
Battery icons shape perceptions of time and space - got-any-grapes
https://phys.org/news/2019-09-battery-icons-perceptions-space-user.html
======
umvi
> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops
> on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their battery away,"
> said the study's lead author, Dr. Thomas Robinson.

Are people really like this? If so, I think we need to pump the brakes on
phone usage for children because this is out of control. People are literally
slaves to their phone.

Imagine the absurdity of a 1960s equivalent:

> People no longer think about their destination being 10 km away or 10 stops
> on the tube. They think about it being 50 per cent of their book away," said
> the study's lead author

~~~
maxerickson
I don't think the book analogy says anything interesting, it's a different
sort of thing.

Maybe we just need some combination of bigger batteries, more efficient
devices and easier charging.

Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone
before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or am
I just vaguely prudent?

~~~
inetknght
> _Like, what does it say about me that I bought a car charger for my phone
> before a recent long drive? Am I hopelessly addicted to my battery meter or
> am I just vaguely prudent?_

I would argue: unless you have a paper map and know how to use it, buying a
car charger for your phone would be a symptom of you not knowing how to get
there and/or expecting to call to ask for directions.

~~~
maxerickson
I mean, I didn't exactly know how to get there but the main thing was for a
crowd sourced street level imagery app.

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crazygringo
First, the headline feels almost-misleading -- it's not about battery "icon
shapes" as the graphic also seems to imply, just about battery levels
affecting your activities and anxiety.

But second, the best trick is just to turn your phone to airplane mode
whenever you're on transportation. My iPhone goes from 100% to about 80% if I
spend the whole day at home. It goes from 100% to 20% by mid-afternoon if I
take a few subway rides. Your phone constantly searching for a new signal
drains the battery more than anything.

It makes me wish there were a setting to reduce the aggressiveness of
connectivity -- if the accelerometer has figured out I'm in motion, and I'm
not using my phone at the moment, then only bother searching for a signal only
once every, say, 5 minutes. I don't care about getting calls immediately when
on the move, but still want text messages to come through every so often.
(Obviously not true for everyone, so doesn't need to be a default -- just a
setting.)

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aeternum
>Anything less than half full, however, induced feelings of profound anxiety
and discomfort," he said.

I wonder how much priming they had to do to get that response. Sounds like we
can cure the world's anxiety with a $20 battery backup.

~~~
crooked-v
Seeing my phone battery below 50% makes me faintly anxious because it seems
like it always discharges faster from 30% to 0% than from 100% to 70%. It's
the unpredictability of discharge rate rather than merely having a low
battery.

~~~
waste_monk
That is what's happening - I'm not an electronics person but my vague
understanding is modern li-ion batteries output e.g. 3.5v but actually hold
between 2.x and 4.x volts, and regulate power up or down. When it's full it's
easier to push current through, when it's nearly empty it has to work a lot
harder to supply power and consequently drains faster.

~~~
jobigoud
If it's known the battery API should do a non linear mapping before returning
the number.

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gftsantana
I never carry a charger for my phone or laptop unless I plan to spend more
than a day out (I had to with my old laptop, though). I actually feel a little
frustrated when my phone's battery lasts less than 48 hours, because it means
I'm using my smartphone much more than necessary. I don't try to limit my
phone use, but I do take some measures that probably help to save battery:
screen rotation and bluetooth are always off and I use an app that
automatically adjusts screen brightness much more efficiently than the stock
android setting does.

~~~
standardUser
What is the screen brightness app you use?

~~~
gftsantana
It's called Lux Auto Brightness (I've no relation whatsoever with the
developer). I prefer it to other options because with it the brightness is
always very comfortable to me. Just checked the battery usage by apps, and it
doesn't even appear in the list.

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Jeff_Brown
Data point of one, but I cannot relate to this in the slightest. My Android
phone is two years old and I never even check the battery. I don't even charge
it at work -- but if that became a problem, I would. Seems like an easy
problem to solve.

And who in the world measures their commute in batteries? Ten miles will stay
ten miles; half a battery could mean very different things from one day to the
next.

(The phone is a Huawei Y7 that I bought in Bogotá in Dec 2017. It wasn't
available in the US at that time, and I never really found the specs online --
only for models that seemed likely to be similar.)

~~~
partyboat1586
Do you by any chance also pack light for trips? Have fairly empty pockets?
Genuinely interested.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
What a surprising question. Why?

I always have a wallet, keys (in a coinpurse which sometimes has coins too)
and a phone, and very rarely anything else. Sometimes I pack light, sometimes
heavy -- enough so that I've been made fun of for both.

I carry a backpack around a lot, full mostly of a laptop, umbrella and jacket.
Bogotá rains a lot.

~~~
partyboat1586
Interesting, thanks. Asking because I have a pet theory about phone charging
anxiety being related being over prepared in general and visa versa.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
The actual article
[http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/22401/3/Main%20Docume...](http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/22401/3/Main%20Document.pdf)
seems to be an example of using jargon to obfuscate

> We show that energy gauges on portable technology (e.g. battery icons in
> phones) are a key to energy hysteresis. Through “hermeneutic reflection” on
> the battery charge in portable technology and information about
> accessibility of infrastructure outlets in the city, consumers adapt
> practices (Bourdieu 1990a: 99) in order to ‘re-embed’ or ‘pin down’
> infrastructure, technology and social relations (Giddens 2013:79). The aim
> of these practices is to attain ‘psychological comfort’ in vulnerable
> circumstances (Giddens 2013: 155). However, rather than a return to
> equilibrium as in Phipps and Ozanne’s (2017), single domain context we see
> energy consumption through portable technology as leading to a system of
> contingency planning that anticipates disequilibrium (see figure 1).

~~~
cududa
Just because you don’t understand a specific scientific term doesn’t make it
“jargon”. Plenty of perfectly valid technical docs would be considered invalid
jargon if you held them to the same standard.

~~~
taneq
Just because you understand a specific scientific term doesn't make it
cromulent. Plenty of pop-sci articles are perfectly approachable and eschew
_gratuitous_ jargon.

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Animats
_" We found that people who let their phones batteries run out are viewed by
others as out of touch with the social norm of being connected and therefore
unable to be competent members of society. Phones have become such a nexus for
everything that we are that an inability to effectively manage battery life
becomes symbolic of an inability to manage life."_

Scary.

I just have a Caterpillar Tractor phone with 3 days of battery life, and don't
worry about it much.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
How are you liking it? I wanna get a new phone soon, and I'm torn between a
Pixel 3a and one of the Cat phones.

~~~
androidAgain
They're just your typical Android phones. Nothing special. medium resolution
touch screen, a little bit of extra heavy plastic on the case. The usual OEM
crapware is permanently installed on the device, and sending analytics back to
the mothership.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I know the hardware specs are nothing special. I don't need them to be. I'm
asking about the Cat-specific features. Ruggedness, waterproofing, extra-long
battery life, IR camera--do they work as advertised? Does the extra bulk
affect usability?

The OEM crapware is an issue, but from a quick google it seems like Cat phones
are rootable, yes? So it should be possible to fix that manually.

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tengbretson
I can't for the life of me understand what that battery icon with the leaf
superimposed over it is trying to convey.

~~~
whoopdedo
Power-saving mode. I know Acer used this in their notebooks. (I had one.) You
could manually switch to a reduced power mode. Because it used less battery
power it was advertised as eco-friendly since I guess the marketing assumed
conservation always means the same thing.

Nowadays every CPU and peripheral does automatic power throttling all the time
and no one pretends it has anything to do with being environmentally
conscious.

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KiDD
I think this is only true for people with crap batteries... Oh my phone is
only 30%... It'll be good all day

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chmod775
And then there's people like me not noticing their phone ran out of charge
yesterday...

~~~
tempestn
> "We found that people who let their phones batteries run out are viewed by
> others as out of touch with the social norm of being connected and therefore
> unable to be competent members of society," Dr. Robinson said.

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laugable
Geez, sounds like this author has never driven a Nissan Leaf.

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PavlovsCat
The "social norm of being connected"? Hmm. I seriously doubt the bandwidth of
emojis and oneliners, so to me that's like looking down on someone for not
having 10 watches drawn with marker on each arm, because they _obviously_
don't care about punctuality or even space time itself.

I suspect they asked mostly mobile users, maybe even a subset of that, because
from my experience either this study isn't relevant to my neck of the woods,
or people are _so_ taken aback and scared by this person from the wilderness
reading a book, that they instantly become fantastic at acting as if they
don't care at all.

