Eideard

French solo sailing star Florence Arthaud fell off her boat during a toilet break but was saved from the Mediterranean waters by rescuers after she called her mother by mobile phone.

Ms Arthaud, winner in 1990 of the Route du Rhum single-handed transatlantic sailing race, was located and rescued near the island of Corsica thanks to a headlamp and the GPS system on her phone.

A small wave hit the boat and knocked her overboard while she was taking a toilet break without her usual harness, she said.

“I quite simply fell into the water while preparing to take a pee,” the 54-year-old told BFM television.

Ms Arthaud, alone on her 10-metre (33ft) yacht The Argade II when she fell overboard, managed to hold her phone, encased in a waterproof covering, above water and call her mother in Paris to raise the alarm. Her mother alerted a rescue team, which set off in search of the sailor.

She spent almost two hours in the water before being rescued. And probably won’t pee over the side of the boat for a while, I’ll bet.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Four people were pulled out alive Monday from the rubble of the Turkey earthquake after one managed to call for help with his mobile phone…

Dozens of people were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after hundreds of buildings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages pancaked or partially collapsed in Sunday’s earthquake.

Worst-hit was Ercis – an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border that lies in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones – where about 80 multistory buildings collapsed.

Yalcin Akay was dug out from a collapsed six-story building with a leg injury after he called a police emergency line on his phone and described his location, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also rescued from the same building in Ercis 20 hours after the quake struck, officials said…

As over 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers searched mounds of debris for the missing and tearful families members waited anxiously nearby. Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of concrete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels. Generator-powered floodlights ran all night so the rescues could continue.

Aid groups scrambled to set up tents, field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to re-enter their homes. Many exhausted residents spent the night outside, lighting fires to keep warm…

The bustling, larger city of Van, about 55 miles (90 kilometres) south of Ercis, also sustained substantial damage, but Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said search efforts there were winding down. Mr Sahin expected the death toll in Ercis to rise, but not as much as initially feared. He told reporters rescue teams were searching for survivors in the ruins of 47 buildings where dozens could be trapped, including a cafe…

More than 2,000 teams with a dozen sniffer dogs were involved in search-and-rescue and aid efforts.

Several countries offered assistance but Mr Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being. Azerbaijan, Iran and Bulgaria still sent aid, he said.

I decided a long time ago that life was tough enough without adding earthquakes to the potential of forces completely out of your control that could affect your life.

 
Har.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

India’s former telecommunications minister has been arrested by detectives investigating suspected corruption in the government auction of 2G mobile phone licences.

Andimuthu Raja was forced to resign as India’s telecommunications minister in November following allegations that corruption in the allocation of phone licences had cost Indian taxpayers more than £22 billion in lost revenues.

Public anger erupted over the issue in the same month when secretly taped telephone conversations of one of India’s top public relations figures revealed she had campaigned for Mr Raja’s appointment as telecommunications minister while working as a lobbyist for one of the main beneficiaries of the 2G auction.

Protests on the issue and demands for a full inquiry into the affair by India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party brought the country’s parliament to a standstill in its last session.

Mr Raja was still being questioned by detectives from the Central Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday night while two of his former civil servants were also arrested…

He denied the charges and said he had followed the same system set in place by the previous BJP-led government. He also said his decision to sell licences cheaply had been a key factor in the rapid increase in the number of Indians using mobile telephones. India today has 730 million mobile phone subscribers — more than those who have access to a toilet.

I’ll leave the jokes about mobile-phones and toilets to folks running for office in India.

Though it’s tempting.

Mobile phone tower disguised as a giant penis

Do mobile phone towers make people more likely to procreate? Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast protruding from the landscape?

These questions are our natural response to learning that variation in the number of mobile phone masts across the country exactly matches variation in the number of live births. For every extra mobile phone mast in an area, there are 17.6 more babies born above the national average.

This was discovered by taking the publicly available data on the number of mobile phone masts in each county across the United Kingdom and then matching it against the live birth data for the same counties. When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.

The match between mobile phone towers and birth rates is an extremely strong correlation and it is highly statistically significant. There is no doubting the mathematical finding that more mobile phone masts mean that there will also be more births. This is about as rigorous as statistics can get.

Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth…

But would the media turn a correlation-only finding into a causation-based health scare? To find out, I have released my mobile masts and births results as a press release. We’ll see if anyone jumps to the conclusion that mobile phone radiation really can give conception a helping hand.

I love it. My kind of computational analysis – taking the time to examine factors beyond the few chosen as possible cause-and-effect determinants.

I don’t recall posting any of Matt Parker‘s ruminations in the past – but, he’s my kind of smartass.

A French woman had to be rescued by helicopter after she got stuck in a tree where she took refuge from a herd of wild pigs she encountered while strolling in a valley.

The 30-year-old was walking near the southwestern town of Bagneres-de-Luchon on Monday when she took fright after seeing the boars and climbed up a nearby tree.

When she later tried to climb down she fell six feet and got stuck in branches from where she called rescue services with her GPS-equipped mobile phone and was able to give them her exact location, police said.

When rescue workers arrived they decided they would need a helicopter to extricate her safely from the tree and summoned one from a nearby base.

“She was shivering and suffering slightly from hypothermia” but had no broken bones or other injuries, said a rescue worker.

Fearless little buggers!

This will be their next requirement

Radio broadcasters and music labels are seeking to legally mandate FM radio reception as a feature in all consumer mobile devices in an effort to expand the market for radio.

A report by Nate Anderson of the Ars “Law & Disorder” blog notes that competing interests in radio and studio industry groups have sided on a proposal to force hardware makers to add FM radio chips to mobile phones and other consumser devices…

Negotiations between the two trade groups have found agreement on a plan that requires radio stations to pay new, limited performance rights fees to the studios annually, but that plan is tied to the ability of the two groups to pass laws forcing mobile device makers to add FM radio features to their devices…

Apple hasn’t commented on the plan, but the Consumer Electronics Association is strongly opposed to the idea. “The back room scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” CEA president Gary Shapiro said in the report, adding that such a move is “not in our national interest.”

The Performance Rights Act currently before Congress is at the center of the controversy. “The performance royalty legislation voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee does not include this onerous and backward-looking radio requirement,” Shapiro said, indicating that the CEA wants the bill to continue without any FM radio requirements being mandated.

“Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace,” Shapiro said, “NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.”

These associations are wholly composed of the most reactionary and predatory sharks in the world of entertainment. Music, discussion, any of the content falling within their purview is only a commodity to be regulated to produce the most profit.

The rights of consumers are as meaningless in their 19th minds as concepts like progress and ethics.

“You want me to buy what…?”
Daylife/AP Photo by Ramon Espinosa

The UK’s mobile phone networks are to start selling data about the internet sites visited by their customers to advertisers.

The companies have been collecting the information over the past year and will use it in an attempt to generate more advertising. News that the industry has been monitoring what users do on the mobile web is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.

“You can really start to build up a compelling case that says if you are a media company or advertising company, this is where you should be targeting your spending…” - says their flunky spokesman.

In the fixed-line world, BT has come under intense criticism for using technology developed by Phorm to snoop on what its customers are doing on the web, even though customers must give their permission before their traffic is watched and all information about which sites are being visited is immediately anonymised.

The GSMA stressed that the traffic data it had been collecting in the UK had also been anonymised and it had checked with European regulators to ensure that its service complied with the relevant laws.

Michael O’Hara described the data as “a real measurement of what people are doing with their mobile device.”

I know, I know. It’s Opt-in and I do, in fact, opt in for a couple of services accessing my home entertainment system and network.

The Brits serve as stalking horse for most of the Western Establishment’s assault on civil liberties and I’m doubly suspicious of anything their teleco gatekeepers come up with.

Thanks, Cinaedh

A copy of next week’s Best Buy circular (above) duly notes the handset’s arrival with a sprawling glamour shot across its cover, the latest example of a blossoming relationship between Apple and the No. 1 U.S. specialty electronics retailer…

On September 7th, Best Buy will also become the first independent U.S. retailer to carry the iPhone 3G when it’s put up for sale at 970 Best Buy locations and 16 Best Buy Mobile specialty outlets across the country. More importantly, however, the deal broadens Apple’s reach by expanding the number of iPhone distribution points by approximately 30 percent to over 3000 locations.

Up until now, Americans could only purchase the iPhone from approximately 2,200 locations, including approximately 190 Apple retail stores and 2000 mobile phone dealerships operated by exclusive US iPhone carrier AT&T.

I’ll stop by my local Best Buy and see if there’s anyone there who knows whatever about the iPhone.