Political pollsters are having a difficult time receiving responses from residents due to diminishing landline phone use and increasing cell phone use.

Brian F. Schaffner, an associate professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, and Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found in a recent study that “one in five households rely solely on cell phones.”

Schaffner estimates that between 35 and 40 percent of call recipients are difficult to reach.

The traditional methods of conducting political polls and surveys to the public needs modification to keep up with the population’s changing habits, say the two researchers. Responses from residents are more difficult to receive since the shift from family home phone usage is increasingly moving toward mobilized individual cell phones. Before the age of cell phones, residents could typically be reliably reached on their home phones. Now that people generally have multiple phone lines, it is more difficult to get an accurate unbiased sample from a population.

“People with land lines tend to be older, they are more likely to have families and children, and they tend to move around less. And because of these characteristics, they also tend to be more Republican than people with only cell phones,” Schaffner said. This produces results with Republican bias and excludes those younger, more Democratic residents.

According to Schaffner, Survey USA and Rasmussen Reports are both large opinion research organizations that don’t include cell phones in their contacts.         

The prominent survey-conducting firm www.surveyusa.com states on its website that “no other public opinion pollster has the breadth and depth of Survey USA.” The organization has completed some 24,000 research projects and interviewed 36 million Americans.

SurveyUSA ensures viewers that “the probable residential phone numbers that SSI sells to SurveyUSA are just that: phone numbers. They do not come with names, addresses, skin color, income, education, or any other characteristics. We don’t know anything about you before we start asking questions.” While the phone numbers themselves are unbiased and completely random, they are not an accurate representation of the population as a whole, since these numbers are solely based on residents that have land-line numbers, according to the two researchers.

The solution to ensuring that political polls are accurate seems to be elusive. Schaffner notes that pollsters have tried calling both land-line and cell phones, but that method turns out to be very costly and still proves shoddy at retrieving responses. He also says pollsters try to utilize Internet surveys, but they aren’t always effective, considering some do not have access to computers.

Because there is no feasible solution, Schaffenr said “pollsters do work to try to adjust those samples after the fact to make them look more representative.”

On adjusting the data he explains, “The techniques require some expertise in statistics, but the basic notion is that if you have fewer of some group [younger demographics] in your sample than you should have, you weight the data so that each young person who is in your sample counts more to make up for the shortfall.”

Nancy Pierce can be reached at npierce@student.umass.edu.

MCT

A lot of those movies used radiation as a plot device to explain why an iguana, or a tarantula or whatever else was on sale in the pet store closest to the studio had grown to enormous size and was now threatening a small town with no minority residents.

As a result of those movies, I think, more than any actual scientific research, the public has developed an unhealthy fear of radiation. Well, my newly grown second head and I are in complete agreement: the threat of radiation is greatly exaggerated, especially when it comes to cellular phones.

Last year, the City of San Francisco passed an ordinance decreeing that all electronics stores post information on the amount of radiation emitted by cell phones.

Unfortunately for the nanny-statists in ‘Frisco, the World Health Organization has said “Current exposure to RF [radiofrequency] fields, such as those emitted by mobile phones and their base stations, is unlikely to induce or promote cancers.”

Cell phones can still be dangerous when you’re driving and holding the thing to your head and Apple products can explode with alarming regularity. But your phone’s radiation isn’t going to give you cancer.

The important thing to know about radiation is its penetrating power, which is tied to its frequency and wavelength. High frequency, short wavelength radiation penetrates the human body more easily than low frequency, long wavelength radiation.

To explain this next bit, I’d like to turn it over to my friend, a sock puppet with cardboard electron orbitals so he looks like Ernest Rutherford’s “solar system” model of the nucleus, Adam the Atom.

Adam: Hello, kiddies! Before I start I just want to make clear that I am in no way similar to any other character who may have been named with the same pun in mind.

Me: There’s no need to be patronizing, Adam, just tell the liberal arts majors the difference between radioactivity and radiation.

Adam: Sure thing! Radioactivity is when an atom like me disintegrates, releasing energy in one of three forms: an alpha particle, which is two protons bound up with neutrons – otherwise known as a helium nucleus, a beta particle, which is just an electron, and gamma rays, which are high energy electromagnetic particles. When a substance decays like that, it’s considered radioactive. Yay!

Me: And those three things are radiation?

Adam: Sure! But radiation isn’t just those three; any form of energy that’s emitted can be considered radiation. Light, heat, microwaves, X-rays – all of them are forms of radiation. The big difference is in how much energy the radiation has. If it has enough energy to knock an electron off an atom, it’s called ionizing radiation.

Me: Thank you, Adam.

Ionizing radiation gets the most attention because it is the most dangerous – it’s high energy, high frequency and short wavelength, so it can penetrate deep into the body and increase the risk of cancer by interfering with DNA.
However, even then, there are so many trillions of atoms in the body and atoms are mostly empty space that the real determining factor is the dose level. The people at Fukushima who keep going back in there to try to bring it under control are giving up their lives for Japan; the guy in Seattle who doesn’t want to eat fish probably doesn’t have a thing to worry about; the Pacific Ocean is pretty big, I’m told.

Cell phones use microwaves for communication. Microwaves have wavelengths between one meter and one millimeter – longer than visible light and much longer than those of “hard” forms of radiation, like gamma rays. Microwaves have been used for various consumer purposes for decades now, especially the ovens, although broadcast television used microwaves and satellite TV still does.

It may be that, as the first mobile-intensive generation we’ll get cancer from cell phones when we are in our 80s, but right now the evidence suggests otherwise. So just remember to stay clear of the gamma rays, recycle old phones properly and watch out for iExplosions.

Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at mrobare@student.umass.edu.

If there is one thing in the tech world that is cyclical, it is big cell phones.

Since the introduction of the HTC Advantage and Apple iPhone in 2007, with five and 3.5-inch diagonal screens, respectively, the screen size has been growing almost every year. Currently, the latest generation of iPhone offers 4.7 or 5.5-inch displays, while the Google Nexus 6 offers a 5.96-inch screen. These larger phones, which supposedly combine portability and functionality of a smartphone with the large-screen and quality of a tablet, have been dubbed “phablets.”

But why are phablets becoming so popular? Itproportal.com notes that even when the market growth rate for tablets and smartphones have slowed down – approximately 26 million phablets shipped in 2012 – nearly 60 million shipped in 2013,and 146 million are expected to ship out by the end of next year. There seem to be several reasons beyond consumer demand, including manufacturing necessity like screen efficiency and battery life, and plain and simple economics.

With the introduction of smartphones, consumers have grown accustomed to the technology for quite some time now. Multimedia quality has therefore become an increasingly important factor in purchasing decisions.

For instance, droid-life.com polled over 9,000 people and found 65 percent consider multimedia an important part of a buying decision, while 25 percent make buying decisions based solely on a phone’s camera capabilities.

Men are also a possible driving force behind the demand for larger phones, as Androids have almost always been larger than their iPhone counterpart. Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 31 percent of men use Androids versus 24 percent who use iPhones.
Women use Androids and iPhones equally at 26 percent. Overall, the consumer demands for an improved multimedia experience with better display functions, higher-powered cameras and extended battery life in turn necessitated that phones become larger.

There are also theories in manufacturing involving heat dissipation that impact a phone’s size. Smartphones need to be larger in order to dissipate heat that their internal parts generate, so more stuff going on inside necessitates a larger phone. For instance, high-density screens generate more heat and draw more power because of the need for backlighting, but with a larger surface area, heat can be dispersed more evenly. This allows for extended battery life and will not burn a user’s hand.

The market growth for tablets and smartphones has slowed, but the market for phablets is virtually untouched. Companies are looking into new products to develop and sell, and hybrid devices that are the best of both worlds are perfect in a price-conscious market. Consumers do not want to purchase two separate devices that do virtually the same thing, especially in developing countries where people have even less disposable income.
Even though a larger phone makes phone calls all the more awkward, it doesn’t really matter because phone calls are such a small part of what people use their mobile phones for now.

The question that arises from the phablet trend is whether or not it is just a trend. Trends tend to come and go, lasting only a short while, but the market is only expanding for phablets. And yet, if you read reviews on phablets, people are cautious. The phones have been mocked for their size and how it requires two hands and how it will look trying to use or carry such a large device. The consumer call for varied screen size is loud, and companies like Apple have responded by offering two different versions of the iPhone 6 along with the iPad mini. Only time will tell if phablets are a lasting product.

Emma Sandler can be reached at ehsandle@umass.edu.

Erica Lowenkron/Collegian

Every yoga class ends with Savasana, where bodies that were moving endlessly and contorting into impossible positions for the past hour finally come to rest quietly on their backs with eyes closed. This position, also called “corpse pose,” is as difficult as it is blissful. It is one that requires mindfulness and intention, qualities that are more elusive in our world than headstands or Chakra Bandhasanas (seriously, Google this one). In our society, it’s easier to push oneself into a posture than it is to detach from the constant stream of stimuli that runs through modern life.

At the bus stop, before class begins, in the dining hall and everywhere in between, people sit on their phones and laptops, mesmerized by screens and temporary pleasures. Though “social” in name, people tend to engage with these medias by isolating themselves from their surroundings. I never feel lonelier than when I look around and confront the reality that people would rather look at memes than have a conversation. Technology has changed our lives irrevocably, without our approval or even acknowledgment.

What are we looking for on social media? Companionship? Comfort? Love? We’ll never find it there; it does not and cannot exist in that realm. Of course, the internet connects us with long distance friends and offers a glimpse into the lives of those with whom we were once close, but at what cost? We trade our present life for nostalgia, pause to take pictures and miss the moment and sacrifice authentic joy for the appearance of it. We have incorporated Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat unthinkingly into our lives, and they have, for better or for worse, transformed us.

The popular television series “Black Mirror” touches upon the dystopian possibilities of our addiction to technology, and its predictions are often uncomfortably plausible. Perhaps ironic in its medium, the show is an anthology of episodes, each representing some future point based on the current trajectories of the ways in which humans and technology interact. One of the most disturbing episodes incorporates bystanders who document rather than intervene in stopping a terrible crime. The people of this dystopian future look a lot like the people of our present, and we need to critically engage with the ways in which technology seduces us into inaction.

Yoga isn’t the only way to practice mindfulness, and it’s not for everyone. We can all lead more intentional lives by examining our practices and spending time with ourselves. It’s important to assess the technology that we incorporate into our routines in order to evaluate what levels bring about the highest contentment. In a world where oranges are peeled and then sold in plastic wrap, we are obligated to determine whether what we call advancement is really moving us toward a brighter future.

By all means, use phones and social media as much as you’d like, but make sure it’s a real choice. Only when we intentionally come to know ourselves can we determine what is in our best interest.

Laura Handly is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at lhandly@umass.edu.