Eideard

One in six UK mobile phones are contaminated with faecal bacteria due to poor personal hygiene, scientists have found.

Researchers said that 16% of the devices were contaminated with E coli, which can cause food poisoning, most probably because people fail to properly wash their hands after going to the toilet. The study…also found that Britons tend to lie about their personal hygiene…

Dr Val Curtis, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “This study provides more evidence that some people still don’t wash their hands properly, especially after going to the toilet.

“I hope the thought of having E coli on their hands and phones encourages them to take more care in the bathroom – washing your hands with soap is such a simple thing to do but there is no doubt it saves lives.”

Birmingham has the highest proportion of bacteria-ridden phones (41%) but the highest level of E coli contamination was found in London (28%).

But the scientists also found a north-south divide in the levels of bacteria found on phones, with northern cities the dirtiest. Glasgow was the worst with average bacterial levels on phones and hands nine times higher than in Brighton…

Dr Ron Cutler, of Queen Mary, University of London, said: “While some cities did much better than others, the fact that E coli was present on phones and hands in every location shows this is a nationwide problem.

“People may claim they wash their hands regularly but the science shows otherwise.”

BTW, today, 15th October is Global Handwashing Day.

I doubt anyone in the US knows that, either. Or washes their hands anymore often.

NOT on the way to deliver newspapers for Rupert

T-Mobile is considering joining Ford by pulling its advertising in News of the World following Monday’s allegations that the newspaper hacked Milly Dowler’s phone after she went missing.

A T-Mobile spokesman told the Telegraph: “We’re currently reviewing our advertising position with News of the World, following the recent allegations, and await the outcome of the ongoing police investigation.”

It is also understood that Currys and PC World are reviewing their options.

On Tuesday afternoon, it emerged that car manufacturer Ford has pulled its advertising in the News of the World. They…said in a statement: “Ford is a company which cares about the standards of behaviour of its own people and those it deals with externally. We are awaiting an outcome from the News of the World investigation and expect a speedy and decisive response. Pending this response we will be using alternative media within and outside News International Group instead of placing Ford advertising in the News of the World…”

A spokesperson from Halifax bank told the Telegraph on Tuesday they would be “reviewing and considering their options with regards to future advertising” in the News of the World, following Npower and Ford’s decision to consider places ads in the Sunday tabloid…

Twitter and Facebook were from Monday busy with users urging advertisers to boycott the News of the World. Many threatened specific companies that they would withdraw their custom unless those companies dissasociated themselves from the newspaper. There was also a Facebook page campaigning for a boycott.

Murdoch’s tradition of opportunism, sleaze and sensationalism — as a substitute for journalism — appears to be reaching a potential qualitative change among advertisers. Who do you want your brand to be associated with, after all? Reputable journalists, hard copy or online? Or creeps who hack into a kidnapped girl’s cellphone hoping for an extra special headline?

Face it. The only aspect of “ethics” that can impress a thug like Murdoch is a reduction in profits.

According to USA Today, church steeples across the United States are disappearing.

The steeple at St. Mark’s Episcopal in Wadsworth, Ohio is rotting away, having weathered the elements since 1842. But the $30,000 repair bill is a stretch for a congregation that numbers a mere 58. And aside from hefty maintenance costs which rise as steeples age, it seems that the steeple has “outlived its usefulness as a signpost.”

“People hunting for a church don’t scan the horizon, they search the Internet,” writes the paper’s Cathy Lynn Grossman. “Google reports searches for ‘churches’ soar before Easter each year.”

However…technology may also be what saves the ones which remain.

Grossman explains that Providence Baptist Church in McLean, Va., “managed to get a whole new aluminum steeple and $25,000 annually for its maintenance budget” by turning it into a cell tower…

As it happens, the “steeple-as-cell-tower” is quite a bit more common than one might think:

Of course, there are societal shifts that are hastening the death of the steeple, as well. Architect Gary Landhauser, who has designed nearly 30 churches, says, “”We have done a lot of church designs, but we haven’t done a steeple design in 15 years.”

In fact, many people today don’t even want their church to look like a church. These folks, Landhauser says, prefer their houses of worship to look “more like a mall.”

That probably suits the essential function of today’s established religions: fundraising to keep the church in business, a gathering place for people whose only sense of community remains the church they attended as a child.

The mall as church probably feels more like useful to today’s young churchgoers. That – and a place to meet others with needs more primal than catechistic.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Whoever killed four prostitutes, and possibly four other people, and then dumped their bodies in heavy underbrush along a beachfront causeway on Long Island appears to have a sophisticated understanding of police investigative techniques…

A series of taunting phone calls made to the teenage sister of one of the victims — calls that the police suspect came from the killer — were made from in or around some of the most crowded locations in New York City, including Madison Square Garden and Times Square, according to the people briefed on the case and to the mother of Melissa Barthelemy, that victim.

The locations, detectives say, were probably chosen because they allowed the caller to blend into crowds, so that if investigators pinpointed his location from the cellphone’s signal, they would be unable to pick him out of the crowd using any nearby surveillance cameras, one of the people said.

This fact, as well as the killer’s use of disposable cellphones to contact the four victims who have been identified — women in their 20s who advertised their services on Craigslist — suggested to some investigators that the killer was well versed in criminal investigative techniques, gleaned either through personal experience or in some other way, and could even be in law enforcement himself…

Also, the caller kept each of his vulgar, mocking and insulting calls to less than three minutes, according to the dead woman’s mother, Lynn Barthelemy. The caller made about a half-dozen calls over roughly five weeks to the victim’s sister.

One investigator said the brief duration of the calls thwarted efforts by the New York Police Department to use the signal to pinpoint the caller’s location and find him, something Lynn Barthelemy said they told her they tried to do four times…

Ms. Barthelemy’s body was one of four uncovered over the course of three days in December in the thick undergrowth along Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, in the town of Babylon. All were dumped in burlap sacks.

RTFA for a bit more detail. I guess back in the day before the multiplicity of CSI variants on TV it would have required a bit of research to know how forensic investigation has moved on since the days of Quincy.

We even had a suicide here in New Mexico that imitated an episode of CSI in an attempt to make it look like murder. Life imitates art, once again.

Most Americans probably aren’t aware of the growing scandal involving one of the leading UK newspapers owned by that idol of journalism, Rupert Murdoch. It’s called illegal wiretapping.

Ian Edmondson, left, and Neville Thurlbeck

The former news editor and current chief reporter from the News of the World are in police custody after being arrested on suspicion of unlawfully intercepting mobile phone voicemail messages…

“They remain in custody for questioning after being arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section 1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977, and unlawful interception of voicemail messages, contrary to Section 1 Ripa [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act] 2000,” the briefing added…

The arrests are the first salvo in Operation Weeting, whose tasks include establishing whether there are grounds for bringing further prosecutions in the phone-hacking scandal.

Edmondson and Thurlbeck will probably be released later this afternoon after the search of their homes is complete.

The two men have been implicated in the long-running scandal through documents seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the newspaper…

Only one reporter, the former royal editor Clive Goodman, has been convicted of a crime as part of the scandal. He and Mulcaire were sentenced to jail terms in January 2007.

No other reporters or executives were questioned by the initial police investigation. It was only after a series of high court cases brought by the actor Sienna Miller, the football pundit Andy Gray and others that the Metropolitan police were forced to reveal material found on Mulcaire’s computer, during a 2006 raid of his home.

Last Friday, a high court judge ordered NoW to make available Mulcaire’s notes to the growing list of people suing the paper. Justice Geoffrey Vos, who is in charge of the hacking cases, ordered “rolling disclosure” to all claimants.

Hundreds of thousands of emails will now be handed over to alleged victims.

Rupert’s NewsCorp says they’re cooperating willingly with the police investigation. Five years after the initial arrests and denials that anyone remaining at the newspaper could possibly have been involved in the illegal electronic snooping on celebrity mobile phones.

UPDATE: Senior Journalist James Weatherup is a 3rd arrest in this case.

“No – you can’t have a white one!”

U.S. paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division recently took part in a field exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they experimented with a tool not normally used by the armed forces – a smartphone. And no, they weren’t playing Farmville. Instead, they were using custom phones running custom apps, to coordinate the swarming of a mock village and the capture of a high-value target. Judging by how the exercise went, smartphones could soon be showing up on battlefields everywhere.

The phones were ruggedized Android-based prototypes developed specifically for the project. They were plugged into the soldiers’ tactical radios, combining the capabilities of both technologies. Running on the phones were two apps – Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, and Tactical Ground Reporting, or TIGR Mobile.

JBC-P displays a map of the battlefield, using GPS to indicate the locations of friendly forces, enemies, and landscape hazards in real time. TIGR allows soldiers to send photos back and forth, and swap historical information relevant to the operation…

Given that troops presumably wouldn’t want to be thwarted by coverage limitations, the phones communicated using the WIN-T secure terrestrial network provided by the soldiers’ HMS Manpack and Rifleman radios. The network allowed troops to share information with one another in the field, and with the battalion tactical operations center. WIN-T also links up to a secure satellite connection, to keep the higher-ups at headquarters in the loop.

Of course, the U.S. Army is confident that no one else in the world can match our tech know-how. Couldn’t possibly hack into battlefield cellphones and use the information against our troops.

We need a new generation of Navajo code-talkers.

Will electric car charging networks have the type of roaming commonly found between cell phone providers? If Nokia Siemens Networks — a joint venture between the European networking giants — has anything to say about it, in Europe they will. This week at Mobile World Congress, an annual telecom conference in Barcelona, Spain, Nokia Siemens Networks and a German public utility group called Smartlab announced they are developing an authentication and authorization service to enable electric vehicle drivers to “roam” when charging up via various service providers.

Called e-clearing.net, the service will essentially authenticate your data across charging infrastructure, using information like your EV charging contract ID, an RFID card number, a PIN number or a telephone number. The group notes that the service is built to be secure, and says in the future, electric charging service providers can use e-clearing.net to make customer billing easier…

The group’s new e-roaming project highlights just how nascent the electric vehicle industry is. While there are some early standards in place for charging, the IT layer for the data involved with charging isn’t yet standardized…Nokia Siemens Network’s involvement also shows how the telecom sector is increasingly looking to work on using their networks for the “Internet of things,” including EVs and smart meters….

Katie takes the time to reinforce her belief that Open Source is needed to advance the tech. I’m not at all convinced of that. But, I hadn’t considered this solution to roaming with an electric car.

I can conceive of a salesman out for dinner with a client falling over himself to pick up the tab for charging the client’s car.

Wireless opponent Arthur Firstenberg wants a new round of public hearings on last month’s upgrades of AT&T’s cellular-phone system in Santa Fe.

Firstenberg, who says he is hypersensitive to electromagnetic signals from wireless devices, drew headlines last year by suing his neighbor over her use of an iPhone and a Wi-Fi system. A judge has thrown out the iPhone claim, but the Wi-Fi claim is set for trial on March 21. Do you believe it?

Now, Firstenberg is asking for a judge to require AT&T to apply for a special exception from the city to increase the intensity of its signals. Otherwise, he contends, AT&T should be forced to shut off its new system in 30 days…

AT&T’s implementation of 3G service “vastly increased the bandwidth of their radio emissions,” constituting “a change in the intensity of use,” according to Firstenberg’s pro-se petition for a writ of mandamus…

Attached to Firstenberg’s petition are letters from more than a dozen people asking the Board of Adjustment to reject the changes because they are concerned that their health, or that of others, is being damaged by the proliferation of electromagnetic signals.

Angela Werneke of Santa Fe wrote that she has immune deficiency, chronic fatigue and chronic migraines. Although she has not been diagnosed with electromagnetic sensitivity, she wrote, she is “deeply concerned, not only for my own personal health and well being, but also for all those who are being marginalized from our community by the pervasive and rapidly increasing levels of electromagnetic radiation.”

Felicia Noelle Trujillo, a Feldenkrais practitioner in Santa Fe, wrote that she has patients who are undeniably sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and will suffer from “this brutal and instant rise in the levels of EMR in their environment, when they are already in a weakened state.”

The essentially “weakened state” lies between the ears of these Dodo-birds. Certainly, they have a right to initiate lawsuits. Just as certainly the courts have a responsibility to throw them out as soon as the petitions waltz in through the door in all their frivolous glory.

No, I don’t see any more need to speak politely about this foolishness than I must when considering the threat to Homeland Insecurity from that alleged terrorist, Rumplestiltskin.

A new study has suggested that cell phone radiation may be contributing to declines in bee populations in some areas of the world.

Bee populations dropped 17 percent in the UK last year, according to the British Bee Association, and nearly 30 percent in the United States says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Parasitic mites called varroa, agricultural pesticides and the effects of climate change have all been implicated in what has been dubbed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD). But researchers in India believe cell phones could also be to blame for some of the losses.

In a study at Panjab University in Chandigarh, northern India, researchers fitted cell phones to a hive and powered them up for two fifteen-minute periods each day. After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced…

But the UK’s Mobile Operators Association — which represents the UK’s five mobile network operators — told CNN: “Research scientists have already considered possible factors involved in CCD and have identified the areas for research into the causes of CCD which do not include exposure to radio waves.”

Norman Carreck, Scientific director of the International Bee research Association at the UK’s University of Sussex says it’s still not clear how much radio waves affect bees.

“We know they are sensitive to magnetic fields. What we don’t know is what use they actually make of them. And no one has yet demonstrated that honey bees use the earth’s magnetic field when navigating,” Carreck said.

An interesting question or two are raised by the study: If correct, would people stop using cellphones? Or would lobbying be next to change the frequencies to something less lethal? A question raised in the article.

I was dismayed the next morning to see I’d been sleeping directly in front of an enormous military radar antenna beaming out into the Atlantic defending American from invaders of one or another flavor. I was lucky I didn’t glow in the dark.

World’s leading example of bunker architecture

The largest U.S. embassy in the world has very large problems keeping track of vehicles and millions of dollars of other equipment, from cell phones to medical supplies, according to a new State Department Inspector General’s report…

One glaring problem is tracking down vehicles or even knowing how many the embassy needs, according to the report. There are 1,168 standard and armored vehicles assigned to the embassy but 159 are unaccounted for and an additional 282 don’t show up on the official database.

“Motor pool personnel have struggled to ascertain the owners and users of these vehicles to properly inventory them,” the report says. “Denying fuel and maintenance to vehicles until they are accounted for may solve this issue.”

The inspector general warns too little oversight of medical supplies, especially of controlled substances, such as morphine and oxycodone, risks “a significant vulnerability for misuse and fraud.”

Millions of dollars of communications gear are improperly tracked, according to the audit. Cell phones that are unassigned still rack up monthly charges, wasting an estimated $286,000 dollars a year.

“Some assigned phones are underused or unused, and extensive charges for overseas calls have been associated with both assigned and unassigned phones,” the report says. The investigators calculated “the embassy could save more than $740,000 by disconnecting unassigned and underused phone lines and curtailing international calls…”

In other words, Embassy Baghdad is still being run like Congress. We get to pay for both.