GPS systems used to track lightning strikes, to help stop wildfires

KKTV News 11 reports: "A local United States Colorado community has a high tech way to protect against fires. They have installed technology that tracks lightning strikes.

The community of Crystal Park Colorado decided to do this after they were evacuated during the Waldo Canyon Fire. When they came back, they discussed ways to protect their community from fires and this was one of those ideas."

The gated community is located southwest of Manitou Springs Colorado. There are 225 homes situated in 2,000 acres of rugged terrain and forest.

"It's a little bit risky to live up here, but it's beautiful and we enjoy it," said John Swafford, who lived in Crystal Park and is on the HOA board.  To protect the homes from wildfires, the HOA invested in technology that tracks lightning.  "What we've set up is a lightning location and analysis system," said Swafford.

Using a national sensor database, Swafford monitors where lightning hits the ground during a storm. If it's a stronger strike, the volunteer fire department uses GPS to find out where it hit and respond to the area.  The NLDN uses over 100 remote, ground-based sensing stations located across the United States that instantaneously detect the electromagnetic signals given off when lightning strikes the earth's surface.

"This system helps us to locate it precisely and also gauge how serious the lightning strike is and whether it was likely to have started a fire," said Swafford. "If you don't have data to say where it was then all you can do is wait for the smoke. This way we get a faster start on it."

Last Saturday during a storm, the system sent an alert to Crystal Park homeowner, Vic Russelavage. Lightning had struck less than 100 feet from his house. Fortunately, he didn't find any damage.  "It's nice to know when those hit because then you can go out once the dust clears and check things out," said homeowner Vic Russelavage.

The technology has been up and running for two weeks. In that time, there have been 11 lightning strikes recorded in Crystal Park.  The software costs about $8,000USD. The community got the money to pay for it from a grant from FEMA. They were one of 30 communities nationwide to be awarded the grant. Eventually, they will have to pay about $1,500USD a year to keep the subscription.

GPS Fleet Tracking improves fleet safety; reducing liability

Effectively managing workers in the field is an essential component of finishing any project on time and within budget. However, you can’t be everywhere at once. Relying on trusted supervisors is a good start to improving the efficiency of your workforce, but GPS fleet tracking can help you take it to another level.

GPS tracking is most commonly associated with vehicles, but there are many features that can also help you manage a workforce which can include tracking smartphones.

Use GPS Fleet Tracking to Supervise Workers
Improve productivity by ensuring that your vehicles and employees are where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there. Certain GPS tracking features allow you to get more accurate time reporting, and ensure that you are  paying for time not spent on the job:

Driver key fobs
Time sheet verification
Landmark and geo-fence alerts
You don’t need to be onsite to confirm that your employees and their supervisors are doing their jobs.

Monitor Activity with GPS Fleet Tracking Reports
Just showing up is not enough to get the job done. Monitor worker activity and performance with these reporting tools:

Starts and Stops
Ignition on-off locations
Idle reports and fuel usage verification
As gas prices go up, so do incidents of fuel theft.  Idle reports can help to make sure that fuel is not being wasted, and fuel usage verification reports can make sure that fuel theft is kept in check.
Power take-off (PTO) events
PTO monitoring can be particularly useful. These reports allow you to confirm that an employee is not just sitting in an idling vehicle, but actively using the equipment; and that the vehicle is being used for the project it was intended for and not for activity that the company or owner isn't being compensated for.

Use GPS Fleet Tracking for Work-site Compliance
Enforce work-site compliance regulations that are designed to protect both employees and clients. Time reports allow you to monitor hours of operation so you can schedule staff in a way that ensures they don’t work too many hours. Geo-fences and alerts allow you to keep employees out of restricted or dangerous areas, protecting client assets and keeping employees safer.

GPS Fleet Tracking Improves Worker Safety
Maintaining a safe work-site is everybody’s responsibility. Do your part by implementing a GPS tracking system with safety features like seat belt alerts and panic switch alerts. Seat belts help keep drivers safe while the vehicle is in operation. Panic switch alerts are a safety feature that can alert staff in case of an accident or a hostile situation.

In today's litigious society, improving fleet and worker safety also helps to reduce liability, and insurance costs.  Tracking your fleet also provides data that can be helpful in refuting any potential claims made by a third party.

Even though vehicles don’t always move far or fast, GPS fleet tracking can still be used to monitor worker activity, improve productivity, and keep your employees safe.

GPS signal distortion by Hurricanes provides clues to wind speed

Global Position Satellites (GPS) have been used for several unusual purposes, but hurricane wind speed tracking counts as one of the most unusual.

Hurricane hunters flying for the National Hurricane Center, and based out of Keesler Air Force Base in Georgia, typically use dropsondes which are tiny tracking devices attached to balloons to track wind speeds.  However, these devices are expensive so the planes only drop a few per storm, which means only intermittent monitoring.  Dropsondes were first used in 2007, and about 1000 are used each year for hurricane tracking, at a cost of about $750USD per unit.

Instead the GPS system on-board the weather reconnaissance aircraft works almost continuously as the plane flies through the storm, giving researchers a list of readings.  The planes are listening for GPS signals that are being reflected from the oceans surface.  When the oceans are choppy due to high wind speeds, the waves reflect the GPS radio waves back in various directions distorting the signal.

Winds blowing over a body of water generate heaving waves.  "Imagine you blow on a hot bowl of soup," said Stephen Katzberg, a researcher at the NASA Langley Research Center and author of the study, in a press release. "The harder you blow, the bigger the 'waves' are in the bowl."  Scientists have figured out how to measure these reflected 'distorted' radio waves and use the measurements to decode the speed of the wind.

The first comprehensive test run was in 2000, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists have been refining the system every year since then.  They system today is almost always accurate for wind speeds between zero and 40 meters per second.  While it's not yet as accurate as dropsondes, the analysis is lower cost, lower weight, and requires less power.

Similar systems could be installed in weather drones in the future, and with further technology advances it may be utilized directly in satellites.  In 2016, NASA plans to launch a system of 8 small satellites called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) to measure reflected GPS satellite signals from low earth orbit in order to monitor storm wind speeds from space for multiple storms.

The data collected helps to predict storm severity, and where the storm may be headed.

Geofence Alerts setup to help Aspen Police find stolen bikes

Channel 7 News reports: ASPEN, Colo. - Flashy cars used by police as bait to catch car thieves are taking a back seat to bait bicycles being used by Aspen police.

Police say more than 33 bikes have been reported stolen in Aspen since May and there has been a 30 percent increase in bike thefts from 2011 to 2012.

The Aspen Times reports police are using GPS-enabled bicycles at various locations that have been identified as hot spots for bicycle theft.

If the bicycle with the device is moved, the Aspen Police Department will be alerted and police will be able to track it down, with hopes of nabbing the culprits.

New Apple Patent could use Geofences to disable Smartphone Cameras

PetaPixel reports: "In June of last year, we reported on an unsettling patent filed by Apple that would allow certain infrared signals to remotely disable the camera on iPhones. It showed the potential downsides of bringing cameras into the world of wireless connectivity, which appears to be the next big thing in the camera industry. Now, a newly published patent is rekindling the fears of those who don’t want “Big Brother” controlling their devices."

U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, published on Tuesday, is titled, “Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device.”

Here’s the quick description: "Apparatus and methods for changing one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device, such as upon the occurrence of a certain event. In one embodiment, the event comprises detecting that the wireless device is within range of one or more other devices. In another variant, the event comprises the wireless device associating with a certain access point. In this manner, various aspects of device functionality may be enabled or restricted (device “policies”). This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and/or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter “sleep mode” when entering a sensitive area."

If this type of technology became widely adopted and baked into cameras, photography could be prevented by simply setting a “geofence” around a particular location, whether it’s a movie theater, celebrity hangout spot, protest site, or the top secret rooms at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

There are some questions about how updates for the geofences would operate for the camera - since one way to potentially defeat the functionality would be to turn off wireless communications and the GPS sensor prior to entering these 'areas'.  You might not be able to send the data in near-real-time, but you would still potentially be able to send the pictures or video when back outside of the geofence.

Companies often file patents for all kinds of random technologies that never end up seeing the light of day, so you shouldn't be too concerned about this latest document. It’s just a warning of what the future could potentially hold.

The Future of Digital Mapping: Crowdsourced Maps

Crowdsourced OpenStreetMap (left) vs the same Nokia map (right)

In a recent article by Oliver Kühn Skobbler, he writes  that the future of digital mapping will be in crowdsourced maps; and I think he makes a compelling argument.

In his article he says "One of the most exciting opportunities for crowdsourced maps specifically, and digital maps generally, lies in car user data, which is just coming into its own. Cars are obviously one of the largest travel tools utilized by individuals on a daily basis, and, with the advent of the connected car, the data that they collect via internal/external sensors has grown more nuanced, granular, and specific over the years.  Cars are simply getting smarter, with sensors capable of providing everything from weather conditions to speed-zone information.

Making this information available in the cloud and combining it with data available via crowdsourced mapping platforms produces remarkable possibilities for innovation. Imagine adding road-condition data, as just one example, to crowdsourced mapping services. By marrying a crowdsourced map with crowdsourced car-sensor data, the map’s overall utility multiplies immeasurably."

He also mentions that with Google's recent acquisition of Waze, that they are hoping to improve their own efficiency in this area.  Google currently spends billions a year to maintain it's mapping platform.  How much will they likely save by having local drivers provide near-real-time updates for them?

When GPS fails, this tiny device could step in

From a report by Phys.org: In a pellet of glass the size of an apple seed, University of Michigan engineering researchers have packed seven devices that together could potentially provide navigation augmentation in the absence of the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS.)

Space-based GPS – convenient for civilians and essential for the military – is far from fail-proof. It doesn't work indoors, near tall buildings or in heavy cloud cover, and it's relatively easy to jam, researchers say.

"In some cases, there is no good solution for that yet," said Khalil Najafi, the Schlumberger Professor of Engineering and chair of electrical and computer engineering. "That's one of the reasons there's interest in developing this technology."

So-called "timing and inertial measurement units" similar to this new one are used nowadays as motion sensors in cell phones, game controllers and automotive systems, but the performance of these silicon sensors isn't good enough for navigation, positioning and guidance across larger distances or long times. Inertial sensors have been used to navigate ships and aircraft since long before GPS. Those still in use today in these vehicles are much larger.

"In the smallest commercial inertial systems, the volume is about the size of an apple, and most are larger – about the volume of four apples," Najafi said. "The volume of our device is less than an apple seed. The main breakthrough is that the technology we developed is hopefully going to allow us to build very high performing devices in extremely small sizes."

At 13 cubic millimeters, the package contains a highly-precise master clock and six sensors that detect movement in six different axes.

To make their advanced inertial measurement unit, Najafi and his research group developed special fabrication processes that allows them to stack and bond the seven different devices in layers. And to make their unit more robust, they built it out of fused silica – a high quality glass – rather than silicon, which is commonly used for these types of devices.

Timing and inertial measurement units track a path by measuring speed, time, direction and distance from a starting point. "In order to measure position, you need to know where you are and then how far you've moved in so much time and in what direction," Najafi said.

GPS receivers, on the other hand, calculate location based on their movement in relation to a network of satellites. The satellites continuously ping the receiver. Najafi envisions that the two approaches could be combined so navigation systems would have a backup component and seamless operation both outdoors and indoors. But that, he believes, is at least five years away.

Other researchers who contributed to the work include: post-doctoral research fellow Zongliang Cao; graduate student Yi Yuan; assistant research scientist Becky Peterson; and visiting assistant research scientist Guohong He, all in the department of electrical engineering and computer science. Najafi and his colleagues presented a paper on the device, "Fabrication of Multi-Layer Vertically Stacked Fused Silica Microsystems" on June 18 at the 17th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuator and Microsystems Conference (Transducers '2013) in Barcelona, Spain. Mina Rais-Zadeh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and her group developed the timing unit for this system. Najafi is also an Arthur F. Thurneau professor and a professor of biomedical engineering.