I completely destroyed two Apple iPhones within six months before I switched to Nokia. There has been no looking back.

My Nokia phones have taken far worse abuse than the Apple products ever did and yet there has been literally no signs of damage. It’s really an unbelievable experience.

When I pull out my N9 people ask me if it is brand new despite the fact that it has been through months of use and abuse all over the world. The following video gives a good demonstration of what I am showing them. It is a very dramatic difference in product quality. Try this with your iPhone:

Even the Motorola Defy, which is marketed as a tough phone, is easily destroyed. I just replaced the screen on one the other day. The upside to the Motorola is that parts are cheap and easily available. I would still prefer that over waiting in line at a retail location with a bunch of sad-faced Apple owners. There’s nothing worse than trying to find a specific retail location when you are on the road and then fighting to get a spot in line. No wonder kids think the 1980s are cool again. If they use iPhones they are literally in a proprietary retail experience of thirty years ago.

So if you want a sophisticated phone that is rugged, the Nokia Lumia 900 or N9 seems to be the clear (pun not intended) winner in the market right now. It’s not only beautiful, but its physical integrity and data availability are superior to the competition.

This isn’t taken well by analysts, of course, who try to come up with reasons why the data is flawed. Consider this example from SlashGear:

…since the Lumia 900 hasn’t been a commercial blockbuster, there are not as many customers to review it, meaning it’s much easier for that phone to get a 5-star average than something as incredibly well-selling as the iPhone 4S.

So when you eat a commercial blockbuster McDonalds McRib (pig tripe, heart, and scalded stomach) sandwich just remember how incredibly well-selling it is versus a top-chef Gary Danko dinner you could have been having instead. The 5-stars that Gary Danko received were much easier to get because far fewer people eat his food than the McRib, right?

A new movie on the issue of water quality is set to appear in theaters tomorrow:

Illuminating the vital role water plays in our lives, exposing the defects in the current system and depicting communities already struggling with its ill-effects, the film features activist Erin Brockovich and such distinguished experts as Peter Gleick, Alex Prud’homme, Jay Famiglietti and Robert Glennon.

This comes just in time to highlight the latest research on nuclear fallout from Japan, which now is being detected on the West Coast of North America as reported in Environmental Science and Technology: Canopy-Forming Kelps as California’s Coastal Dosimeter: 131I from Damaged Japanese Reactor Measured in Macrocystis pyrifera.

Projected paths of the radioactive atmospheric plume emanating from the Fukushima reactors, best described as airborne particles or aerosols for 131I, 137Cs, and 35S, and subsequent atmospheric monitoring showed it coming in contact with the North American continent at California, with greatest exposure in central and southern California. Government monitoring sites in Anaheim (southern California) recorded peak airborne concentrations of 131I at 1.9 pCi m−3

“Greatest exposure” translates to rates 500% higher near Los Angeles than the rest of the coast. For many years now I have been researching methods of using dehumidifiers to source water. The military been developing some amazing technology that can pull water out of the air in the desert, or reclaim water from exhaust pipes in vehicles. Imagine having a drinking fountain in your dashboard. In San Francisco each building, or even each dwelling, would simply produce their own water from absorbing moisture out of the fog, powered by the sun or the wind, as I mentioned in my presentation at last year’s BSidesLV.

It makes a lot of sense to pull moisture from the air when it is such high humidity and there is no shortage of wind power. This move from ground-based systems avoids numerous pollution issues found in piping water from remote reservoirs and it creates higher resilience to attack or disruption. However, it does not help in cases where nuclear fallout or other risks are drifting through the air.

Bitter Seeds is Peled’s third film in a trilogy on globalisation. It explores the risks faced by Indian cotton farmers caught up in a genetically modified seed program by Monsanto. The movie follows a farmer’s daughter as she tries to expose the story of her father’s death.

Farmers unable to get bank loans instead try to borrow illegally but they take on high interest rates. Then they struggle to overcome low yields coupled with expensive seeds that need for even more expensive fertilizer and water. The traditionally stable means of living becomes a financial gamble that the farmers realise they can’t win; they then kill themselves to escape an inevitable loss of pride.

Monsanto’s pesticide is said to be a direct cause of death in hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides.

Part One: Store Wars – When Wal-Mart Comes to Town
Part Two: China Blue

Scientists are perfecting their ability to survey penguins by using high-resolution satellite imagery. The birds now can only hide by flying (underwater)

The satellites are actually providing the first ever species-wide population count of an animal. The space-based species census had good news:

“We are delighted to be able to locate and identify such a large number of emperor penguins,” lead author Peter Fretwell, a geographer for the British Antarctic Survey, said in a press release. “We counted 595,000 birds, which is almost double the previous estimates of 270,000 – 350,000 birds. This is the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space.”

Any guesses what the next target species will be? The secret sauce to the surveillance seems to be linked to waste analysis.

Although finding a great splurge of penguin poo on the ice is a fairly straightforward – if laborious – process, counting individual birds in a group huddle is not, even in the highest resolution satellite pictures.

This means the team therefore had to calibrate their analysis of the colonies by using ground counts and aerial photography at some select sites.

The Guardian in 2009 showed penguin guano from space

Few probably realise that waste is one of the primary ways to find and monitor them (e.g. tracking is all about impact). I’ve written before about the security implications of innovative recycling and avoiding centralised sewer systems. Analysis of waste, especially water quality, tells us a lot about behaviour to predict risks. In this case the scientists are trying to predict how climate change affects the penguins but the methodology could easily be flipped around.