Rylan's Blogthing
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Racing Under a Watchful Eye That’s Thousands of Miles Away
LOOKING FOR TROUBLE Watching data flow at McLaren headquarters in England.
By STEPHEN WILLIAMS
Published: June 24, 2010
STUDYING the stream of numbers flashing across his computer screen, Mark Williams checked the vital signs of Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren MP4-25 racecar as it attacked a corner at the Australian Grand Prix in March. Hamilton pushed hard at the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne, working his way up to a sixth-place finish after starting 11th.
Related
Streaming the Data to Fans’ Homes (June 27, 2010)
Lewis Hamilton, left, and Jenson Button, right, McLaren’s team drivers, in Bahrain with Hiroshi Imai, a tire engineer.
Monitoring telemetry in the Williams team garage.
But the shriek of the Mercedes V-8 engine in Hamilton’s racecar never distracted Mr. Williams from his task as head of race engineering for the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula One team. On the lookout for abnormal readings — high brake wear, an engine malfunction, excessive fuel consumption — Mr. Williams worked at a desk in the operations room of the team’s home base in Woking, an upscale commuter town about an hour’s drive southwest of London — and 9,000 miles from where the race was taking place in Australia.
That’s racecar telemetry at work in 2010, and it will be in place this weekend as well for the European Grand Prix in Valencia, Spain. Hamilton goes into the race leading the driver championship points, and his team is atop the standings in the constructors’ championship.
Gathering on-track data from electronic sensors to develop the best race-day set-up and strategy is nothing new in Formula One; such remote reporting has been standard practice for years, with multiple channels of radio signals flowing from the car to computers and recording devices at the racetrack, either in the pits or the team’s garage.
Compiling the flood of information electronically is, after all, the most effective way a team’s two drivers, supported by a staff of engineers, technicians and mechanics, can hope to analyze the car’s performance and improve in this series.
In the last two years, remote has come to mean really remote, as most Formula One teams have taken advantage of high-speed information technologies. As a result, the transfer of data between the car — which may have as many as 200 sensors “measuring anything and everything that moves or gets warm,” Mr. Williams said — and the engineers has migrated from trackside to the teams’ headquarters.
“Most teams are using this system, because it saves you shipping lots of people around the world,” Mr. Williams said in a telephone interview. “We’re only allowed to take 45 mechanics and engineers to each race.
“With this limitation you have to make better use of the transmissions back to the factory,” he said. “You do need a certain number of people at the track, but I can see us doing a lot more from here as time passes.”
The data monitoring room in Woking can seat up to 13 engineers before an array of 26 monitor screens. In addition to the data link, each pod has voice communications directly to the circuits. Fiber optic pipelines for the data transmissions are established a week before the race weekend by Vodafone, McLaren’s telecommunications partner and a team sponsor.
The AT&T Williams team, a nine-time constructors’ world champion that has struggled in 2010, follows a similar course, using the services of its sponsor to send information back to the team’s headquarters in Grove, England.
The level of competition in Formula One makes it vital for all the teams to relay data as quickly as possible, especially during practice and qualifying sessions. For instance, in Barcelona for the Spanish Grand Prix in May, the team tried new dampers on the cars on Friday; by that night the engineers in England were doing deep analysis of the practice laps.
“If we didn’t have the data linkage, we would have had to wait until the data was brought back to the factory,” said Alex Burns, the team’s chief executive. Then he added: “After the race.”
During that race weekend, Mr. Burns said, about 27 gigabytes of data was collected, some of which was transferred to computers in the garage at the track. The raw data forwarded to England can be analyzed by the team’s supercomputer, making the factory’s involvement crucial.
“Information that took 40 minutes to transfer previously was reduced to eight minutes, and now it’s three minutes,” Mr. Burns said.
Do the teams sometimes miss signs of trouble in the data?
“Yes, that often happens,” said Mr. Williams of McLaren. “Sometimes things don’t go right and you don’t make the right calls. You have to make really fast calls, and you’re not always going to get it right.”
Everything did click, though, at the Abu Dhabi race in 2009, where the team found a brake problem in one of the cars and told the driver to brake less and earlier, averting a problem.
“So the last thing we want midrace is for all the screens to go black,” Mr. Williams said. “Fingers crossed it never will.”
Mr. Burns echoed the sentiment, saying: “What we’re doing is complex, and it hasn’t let us down. But there’s still a massive human factor at work.”
While telemetry systems work in only one direction — operational changes cannot be made to the car remotely during a race — drivers can make a reasonable degree of changes themselves. “It is the driver who’s feeling the grip and the balance and knows the conditions, so you have to present him with the information and rely on him to make the calls,” Mr. Williams said.
SAN FRANCISCO – In a tongue-in-cheek call for immigration reform, farm workers are teaming up with comedian Stephen Colbert to challenge unemployed Americans: Come on, take our jobs.
Farm workers are tired of being blamed by politicians and anti-immigrant activists for taking work that should go to Americans and dragging down the economy, said Arturo Rodriguez, the president of the United Farm Workers of America.
So the group is encouraging the unemployed — and any Washington pundits or anti-immigrant activists who want to join them — to apply for the some of thousands of agricultural jobs being posted with state agencies as harvest season begins.
All applicants need to do is fill out an online form under the banner "I want to be a farm worker" at http://www.takeourjobs.org, and experienced field hands will train them and connect them to farms.
According to the Labor Department, three out of four farm workers were born abroad, and more than half are illegal immigrants.
Proponents of tougher immigration laws have argued that farmers have become used to cheap labor and don't want to raise wages enough to draw in other workers.
Those who have done the job have some words of advice for applicants: First, dress appropriately.
During summer, when the harvest of fruits and vegetables is in full swing in California's Central Valley, temperatures hover in the triple digits. Heat exhaustion is one of the reasons farm labor consistently makes the Bureau of Labor Statistics' top ten list of the nation's most dangerous jobs.
Second, expect long days. Growers have a small window to pick fruit before it is overripe.
And don't count on a big paycheck. Farm workers are excluded from federal overtime provisions, and small farms don't even have to pay the minimum wage. Fifteen states don't require farm labor to be covered by workers compensation laws.
Any takers?
"The reality is farmworkers who are here today aren't taking any American jobs away. They work in often unbearable situations," Rodriguez said. "I don't think there will be many takers, but the offer is being made. Let's see what happens."
To highlight how unlikely the prospect of Americans lining up to pick strawberries or grapes, Comedy Central's "Colbert Report" plans to feature the "Take Our Jobs" campaign on July 8.
The campaign is being played for jokes, but the need to secure the right to work for immigrants who are here is serious business, said Michael Rubio, supervisor in Kern County, one of the biggest ag producing counties in the nation.
"Our county, our economy, rely heavily on the work of immigrant and unauthorized workers," he said. "I would encourage all our national leaders to come visit Kern County and to spend one day, or even half a day, in the shoes of these farm workers."
Hopefully, the message will go down easier with some laughs, said Manuel Cunha, president of the California grower association Nisei Farmers League, who was not a part of the campaign.
"If you don't add some humor to this, it's enough to get you drinking, and I don't mean Pepsi," Cunha said, dismissing the idea that Americans would take up the farm workers' offer.
California's agriculture industry launched a similar campaign in 1998, hoping to recruit welfare recipients and unemployed workers to work on farms, he said. Three people showed up.
"Give us a legal, qualified work force. Right now, farmers don't know from day to day if they're going to get hammered by ICE," he said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "What happens to my labor pool?"
His organization supports AgJobs, a bill currently in the Senate which would allow those who have worked in U.S. agriculture for at least 150 days in the previous two years to get legal status.
The bill has been proposed in various forms since the late 1990s, with backing from the United Farm Workers of America and other farming groups, but has never passed.
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On the Net:
I received a phone call today from PC Magazine. They were running a story on the new Apple iPhone 4, specifically the reports (PC Mag, Gizmodo, Engadget) that people are experiencing decreased reception on their cell phone when they hold the phone by the metal frame. That frame has been touted by Apple, in the keynote address by Jobs, as being part of the antenna system. Here is a brief summary of what I told the reporter who called me, and a little extra. (I will update this with his name when he emails me.)
I saw the photo of the frame of the iPhone in the slideshow at the end of Steve Job's keynote address at the Developer's Conference. There are three gaps in the stainless steel band which are allegedly part of the antenna system. I have not had alot of time to analyze their structure, nor do I have one in my hands yet. So, either it is public relations hokum, or those slots are really part of the antenna structure. They do appear to be active, based on observations.
In the first generation iPhone (which I am currently using), the antennas were on the back of the phone, near the bottom. There was a piece of plastic on the bottom covering the antennas, so you knew where they were. I developed a way to hold the phone which avoided covering this area with my hand, similar to the Gizmodo article linked above. It is worth stepping back a moment and asking the question, "Why are the antennas placed where my hand is MOST likely to cover it?" It's a fair question.
The FCC puts strict limits on the amount of energy from a handheld device that may be absorbed by the body. We call this Specific Absorbtion Rate, or SAR. In the olden days, when I walked ten miles to school in three feet of snow, uphill in both directions, cell phones had pull-up antennas. This allowed the designer to use a half-wave antenna variant, and put the point of maximum radiation somewhat away from the users cranium. Of course, most people did not think it was necessary and kept the antenna stowed. Motorola's flip phone acutally had a second helical antenna that was switched into place when this was the case. But, more importantly, SAR rules were not yet in effect.
Flip phones became yesterday's style, and phones were becoming more monolithic. Some phones, like the early Treo, kept the antenna in the traditional location at the top of the phone, near one edge, but reduced it to a short stub. Whips became stubs, stubs became bumps, and finally antennas were embedded into the rectangular volume of the phone. The trouble was SAR; if you left the antenna at the top, the user was now pressing it into their head, insuring lots of tissue heating. Enter the bottom-located cellphone antenna.
Just about every cell phone in current production has the antenna located at the bottom. This insures that the radiating portion of the antenna is furthest from the head. Apple was not the first to locate the antenna on the bottom, and certainly won't be the last. The problem is that humans have their hands below their ears, so the most natural position for the hand is covering the antenna. This can't be a good design decision, can it? How can we be stuck with this conundrum? It's the FCC's fault.
You see, when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But, the hand is not!! And the FCC's tests are not the only tests that must be passed by a candidate product. AT&T has their own requirements for devices put on their network, and antenna efficiency is one of them. I know because I have designed quad-band GSM antennas for the AT&T network. The AT&T test similarly does not require the hand to be on the phone.
So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!
OK, back to the iPhone 4. The antenna structure for the cell phone is still down at the bottom (I won't address the WiFi nor GPS antennas in this blog entry). The iPhone 4 has two symmetrical slots in the stainless frame. If you short these slots, or cover them with your hand, the antenna performance will suffer (see this video I found on YouTube). There is no way around this, it's a design compromise that is forced by the requirements of the FCC, AT&T, Apple's marketing department and Apple's industrial designers, to name a few.
One of the questions the intrepid reporter from PC Magazine asked me was, "Will putting the phone in a pocket and using a Bluetooth device help?" Good question. The answer is yes, to a point. The first generation iPhone clearly had a conductive surface below the antenna (I hesitate to call it a ground plane, because it it too small). So, putting it in your pocket with the screen toward your body and the antennas facing out while using your Bluetooth earpiece will work better than holding the phone with your hand. In fact, in my car my iPhone sits forward on the dashboard, under the winshield, screen down while I use my Jawbone. Works great. (However, if you put your iPhone in your left back pocket, and your earpiece in your right ear, you may have issues. This is a failing of the Bluetooth system in dealing with severe body losses at 2.4GHz, not the cellphone's problem.)
The iPhone 4, however, moved the antenna action from the back of the phone to the sides. This probably improves the isotropy of the radiation pattern, but only when the phone is suspended magically in air. Not too helpful. Putting this iPhone 4 in your pocket will likely couple more energy into your body (you bag of salt water, you) than did the first generation model. Yep, I predict it will be worse.
So, what's an iPhone lover to do? Well, I voted with my dollars. I ordered my iPhone 4 to replace my Original. I already know how to do the Vulcan Antenna Grip on the iPhone, and I am wearing out my current model.
And sometimes an antenna that's not great, but good enough, is good enough.
