Tropical storm Irene and The Connecticut River

This was my first week back from vacation and it was a busy one both inside and outside the office. Tropical Storm Irene came through last weekend and the flooding after really did some terrible damage and continues to impact people's lives from North Carolina to Maine..

Much of the rain that fell north of us from Irene eventually ended up flowing down the Connecticut River that separates Vermont and New Hampshire and splits Massachusetts and Connecticut. I drive by the Holyoke Dam every day going to and returning from work and took a few minutes to shoot some video on August 30, the day the river crested. I have never seen the river this high and this powerful. This was shot on the bridge connecting Holyoke and South Hadley Falls.



I could not believe the debris along with the color of the water.

Telephone Set Function 2. To provide the telephone company with the number the caller wishes to call - Part 2

In my last legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) post I covered pulse or rotary dial service.  Let's look at dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) dialing service in this post.

The most commonly used method for inputting a number in the US and Europe is now the dual-tone-multifrequency (DTMF) signaling method. DTMF telephones are also commonly known as Touchtone telephones. These phones also use numerical keypads but offer an even faster way to signal the number to call by sending tones on the telephone line. The DTMF phone uses a 12-button keypad. When a button is pressed on the keypad an electric contact is closed and two oscillators generate two tones at specific frequencies. 

Telephone DTMF Keypad

These tones combine to form one sound to the listener, just like when two different musical notes on an instrument are played at exactly the same time. The combined tones are a signal for the button that was pressed on the keypad. The frequencies used are illustrated in the keypad diagram. For example, notice when the number 8 is pressed the frequencies 852 Hz and 1336 Hz are combined to form the number 8 tone. 

For the central office to accept tones from a caller, the tones must be at least 50 milliseconds long and also be separated by  a 50 millisecond pause. DTMF phones offer much more rapid dialing of numbers than rotary pulse methods with the average phone number taking 10 to 15 times less time to dial using a Touchtone phone. Not only are Touchtone phones faster, they are also more reliable because they do not depend on as many moving parts as a rotary phone.

In my next legacy PSTN post, I'll describe how a telephone is made to ring.

Community Colleges - The Jobless Solution

The August 24, 2011 issue of Business Week has an upsetting article titled The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man. Here's some details from the piece: 

The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009.

These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. 

Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. 

In 1969 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

Median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, putting them back at their earnings capacity of the 1950s.

Both men and women have confronted job losses in the weak economy. In July, 68.9 percent of women aged 25-54 had jobs, vs. 72.8 percent in January 2008. 

Unemployed men are now more likely than women to be among the long-term jobless. 

The piece goes on to discuss how women (who currently account for 57% of jobs in the U.S.) have made up the majority of college students over the past 30 years and fit better into our data-driven economy. However, women continue to earn about 16 percent less than men and struggle against gender discrimination and career interruptions. 

All this going on while, at the same time, we've got companies struggling to hire workers with the right skills.     

President Obama will layout a new jobs plan shortly after Labor Day and community colleges must be a major part of the solution. They are the perfect place for long-term jobless women and men to go and get the education and training needed for stable and well-paying careers. 

If you are out of work and feel you have no prospects well..... you are 100% wrong. There is a ton of opportunity at your local community college. The fall semester has either just started or is starting soon. There is time right now to get yourself on track. The American Association of Community Colleges has a great interactive community college finder on their website - click here to link. 

Study: iPhones, Backups and Toilets

Retrevo.com's got an interesting new Gadgetology study titled iPhones, Backups and Toilets, What's the Connection?  

The study focuses on cell phone security and who is the most unprepared. Here's some highlights:

• 39% of Android owners haven't done anything to prevent someone from misusing data on their cell phone if it were lost or stolen (compared to 30% of BlackBerry owners and 26% of iPhone owners).
• Only 32% of Android owners think their cell phones can get malware and 27% don't know.
• 36% of iPhone owners think their cell phone can get malware and 30% don't know.
• If they lost their cell phone today, only 18% of Android owners would use a recovery service to get their cell phone. back, compared to 28% of BlackBerry owners and 37% of iPhone owners. 39% of Android owners don't know how they would get their cell phones back, compared with 31% of BlackBerry owners and 26% of iPhone owners.
• BlackBerry (62%) and iPhone (61%) owners are the most likely to have password protection on their cell phone, compared to Android owners (only 49%).

Retrevo also asked: Have any of the following ever happened to you or someone you know?

• 36% of people said they had, or knew someone who has "Dropped a cell phone in a toilet".
• 31% of people said they had, or knew someone who has "Had a cell phone fall in a pool, lake or other body of water".
• 44% of people said they had, or knew someone who has "Dropped a cell phone on the floor and had it break".
• 30% of people said they had, or knew someone who has "Spilled coffee or other liquid on a cell phone".

Telephone Set Function 2. To provide the telephone company with the number the caller wishes to call - Part 1

In this post I continue legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) technology coverage.

There are two methods currently used to provide numbers to the telephone company, pulse or rotary dial service and dual tone multi frequency dialing. Let's look at pulse or rotary dial service in this post.

In the past, when a handset was lifted, the caller did not hear dialtone, the caller heard an operator asking for the number the caller wanted to dial. As the number of telephones grew, telephone companies projected that hundreds of thousands of new operators would be needed so rotary dials were added to telephones.

Rotary dials were invented to eliminate operators and use dial pulsing to automate the switching required to get from a caller to a receiver. The rotary dial generates pulses on the local loop by opening and closing an electrical switch when the dial is rotated and released. Each pulse opens the loop and interrupts the local loop current flow of 20 - 120mA resulting in a series of current pulses on the local loop. This process is referred to as out-pulsing and pulses are generated at a rate of ten pulses per second. Each pulse is actually an interruption in current flow on the loop and is .05s with a .05s pause between pulses. Each number on the dial corresponds to the number of pulses produced for that number. For example, dialing the number 4 produces four pulses as indicated in the figure below  and takes a total of .4 seconds (8 x ,05 seconds = ,4 seconds). As you can see, rotary dialers are slow when compared to modern telephones today.

Telephone Rotary Dial Timing Diagram of the Number “4”

Example

How long does it take to dial the single number "9" on a mechanical rotary phone?

Solution

Dialing the number "9" produces: 

.05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause, .05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause, .05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause, 05s pulse, .05s pause

.05 seconds x 18 = .9 seconds

As telephone manufacturing technology developed the rotary dials were replaced on many phones with a push-button keypad. These keypads use an electronic circuit to generate the pulses, not a mechanical rotary dial. Since people can punch numbers very rapidly and pulse signals still must be .05s long and be separated by .05s pauses, this type of dial is equipped with a buffer that stores numbers as they are keyed. The buffer then out-pulses the numbers with the proper timing intervals. You may also have noticed a telephone "digital" keypad number sequence is opposite that of a calculator. This was done purposely to slow people down when dialing on pulse generators.

Pulse generation phones still work on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). It's amazing the telephone companies still support these now almost obsolete phones! In my next telephone technology post I'll cover dual tone multi frequency dialing.

Verizon Strike To End On Tuesday

It looks like the strike will be over Tuesday, at least for now. The Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have agreed to go back while they continue negotiations. Here's a quote from the Pittsburg Business Times published at 6:24 PM today.

"We have reached agreement with Verizon on how bargaining will proceed and how it will be restructured," said a joint statement released Saturday afternoon by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers . "The major issues remain to be discussed, but overall, issues now are focused and narrowed."

The two unions and the company will continue to negotiate the sticky points as listed by William Huber, president of IBEW Local 827 in New Jersey:

• Verizon wants to tie pay increases to performance review.
• Verizon wants the union workers to contribute to health-plan premiums.
• Verizon wants to freeze pensions at the end of this year.
• Verizon wants to eliminate the sickness and death program
• Verizon wants to cut the sickness disability benefits from 52 to 26 weeks.

45,000 workers will return to work under the contract that expired on August 6. At this time, there is no specific deadline for a new contract.

Verizon Strike Goes On

The strike continues. Here's some interesting details pulled from a Steven Greenhouse New York Times piece published on August 14:

• Verizon says its unionized workers average $70,000 a year before overtime and $91,000 with overtime. But union officials say only a small percentage of workers earn that much with overtime, an amount they say would require hundreds of hours of it. 
• Company officials note that the average U.S. worker earns $23 an hour, translating to $48,000 a year for a full-time worker. 
• Union officials say Verizon's proposed health insurance changes would cost some workers $6,800 more each year, and its overall proposals would cost workers $20,000 on average each year.
• In addition to the health insurance changes, Verizon has called for a pension freeze, reduction of sick days and elimination of all job security provisions -- a proposal workers fear will lead to far more layoffs and outsourcing, especially of call center workers.

Doug Anderson, a Verizon technician for 15 years is quoted in the piece:

"What we make is just a living wage in the New York area. On what I earn, my family can't even afford to live where I work -- Westchester County (NY). And on what we earn, it's hard to send a child through college."

The estimated median household income for Westchester County, New York in 2009 was $77,189 and the mean price for a detached house was $776,277.