Listening 5-1 (track 20)

Now, I know that many of you are going travelling during the long summer vacation
and I’m sure that one
thing you’ll certainly take with you is your smart phone, whatever type you happen to
have. Now, losing your
phone is a horrible feeling at any time, but when it’s your main link to your life back
home, it can be really
upsetting. What’s more, we generally keep a lot of sensitive information on our
phones – so if they fall into
the wrong hands, it can lead to all sorts of problems. So what should you be doing to
protect your phone?
According to recent research, an incredible 70 per cent of people never bother to lock
the screen with a
passcode – so this is the first thing you should do and it’s really easy. Less of a
surprise is the finding that if
someone comes across a lost phone, they’re highly likely to go through it looking for
personal information
to identify the owner, even if they don’t have criminal intent.

What’s more, leaving an unlocked phone somewhere silly opens up your personal life
to whoever wants to take a look, even if you don’t actually lose it. It’s bad enough
allowing easy access to emails, notes, contact lists and personal photos – but when it
comes to shopping apps, it’s really foolish to stay logged in on your handset – you
really shouldn’t do that, no matter how secure the site claims to be. Have a browse
through your apps later and take a moment to consider the impact of a dishonest
person getting hold of all that information.

So what if you do lose your phone? When you first realise it’s not in your pocket, do
check that you haven’t just dropped it, like under the seat in a car or whatever.
Missing phones can also be located by sending what’s called a ‘scream’ instruction to
your device, so that it makes a loud noise wherever it is. This might help if you’ve
simply forgotten where you put it in your room – less so in the case of theft or if
you’ve left it behind on a bus. But if you still can’t find it, there are apps available to
help you locate a missing phone via GPS – just search the relevant app store for
something like ‘find my phone’. But whichever option you go for, make sure you
enable the app and register before you leave home.

Some of these apps also have a lock and complete datawipe feature for use in the
worst-case scenario where you don’t get your phone back. Although you have to pay
extra for this, it’s probably worth it to give you peace of mind – even though you’ll
probably never use it. But, of course, it goes without saying that you need to have
your data backed up somewhere else if you go for this option.
Passcodes, however, can be a pain. People have been known to forget them,
especially new ones, or need to keep a written record of them somewhere for fear of
forgetting them, which also compromises the security of the phone. But more
significantly, not every lost phone falls into criminal hands. And if you’ve sensibly
locked yours with a passcode, how is the kind person who comes across it by chance,
and wants to return it to you, able to do that? One great solution is to stick on a tag
from a global lostand-found service that uses QR code stickers to mark an item. This
allows anyone finding your phone to log on to a website and arrange how to get it
back to you. When you register a tagged item, you provide contact details and can
even offer a reward if you like, using a credit card or PayPal account to fund it.
Finders and losers are linked up anonymously so they can organise the return of the
item.

Listening 5-2 (track 23)

You will hear a conversation between a university tutor and two students about
their research project on birds called robins. T = Tutor, F = Fiona, J = Jack
T: So Fiona, Jack, tell me about your research with robins. How did it start, Fiona?
F: Well, we were originally doing some simple experiments to see how birds know
which way to fly when they migrate. It’s a study involving small European birds
called robins, and it’s been going on for years – with the aim of identifying any
variations in long-term patterns of behaviour.
J: When it’s time for the birds to migrate, they start to feel what’s called migratory
restlessness and they fly off northwest in spring and fly back southeast in autumn.
F: The strange thing was that for some reason, the birds we were studying stopped
doing it. They’d become disorientated, going in one direction one day and in the
opposite direction the next. And what made it all the
more incredible was that it happened all of a sudden, didn’t it, Jack?
J: That’s right. This wasn’t a gradual thing – it was overnight. Something was
interfering with the bird’s navigation system, but we didn’t know what.
F: I was convinced that it was going to be something like diet, so we changed the food
we gave our captive birds, but that made no difference. Then I wondered if air
pollution was the cause, so we put some birds in a protected environment – and that
made no difference either.
J: Then we did the same with light pollution at night – all to no avail.
F: Then Jack came up with the idea that it might be electromagnetic noise – like radio
waves. Honestly, I didn’t think that this could make much difference, but by that time,
we were willing to try almost anything to get these birds to show their natural
behaviour.
T: And so you started screening out the electromagnetic fields using a piece of
equipment called a Faraday Cage.
What did you start to see? Jack?
J: The birds started to orient just like they were supposed to do – back to normal. I
was like, ‘Really?’ That was very unexpected, but anyway, I was happy because we
could resume our normal experiments – and that's just what we did.
F: But it also became clear to me that if the improved orientation was really due to the
screening out of the electromagnetic noise, then that was a very important finding in
its own right. So I convinced Jack that we should start to investigate which particular
frequencies were interfering with the birds.
J: It was this that allowed us to identify mediumwave radio as the source rather than
say, electricity power lines of mobile phone communication.
T: So, what do you think the implications of this are?
F: Well, the birds needed to be quite near to the source – in this case the radio receiver
– for the effect to be present. Which suggests a correlation with density of human
population and activity – therefore robins in urban areas are at greater risk.
J: Which also goes a long way to explaining why this seemed to affect our birds and
not all robins in general and why it happened suddenly. Somebody must’ve started
listening to the radio nearby who hadn’t been doing so before. It was as simple as that.