I wear two hearing aids with DSP processors built in. Let me tell you a little bit about why they are so expensive. The largest supplier of hearing aids in the USA is Starkey in Minneapolis. I've been to the factory, and have experienced the process from start to finish courtesy of the president of the company.
1. Because hearing aids, especially BTE and ITC types use a single cell 1.5 volt battery, which can drop as low as 1.3 volts through its useful operational life, the circuits must be of extremely low power consumption and low voltage. The only chip material that works for this is germanium, which has a diode junction breakdown voltage of ~ 0.3V as opposed to the ubiquitous silicon used in consumer electronics. While germanium was once very common for transistors and some early integrated circuits, it has fallen out of favor in the microelectronics world. There are only a handful of sources and companies now that work with germanium, thus the base price is higher due to this scarcity. You can't just take an off the shelf silicon chip and put it in these aids. Each one is custom designed in germanium.
2. The process of properly fitting a hearing aid is labor intensive. Custom ear molds must be created from latex impressions, and these need to be fitted for comfort. A small variance or burr can mean the difference between a good fitting mold and one that is painful to wear. Additionally, if the mold doesn't maintain a seal to the inner ear properly the hearing aid will go into oscillatory feedback. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 attempts to get the fitting right.
3. On the more expensive aids, labor is involved in doing a spectral hearing loss analysis of the user's hearing problem, so that the aid doesn't over-amplify in the wrong frequencies. Just throwing in a simple linear amplifier is destructive to the remaining hearing due to the sound pressure levels involved.
4. Construction of aids is done by hand by technicians, especially with the popular ITC (in the canal) aids. At the Starkey company, a technician is assigned to create the aid from the ear mold, fit the chips and microphone/receiver and battery compartment, and connect it all with 32 gauge wire and make sure it all fits in the ear mold. This can be a real challenge, because human ear canals aren't often straight, but bend and change diameter. Imaging a room with a hundred technicians sitting at microscopes assembling these. Each is a custom job. There's no mass production possible and thus none of the savings from it.
5. After the aid is created, then there's the fitting. This process is also hands on. Getting the volume and the audio spectrum match right is a challenge, and audiologists have to have chip programming systems onsite to make such adjustments withing the limits of the aid. Sometimes aids are rejected because the user isn't comfortable with the fitting, and then the aids go back to the factory for either a new ear mold, new electronics, or both.
6. There's a lot of loss in the hearing aid business. Patients don't often adapt well, especially older people. There may be two or three attempts at fitting before a success or rejection. Patients only pay when the fitting is successful. If it is not, the company eats the effort and the cost of labor and materials. Imagine making PC's by hand, sending them out to users, and then having them come back to have different cases or motherboards or drives fitted two or three times, and software adjusted until the customer is happy with it. Imagine 4 out of 10 PC's coming back permanently after trial and error with a customer.
7. Early hearing aids weren't anything but simple amplifiers. Even until the mid 90's there was very little spectral customization. Now many aids are getting features like frequency equalizers and DSP noise reductions that we take for granted in even the cheapest silicon based consumer electronics. Hence, prics has increased with complexity, but there's still the high cost of custom special chips, and lots of labor.
The NASA GISTEMP data you cite is polluted with questionable surface station data. Even the press is beginning to questions James Hansens methods in arriving at the data and graphs he distributes. Loys of "adjustment" going on. See this article from the UK Register
A much better metric is the Lower Troposphere temperature as measured by satellite. It in fact shows no trend from 1998, and also shows a big drop globally in temperature since January 2007. See this analysis of the satellite data.
I build systems that display weather graphics for a living. We've done systems on Win2K and XP and made them work in the most demanding environment possible, live TV, where things simply can't crash.
Recently, I had to give a presentation to about 50 scientists at UCAR in Boulder. It was the most important presentation I was ever to give, so I left nothing to chance. That included leaving my Windows Vista based laptop at home, because I needed a backup in case their presentation system was also Vista based or Mac based. The Scala presentation software I use is the same I used for live TV weather, and blows Powerpoint out of the water, but like many programs, it won't run under Vista. So I took my older XP based laptop with me just in case I needed it.
Even though my older laptop has less features, less CPU speed, only one CPU core, 512MB RAM, slower IDE hard disk, it still ran circles around my Vista based laptop with dual core CPU, 2GB RAM, SATA drive, and better graphics. I had forgotten how I had begrudgingly slowed my own perceptions to match that of Vista.
For example, here are couple of benchmarks:
Creating new blank email in Outlook Express- Vista:20-30 seconds XP: less than 1 second Fully booting up from power off- Vista 4-5 minutes XP: 1-1:30 minutes Running Microsoft Office 2007- Vista won't do spell check XP: with office 2003 ll works fine Microsoft Frontpage 2003 crashes under Vista - Microsoft aware but offers no fix. Works on XP fine Running programs- Vista: maybe, not likely if program more than 1 year old XP for certain Background Processes - Vista: hundreds XP: dozens
and the list goes on and on...bear in mind the XP machine used to get those numbers above is older, slower, with less memory, and slower hard drive.
Recently, after quietly tolerating Vista's slowness and incompatibility, I learned that Microsoft had pushed back the first Vista service pack release until the first quarter of 2008. Originally I'd heard of releases before Christmas, so that millions of people wouldn't be disappointed in Vista's lackluster performance. Learning that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
So, I purchased a new SATA laptop drive for my new Vista laptop. I pulled out the old Vista drive after backing up a few files, and installed the new one. I installed a fresh copy of XP and then proceeded to try locating drivers. Not so easy, because Microsoft pushes hardware vendors to push Vista. For example, XP drivers for the nVidia Go 6150 graphics chip are mysteriously missing from key places. Fortunately tech blogs tracks and archive these things so with a little hunting I had all my drivers burned to a CD ready for install.
I have my once Vista enabled laptop now fully upgraded to a stable and functional operating system, Windows XP Professional. The Vista loaded drive will stay on the shelf until Microsoft pulls their head out of the sand and starts making an OS that isn't crippled.
Take my advice: dump Vista, "upgrade" to XP...and do it soon, as Microsoft says (in yet another brilliant marketing move) that Windows XP will no longer be available after January. I predict there will be a last minute rush and hoarding of Win XP because Vista, to put it simply, just plain sucks.
BTW I'm writing this on my XP based laptop, which used to be Vista based.
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I wear two hearing aids with DSP processors built in. Let me tell you a little bit about why they are so expensive. The largest supplier of hearing aids in the USA is Starkey in Minneapolis. I've been to the factory, and have experienced the process from start to finish courtesy of the president of the company.
1. Because hearing aids, especially BTE and ITC types use a single cell 1.5 volt battery, which can drop as low as 1.3 volts through its useful operational life, the circuits must be of extremely low power consumption and low voltage. The only chip material that works for this is germanium, which has a diode junction breakdown voltage of ~ 0.3V as opposed to the ubiquitous silicon used in consumer electronics. While germanium was once very common for transistors and some early integrated circuits, it has fallen out of favor in the microelectronics world. There are only a handful of sources and companies now that work with germanium, thus the base price is higher due to this scarcity. You can't just take an off the shelf silicon chip and put it in these aids. Each one is custom designed in germanium.
2. The process of properly fitting a hearing aid is labor intensive. Custom ear molds must be created from latex impressions, and these need to be fitted for comfort. A small variance or burr can mean the difference between a good fitting mold and one that is painful to wear. Additionally, if the mold doesn't maintain a seal to the inner ear properly the hearing aid will go into oscillatory feedback. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 attempts to get the fitting right.
3. On the more expensive aids, labor is involved in doing a spectral hearing loss analysis of the user's hearing problem, so that the aid doesn't over-amplify in the wrong frequencies. Just throwing in a simple linear amplifier is destructive to the remaining hearing due to the sound pressure levels involved.
4. Construction of aids is done by hand by technicians, especially with the popular ITC (in the canal) aids. At the Starkey company, a technician is assigned to create the aid from the ear mold, fit the chips and microphone/receiver and battery compartment, and connect it all with 32 gauge wire and make sure it all fits in the ear mold. This can be a real challenge, because human ear canals aren't often straight, but bend and change diameter. Imaging a room with a hundred technicians sitting at microscopes assembling these. Each is a custom job. There's no mass production possible and thus none of the savings from it.
5. After the aid is created, then there's the fitting. This process is also hands on. Getting the volume and the audio spectrum match right is a challenge, and audiologists have to have chip programming systems onsite to make such adjustments withing the limits of the aid. Sometimes aids are rejected because the user isn't comfortable with the fitting, and then the aids go back to the factory for either a new ear mold, new electronics, or both.
6. There's a lot of loss in the hearing aid business. Patients don't often adapt well, especially older people. There may be two or three attempts at fitting before a success or rejection. Patients only pay when the fitting is successful. If it is not, the company eats the effort and the cost of labor and materials. Imagine making PC's by hand, sending them out to users, and then having them come back to have different cases or motherboards or drives fitted two or three times, and software adjusted until the customer is happy with it. Imagine 4 out of 10 PC's coming back permanently after trial and error with a customer.
7. Early hearing aids weren't anything but simple amplifiers. Even until the mid 90's there was very little spectral customization. Now many aids are getting features like frequency equalizers and DSP noise reductions that we take for granted in even the cheapest silicon based consumer electronics. Hence, prics has increased with complexity, but there's still the high cost of custom special chips, and lots of labor.
A much better metric is the Lower Troposphere temperature as measured by satellite. It in fact shows no trend from 1998, and also shows a big drop globally in temperature since January 2007. See this analysis of the satellite data.
I build systems that display weather graphics for a living. We've done systems on Win2K and XP and made them work in the most demanding environment possible, live TV, where things simply can't crash.
Recently, I had to give a presentation to about 50 scientists at UCAR in Boulder. It was the most important presentation I was ever to give, so I left nothing to chance. That included leaving my Windows Vista based laptop at home, because I needed a backup in case their presentation system was also Vista based or Mac based. The Scala presentation software I use is the same I used for live TV weather, and blows Powerpoint out of the water, but like many programs, it won't run under Vista. So I took my older XP based laptop with me just in case I needed it.
Even though my older laptop has less features, less CPU speed, only one CPU core, 512MB RAM, slower IDE hard disk, it still ran circles around my Vista based laptop with dual core CPU, 2GB RAM, SATA drive, and better graphics. I had forgotten how I had begrudgingly slowed my own perceptions to match that of Vista.
For example, here are couple of benchmarks:
Creating new blank email in Outlook Express- Vista:20-30 seconds XP: less than 1 second
Fully booting up from power off- Vista 4-5 minutes XP: 1-1:30 minutes
Running Microsoft Office 2007- Vista won't do spell check XP: with office 2003 ll works fine
Microsoft Frontpage 2003 crashes under Vista - Microsoft aware but offers no fix. Works on XP fine
Running programs- Vista: maybe, not likely if program more than 1 year old XP for certain
Background Processes - Vista: hundreds XP: dozens
and the list goes on and on...bear in mind the XP machine used to get those numbers above is older, slower, with less memory, and slower hard drive.
Recently, after quietly tolerating Vista's slowness and incompatibility, I learned that Microsoft had pushed back the first Vista service pack release until the first quarter of 2008. Originally I'd heard of releases before Christmas, so that millions of people wouldn't be disappointed in Vista's lackluster performance. Learning that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
So, I purchased a new SATA laptop drive for my new Vista laptop. I pulled out the old Vista drive after backing up a few files, and installed the new one. I installed a fresh copy of XP and then proceeded to try locating drivers. Not so easy, because Microsoft pushes hardware vendors to push Vista. For example, XP drivers for the nVidia Go 6150 graphics chip are mysteriously missing from key places. Fortunately tech blogs tracks and archive these things so with a little hunting I had all my drivers burned to a CD ready for install.
I have my once Vista enabled laptop now fully upgraded to a stable and functional operating system, Windows XP Professional. The Vista loaded drive will stay on the shelf until Microsoft pulls their head out of the sand and starts making an OS that isn't crippled.
Take my advice: dump Vista, "upgrade" to XP...and do it soon, as Microsoft says (in yet another brilliant marketing move) that Windows XP will no longer be available after January. I predict there will be a last minute rush and hoarding of Win XP because Vista, to put it simply, just plain sucks.
BTW I'm writing this on my XP based laptop, which used to be Vista based.