singh, 29, had used a GoPro camera to record some short flights he made with different passengers aboard his two-seat Cessna 150, to and from Front Range Airport here, east of Denver. He did not record the fatal trip on May 31, but did record one six-minute jaunt shortly before it.

“The GoPro recordings revealed that the pilot and various passengers were taking self-photographs with their cellphones and, during the night flight, using the camera’s flash function during the takeoff roll, initial climb and flight in the traffic pattern,” the report said.

Distracted driving is a factor in more than 3,000 traffic deaths annually in the United States, and about one-tenth of those involve cellphones, according to the Department of Transportation.

Several train accidents have also been blamed on engineers paying attention to their phones, including the 2008 collision of two trains in Los Angeles that killed 25 people.

So it seemed inevitable that the scourge of distraction by electronic devices would move into the skies. In 2009, the pilots of a Northwest Airlines flight from San Diego to Minneapolis were so busy using their personal laptops to figure out their work schedules that they overshot their destination by more than 100 miles.

Last year, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited the use of personal electronic devices in airline cockpits, but some pilots have not given up the habit of posting on Instagram scenic pictures they took seven miles aloft.

The ban does not apply to private pilots, who often use tablet computers, and even phones, running software for navigation, weather forecasts and flight planning.

“It is of course the pilot’s primary and sole obligation to remain attentive to the flight,” said Steve Hedges, a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. He said the group has made it a priority to train pilots on how to use electronic devices appropriately.

At the small airfield here, the “selfie accident” was the topic during lunches and snack breaks, and as technicians tinkered with engines and hobby pilots inspected their planes.

An airplane is most vulnerable during the kind of low-altitude, low-speed maneuvering Mr. Singh was doing, and the pilots here said they would never take a self-portrait in that time, when absolute attention is needed.

“It’s the critical stage of flight,” said Bill Zempel, 49, a private pilot and airplane mechanic, taking a cookie break amid three single-engine planes. “That’s bad decision-making.”

But he and a colleague, Kiki Winchester, admitted to the occasional self-portrait — taken, they said, once they are at a safe altitude and the plane is cruising. “We’ve got lots of pictures of ourselves in the planes,” said Ms. Winchester, 41.

They said the modern pilot, like the modern driver, faces a growing number of distractions and technological temptations. There is the expanding number of screens inside the plane — the GPS device, the traffic collision avoidance system — and then there is the ever-more-present pressure to always be in touch.

Ms. Winchester cited a urologist who frequents the airport and takes work calls via Bluetooth while in the air. (He cedes control to a co-pilot as he doles out advice.) And then there is that sneaking desire to show off, or at least to share good times with others.

Mr. Singh was not well known at the airport. Others described him as a fairly new flyer who worked on the ground for an airline at Denver International Airport. The crash got little local attention, but drew more in India, because Mr. Singh’s passenger, Jatinder Singh, 31, was a keyboard player for a popular Punjabi singer, Manmohan Waris. Amritpal Singh, who lived near Denver, was reportedly assisting Mr. Waris’s band with its American tour. (It is not clear if the two men who died were related; Singh is a common name among followers of the Sikh religion.)

The safety board report cited “instrument meteorological conditions” at the time of the last flight, meaning that visual cues were poor, so the pilot had to rely more on his instruments. Under such conditions, a plane can go into a deadly spin without the pilot’s being able to tell by looking out the window.

The flight log book showed that Mr. Singh did not have enough recent experience under adverse conditions to be allowed to fly in such circumstances, or to fly at night with passengers, the report said.

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"Why Successful People Never Bring Smartphones Into Meetings"

"You are annoying your boss and colleagues any time you take your phone out during meetings." (In case this never occurred to you!)

by Ken

Sometimes questions that seem too obvious to be worth asking can produce answers that are surprisingly interesting. For example, would you really think it necessary to ask, as LinkedIn seemed to feel I wanted to, "Why Successful People Never Bring Smartphones Into Meetings"?

I don't go to a lot of meetings myself (thank goodness!), and after something like three years I still regard my smartphone as something like an enemy agent, which I hardly ever carry with me. But if I used my smartphone and if I went to meetings, would I -- barring some sort of urgent pending development for which it was generally understood that I might need to leave the meeting -- bring my smartphone into a meeting?

Short of that, I'm hard put to think of what, if I were attending a meeting, it would even occur to me to bring my smartphone along, assuming that I'm not some pathetic dim bulb who imagines that it makes him somehow some sort of important person. The question did, however, occur to Dr. Travis Bradberry, who is "the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world's leading provider of emotional intelligence tests, emotional intelligence training, and emotional intelligence certification, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies," whose "bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries," etc., etc.

And Dr. Travis says, "You are annoying your boss and colleagues any time you take your phone out during meetings, says new research from USC's Marshall School of Business, and if you work with women and people over forty they're even more perturbed by it than everyone else." In the researchers' survey of "554 full-time working professionals earning above $30K and working in companies with at least 50 employees," they found:

The researchers conducted a nationwide survey of 554 full-time working professionals earning above $30K and working in companies with at least 50 employees. They asked a variety of questions about smartphone use during meetings and found:

• 86% think it’s inappropriate to answer phone calls during meetings
• 84% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails during meetings
• 66% think it’s inappropriate to write texts or emails even during lunches offsite
• The more money people make the less they approve of smartphone use. [Boldfacing in source. -- Ed.]

The study also found that Millennials are three times more likely than those over 40 to think that smartphone use during meetings is okay, which is ironic considering Millennials are highly dependent upon the opinions of their older colleagues for career advancement.

Dr. Travis goes on to say this his company, TalentSmart, "has tested the emotional intelligence of more than a million people worldwide and found that Millennials have the lowest self-awareness in the workplace, making them unlikely to see that their smartphone use in meetings is harming their careers." He continues:

Why do so many people—especially successful people—find smartphone use in meetings to be inappropriate? When you take out your phone it shows a:

• Lack of respect. You consider the information on your phone to be more important than the conversation at hand, and you view people outside of the meeting to be more important than those sitting right in front of you.
• Lack of attention. You are unable to stay focused on one thing at a time.
• Lack of listening. You aren’t practicing active listening, so no one around you feels heard.
• Lack of power. You are like a modern-day Pavlovian dog who responds to the whims of others through the buzz of your phone.
• Lack of self-awareness: You don't understand how ridiculous your behavior looks to other people.
• Lack of social awareness: You don't understand how your behavior affects those around you.

Whoa! Well said, Dr. Travis! No wonder so many people buy your books and read your articles in the zillion places where they're published!

Now I wonder if anyone is working on a study of people who use smartphones on stairways, on crowded sidewalks, and every other damn place they feel like it.

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Polls That Leave Out Cell Phone Users Significantly Favor Conservatives

Tuesday is primary day in Illinois and the contest we're concentrating on is the swing district stretching from Champaign to the St. Louis suburbs, IL-13, currently held by weak Republican backbencher Rodney Davis. The Dick Durbin Machine and hapless DCCC chairman Steve Israel picked some mystery meat "moderate," Ann Callis, who refuses to tell anyone where she stands on any issues if, indeed, she stands anywhere on any issues. The grassroots progressive in the race is particle physicist George Gollin, who has been endorsed by Blue America, by every major newspaper and by Alan Grayson.

As of February 26, Gollin had spent $250,450 and was left with $227,112, cash on hand. Callis has spent $378,084 and had $449,496. The only publicly disclosed polling showed Callis's Machine campaign with a wide lead over Gollin's insurgent efforts, 41-25%. How significant are those findings in a district like IL-13, where so many students vote in the Democratic primary and have no landlines, just cell phones? The Blue Dog/New Dem polling firm, Anzalone Liszt Grove Research made the case to their clients last week that polls that ignore cell phone users who have no landlines-- now 40% of voters-- are inaccurate, if not worthless. In reading this analysis, keep in mind that Anzalone polls for Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, conservatives, not real Democrats. Their bias in all things is inside the context of Blue Dogs and New Dems vs Republicans. When reading the opinions below, it is helpful to replace the word "Republican" with "conservative," something they would never do themselves, of course.

More than 60 percent of adults under 45 had only a cellphone in early 2013, while only 13 percent of people 65 and older had only a cellphone… Latinos were far more likely to only have a cellphone (50 percent) than African-Americans (39 percent), Asian-Americans (35 percent), or white people (35 percent)

…It is instantly obvious that these younger, more-Latino cell-only voters are a Democratic-leaning group. In our combined 2012 surveys in battleground states-- tens of thousands of interviews-- we saw that cell-only voters were more Democratic (38 percent Democrat and 27 percent Republican, or +11 Democrat) than people who we reached on their landlines (35 percent Democrat and 33 percent Republican, or +2 Democrat).

…Just replacing cell-only people with someone similar that owns a landline is going to skew polls towards Republicans, so pollsters must reach people on their cells. Finally, there's also a big difference in cell-mostly voters we reached on their cellphones (+16 Democratic) and those on their landlines (+1 Democratic), so some cell-mostly voters must be called on their cellphones too.

Leaving cell-only voters out of polls has biased polls toward Republicans.

Landline-only polling problems went deeper than just Mitt Romney's widely-covered polling problems. For example, in the 2012 U.S. Senate race in Indiana, after Republican Richard Mourdock said that a pregnancy resulting from rape was a gift from God, our late-October poll that included 20 percent cellphones showed Joe Donnelly leading by seven points. Mourdock's pollster showed Mourdock with a two-point lead, and Donnelly won by six. More broadly, Nate Silver in his 2012 after-action report correctly cited polls that "called only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts" as polls that "performed poorly and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually turned out."

Why doesn't everyone just dial cellphones already?

Doing polls right and dialing cellphones is expensive and time-consuming. For starters, a lot of technological advances that have made political phonecalls and telemarketing cheaper (and more annoying) have kept polling costs from ballooning, too. But federal law says cellphones must be dialed by hand, meaning they are more expensive to call. The law also means pollsters who use only cheaper automated-recording calls-- "Press 1 if you are supporting Barack Obama"-- are legally barred from including cellphones in their polls.

A huge number of cellphones are also owned by people under 18, who we must hang up on for voter surveys. And finally, pollsters have to spend time calling (and gracefully hanging up on) people whose area code says they are in one state, but actually live all the way across the country. These and other factors combine to make the cost of a cellphone interview more than double the cost of a landline interview in the worst-case scenarios.

...Cell-mostly populations must be reached via landline and cellphone.

As our 2012 polling showed, cell-mostly voters we reach on cellphones are different than cell-mostly voters we reach on their landline. This means that some cell-mostly people must be called on their cellphones.

To their credit, Republican pollsters including the highly-professional Public Opinion Strategies have now recognized the need to dial cellphones. Including cells, and a lot of them, will not be the only measure of a quality poll in 2014 and 2016. But campaigns, the media and the poll-consuming public should be skeptical of any poll that doesn't include cellphones.

This Michigan judge cracks down on his own danged cell-phone-abusing self

"Why would I treat myself any different?" says Judge Clarke. "That would make me a hypocrite."

by Ken

Here's a touching little story I wanted to make sure you saw. There's one detail in the HuffPost Tech account, one that happened to bother me, which isn't quite right, as you'll see by referring to Judge Clarke's actual courtroom sign, reproduced above.

Michigan Judge Hugh Clarke Holds Himself In Contempt After Smartphone Rings In Court

Anyone who's ever visited Judge Hugh Clarke's courtroom in Lansing, Mich. knows the rules -- turn off your cellphone or silence it before entering inside.

Violators will have their phone seized by the judge and will be fined $50, according to the Lansing State Journal. It's happened five or 10 times since he created the policy in May. Friday morning, a man Clarke was sentencing for unlawful use of credit cards had his cell phone go off while his attorney was making arguments. The judge took his phone.

So when Clarke's own smartphone went off just a few minutes later during the same sentencing hearing, the Lansing State Journal reports, he upheld the law to the best of his abilities.

He held himself in contempt, pulled $50 out of his pocket and gave it to a court officer.

"Why would I treat myself any different?" asked Clarke, who has served on the 54A District Court since 2010. "That would make me a hypocrite."

He isn't the first judge to have punished himself for an unlawful use of technology in the courtroom. In April, an Ionia, Mich. judge named Raymond Voet held himself in contempt and fined himself $25 after his smartphone went off in the courtroom. But these two judges have got nothing on the "shirtless judge," Wade McCree of Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit, when it comes to cellphone-courtroom scandals. McCree, who was rebuked for sending topless cellphone photos of himself to a courtroom deputy, was recently removed from the bench.

“What’s the moral of the story?" Clarke told the Lansing State Journal. “Leave my damn phone in the office."

NOW, AS TO THAT DETAIL THAT'S NOT QUITE RIGHT

The HuffPost account says, "Violators will have their phone seized by the judge and will be fined $50." Which left me thinking, well, fine and dandy as far as paying the fine is concerned, but what about the damned cell phone seized? Is Judge Clarke a hypocrite (his own word, remember) after all?

Fortunately the actual sign is clearer. The seizure of the phone is "subject to a $50.00 fee for return of phone." So the judge's $50 duly ransomed his phone. Of course the sign also promises "a contempt citation," and it's not absolutely clear that he issued himself one of those.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Fantastic news for super-observant Jews: Now you can apply to buy a dumbed-down smartphone

Not Too Smart: New rabbi-approved ‘kosher’ phones are being marketed to ultra-Orthodox Israelis. They are like their high-tech treyf cousins, but disabled to avoid the internet or even phone calls. (Forward caption)


"[H]ow does a smart phone cross from treyf to kosher? It has to be de-smarted. The Haredi objection to smart phones is that they allow free access to the internet, putting all aspects of secular thought, culture and media, as well as sexual content like pornography, at the fingertips of the observant.

“ 'We get new cell phones in the shrink wrap, open them, and modify them,' Rami Levy Communications’ manager Shlomi Gulian told the Forward. The alteration completely disables web browsing. It is, Gulian stressed, irreversible."

-- from Nathan Jeffay's Forward report, "Kosher Smart
Phone Arrives as Ultra-Orthodox Tech Taboo Shifts"

by Ken

Religious zealots like to complain when the slightest provocation makes them feel disrespected -- or "persecuted," as they would probably have put it. Actually, I could probably have ended that sentence at "complain": "Religious zealots like to complain."

Since they never have to listen to themselves, it never seems to occur to them that it's all on them.

Kosher Smart Phone Arrives as Ultra-Orthodox Tech Taboo Shifts
Israeli Rabbis Approve Phones That Don't Surf Web or Call

By Nathan Jeffay

The taboo among the ultra-Orthodox in Israel about using smart phones is no longer, with the launch of models deemed appropriate for the devout.

That’s a real milestone for Haredi leaders, who have denounced the technology as a new form of evil. Last year the renowned rabbi Chaim Kanievsky declared the destructive capacity of smart phones to that of weapons, and another rabbi, Lior Glazer, publicly smashed one.

But on October 22, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications will start selling niche Haredi smart phones, complete with a certificate stating that a rabbi has inspected the technology.

So how does a smart phone cross from treyf to kosher? It has to be de-smarted.

The Haredi objection to smart phones is that they allow free access to the internet, putting all aspects of secular thought, culture and media, as well as sexual content like pornography, at the fingertips of the observant.

“We get new cell phones in the shrink wrap, open them, and modify them,” Rami Levy Communications’ manager Shlomi Gulian told the Forward. The alteration completely disables web browsing. It is, Gulian stressed, irreversible.

And which model of telephone is his company modifying? “We’re selling the Google Phone -- without Google,” he revealed.
The LG Nexus 4 is widely known as the Google Phone because it was developed by the internet services giant and configured especially to showcase its products, including its search engine -- all of which are deactivated by Rami Levy.

Though there’s no web browsing, the neutered Nexus allows users to do far more than the existing “kosher phones” which only allow communication by voice calls. Users can send and receive text messages and emails, and use apps.

The phones have access to a special application store that contains only applications that Rami Levy’s rabbinic advisors have deemed appropriate. Digital banking, satellite navigation, interfaces for booking health appointments and Haredi-style religious reading are in; secular news and most other general content is out. There are currently 600 approved apps, and the company hopes to increase that eventually to 20,000.

Gulian said that his company launched the phones because in today’s business environment it is becoming increasingly hard for Haredi professionals and businesspeople to manage without connectivity on the go and without SMS messages.

He said it also did so to rectify the situation wherein Haredi consumers “pay more and receive less” -- because when they buy voice-only phones they also then need to purchase extra devices like a GPS units instead of being able to use the apps their phones would otherwise have. . . .

Oh, there's more, plenty more. But let me just throw in one more detail:

The phones retail at $450 or $530 depending on the size of the memory -- less than most other smart phones in Israel. But the general public can’t take advantage of them.

To apply for one, you have to complete a form outlining your reasons for needing a smart phone, and secure the approval of your rabbi, whose name and phone number must be written down so that the company’s supervising rabbis can decide whether they think that you can be trusted to use it responsibly. They accept work-related reasons, but not requests for recreational -- or what they deem frivolous -- use. They decline applications from young yeshiva students who are meant to be focused on their religious studies but do consider older applicants.

These people -- authoritarian religious leaders and nitwit religious followers -- are engaged in a conspiracy of insanity and thuggishness. They deserve each other, the leaders and the followers -- same as any other s&m religious cult leader and followers. But why in the world they would expect anyone else to have anything but contempt for them escapes me.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Apps ahoy! (One of these days, almost for sure)

No, I didn't take this picture. Even if I knew how to take pictures with the thing, I could hardly have taken a picture of it, could I?


"[M]aybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous. For all these reasons I quit Facebook about two months after I'd joined it. As with all seriously addictive things, giving up proved to be immeasurably harder than starting. I kept changing my mind: Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I've ever had, and I loved it for that. I think a lot of people love it for that. Some work-avoidance techniques are onerous in themselves and don't make time move especially quickly: smoking, eating, calling people up on the phone. With Facebook hours, afternoons, entire days went by without my noticing."

-- Zadie Smith, in a November 2010 New York Review
of Books essay, "Generation Why?"

"[O]n Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time."

-- Margaret Atwood, in a new NYRB blogpost,
"Deeper into the Twungle"

by Ken

I just dug up the New York Review of Books piece that contains the above quote from the almost-always-stimulating Zadie Smith. It's an essay that took as its jumping-off points the Aaron Sorkin-David Fincher film The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. The quote, once found, turned out to be very much as I remembered it. What surprised me is what a small portion of the piece this quote represents.

Somehow I had forgotten how generally, and even alarmedly, negative Smith (left) was in the piece with regard to Facebook and the kind of social, or antisocial, mindset it embodies. I can see now that this didn't surprise me back in November 2010. Probably what surprised me then was learning that she had actually been through a period of Facebook addiction. From my own experience, I just couldn't understand how this was even possible, not for someone with such seemingly strong connections to nonvirtual reality as Smith.

I had recently come through a brief period of trying, at the recommendation of (once-trusted) friends who assured me that Facebook would open a new world to me, to find some reason -- any reason -- for hanging out on Facebook. I was never able to figure out how or why anybody would spend more time there than the couple of minutes it takes to whiz through the latest maunderings posted by the person's "friends."

I still can't figure it out. Even now, I keep receiving regular e-mails from Facebook claiming that I have new "notifications," which always turns out to be a lie. The first couple of times I went scrounging all around the damned site in search of these new notifications, until I found a screen that told me in no uncertain terms that I had no new notifications. That at least relieved my anxiety that I was missing some desperately important communication. Now when I get one of those fib-mails, I do sometimes check into my account, just to peek at the graffiti scrawled over my "wall." I've accepted a bunch of "friend" invitations, if only out of politeness, and some of these are people I actually wouldn't mind hearing from, or at least about. Every now and then I pick up a scrap of information, like the death of a parent or the birth of a new grandchild. I've never timed it, but I think I usually get in and out of the site in two or three minutes.

I SHOULD EXPLAIN THAT TWO OR THREE (MAYBE FOUR)
WEEKS AGO TODAY MY SMARTPHONE WAS DELIVERED

Partly I can't remember how many weeks it was (I just remember it was a Monday, because I wasn't expecting it to arrive till maybe Wednesday) because after the couple of days it took to get the thing activated and straighten out a number of details with my provider in order to get my online account set up, I haven't so much as turned it on.

I admit, I'm a-scared of it. I don't know how to do a darned thing with it, and it scares me to be that clueless. Now, I'm not constitutionally technophobic. There was a time, notably when I was first making my way in the computer world, when few things gave me more pleasure than ripping open the package of a new item of hardware or softward and attacking the manual to get the thing up and running and teach myself how to manage at least its basic functions.

No more. Somewhere along the line I lost confidence in my ability to make head or tail of the manual. This goes back at least to the time I boldly ordered a SCSI card to expand my fairly primitive Mac, so that I could have such unimagined newfangled devices as a CD-ROM drive, and was so intimidated by all the intricacies I had heard and read about that I don't think I ever even opened the package. (I outwaited myself. Eventually I bought a new computer that had all that stuff taken care of internally.)

At the moment somewhere in my apartment I've got the package containing the Elements of Photoshop software I ordered sitting safely (I assume). Even if I found a window of courage for installing it, I would first have to find the package.

With regard to the smartphone, I've written before about my resistance to this whole world of "apps." But I faced a decision. I literally wasn't using my old dumbphone at all, partly because it wasn't working so well anymore, and would have had to be replaced if I hoped to get any use out of it, but also because I just didn't seem to have any use for it, with the exception of when I was traveling, when it was a fabulous thing to have -- but I hardly ever travel. I really only broke down and got the damned thing because there came a moment during my mother's long decline, 1500 miles away, when I simply had to have a way to be in regular contact with her onsite caregivers. (I was being hassled at work for using my office phone.)

It's now more than two years since my mother died, though, and for month on end my "usage" month after month was zero. Not zero above my allotted minutes, but zero. Not a great return on my montly $50-plus investment. I faced the choice, it seemed to me, especially with my phone itself in need of replacing, of either down- or upgrading -- either giving the thing up altogether or seeing how much it would cost to upgrade to smarphone service and see if I might actually use it.

Before my phone even arrived, I had found and downloaded the manual, and then printed the whole 200 pages out. And then carried them around in an envelope back and forth between home and work every day, hardly daring to peek inside.

I thought, as last weekend approached, during which I would be doing three walking tours and might well want to write something about them, that this would be a great time to figure out how to use the camera function. (My poor old dumbphone took pictures, but I never found a way of extracting them from the device.) In the days preceding I kept thinking this would be a good time to crack open that printout of the manual. No go.

Even when I set out on Saturday morning, I had with me both the envelope containing the printout and, safely tucked I away (I hoped), the contraption itself. I had about a 45-minute ride on the M100 bus to the meeting point for my Municipal Art Society walk from Harlem into the Mott Haven area of the Bronx. I found other occupations to fill that time. As I wrote here, I had about a 50-minute subway ride from the Bronx to the Park Slope area of Brooklyn for my MAS walking tour there. Again, I found other ways to fill the time.

It's true that much of the time from my return home Saturday to my departure for my Sunday MAS walking tour of Downtown Brooklyn was filled with work on my Sunday Classics post, but I could still have cracked open the smartphone manual on the subway ride to Brooklyn. But I didn't. I did wind up writing a post, but had no pictures of my own to add to it.

The reason I'm going into all this just now is that not long before I started writing this post I stumbled across the new NYRB blogpost by Margaret Atwood from which the second quote at the top is taken. Here's a little more of what the distinguished writer -- not a grand passion of mine, but someone I certainly take seriously -- has to say:

[On] Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time. You might even find yourself climbing the odd tree -- the very odd tree -- or taking refuge in the odd hollow log -- the very odd hollow log -- because cute bunnies and playful kittens are not the only things alive in the mirkwoods of the Web. Or the webs of the mirkwoods. Paths can get tangled there. Plots can get thickened. Games are afoot.

When I first started Twittering, back in 2009 -- you can read about my early adventures in a NYRblog post I wrote two years ago -- I was, you might say, merely capering on the flower-bestrewn fringes of the Twitterwoods. . . .

[Editor's note: The above photo of Ms. A appeared with the 2009 NYRB blogpost she cites, which was titled "Atwood in the Twittersphere." The 2009 caption read: "Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009."]

Really? "You can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time"? Huh? Like where? Hey, I yield to pretty much no one in my ability to woolgather and timewaste, but I do have my limits.

As it happens, I was recently exhorted by yet another once-trusted friend on the subject of the usefulness of Twitter. (I won't name him, but he knows who he is, and you know him too.) To the point where, with no little trepidation, I signed myself up, and in the process was forced to choose 15 or 20 people or things to "follow." My once-trusted friend had assured me that if indeed I found, as I put it to him, that I was being swamped with urgent news like somebody having just made a sandwich, I could just ditch such tweeters, as he does frequently when people he follows devote too much attention to subjects like sports.

Since I signed up, I've only ventured back onto the site a few times. Talk about useless! What I found there hasn't encouraged frequent return visits. I suppose I could be devoting time to rooting out the rot and hunting down more informative or entertaining sources. Maybe I'll put that on my "to do" list.

First, though, I'm going to have to turn my phone again. I'm too cheap to be shelling out what I'm going to be shelling out each month (I've paid my first bill but because of the extra stuff it included I'll need to wait for the next one to see what the actual monthly total will be with all taxes and fees added) for something I don't use at all, and I'm way too cheap to even consider shelling out those big contract-buy-out bucks.

I guess one of these days I should start trying to figure out which apps might actually do something for me. I don't suppose anyone has any useful suggestions.

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