In the May-Jun ‘96 issues, we examined the working of fancier things like fax. This issue looks recently introduced technology of mobile telecom equipment. Pagers and cellular phones are now available in major cities. These mobile systems attempt to solve one big disadvantage in the telephone system. Your telephone instrument is fixed to a particular location, you cannot move it around with you while you are traveling.
The instrument is connected to the exchange through wires. It is this connection that’ sets your telephone number. The number is used to switch incoming calls to you and to bill you for outgoing calls. What if you want to call someone who is not near a telephone? In a large hospital, it is sufficient for a person to carry a beeper. To contact him, the operator at the switchboard dials the number of the beeper. The beeper then makes a sound or vibrates to alert the person that he is needed. He goes to the nearest internal telephone and calls up the switch board to get the message. This is called paging. Such systems have been in use for a long time. Paging systems use frequencies in the Very High Frequency (VHF) range- around 100 Megahertz . Since there is very low power there is no interference with systems installed elsewhere and the same frequencies can be reused. Also, since only a few tones (beeps) are sent, the bandwidth needed by these systems is very small (only around 1 kilohertz). However these are local systems which cannot be accessed by people outside the particular building complex- a call can be made only from the switchboard.As mobile devices increasingly become a part of our everyday lives, they are slowly but surely becoming a key part of our classrooms. While some schools continue to ban cell phones, others are embracing them – as well as other kinds of mobile devices. This infographic provides up-to-date statistics on the use of mobile devices in education, and the numbers may surprise you.In 2015, Dakota Lawson and Bruce B. Henderson performed a study to examine the relationship between mobile phone use in class and information comprehension. The study involved 120 students from an introductory psychology course, mostly first-year students. The result showed that students who were texting in the class had significantly lower test scores even when the material that was presented was simple: mobile phone use in class impairs students’ comprehension and performance. This study was performed after several similar studies in the past and corroborated their results.
Furthermore, researchers julia irwin and Natasha Gupta of Macquarie University performed an experiment in 2016 testing the effect of facebook-related distractions in the classroom. The researchers found that students who were interested in the subject material and the way it was presented were less likely to be distracted by Facebook. However, the students with access to phones still performed poorer than students that were not allowed access to cell phones during the lecture.To prevent distractions caused by mobile phones, some schools have implemented policies that restrict students from using their phones during school hours.
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