One of the most troublesome high-tech news stories to linger in the media is the way that high-tech workers are treated in China. Foxconn, who employs a million workers in China building the iPhone and many other consumer electronic devices, has repeatedly come under file for creating working conditions that would be criminal in this country. Among the allegations are hiring children as young as 12 and paying them 70 cents per hour, enforcing 14-16 hour days hours in spartan and often dangerous conditions, and injuring or even crippling workers through non-existent safety practices and then simply firing them without paying for their medical treatment. The conditions are so bad that suicides are not infrequent (a problem that the company addressed by installing nets beneath the taller buildings). In case you haven’t been following the story, there’s good coverage in Business Insider.

Every time a new allegation emerges, iPhone users wag their fingers at Apple and threaten a boycott unless something is done. Apple responds by sending someone to investigate, and they return with stories of frank conversations with management, improving conditions and promises to do better. But the reality is that we, as citizens of the first world, cannot improve the working conditions in other countries, and shouldn’t. In the short run, our interference can only make the conditions worse.

Working conditions in China’s factories today are little different from the conditions during the early Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the U.S. Then, eight year old children routinely worked 14-hour shifts for the equivalent of fifty cents in today’s money, although adult men might do considerably better, making $2.50/day (adjusted).

The conditions were dismal; poor light, unbreathable air, dangerous and heavy equipment with no safety features, and routine exposure to toxic chemicals. If you didn’t want to freeze, you brought in your own lump of coal for the furnace. Beatings and mistreatment were the norm for even the smallest offense, like being a minute late. Workers had absolutely no rights and were immediately fired for any infraction or injury. Unions were illegal and you could be arrested for inciting unrest if you tried to organize. Factories were sometimes fenced with barbed wire to “keep the young imps inside.”

Still, people flocked to the factories and stood in long lines for hours for the chance of employment. Why? Because these jobs, grim as they were, represented their best option. It was better to be a slave than to be a beggar or starve to death.

Child labor had never been a subject of controversy in a world dominated by agricultural and handcraft economies. Children always worked on family farms and boys as young as 10 were apprenticed to their crafts. As a result, improvement came slowly.

In 1833, the controversial Factory Act passed by British Parliament. Under this enlightened law, children 9-13 years of age were only allowed to work 8 hours a day and those 14-18 years of age could not work more than 12 hours. By 1899, about half the states had passed laws regulating child labor, but these were almost never enforced. In 1912, after a 9-year battle, activists in the U.S. forced the government to establish the Children’s Bureau to monitor child labor, but it wasn’t until 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act that the Federal government finally regulated the minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children.

These changes in working conditions could not have come about without the rise of an educated middle class, without the development of modern social and government institutions, and the improvements in the standard of living which were the benefits of industrialization itself. There is no short-circuit. Just as a child needs to grow through those awkward teenage years in order to develop the skills required to take on adult responsibility, a society needs to suffer the growing pains which lead to the development of institutions and an enlightened population.

Our outrage at the labor practices in China (or Nike paying teenagers $2.17/day to make sneakers in Jakarta) only serves to pressure companies to take those jobs elsewhere, removing the engine that was providing the possibility for economic and social growth. Higher salaries only fuel the type of rampant inflation that destroys local economies and breeds crime. For proof, we need look no farther than any modern tourist destination.

Fair trade programs, the darlings of the coffee, chocolate and handcraft industry, have fared poorly as well. While making American consumers feel good about buying foreign products, they have done little to help local farmers and may have even hurt them by creating an addiction to US markets and acting as a disincentive to the modernization and mechanization which could provide real and lasting benefit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know what is best for the whole world. The factory jobs at Foxconn, as dismal as they may seem to us, are far superior to slaving in a rice paddy all day and represent real opportunity for the Chinese people, especially the women. So go ahead and enjoy your iPhone and your other toys. You are providing real economic opportunity to developing countries who, like us, will one day enjoy a standard of living that prices them right out of the global labor market. It just won’t happen overnight.

Elsewhere on the Web

David Pogue, What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found

I recently became concerned that I might have sleep apnea, a sleep disorder characterized by abnormally low breathing or missed breaths during sleep. Although an individual with sleep apnea is often unaware of having difficulty breathing, even after they awaken, the condition can cause the daytime sleepiness and fatigue associated with any type of significant sleep disturbance.

My doctor prescribed an overnight stay in a sleep lab, which is just what you might imagine: you try and get a good night’s sleep in a hospital bed connected by a sheaf of cables to a stack of electronic equipment standing sentinel over you, monitoring your heart rate, blood oxygenation, and a host of other vital signs. In addition to measuring your vitals, this equipment keeps a log so that doctors can review what’s been happening.

This didn’t sound like much fun. Fortunately, the electronics revolution that has turned your cell phone into a computer/camera/navigation/videophone has dramatically reduced the size and cost of medical instruments as well. The monitor shown here fits over the end of your finger, is battery powered, logs up to 40 hours of data, and can be connected to a laptop via USB for data analysis, reporting, and battery recharging. It also sports a fully graphical display and built-in alarms if any of the patient values go too high or too low. But the best feature may be the cost. Instead of costing thousands like their rack-mounted counterparts, even the best of these devices can be had for well under $100.

As an experiment, I ordered one from Hong Kong, slipped it over my finger, and generated pages of data while I slept in my own bed. Next time I see my doctor, I’ll have the data she needs for a meaningful analysis at a fraction of the cost of a sleep study and with zero interruption of my life. Plus the data is more accurate because it reflects my behavior at home, sleeping in my own environment, instead of an institutional lab.

Inexpensive medical equipment like this will recast the very structure of medicine. Big medical institutions in this country aren’t likely to change how they do things right away because of the costs associated with organizational change. But emerging economies, remote settlements, and mobile care providers will be revolutionized. Mobile medical providers and rescue workers can carry one of these devices on a lanyard around their neck, providing valuable data at the point of care. Four of these devices plugged into an inexpensive laptop can turn a tent into a multi-patient ICU.

Perhaps the biggest revolution in health care will happen right in your own home. In the near future, every home medicine chest will contain devices like this, just as they carry thermometers today. When your child has an asthma attack or an allergic reaction to a bee sting, devices like these will provide an accurate, unemotional assessment of the patient’s status, making it easy for the doctor on the other end of the phone (or website) to decide if they need an ambulance, a clinic visit, or a couple of aspirins and a good night’s sleep.

The moment you think you’ve lost your wallet, you get that panicky feeling. All of your cash, your ID, and your credit cards are suddenly gone. Your range of options is dramatically limited. You might be stranded somewhere, unable to get home or into the club where your friends are. You can’t buy food, lodging or transportation. It’s scary, frustrating, maddening, and the clean-up is a mess: you have to contact your bank, your credit card companies, your air travel and other loyalty card providers. You need a new driver’s license and perhaps social security card. What were all of those cards in your wallet? How do you reach all of those providers? Thank god you have your cell phone.

But given the choice between have my wallet or my cell phone stolen, I’d much rather lose the wallet.

My cell phone has all of the email conversations between me and my friends and my clients. There’s also a phone directory of everyone I know, a calendar with my birthday, their birthdays, and everywhere I am planning on being (or have been) for months. It would be easy to impersonate me on the phone, by email, and in all of the online communities in which I participate: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You could ruin my reputation, extort money, and victimize anyone I know.

There’s also confidential client data — presentations and meeting notes, recordings,and photos. All of that is in addition to the thief’s ability to access to my bank, financial institutions, PayPal, investment firm, and Mint.Com.

Cleaning up after having your wallet stolen is a cakewalk compared to the mess you’re in if your phone is compromised. Yet people are way more casual about leaving their phone laying around than their wallet.

Part of the reason for this is that the function of a wallet has remained relatively constant, while the function of a phone has dramatically increased in scope. Even though it’s a now a GPS navigation system, financial terminal, email client, Internet browser, hard drive, camera, media player and social media device, we still call it a “phone.” Our attitude about phones hasn’t kept up with the phone’s increasingly important role.  The truth is, if I had to eliminate one function of my phone, I would do without the part where you talk to people.

Even if you’ve been slow to realize how important your phone is, criminals have not. Antivirus firm McAfee reports that last quarter mobile device malware was up a whopping 46%, while other threats we down overall. The problem is only going to get worse as phone functionality increases. This year near-field communication chips are being added to phones which literally turn them into wallets, meaning you can lose your phone and wallet simultaneously.

Virus attacks on your desktop computer are becoming passe, with most users aware of the threat and using a range of very good free and low-cost AV tools. On your phone, you’ve had fewer options. But that’s changing as phone manufacturers and software developers recognize this threat.

The first line of defense is to use your phone’s built-in password security. Most people don’t turn this feature on because it’s a nuisance to enter a password every time you pick up your phone to use it. Unless your phone is stolen by the NSA, this feature does a great job of protecting information stored in your phone itself, although it does nothing about data or documents stored on your phone’s removable memory card.

To encrypt passwords and other sensitive data that you carry around with you, there are specialized applications like OISafe. Programs like WaveSecure can help you track a missing phone, backup up the data on it, and remote wipe the memory on command.

Those applications are great if you know that your phone has gone missing, but the far greater threat is malware which can steal the data off your phone while you’re using at it. While there hasn’t yet been a wide-reaching virus attach on mobile devices, it’s just a matter of time as tablets and phones replace laptops as people’s primary mobile device. This past year has seen Norton, McAfee, AVG and dozens of smaller companies release smartphone security applications, many of them not very good. (Lookout Mobile Security is a standout, featuring anti-virus, lost phone tracking, remote backup and remote wiping.) Expect to see an arms race on mobile devices play out in a way similar to the way it did on the desktop, only at an accelerated rate. (Hackers and AV companies have, after all, learned a lot from the desktop wars and will be applying it to the battle for mobile security.)

So, you’ve been warned. If you haven’t taken the time to set the lock code on your phone, do it now. And think about installing an anti-virus application and a remote-wipe function. It’s simple to do now, and impossible to do when you realize you really need it.

Every now and then a product comes along that makes me want to sit down with the product manager, buy them a beer and ask “So…What was going through your mind when you made these decisions?” The Galaxy Tab is one such product.

First of all, it’s an awkward size; just a little bit too big to comfortably hold (even in my basketball-palming hands), a little bit too heavy to hold up comfortably, and (here’s the magic) as smooth, featureless and slippery as a slab of polished glass. I can’t believe I haven’t dropped it yet.

In the world of hand-held devices, this one is Helen Keller. It has all the brains you could want, but is completely handicapped in its ability to communicate. There is no USB port, for example. And even though it is running one of the world’s most powerful phone operating systems, is purchased from a cell phone company and is connected to the cellular network, you can’t use it to make phone calls. There is no video output (even my phone has an HDMI connector). And then, just to keep you on your toes, they swapped the positions of the HOME and MENU keys so that they are backwards from every other Android device in the world. Had enough yet? The charging connector is absolutely unique in this world, so you’d better carry the custom cable with you since you will never be able to borrow someone else’s, use one from another of your devices, or buy a replacement at Walgreen’s if you forget it.

I want to love it. I was excited when I read about it, I waited and waited for it, and now I’m the first kid on my block to have one. For the moment, anyway, because I’m not keeping it. I simply can’t figure out what to do with it.

Functionally, it’s the part of the Venn diagram where my phone and my laptop intersect. It doesn’t replace either, and it doesn’t do anything unique. And if you were thinking that it might make a nice “instant on” replacement for a laptop in light duty situations, don’t forget about the single-window user paradigm which makes it very tedious to move information from one application to another (for example, sending an excerpt of a word document in an email.)

No, sadly, the perfect device for me hasn’t been invented yet.

Still, I hear Google is working on this Chrome-based netbook to be released early next year. I’m on the waiting list. [Here we go again...]

[In my previous posting, I discussed the shortcomings of the digital alarm clock and what my goals were for the ideal clock. A link to that posting is at the bottom of this one.]

How the Clock Works — from the Outside.

Our clock has only three interface elements; a big blue display (the time), a smaller yellow display (the alarm time) and a knob. Pressing the knob turns the alarm (and the yellow display) on and off. No yellow numbers, no alarm. Yellow numbers? That’s what time the alarm will go off. It’s that simple.

You change the alarm time by turning the knob. It moves in 15-minute increments, so in a couple of spins (forwards or backwards) you can move through a whole day. I’ve always thought that the little AM/PM light was hard to notice, so we’ve done away with it here. You set the alarm in 24-hour time. which makes it really hard to get it wrong; 7:00 AM reads as “7:00″ while 7:00 PM reads as “19:00.”

That just leaves the noisemaker. Rather than leave it up to the a radio station, which has too many parameters to set (volume and tuning) or may have unreliable programming, I decided to include my own noisemaker. Sure, we could have interfaced to an iPod, but adding another device undermines our assurance that the alarm will go off as planned. Instead, I’ve chosen to play sound files off a micro-SD card. This gives us lots of other capabilities as well, like making the clock chime on the hour, speak the time, or play different alarm tones at different times. Since the reader accommodates a 2Gb card, you can design your own audio “skin” if you like.

Last, but not least, we solved the power problem. With the old mechanical clocks, you lost exactly as much time as the power was out. With digital clocks, even a brief power interruption restarts the clock at 12:00.  Some clocks have a back-up battery in case the power fails, but most do not. The ones that do, require you to replace the battery periodically (which no one ever seems to do).

This clock keeps the correct time even when you pull the plug. For how long? At least a few days and maybe a couple of weeks (there are a lot of factors involved). The displays turn off and the alarm can’t sound when the power is off, but when power is restored, the time is still accurate.

How the Clock Works — from the Inside.

The guts of this machine contains a hard-working and very inexpensive 8-bit PIC microcontroller. (It’s the long rectangular black thing in the picture.) There is also some audio circuitry to play sound files off a micro-SD, an amplifier to drive a speaker, some LED displays, and a power supply to make it all work.

The Logic Board

The PIC microcontroller does all of the heavy lifting, keeping track of the time, managing the two displays, controlling the audio chip, and handling user interaction.

One more component worth mentioning is the carbon aerogel supercapacitor. (It’s the big round thing on the logic board.) This little guy stores up electricity when we’re plugged in. When we’re not, the microcontroller senses the power failure, shuts down everything non-essential and hunkers down for a long winter. It draws just enough power from the ultracapacitor to stay alive and keep track of the time. Supercapacitors are cool because, unlike batteries, they don’t get tired of charging/discharging so they don’t need to be replaced periodically.

Mechanically

I decided to build this clock into a CD storage container. It was about the right size, inexpensive, and I liked the color. In order to give myself a little more flexibility, I put all of the electronics on two boards instead of just one. There is a display board, which holds the digital displays and the knob, and a logic board which holds the microcontroller, audio electronics, and power supply. A 16-pin connector mates the two boards together.

The Display Board

The size of the display board, which is the larger of the two, is primarily determined by the size and placement of the LED displays. By putting the rest of the electronics on another board that mates behind it, I gave myself the option of fitting the whole thing into a smaller box than I could have if it were all on one board (in case I change my mind later).

In our next installment, we’ll talk more about the details of the design and how engineers design something like this.

With everyone at the Consumer Electronics Show drooling over giant flat screen TVs and miniature tablet-shaped supercomputers, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a common consumer device that we STILL haven’t gotten right after a hundred years or so: the alarm clock.

You would think that a device so critical to modern life would be designed better, but in spite of the fact that there are thousands of models to choose from, they pretty much all suck. How often have you gone to bed the night before a critical meeting and been unable to fall asleep because you had no confidence that the alarm was set correctly? My own alarm clock requires at least a dozen cognitive steps to set the alarm with any confidence.

How it should work

You should be able to set your alarm clock in a few seconds. You should be able to tell from across the room if the alarm is set, and for what time. You should be able to set it in the dark, without your glasses. You should never be lying in bed wondering if you accidentally forgot to push some button or bumped the volume control and are going to get up late and look stupid.

So, forty years after the digital watch was rolled out at CES, I decided to design and built the perfect digital alarm clock. Even with all of the advances we’ve made since the 1960s, this has turned out to be a really interesting challenge. It involves assembly language programming, custom fabrication, parts suppliers from all across Asia, and an enterprising low-volume circuit board manufacturer based in Bulgaria. Why all the complexity? Because of the simplicity.

Simple = Complex

Let’s assume you want to fly to Los Angeles. (Don’t take it personally, it’s just an example.) Think about the steps you have to go through to make that happen.

• Determine when you want to go and when you want to return
• Go on various websites to find the right combination of itinerary, cost and airline
• Identify and use the correct payment method
• Manage your seat assignments
• Create appropriate reminders to ensure you arrive at the correct airport at the correct time
• Arrange for transportation to and from the airport

And this doesn’t even include packing luggage and all the personal aspects. This is just getting there and back. Now imagine you wanted to make this completely simple for yourself. What would you do? You’d hire an assistant and say “Steve, book me a flight to Los Angeles.” Very simple for you, but it requires that you interface with a highly complex and sophisticated machine — Steve.

The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designer. This is something I’d always more or less understood, but this project made that completely clear.

In the next posting, I’ll describe the clock itself: how the user experiences it, and the insane complexity behind that apparent simplicity.

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

I’m having some difficulty understanding how retailers think they are going to stay in business.

Case in point: I traveled across Chicago tonight to Best Buy looking for two simple items that they should logically carry. One was a desktop tripod for a cell phone making it easier to take pictures with the built-in camera. The other was a pocket battery booster to give your cellphone extra life in case the battery runs down. Both are simple items, easily found on the Internet. But why not pick them up right now, while I’m thinking about it?

After a 20 minute trip to the store, I spent another 20 minutes with sales people explaining what I was looking for, then following them around while they looked for things and attempted to find other, presumably more senior, personnel. Complete failure. “We could order it for you and have it shipped to the store,” offered one young sales associate. Now if THAT isn’t the worst of both world’s, I don’t know what is.

In all fairness though, the 20 minute trip back from the store wasn’t wasted. While I sat on the train, I ordered the items I needed from two different Internet retailers at prices which, including the shipping, would have produced head-spinning margins for Best Buy.

And don’t think it’s just the folks at Best Buy who are dropping the ball. The week before, I read about a new best-seller book I thought I’d enjoy. I would have just ordered it from Amazon, but in a moment of enlightened self-interest, I thought “why not head down to my local Barnes and Noble and give them the business?”  Here’s why:

Not wanting to wait in line for an assistant, I scoured the shelves and end-caps. Not finding it, I waited in line. “That’s funny,” he told me “I see that we have them on order but they don’t seem to be here.” No estimated due date, no nothing.

I need to update my model of the world. I always thought that if you wanted it NOW or you needed some help with your product selection, you went to your local retailer. If you just wanted the lowest price and the greatest assortment, you ordered from the web.

Every day the web becomes a fiercer and fiercer competitor; the selection is better, the pricing is better, the information about the product is better, and it’s easier to find things.

The only advantages to retail are that you can physically touch the product and you can create an experience around shopping for it. But for the most part, retailers have just stayed the same. They are just standing in the trash compactor as it closes around them.

So today, it would seem, you are better off ordering the things you need off the web. Retailers are just for…uh… See? That’s where I get stuck. Why do we need retailers?

I’ll just come right out and admit it: This gadget seduced me. You could set the retail package on a pedestal in the MoMA and it would blend right in. It is a work of art.

I opened up it up, stuck it in my ear and it just started working. It talked me through the process of pairing with my phone (a process which is ALWAYS a pain in the butt), and that was that; we were instant friends.

The Q1 is completely voice operated, even to turn it off. You can say stuff like “Redial”, “Call back”, “Answer call” or “Ignore call,” even “Check battery.” And, you can pair it with up to 8 devices just by saying “Pair me.” It can even monitor two phones at once and answer which ever one is ringing.

Nice, but how does it perform?

The Q1 actually has 2 microphones, one to monitor the environment and one to listen to you. The signal from the environment is fed into a DSP chip where the noise is digitally subtracted from your speech, giving whoever you are talking to a crisp clear signal devoid of road and wind noise.

One of my most demanding specifications is battery time. In spite of its light weight and small size, the Q1 has a talk time of 4 hours and a standby time of 100 hours. It charges through a standard micro USB connector. When it is time to charge it, you can use the tiny foldaway AC adapter or the USB cable to charge it off your laptop (both are included).

The USB cable has one other function. The Q1 is designed to allow the firmware to be upgraded to accommodate new phones, add features or (heaven forbid) fix bugs.

Sadly, the Q1 makes my Jawbone headset, which I was SO excited about just a couple of months ago, seem obsolete and hard to use. (Ouch!)

I’m giving the Q1 five stars.

QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

• Social Media Examiner, “How QR Codes can Grow your Business”