Posts Tagged ‘gps’

In the vast canon of techie terms, the word "dongle"  ranks somewhere between "thingamajig" and "whoseamawhatsit" as an official-sounding device. It may be fun to say, but it doesn't exactly instill much technical confidence in the person or entity that is pushing the newfangled "hoobajoob" on you.

In Nike's case, the sneaker stalwart was charging $29 for running enthusiasts to track their jog-gress (jogging progress!) via their various Apple devices working in concert with the Nike + Shoe-dongle– a device implanted under the inner sole of your active footwear.

Well, after a lengthy experimentation period, Nike is no longer requiring Apple-using fitness freaks to monitor their training by slipping their tiny dongle where the sun don't shine. Instead, they'll stay hot on the trail of your cross-trainers with those magical monitoring initials: GPS

By spending a mere $2 in the Itunes App Store, runners can download the new Nike + GPS to their favorite iThings and run like the wind– or the tortoise. No matter what you run like, the program works by connecting with the GPS radio in most newer Apple gadgets (iPod, iPhone, iPad) to allow you to record your time, map your runs and browse previous runs. Users can also share their runs and get competitive by comparing themselves with other users on the Nike + site. You might be tempted to best your local rivals times, but remember, slow and steady wins the race– though you could stand to pick up the pace a little bit.

Sometimes when former college athletes are out of the spotlight for some time, the media will see fit to look back upon their glory days by tracking them down to answer the question, "Where are they now?"

The Hamilton County, Indiana police had raised that very same inquiry about former Indiana University basketball hero Todd Leary. Their reasoning was not one of nostalgia for his Hoosier glory days; rather, Mr. Leary had been suspected of robbing appliances from foreclosed homes in the area– quite a step down from hitting buzzer-beaters. 

Two of Leary's thieving cohorts had been identified by a neighbor of one of the burgled houses in a police lineup; rather than arrest the two on the spot, the police decided to keep up their location inquiry with the help of GPS tracking, aiming to take down their entire small-town syndicate.

Following the positive identification of Leary's two accomplices the cops covertly slapped a GPS device onto their van and waited for them to commence criminal activity. They only had to wait a few weeks to catch the duo in the act; only this time it appeared they were taking directions from Leary stationed in a nearby Chevy Avalanche. Leary now faces charges on five felony counts in the state of Indiana, but at least if anyone sees fit to locate him for a "where are they now?" segment, they won't have any trouble tracking him down behind bars.

As for the recent controversy over the legality of law enforcement tagging GPS devices on vehicles, we'll chalk this one up to probable cause.

Jack Sparrow is a legendary pirate captain (kind of). He is daring (sometimes) and romantic (with enough rum), an excellent swordsman (Best Performance Involving A Poker) and an inspirational leader (no). But what sets him apart from Barbossa and Blackbeard? Is it his rugged good looks, his dreadlocks and multiple piercings? His bizarre charisma and dogged persistence? What makes him such a successful buccaneer?

Why, to that we laugh and state the obvious: his GPS.
Ok, maybe not GPS per se – or at least, a model contained in a very, very old version of today’s smartphones – but if Jack Sparrow can find the Fountain of Youth with his outdated tech, then the good folks of the (hugely improved) GPS have contributed to your ability to do the same, with recommended side trips for your pleasure (although you have to pay extra to find the Fountain. Maybe.)

Meet the newest iPhone App that will make us thank G-d for GPS: the mTrip, companion to travelers in foreign countries and savior of those indecisive tourists who just don’t know where to go first. Created by travel guide publisher Sparks,  mTrip combines GPS technology with the iPhone’s compass and internet services in order to provide users with a map to local points of interest. Tourists will be able to open this up on their iPhones and see pictures corresponding to different destinations they can visit at their leisure, with this handy dandy app pointing the way.

But the mTrip is STILL way more than that. More, you say? Yes! This is the GPS of the future, after all. mTrip is an augmented reality program, which combines real and virtual images to best serve users in a real-time setting. Through this technology mTrip provides the ability to view not only a customer’s chosen stopping point, but to simultaneously peruse the surrounding area. This option indicates other potential destinations, shopping areas, and restaurants, complete with store times and customer reviews. As follows with Sparks’ general tour-guide philosophy, the mTrip experience is a combination of administrator expertise and customer reviews, offering input from all ends of the spectrum to curious travelers. Further incorporating this audience-friendly attitude in the app is a comments section, allowing users to add their own insights to this collection of shared experience. The final tidbit of awesomeness in this beautiful GPS app is mTrip Genius. Similar to iTunes Genius, it looks at attractions you’ve already enjoyed and visited, and designs an itinerary to accommodate your sightseeing preferences.

Like any piece of technology, mTrip does have its limitations. While customers have generally reported satisfaction with the app, there is the age-old GPS complaints of barely-there battery life, as well as some dissatisfaction with precision in locating a path from user location to desired POI; we personally haven’t tried this out, but we’ll keep you posted on how strongly to consider individual complaints.

With twenty-two big cities on the docket, we aren’t too worried that everyone will be able to come across something to love about this app – good for both tourist and native, you can either find yourself utterly enmeshed within the life of your chosen vacation spot, or discover something entirely new in your own backyard. And, at the very least, you’ll know if cannibals live in the neighborhood.

For many parents the summer is a carefree time when keeping tabs on your kids is as easy as sending them to summer camp, or having them accompany you on a family vacation to a Old West desert mining town where the only danger is boarded up, abandoned mine shafts.

But as the toasty weather (eventually) subsides, the reins of your kids’ safety get handed over from an irresponsible 18-year-old making $500 for the summer to the somewhat less-trusted hands of the public school system. With the transfer, the fear of deranged, candy-pushing derelicts in minivans scoping out the bus stop –before students are shipped off to Barricade Fortress Jr. High– clouds the minds of protective parents everywhere.

One Southwest Chicago school district is doing its part to quell the constant amber alerts being issued in the brains of watchful guardians– with the use of GPS.

The Palos Heights 128 School District is keeping tabs on its bus-riding students with ZPass IDs (provided by Zonar Systems). The labels log passengers into the district’s database every time a student steps on or off the bus. The new process is sure to frighten some people with its big brother potential, but for parents who want to make sure their kids travel safely to and from their local center of learning, the system is a win-win. True, it doesn’t ensure their kids will pay attention and get straight A’s when they get there, but making it to homeroom in one piece is a pretty important piece of that battle.

The program itself is an update of one run by the same district the previous three years, in which all buses (but not the students) had been equipped with the same ZPass technology. It cost the district $16,000 to cover passengers on 10 buses, a small price to pay for the safety of it’s students. If the initiative proves an overwhelming success, other districts are sure to make room in the budget for the implementation of such a measure.
 

Treasure hunters became rescuers last week, when two Geocachers stumbled upon two stranded women in the deserts of the Western US. Roy Joseph and Paul Fox were "geocaching" in their off-road jeep on the Colorado-Utah border the week of August 25th. As they motored along, they passed a stationary van - an uncommon occurrence in the desert - and decided to investigate. Inside, sat a woman and her elderly mother; they had been going for a drive two days earlier when their van got stuck in the mud and debris left behind after heavy rain. They were unable to budge the van, or call for help. The women had no food or water and had been sitting alone for two days. Joseph and Fox helped tow the van out of the mud and gave the women food and water. Joseph remarked, "If there had been more rain and runoff, it would have been more serious. Just down ravine, the creek dropped down into a bigger canyon."

Thankfully, these hobbyists helped avert a possible disaster. But what exactly were they doing out there? Who are Geocachers and what do they do? A growing hobby in the 21st century, Geocaching involves the use of satellite tracking and the Internet. It's basically a worldwide treasure hunt. Geocaches are containers hidden in an exact location by fellow enthusiasts. They can be large boxes or tiny, mini-caches. Each cache contains a logbook for finders to sign and a place to leave little "treasures" for the next Geocacher. The geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) are posted on the Geocaching website (see below) for members to find. Geocachers use GPS devices to guide them to the cache. Once they find it, they post their victories online, recording their successes.

Owners of caches are encouraged to hide their treasure chests in interesting places to provide fun experiences for seekers. Members often leave little gifts for the successful finders inside the watertight caches. One rule of Geocaching, however, is that anything removed from a cache must be replaced by another item of equal or greater value. Sometimes, objects have a Travel Bug or Geocoin attached to them. These devices tag an object and contain directions to help the object travel to a specific destination. Any Geocachers who feel they can help it along its way take it to another cache on the route. The tags can also be followed online, tracking the travels of the objects using GPS technology.

With the help of GPS tracking, geocaching is able to excite around 4-5 million enthusiasts who search for over 1 million caches worldwide. The adventure begins at www.geocaching.com. 

There are many ways to break the law, most of which lead a criminal straight to prison. White-collar and non-violent crimes are just as rampant, if not more so, than violent crimes, and yet we choose to punish the offenders the same way: by confining them in dingy prisons controlled by the government. Do carjackers and DUI offenders really deserve to be incarcerated in prisons with violent criminals where they are likely to harden and become even more offensive to the law-abiding American lifestyle?

There are currently 2.3 million Americans incarcerated, putting America in the lead for having the most prisoners. Americans make up only 5% of the global population, making this a humiliating statistic. China, which is four times as populated, only has 1.6 million people in prison. They come in a very distant second for countries with the most prisoners. This is a disgrace to America, so-called Land of the Free. We also have the highest percentage of citizens imprisoned, approximately 7.5 for every 10,000 people.

BI, a company that specializes in GPS tracking devices for parolees, maintains that using trackers for parole surveillance is an effective solution. They run on programs that are designed on a unique tracking system that enables the caretaker of the client to draw specified zones on Microsoft MapPoint and Bing Maps for Enterprise, mapping technologies that are the best in the industry. These programs can then be assigned to alarm the caretaker and/or call the police if the client goes into a non-safe zone. The client doesn’t need constant surveillance, just the thought that someone could be watching him/her at that given moment creates enough of a Big Brother effect that he wouldn’t even feel comfortable skimming the ground around a non-safe zone.

There’s no reason that these technologies shouldn’t be integrated into the federal judicial system. Some of the more technologically savvy local court systems have already implemented such systems to ease the work load of their overburdened parole officers. It is still yet to be seen if this will ever be put to use on a larger scale.

It has come up in many a court whether or not tracking a suspect with a GPS tracker is legal. Is it a breach of the fourth amendment? Is a tracker a form of “unreasonable searches”? Need it be dependent on a warrant “upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation”? Is it in violation of the clause “describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”, because you can’t exactly specify where you will search someone if you are tracking them? All words in quotations come directly from the Constitution, the legal body that almost 350 years after composition our nation still follows.

If the words are taken literally, then it would be almost impossible to use a GPS-enabled tracker to assist in the capturing of a suspected criminal. A tracker in any shape or form would qualify as an unreasonable search by most legal definitions. Any covert tracking generally requires special permission by a legal enforcement authoritative figure. The thing is, issuing a warrant for a GPS tracker would be problematic. There’s almost no way to describe what’s going to be tracked and where, and the whole point of the warrant is that it must be as specific as possible to ensure a legal search.

The dilemma has been brought to court before by suspects that felt that they were violated. They appealed their cases to some of the country’s thirteen federal Court of Appeals. The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of a criminal found guilty on proof that was documented by a GPS tracker. The defendant claimed that such surreptitious tracking was an “unreasonable search”. The courts ruled that placing a tracking device on a car does not qualify as a “search or seizure” because they equated the device to a police car physically tailing the vehicle. The judge reasoned, “if police follow a car around, or observe its route by means of cameras mounted on lampposts or by satellite imaging as in Google Earth, there is no search”. From that ruling, issuing a warrant wouldn’t be necessary.

There was a difference of opinion between the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals to that of the D.C. Circuit. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote a 41 page opinion as to why he and his two fellow judges chose the verdict that favored privacy. “It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he goes to the market or returns home from work,” Ginsburg wrote. “It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.” He felt that GPS tracking was equivalent to the kind of police tracking that requires a warrant.

There’s only one court above the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court. Being as that there is no official verdict yet, it is entirely up to the national court to announce a verdict to apply in all 50 states. It will be interesting to learn the conclusion when the next historic decision is announced.

Due to poachers and hunters who use giraffe’s skin to produce cloth, the giraffe population in Western Africa has unfortunately become extremely scarce. They are slowly making their way up the endangered species list, and scientists have had to act quickly.

In order to gather more information about these long-necked, majestic creatures of Africa, eight giraffes were fitted with GPS tracking collars. These GPS collars were specially designed to fit around the giraffe’s long neck, and are also camouflaged to match the color of the giraffe’s skin so that the giraffe doesn’t become easy prey.

Using the information gathered from the GPS devices, scientists can better understand where the giraffes are most commonly gathering, which helps them figure out in which areas giraffes need the most protection from hunters. The devices also serve as a precautionary measure: many giraffe hunters may be a bit less willing to fire a gun at any giraffe wearing a GPS collar because hunting giraffes is illegal in West Africa.

Getting the GPS collars onto the giraffes is probably the most difficult part of this entire process. Scientists must first fire a tranquilizer dart at the giraffe, and then an anesthesiologist must keep the giraffe unconscious until the GPS tracking collar can be been safely placed around its long neck. It takes a team of seven men to hold down this enormous animal so that it doesn’t make any sudden movements while it is incapacitated.

With this new technology, scientists also hope to find the mating grounds of the giraffes in Western Africa. With this information, scientists will hopefully be able to relocate more giraffes to these mating grounds, thus expanding the giraffe population in Western Africa, and consequently having them lowered them on the endangered species list.

There is also another serious threat that faces the giraffe population in Africa. With industrialization just starting to grow in Western Africa, more and more trees are being cut down, and even more watering holes are being taken over for human resources. The giraffes’ natural habitat is shrinking, which is causing many giraffes to die from lack of food and water. While environmentalist efforts are still trying to limit this harming of the ecosystem, scientists are using the information they gather from the satellite tracking collars to discover better locations for the giraffe population to inhabit.

With the help of this advanced new GPS based technology, the giraffe population will hopefully live on, and these gorgeous, majestic mammals of the dusty planes of Africa can continue to thrive in peace.

Engineers from Japan have invented a prototype device that places GPS navigation technology into a pair of glasses, which they call a “Wearable Personal Navigation System”. Created at the University of Electro-Communications' Nakajima Laboratory and displayed in Tokyo at the Wireless Japan 2010 expo, these devices feature a battery powered microcomputer, as well as a magnetic directional sensor that can be lit up using LED lights.

These glasses operate is very simply. All you need to do is enter your desired destination into a computer and download that information onto the glasses’ hard drive. A walking route will be calculated, sent over to the glasses, and can immediately be used to guide you to your destination.

These glasses also have internal LED lights positioned in a circular fashion around the lens frame. The LED lights are visible in a user's peripheral field of vision, so they won’t distract the wearer from what’s going on in front of them. These small lights surrounding the frame will change their color in order to show the user which direction he or she should be walking in.

These glasses represent the forefront of GPS equipment as we know it, and they also aim to fix some of the major problems that current GPS systems impose. GPS devices of today, like smartphones and vehicle navigation systems, often require you to look down at a display while in motion – preventing you from watching where you're going – which could be very dangerous if you’re driving at high speeds or in a high traffic urban environment. With these glasses, users can look forward instead of looking down.

This technology is relatively new, and engineers are still working out the kinks in the system to make sure they’re as accurate as possible, even in those areas without satellite coverage. (Since the GPS coordinates are pre-programmed into the glasses’ hard drive, they never need to receive any signals.)

Hopefully we’ll see more of this technology sometime in the near future.

Solar storms are extremely powerful natural disasters, and they are able to cause a tremendous amount of economic damage. During a typical solar storm, the sun’s surface flares up and massive fireballs are shot into the Earth’s atmosphere. This often results in the harming of many of the electrical waves back down on earth; radio signals, satellite signals, and even cell phone signals can be shorted out from these powerful eruptions on the suns exterior. Of course, this means that a lot of GPS based equipment could very well loose accuracy or even complete satellite connection during one of these storms.

Due to the sun’s relative dormancy, solar storms tend to occur once every 11 years. The last recorded solar storm was in 2001, which means that the next one is expected to occur sometime in the year 2012.

While no solar storm is good, some can definitely be more devastating than others. Take, for example, the Great Solar Storm of 1859, when a massive solar storm burned telegraph wires all across Europe and the US. The incident was referred to as the 1859 Carrington Flare, and it caused every telegraph signal in two different countries to be completely blacked out. In today’s technology-reliant society, one can’t help but wonder what would happen if such a blackout occurred today. It could take months, if not years, to truly recover.

One of the reasons why these solar storms are so powerful is because of the enormous amount of electro-magnetic waves released by the sun, the same type of waves used in nuclear bombs and EMP devices. These electro-magnetic waves short out any electrical device within the area, and they can throw off any satellite or radio signals in that vicinity.

For better or for worse, our society uses this kind of technology in places like banks, communications, hospitals, computers, transportation systems, as well as in an enormous electrical grid that serves billions of people around the world. If this type of solar eruption were to occur, all memory storage on hard drives and databases could be completely whipped clean.

It’s unthinkable to imagine that a storm could completely shake the foundation of our society, especially when considering how completely dependent we are on technology. As the next solar storm approaches, it’s important to remember that any repeat of the Great Solar Storm of 1859 could bring our modernized society to a screeching halt.