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The payoff should Apple prevail in the patent wars: an estimated $30 billion

“Apple ships a much higher value of smartphones than any other player”

In a note to clients issued Thursday, Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi takes a hard look at the flurry of patent lawsuits Apple (AAPL) has launched against the manufacturers of Google (GOOG) Android phones.

All in all, he likes Apple’s chances. The two key bullet points (we quote):

Filed under: Apple 2.0

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In Techheads.tv’s debut, Robert Wright argues the affirmative, yours truly the negative. 

Source: Techheads.tv

My former Time Magazine colleague Bob Wright, who has written several books about God — including The Evolution of God, a 2010 Pulitzer finalist — does not, it turns out, believe in Steve Jobs.

This theological shortcoming was revealed earlier this week when he and I recorded the premier episode of Techheads.tv, a spin-off of Bloggingheads, the current-events oriented “diavlog” that he and Mickey Kraus founded six years ago.

In the first Techheads episode — which went live Thursday —  he argues that Apple (AAPL) made the same mistake with the iPhone that it made with the Mac. In this scenario, Google’s (GOOG) Android  (or maybe Windows Phone 7) will do to iOS what Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows did to the Mac.

We’ve heard the argument before, and we think it’s wrong. Click here to hear the full 35-minute episode. Or take advantage of Techheads’ special sauce and listen only to those segments that interest you. We’ve pasted the links below the fold.

	Play entire video

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Brain tumor rates in Japanese atomic bomb survivors are often used to scare cell phone owners. The real story turns out to be far more reassuring.

FORTUNE – Tumors in the brains of Japanese civilians who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to tell a frightening tale, the story of how a cancer epidemic can remain hidden for several decades and then suddenly metastasize. The atomic bombings thus provide a perfect explanation for why U.S. brain cancer rates have dropped slightly in the past few decades even as Americans’ cell phone use rose 500-fold.

Just wait, Britain’s The Daily Mail warned mobile phone users: “the same slow development of problems occurred when the Hiroshima bomb survivors were tested: after ten years researchers found no evidence of brain cancer, but 30 years later many cases were found.” Similar evidence from the atomic bombings has been cited in settings as varied as American city council meetings and debates on public radio.  After Fortune.com created this chart showing the apparent disconnect between cell phone use and brain cancer diagnoses, an article immediately popped up on the Huffington Post using the A-Bomb evidence to debunk it.

“To those who understand the long latencies involved, the absence of a general brain tumor epidemic at this time provides no comfort,” wrote Devra Davis, author of a book on cell phones’ cancer threat.  “Survivors of the atomic bombs that fell on Japan experienced no increase at all in brain cancer until four decades after the war’s end.”

It would be a compelling retort, if it were true. Fortunately for cell phone users, the real story from Japan is very different.

Claims that survivors “experienced no increase at all in brain cancer until four decades after the war’s end,” as Davis writes (or even just for 30 years, as The Mirror has it) are wrong on multiple levels.  Local tumor registries only began in 1958, so of course there are no records of tumors in the first 13 years after the bombing. Once the data began to be collected, an abnormal number of brain tumors quickly became visible.  This study, for instance, covers a period from 1961 and 1974 (from 16 to 29 years after the bombing) and found a five-fold increase in brain cancer in some groups of survivors.

Dale Preston, a leading expert in radiation induced cancers, says there’s no sign of a “sudden spike of risk” in any of his research on cancer in bomb survivors. In fact he suspects tumors were already increasing in frequency in the 1950s, before the records were being kept. He is skeptical about drawing parallels between atomic bomb radiation and cell phone radiation (since the A-Bombs deliver ionizing radiation in one big dose, while cell phones deliver non-ionizing radiation in thousands of small doses.)

And then there’s the chief scientist of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, who says that he knows of no evidence that’s identified a sudden increase in brain cancer after 30 or 40 years, or for that matter any other time frame. The main problem is that so few survivors developed brain tumors that he doesn’t see how anyone could suss out any sort pattern. The Radiation Effects foundation is a joint project the American and Japanese governments that has been meticulously accumulating and analyzing data on the surviving civilians’ health following the bombings.

The grim fact that the A-bombs caused some people to get fatal brain cancers soon after exposure fits with the pattern of other radiation-induced cancers, which tend  to increase gradually in the affected population, as different people develop tumors at different rates. The idea that the atomic bombs caused brain tumor rates to shoot up in a sudden spike also conflicts with other the tumor-causing pattern seen in medical radiation treatments: this study found huge variation in the onset of radiation-induced brain cancer, estimating an average lag time of 18 years, plus or minus 10 years.

In other words, if a huge wave of brain cancer is on its way, scientists would expect to see the tide beginning to rise.  Thus the lack of any uptick in brain cancers is “comforting,” says David Savitz, a Brown University professor and former editor of The American Journal of Epidemiology.

Still, conclusively disproving the link between cell phones and brain cancer will only come with another decade or two in which phone use plateaus while tumor rates continue to be flat or down.

Hopefully the evidence will continue to mount. In the current issue of Bio-Electromagnetics a study of brain cancer in England found that “the increased use of mobile phones between 1985 and 2003 has not led to a noticeable change in the incidence of brain cancer in England between 1998 and 2007.” For now the very good news for the billions of people who talk on cells phones is that the real scientific evidence on radiation-induced brain cancer indicates that (1) scientists would expect to see some sign of an impending epidemic if one were really on its way and (2) So far they don’t.

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The business lobby has entered the debt ceiling debate at the 11^th hour with only a whimper, considering the stakes of a default for corporations.

By Tory Newmyer, writer

John Boehner

FORTUNE — If the specter of a default has spooked corporate America, you wouldn’t know it by watching their hired guns in Washington over the last several weeks.

Aside from sending a handful of letters urging Congress to act, the big business lobby has mostly hugged the sidelines as the partisan standoff over the debt limit crisis intensified. That appears poised to change, now that there are only five days to go until the Treasury Department says it will run out of money to pay all the federal government’s bills.

With Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) set to put his plan for a debt ceiling hike to a vote in the House today, the heaviest-hitting trade associations are finally piping up and urging their member companies to rally behind the proposal. On Wednesday evening, a broad collective of those groups – including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the National Association of Home Builders — cosigned a letter to Members of Congress endorsing the plan. And officials with those groups said this time, they will be following up with an aggressive, coordinated lobbying effort to try to muscle the package through a jumpy House Republican conference.

But considering the stakes – business types in Washington agree a default would be calamitous — the failure of the business lobby to engage more forcefully earlier has even some veteran K Street hands scratching their heads. “If you look at the totality of the communications and the lobbying efforts, this has been uncharacteristically quiet,” says one. “It’s been a minimalist approach, and I’d have expected the business community to be much more vocal.”

Representatives of the groups are quick to dispel that point. The Chamber, for example, has spent months organizing lobbying visits to skeptical lawmakers to explain the gravity of the threat. And NAM has been “talking about this issue for almost a year,” says Dorothy Coleman, the group’s vice president of tax and domestic economic policy. But the commitment barely registers against the eight-figure sums the groups regularly dole out for more parochial causes.

Doubting a default

There have been at least a few factors at work keeping big business groups from mounting a concerted campaign to sound the alarm.

For the most part, they’ve rested on the assumption that Congress would figure out on its own how to extend the federal government’s borrowing authority without seriously flirting with default. Ken Bentsen, a former Democratic Congressman from Texas now lobbying for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said his group only started asking member companies to focus on the issue last week. “It’s unthinkable you’d really default, and our members are just coming to grips with the fact that if we don’t act, this could really happen,” he says.

There was a similar dynamic three years ago, when the stunning failure in the House of the first attempt to pass the Wall Street bailout sent a relatively complacent business lobby into what one banking lobbyist called a “no-huddle hyper-drive blitzkrieg.”

“We all expected that to pass, too, and when it didn’t, we lit it up,” this lobbyist said. The Chamber, NAM, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the BRT, which represents top CEOs, all got in on the act, launching a cooperative push with the Bush administration and Congressional leaders to round up votes, in part by generating constituent pressure on wobbly lawmakers. “The effort was extraordinary,” says Joanna Schneider, of the BRT. “We talked to Secretary Paulson every day, we had CEO conference calls with the Secretary every day, and we made a massive effort for all the CEOs, particularly where they had large employment centers, to make calls.”

Lobbyists for the major trade groups point to other reasons they’ve taken a largely hands-off approach so far. Several noted that until this week, there was no specific, credible proposal for them to help push. Presumably, the lack of legislative text wouldn’t prevent the groups from bankrolling, say, a major advertising campaign to educate voters about the stakes. Those types of campaigns are hardly uncommon.

But the argument points to what has been perhaps the most powerful motivator in keeping big business mum: fear of what could end up in whatever package makes it into law. As long as tax hikes remained on the table as a means of trimming the deficit, industries that could see their bottom lines bitten wanted to reserve the right to object.

Indeed, it’s not that there’s been no active lobbying on the debt ceiling by corporate interests. From April through June, more than 140 outfits reported lobbying work on the issue, according to a review of disclosure reports by the Sunlight Foundation. The vast majority appears to have engaged to protect narrow tax privileges, or even seek new breaks. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Oracle (ORCL), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Pfizer (PFE), Devon Energy (DVN), Northrop Grumman (NOC), and Wal-Mart (WMT) all reported at least monitoring the talks. Some no doubt felt more threatened than others. With President Obama making a refrain of the charge that Republicans want to protect a tax break for corporate jet owners at the expense of seniors and middle-income earners, the National Business Aviation Association launched an effort to defend the provision as a job-creator.

“They’re all for shared sacrifice as long as they’re not the ones sharing,” says Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation.

Or, as one Republican lobbyist describes the investment by K Street’s power-players: “They couldn’t have done less if they tried, spent zero dollars and no cents. And it’s because they’re gutless. They’ve not done anything because they don’t want to pop their heads above ground and get their heads taken off.”

With any direct changes to entitlement programs and the tax code likely to be left out of the package, the coast is now clear for the big business groups to jump in. And there’s nothing like an impending economic Armageddon to marshal their focus. But when this scare subsides, and the big business lobbies go back to pressing for specialized treatment under the guise it serves a greater economic good, it will be worth remembering where these special interests stood when that cause was imperiled.

Filed under: Contributors, Term Sheet

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Brain tumor rates in Japanese atomic bomb survivors are often used to scare cell phone owners. The real story turns out to be far more reassuring.

Tumors in the brains of Japanese civilians who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to tell a frightening tale, the story of how a cancer epidemic can remain hidden for several decades and then suddenly metastasize. The atomic bombings thus provide a perfect explanation for why U.S. brain cancer rates have dropped slightly in the past few decades even as Americans’ cell phone use rose 500-fold.

Just wait, Britain’s The Daily Mail warned mobile phone users: “the same slow development of problems occurred when the Hiroshima bomb survivors were tested: after ten years researchers found no evidence of brain cancer, but 30 years later many cases were found.” Similar evidence from the atomic bombings has been cited in settings as varied as American city council meetings and debates on public radio.  After Fortune.com created this chart showing the apparent disconnect between cell phone use and brain cancer diagnoses, an article immediately popped up on the Huffington Post using the A-Bomb evidence to debunk it.

“To those who understand the long latencies involved, the absence of a general brain tumor epidemic at this time provides no comfort,” wrote Devra Davis, author of a book on cell phones’ cancer threat.  “Survivors of the atomic bombs that fell on Japan experienced no increase at all in brain cancer until four decades after the war’s end.”

It would be a compelling retort, if it were true. Fortunately for cell phone users, the real story from Japan is very different.

Claims that survivors “experienced no increase at all in brain cancer until four decades after the war’s end,” as Davis writes (or even just for 30 years, as The Mirror has it) are wrong on multiple levels.  Local tumor registries only began in 1958, so of course there are no records of tumors in the first 13 years after the bombing. Once the data began to be collected, an abnormal number of brain tumors quickly became visible.  This study, for instance, covers a period from 1961 and 1974 (from 16 to 29 years after the bombing) and found a five-fold increase in brain cancer in some groups of survivors.

Dale Preston, a leading expert in radiation induced cancers, says there’s no sign of a “sudden spike of risk” in any of his research on cancer in bomb survivors. In fact he suspects tumors were already increasing in frequency in the 1950s, before the records were being kept. He is skeptical about drawing parallels between atomic bomb radiation and cell phone radiation (since the A-Bombs deliver ionizing radiation in one big dose, while cell phones deliver non-ionizing radiation in thousands of small doses.)
Even if the two do work in similar ways.

And then there’s the chief scientist of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, who says that he knows of no evidence that’s identified a sudden increase in brain cancer after 30 or 40 years, or for that matter any other time frame. The main problem is that so few survivors developed brain tumors that he doesn’t see how anyone could suss out any sort pattern. The Radiation Effects foundation is a joint project the American and Japanese governments that has been meticulously accumulating and analyzing data on the surviving civilians’ health following the bombings.

In sum, the evidence of increased brain cancer rates fit better with a typical situation in which an environmental factor causes a steady rise in cancer over time.  (Dr. Preston says if records from the 1950s did exists he suspects you’d see the beginning of the brain cancer increase there.)

The grim fact that the A-bombs caused some people to get fatal brain cancers soon after exposure fits with the pattern of other radiation-induced cancers, which tend  to increase gradually in the affected population, as different people develop tumors at different rates. The idea that the atomic bombs caused brain tumor rates to shoot up in a sudden spike also conflicts with other the tumor-causing pattern seen in medical radiation treatments: this study found huge variation in the onset of radiation-induced brain cancer, estimating an average lag time of 18 years, plus or minus 10 years.

In other words, if a huge wave of brain cancer is on its way, scientists would expect to see the tide beginning to rise.  Thus the lack of any uptick in brain cancers is “comforting,” says David Savitz, a Brown University professor and former editor of The American Journal of Epidemiology.

Still, conclusively disproving the link between cell phones and brain cancer will only come with another decade or two in which phone use plateaus while tumor rates continue to be flat or down.

Hopefully the evidence will continue to mount. In the current issue of Bio-Electromagnetics a study of brain cancer in England found that “the increased use of mobile phones between 1985 and 2003 has not led to a noticeable change in the incidence of brain cancer in England between 1998 and 2007.” For now the very good news for the billions of people who talk on cells phones is that the real scientific evidence on radiation-induced brain cancer indicates that (1) scientists would expect to see some sign of an impending epidemic if one were really on its way and (2) So far they don’t.

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Android, at 39%, is OS No. 1 in the U.S. But Apple, with 28%, is the No. 1 manufacturer

Click to enlarge. Source: Nielsen

If you’re having trouble interpreting the chart of the U.S. smartphone market released Thursday by Nielsen, think of it as a brownie pan, a spokesman helpfully suggests, not a pie.

And depending how you slice the brownies, Apple (AAPL) is either No. 2 or No. 1 in the U.S.

When all the Android phones are combined, Google’s (GOOG) smartphone operating system is the clear leader. But because so many manufacturers are competing for a share of the Android brownie, and only Apple can make an iPhone, Apple is America’s leading smartphone manufacturer. By a chewy mouthful.

The details (based on a survey of 20,202 Americans in Q2 2011):

• Android has 39% of the U.S. market
• The iPhone has 28% (iPads and iPod touches not included)
• Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry is down to 20%
• HTC is tied with RIM at 20%, divided between Android (14%) and various Microsoft (MSFT) Windows smartphones (6%)
• Motorola (MOT) is down to 11%
• Samsung has 10%, divided between Android (8%) and Windows (2%)
• Nokia (NOK) and Palm (HPQ) are those thin slices on the right with 2% apiece

Filed under: Apple 2.0

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