I've now got an iPhone 4 and tested my app iStethoscope Pro with the new device. The good news is that it works fine and the microphone may be more sensitive, so it may be even easier to hear your heartbeat with the new device. The bad news is that the frequency response of the iPhone 4 microphone appears to be slightly different to that of the iPhone 3G, so there is less detail at the very low frequencies and more noise at higher frequencies. Do please note that the location of the microphone is different in the iPhone 4 - it is on the bottom left, not on the bottom right!

Because the iPhone 4 has a different microphone and casing, it is necessary to modify the audio filter settings in order to hear the clearest heart sounds. My suggestion is:

Use Heartbeat pure mode and in the Audio Settings change to

Alpha value (default 150) = 125

Amplification (default 0.25) = 1

In General, scroll down and change Spectrogram scaling to

Heartbeat pure (default 0.5) = 0.3

As usual you can find the detailed help pages here and here. If you have your own suggestions for settings for the iPhone 4, leave a comment here. Otherwise if you have any problems, please leave your comments on the main support page as usual.

The publicity for my iStethoscope iphone app continues. This month I was contacted by yet more medical researchers asking about the possibility of collaboration, and Swiss magazine NZZ Folio published an article describing the app. This is what they said:

Not long ago I attended the unveiling of a new painting for the 7th floor of the Computer Science Building of UCL. The painter is Nigel Swift who also works in the technical support group. I chatted to him afterwards and to my surprise he said that several of the themes in the painting derive from projects by my students. The mosaic comes from Udi Schlessinger's Moisaic World, the swarm from Tim Blackwell's Swam Music and the biological windows were inspired by some of our biological models such as Fugue, the immersive model of the immune system with Gordana Novakovic.

I recently decided to revamp my book website at http://www.peterjbentley.com/

I was beginning to run out of space so it now shows my books through a slideshow of real photographs of the books. To see more detail you can click on a book and read information in a popup window. The website does rely on javascript, so if your browser is not able to load successfully, the old webpage is still available at http://www.peterjbentley.com/index2.html

I've also updated my UCL pages slightly, making the PhD theses of my students available for download for the first time. These can be seen under "Peter's students, Completed" at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/p.bentley/

It's been a busy month for foreign editions of my books. Today I received the Dutch translation of The Book of Numbers (De Wereld Van Het Getal) published by Fontaine Uitgevers. It looks very nice, although I can't read (or pronounce) any of it. I've also recently received the US version of the audiobook, available from Brilliance Audio as conventional CDs and MP3 CDs. It's read by actor Phil Gigant very nicely. Always a little strange to hear your words read by someone with an unfamiliar voice and accent! Also this month I received the French version of The Undercover Scientist (La journée désastreuse de M. Murphy) published by Dunod, which is illustrated throughout with funny cartoons.