Now I’m a little embarrassed to own an iPhone

I was just reading this analysis of costs and profits of the iPhone, and it’s rather dismaying. It’s largely about how the costs are distributed: the iPhone is assembled in China, and contributes to our trade imbalance, but it’s not because China has a technological edge — all the components are made in Japan, Korea, Germany, and the US, and just shipped to China for the final assembly by the cheap labor there.

The total component cost of an iPhone in 2009 was $172.46. Workers in China assemble the iPhone, but because their wages are low the assembly cost per phone (labeled manufacturing costs in the table below) is quite small, only $6.50 a phone. The total production cost per phone is $178.96.

Apple has a 64% profit margin on the iPhone! That’s not a surprise, though — I’m used to tech companies charging a premium price for the fancy toys, and Apple has never had a reputation as a budget brand. This is what surprised me:

For the sake of discussion, they assumed that assembly line wages in the U.S. are ten times higher than in China. Given that Chinese production workers earn roughly $1 an hour, that is not an unreasonable assumption. The higher wages would mean that the total assembly cost per phone would rise to $65 and the total manufacturing cost would approach $238. If Apple continued to sell the iPhone for $500, the company would still earn a very respectable 50% profit margin.

There is admittedly a very large difference between 64% and 50%, and I can understand why a company would balk at cutting profits by 14%, and it would be an irrational business decision to shift assembly to the US for reasons of national altruism. But still…50% seems obscene enough.

I hope Apple is at least paying respectable taxes on that profit. The article doesn’t say; I don’t have expectations that they are.

(Also on FtB)

Spam advice

The Dennis Markuze story has made it to Ars Technica. I am much relieved to have that pest gone from my mailbox, but I was thinking about one point everybody is missing: the human brain seems to have an edge over computers.

I just checked, and the FtB site has accumulated about 2100 spam hits which none of you have seen, but which were automatically intercepted by the software (you aren’t missing much: somebody really wants to sell you shoes, lots of shoes). Markuze was hitting me on email and twitter for more than that, and the thing was, those all got past the filters I’ve got in place. So one obsessed crazy man with minimal technical skill and nothing but persistence outperforms all the spambots out there, at least on the scale of individuals, if not in breadth of attack.

Spammers might want to think about that. Instead of writing a new generation of software to circumvent our filters, maybe they should recruit social misfits with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and write software that amplifies their efforts. You can blame me if they take my advice.

(Also on FtB)

This photography stuff is amazing

i-c3c037517c16cbce10120441cf2d620f-crowd.jpeg

This is a small piece of a larger — much larger — photo of a Vancouver street crowd. Go to the original image, though, which allows you zoom in and in and in — you’ll be able to see the faces in surprising detail of each of the little dots.

The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels.

I’ve stared at it for hours, though, and still haven’t managed to find Waldo.

(Also on FtB)

Save the James Webb Space Telescope

Lawrence Krauss has written an excellent defense of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble which is currently under threat of cancellation. I was really down on the space shuttle the other day, but that’s because I think it was a failure at doing its job of enabling exploration and discovery — the Space Telescope is a fabulous tool that works, and I want NASA to focus more on cost-effective, powerful methods of exploring the universe.

Lawrence Krauss also criticized the space shuttle, and urges us to send more robots into space. Uh-oh. Cue ominous music as Neil deGrasse Tyson emerges from the wings, carrying a folding chair.

The Space Shuttle gets a reasonable eulogy at last

It’s so good to see someone take off the rose-colored glasses and tell it like it is: the space shuttle was a flop.

The most important thing to realize about the space shuttle program is that it is objectively a failure. The shuttle was billed as a reusable craft that could frequently, safely, and cheaply bring people and payloads to low Earth orbit. NASA originally said the shuttles could handle 65 launches per year; the most launches it actually did in a year was nine; over the life of the program, it averaged five per year. NASA predicted each shuttle launch would cost $50 million; they actually averaged $450 million. NASA administrators said the risk of catastrophic failure was around one in 100,000; NASA engineers put the number closer to one in a hundred; a more recent report from NASA said the risk on early flights was one in nine. The failure rate was two out of 135 in the tests that matter most.

I first had my doubts after Challenger blew up; it wasn’t the failure of the mission that bothered me — I understood that it was risky — but NASA’s responses in the hearings afterwards. I watched those; it was where Richard Feynman really caught the public eye.

According to reports after the Challenger disaster, the ship exploded because of a faulty joint that included an O-ring hardened by especially cold conditions before launch. More importantly, this was far from an isolated problem, as illustrated by a report by Richard Feynman. Feynman slammed not only the O-ring error but the entire process of building and testing the shuttle, plus the management style and decision-making of NASA, for good measure. When he wrote, “Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality,” and, “They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space,” he meant they were at the time not living in reality, which is generally the place engineers ought to live. NASA’s recent report on shuttle safety found that the chance of making it through first 25 flights (#25 being Challenger’s last flight) was only 6%, and the chance of 88 safe flights between the Challenger and Columbia disasters was just 7%. If the study is accurate, then Challenger and Columbia weren’t freak accidents—the flights before them were freak successes.

I got the impression from those hearings that NASA had become an engineering bureaucracy, dedicated to dogmatic, almost ritualistic redundancy and caution, where following procedure, no matter how flawed, was always the answer. Feynman was fabulous cut through all the nonsense and just asked what worked and what didn’t.

Goodbye, old lemon. Let’s hope the next new model actually comes up to spec.

Guess what makes Josh McDowell cry?

I think the loony Christian apologist has got something right. He has identified the greatest threat to Christianity:

The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not.

Hooray for the internet!

Now here is the problem, going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].

Somebody should book this guy for the next skeptics’ conference — he’ll make everyone very happy.

Help me put the Bergman-Myers debate on YouTube!

I’ve received a suggestion that one potential source of a lot of the recent nonsensical creationist literature-quoting has a plausible source: Jerry Bergman. That guy is completely nuts, as I learned in a debate a while back; he’s also pretentious while not knowing much, and he’s painfully prolific, publishing lots in fringey creationist pseudo-journals.

So now I have a technical question. I have a DVD copy of that wretched debate, and I’ve even gone so far as to rip it, and now have five MP4 files sitting on my computer (I also have a folder of the raw ripped files, a bunch of .bup, .ifo, .vob files). And that leads to a terribly naive question: how do I put them on youtube? I’ve had no trouble uploading short, simple things to youtube, but this is about two hours worth of video. I just want to click on something that will segment the files as necessary and neatly upload them without me having to fuss over them. Any experts willing to give me suggestions? I am only going to do this on a Mac, so don’t tell me about PC solutions.

Alternatively, if someone else would like to host them and put them online in their youtube account, I’d be happy to email them or put them on a server somewhere for downloading. Just let me know how.

I’ll look into some of the suggestions I’ve been given. For now, though, I’ve tossed up the files on a free hosting service — if anyone wants to download and do something with these, feel free, and if you put them on youtube or vimeo send me a link to let me know.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c6ec/n/VTS_01_1.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1dacc/n/VTS_01_2.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c65b/n/VTS_01_3.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c68d/n/VTS_01_4.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c67d/n/VTS_01_5.mp4

What’s the matter with Andrew Brown’s brain?

He’s completely lost me again. Brown has a couple of posts up complaining about people referring to mental illness as a “brain disease” and confusing mind with brain — he seems to deplore the growing recognition that the mind is entirely a product of the brain, and that psychology is built on a physical substrate, which leads to what he thinks is a premature reduction of mind to brain. He’s not making an argument from dualism, though; the gist of his complaint is that you can’t deduce thoughts from the structure of the brain, therefore it’s an invalid approach.

That doesn’t make any sense. We also don’t have a consistent, predictable way of deriving the structure of the brain from behavior, but we don’t use that as an excuse to dismiss studying behavior, and it’s not an argument that we need to distinguish mind from brain. We’ll never have a complete description of any brain sufficient to derive thoughts from physiology; so? Time to face the truth and recognize that your mind is entirely produced by chemistry and electrophysiology and molecular biology of the brain, nothing more, and I find no reason to take offense when people are aware that a cup of coffee, the sun shining in your face, or a hug from your children cause biological changes to your brain.

I find the prospects exciting, not annoying. Here’s an example: scientists have created an artificial hippocampal nucleus on a chip. What they did was record the electrical activity from area CA1 of the hippocampus while rats were learning a memory task, and then stuck a device in their brains that played back that sequence into the hippocampus. When they pharmaceutically silenced CA1, which normally inhibits learning, and ran the chip instead, learning was restored. When they used the chip without the CA1 inhibitor, learning was enhanced.

Nobody understands exactly how this works, but there’s no denying that the function of this part of the brain is produced by patterned electrical activity. Incomplete understanding shouldn’t be a barrier to recognizing the reality staring us in our face.

Besides, I’d love to augment my brain with silicon. Although, to be honest, I’d rather test it on my students first — they won’t mind getting a chip implanted to help them learn, right?

Networking is good

I feel a little bit guilty saying this: every time I write about Jonah Lehrer, it seems to be about jumping on his ideas, even though I think he’s a good writer and his other ideas, the ones I don’t carp about, are interesting. The last time was when I criticized his noise about how science is falling, and now he’s gotten on the “The internet is making us stupider” bandwagon. I think it is a silly argument; it’s essentially saying that making the exchange of ideas more free leads to greater ignorance about the diversity of opinions out there.

It’s just not true. I’m an admitted lefty liberal type, but one thing the internet has done is made it possible for me to see what righty rethuglicans are saying, and I do read them…usually so I can point and laugh, but still, I’m more aware of the range of ideas fermenting in American culture than I was 20 years ago.

But I can stop picking on Lehrer now. John Hawks does a fabulous job of dismantling the argument. Letting the arguments bloom does not mean that we’re suddenly blinded!

Very tangentially related, I also recommend this fascinating analysis of the size of social networks. It argues that there are measurable cognitive limits to the size of social groupings primates can recognize, and it’s correlated with brain size. From our cranial capacity and studies of other primates, it’s predicted that we ought to be able to cope with roughly 150 friends at a time, and an analysis of social networks shows that that is actually about right — people on Twitter typically maintain interactive contact with between 100 and 200 people at most, and any more than that is overwhelming.

So I checked my Twitter account, and I see that I’m following precisely…167 people. I feel so average now.

Another reason to dread the airport

On my last flight, I sat next to a woman who had the worst case of fear of flying I’ve ever seen. She spent the entire trip clutching the armrests and breaking into frequent bouts of tears; when I asked if there was anything I could do, she said, no, she knew it was completely irrational, but she just felt extreme terror every time she got in an airplane.

I wonder if she’d pass this new ridiculous test Homeland Security is installing in airports?

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person’s gaze, to judge a subject’s state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

Feeling anxious about the job interview you’re flying to? You will be strip-searched. Angry because the incompetent boob at the ticket counter bumped you from your flight? Your body cavities must be inspected. Steely in your resolve, forthright in your determination to strike the infidel? Welcome aboard!

I predict that, like most of the security theater we go through now, there will be huge numbers of false positives to keep TSA busy, and there will be no real terrorists caught. It’s like the tiger repellent rock from the Simpsons…

Only difference is that this rock is going to cost us at least tens of millions of dollars.

I don’t want any more magic gadgets. I’m just hoping for the day that they come to their senses and let us keep our shoes on.