Now is the autumn Techno Talk
of our discontent…
Mark Nelson
…not made glorious by this arsonist of Lancashire (apologies to The Bard), who is now serving three
years behind bars at Her Majesty’s pleasure for torching a Vodafone base station in Knowsley. His excuse
was that he wanted to ‘put the mast out of action’ because 5G technology helps transmit coronavirus.
H
ow silly can you get? If he
had only bothered to check the
coverage page on Vodafone’s
website he would have seen this outof-town base station was not equipped
for 5G, which Vodafone has so far only
rolled out ‘in select areas of large towns
and cities’. An analysis of his phone revealed he had instead wasted his time in
online chat groups about 5G technology.
Myth-understandings
As you doubtless know, theories claiming that 5G technology helps transmit
coronavirus have been condemned
widely by the scientific community.
Indeed, they have been branded ‘the
worst kind of fake news’ by NHS
England medical director Stephen
Powis. According to the BBC, the theories fall broadly in to two camps: either
that 5G can suppress the immune system, making people more susceptible
to catching the virus, or else the virus can somehow be transmitted by
means of 5G technology. Both of these
notions were condemned as ‘complete
rubbish’ by Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology
at the University of Reading.
You could not make this up
In reality, the connection is far more
subtle and consequently much less
obvious, as someone revealed to me
exclusively for this article. This is
the real deal, in his words, not mine.
‘If you have been Covid-19 checked,
you have been chipped. The swab is
pushed to the back of your nasal passages so you cannot see it. You may
notice a very tiny black dot on the
swab going in and not when it comes
out. That is the microchip, which
runs on the human electric current
just like you see on an electrocardiogram. Once implanted, you have to
use a magnifying TV camera to push
inside to find it and by using the very
long swab they can implant the chip
without you knowing it. The chip,
equipped with an ultra-thin antenna
wire that you cannot feel, makes it
10
possible to track you everywhere because it does not require a satellite
but instead runs on 5G cell phone
networks for undetected communications. It relays any conversation it can
pick up with a sensitive microphone.
A symptom is you may begin sneezing
violently as your sinuses try to get rid
of it, hence the wound to hide it. Well,
that’s what they told me when I asked
why my cell phone shows a signal all
the time, even when I know there is
no cell service near me. Welcome to
the New World Order, fellow slaves.’
Of course, not a word of the above is
true, but it’s exactly the kind of highly
inventive and almost-plausible fantasy
that is spouted on the more conspiracy-obsessed corners of the Web.
The things you find on the Web
Everything you want to know is on the
Internet. The trouble is that most of it
is not indexed, such as this nugget. If
you work in a radiology department at
a hospital, don’t bring your iPhone with
you. I quote: ‘Apparently iPhones were
failing when used near MRI scanner areas. The problem was not the magnets
themselves, but the outgassing of large
quantities of helium gas when the units
were serviced or the magnet quenched.
The iPhones have a MEMS oscillator
timing device inside and the helium
was migrating into the MEMS package
past the seal and weakening the vacuum inside. This lowered the operating
frequency.’ True? Who knows?… and
that’s the problem.
And finally…
Let’s end on a positive note, with a
fascinating example of how a perceived limitation may actually not be
the constraint you imagined. Take the
capacity of a smartphone battery, typically somewhere between 1500 and
2000mAh. If that’s what it is, surely
the laws of physic say you’re not going to get any extra performance than
what it says on the label.
But what if you’re a contrarian and
decide to think outside of the box?
That’s precisely what researchers at
the University of Essex did in order to
squeeze extra life from their batteries.
Their new research methodology employs machine-learning algorithms to
optimise a mobile phone’s performance
and thermal behaviour based on the
user’s interaction with the phone. In
lab tests, this entirely novel technique
has outperformed existing methodologies in the top smartphones used for
the purpose of performance and thermal behaviour.
Developed by a team led by computer scientist Somdip Dey, the technique
would enable users to use their phone
for longer and mitigate the ongoing
issues with smartphone battery life.
Their work has already gained interest
from other researchers keen to pursue
the methodology and further the development of resource-optimisation
techniques in mobile phones.
‘This is ground-breaking work and the
first to propose reinforcement-learning
based on a machine-learning approach
to optimise performance, energy consumption, and thermal behaviour in
a mobile device by taking the user’s
behaviour with the device into consideration,’ explained Somdip, who
pursued the work while working at the
Samsung R&D Institute last year. ‘By
learning from the user’s behaviour, we
have shown how smartphones could
be developed to get even more battery
life for the same usage.’
At lunchtime a user might quickly
scroll through the BBC News app checking the headlines, which will require
a higher FPS (frames per second) than
when they spend more time on the app
in the evening, slowly scrolling down
and reading more stories in full. The
researchers’ methodology detects the
change in FPS for the app being used
and tries to find the best operating frequency of CPU and GPU processors to
cater for the change in app-use behaviour, while aiming to consume the least
amount of power and minimise the
temperature rise in the device, which
is a critical issue in mobile phones.
Practical Electronics | October | 2020
