Why Does GPS Use More Battery Than Any Other Antenna Or Sensor In A Smartphone?

The iTRAK® WebApp™ utilizes the
smartphone or tablet's GPS signal
to locate the device, as well as
the fleet tracking devices associated
with it - using Google Maps.

As reported by Forbes: GPS is expensive (with regard to power usage) because it is a very slow communication channel — you need to communicate with three or four satellites for an extended duration at 50 bits per second. There is no time division as in other communication mechanisms, necessitating powering the antenna for the entire duration of any communication. Worse, while the GPS is on, the system cannot enter into a sleep state. Mobile devices such as Android and the iPhone achieve their battery life largely because they can aggressively and quickly enter into and exit from sleep states. GPS prevents this.

GPS’s battery draining behavior is most noticeable during the initial acquisition of the satellite’s navigation message: the satellite’s state, ephemeris, and almanac. Acquiring each satellite takes 12 to 30 seconds, but if the full almanac is needed, this can take up to 12 minutes. During all of this, your phone is unable to enter a deep sleep. A-GPS (Assisted GPS) partially solves this, by sending the navigational message to your mobile device over your cellular data network or even Wi-Fi. As the bandwidth of either of these greatly dwarves the 50bps of the GPS satellites, the time spent powering the GPS antenna or avoiding deep sleep is greatly reduced.

Nonetheless, even with A-GPS, using your GPS is a noticeable battery hog. This is again due not to powering the GPS itself, but by preventing the phone from going to sleep. Compounding the cost, most mapping software is processor-intense. A well-designed app can make a significant difference here; Google Maps boasts several optimizations to reduce battery consumption from GPS usage.

Is implementing a harassment-proof EOBR solution possible?

Electronic On-Board Recorders, have been mandated by
the FMCSA - however, the order has been vacated by
a Federal Appeals court till the issue of potential
'harassment' has been resolved.

As reported by LandLinemag.com: Back at the drawing board after being forced by the courts to vacate its initial rule on electronic on-board recorders, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is still trying to figure out how to prevent carriers from using EOBRs to harass drivers.

Solving the issue of driver harassment related to the use of electronic on-board recorders continues to be a tall task for the agency.

The agency recently requested information from the Owner-Operator Independent Driver's Association (OOIDA) and other stakeholders about a survey of commercial drivers the FMCSA intends to conduct on the issue of harassment. In response, OOIDA is urging the agency to ask the right questions of the right people or miss the mark altogether.

The FMCSA’s driver survey is not happening by chance.

In 2011, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of OOIDA and forced the FMCSA to vacate its initial rule that would have required electronic on-board recorders, or EOBRs – also known as electronic logging devices, or ELDs – for motor carriers that have unsatisfactory safety ratings.  A recent award was made to two estates by Celadon for a total of $18.5M, where an EOBR device indicated that the driver was using cruise control at 65MPH on an icy road in bad weather, while possibly sleep deprived, right before the fatal crash.

Even with the first EOBR rule vacated, Congress chose to include a provision in the current highway bill that orders the agency to pursue an industry-wide mandate as pushed by the American Trucking Associations and The Trucking Alliance, a group of large carriers consisting of J.B. Hunt, Maverick, Schneider, Knight and others.

In a recent notice in the Federal Register, the FMCSA released some sample questions it could ask drivers about harassment by carriers. In response to that notice, OOIDA says a pending survey can be effective only if it asks the right questions of the right people while accurately defining “harassment.”

“Driver harassment is a little examined issue that affects highway safety and drivers’ work and quality-of-life issues. There is no program or program element currently at FMCSA that protects drivers from motor carrier harassment,” OOIDA President and CEO Jim Johnston stated in comments to the agency.

The survey must focus on drivers who have already been operating with EOBRs, he added.

“In order to respond to the Seventh Circuit’s concerns, FMCSA’s survey should contain carefully crafted questions as to how motor carriers propose to use EOBRs to support what they consider to be legitimate productivity goals. By the same token it must include a comprehensive set of questions to drivers so that they may identify the potential for harassment.”

OOIDA surveyed drivers on its own in 2011 and offers that up for consideration as the agency tweaks its own survey questions.

The OOIDA survey showed that 42 percent of drivers of EOBR-equipped trucks had been contacted by their carriers to ask why their truck was stopped, while 37 percent said their carriers told them to get back on the road regardless of why they were stopped. Thirty-four percent of EOBR drivers reported that their motor carrier audited or changed their logs to suit a particular purpose such as adding available time to their driving clocks.

When it comes to data, OOIDA questions how it will be collected and used by carriers and law enforcement without violating a driver’s rights.

“Using an EOBR to monitor a driver’s personal use of a vehicle amounts to unconstitutional surveillance,” OOIDA Executive Vice President Todd Spencer told Land Line.

“Even company trucks are used for personal conveyance,” Spencer said. “Certainly, companies may feel like they have the right to monitor the movement of that equipment, but personal use should be separate from government surveillance.”

Definition questioned
FMCSA’s sample survey defines harassment as, “an act by a motor carrier, involving the use of information available through EOBR technology (either alone or in combination with other technology) to track a commercial motor vehicle driver’s hours of service and requiring the driver to violate federal hours of service rules or fatigue or ill driving restrictions.”

Based on what drivers told OOIDA, the Association offers to add the following to the definition, that a carrier shall not use EOBRs “in a manner that distracts drivers while operating a commercial motor vehicle or that wakes, disturbs or otherwise interrupts a driver’s quiet use of his/her off-duty time; and … for a use other than that related to compliance with the hours-of-service regulations or monitoring productivity.”

In closing, OOIDA urges the FMCSA to continue to explore the harassment issue.

“If not done properly, this survey has little potential to shed much light on driver harassment and coercion,” Johnston stated.

The brain's GPS: neurons linked to navigation are like a map grid

The entorhinal cortex region of the brain
contains 'grid cell' that help with navigation,
but are also one of the first areas of the brain
affected by Alzheimer's disease.

As reported by EurekAlert: Using direct human brain recordings, a research team from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA and Thomas Jefferson University has identified a new type of cell in the brain that helps people to keep track of their relative location while navigating an unfamiliar environment.

The "grid cell," which derives its name from the triangular grid pattern in which the cell activates during navigation, is distinct among brain cells because its activation represents multiple spatial locations. This behavior is how grid cells allow the brain to keep track of navigational cues such as how far you are from a starting point or your last turn. This type of navigation is called path integration, which is used as a kind of 'dead reckoning' system.

"It is critical that this grid pattern is so consistent because it shows how people can keep track of their location even in new environments with inconsistent layouts," said Dr. Joshua Jacobs, an assistant professor in Drexel's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, who is the team's primary investigator.

The researchers, Jacobs, Dr. Michael Kahana, from Penn, and UCLA's Dr. Itzhak Fried were able to discern these cells because they had the rare opportunity to study brain recordings of epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted deep inside their brains as part of their treatment. Their work is being published in the latest edition of Nature Neuroscience.

During brain recording, the 14 study participants played a video game that challenged them to navigate from one point to another to retrieve objects and then recall how to get back to the places where each object was located. The participants used a joystick to ride a virtual bicycle across a wide-open terrain displayed on a laptop by their hospital beds. After participants made trial runs where each of the objects was visible in the distance, they were put back at the center of the map and the objects were made invisible until the bicycle was right in front of them. The researchers then asked the participants to travel to particular objects in different sequences.

The team studied the relation between how the participants navigated in the video game and the activity of individual neurons.

"Each grid cell responds at multiple spatial locations that are arranged in the shape of a grid," Jacobs said. "This triangular grid pattern thus appears to be a brain pattern that plays a fundamental role in navigation. Without grid cells, it is likely that humans would frequently get lost or have to navigate based only on landmarks. Grid cells are thus critical for maintaining a sense of location in an environment."

While these cells are not unique among animals — they have been discovered previously in rats ¬¬— and a prior study in 2010, that used noninvasive brain imaging, suggested the existence of the cells in humans, this is the first positive identification of the human version of these cells.

"The present finding of grid cells in the human brain, together with the earlier discovery of human hippocampal 'place cells,' which fire at single locations, provide compelling evidence for a common mapping and navigational system preserved across humans and lower animals," said Kahana, a neuroscientist who is a senior author and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The team's findings also suggest that these grid patterns may in fact be more prevalent in humans than rats, because the study found grid cells not only in the entorhinal cortex — where they are observed in rats — but also, in a very different brain area — the cingulate cortex.

"Grid cells are found in a critical location in the human memory system called the entorhinal cortex," said Fried, who is a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "This discovery sheds new light on a region of the brain that is the first to be affected in Alzheimer's Disease with devastating effects on memory"

The entorhinal cortex is part of the brain that has been studied in Alzheimer's disease research and according to Jacobs, understanding grid cells could help researchers understand why people with the disease often become disoriented. It could also help them show how to improve brain function in people suffering from Alzheimer's.

'Third time's a charm' for HOS; Court upholds all but one provision

The US Court of Appeals has largely upheld the new Hours
of Service rules setup by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety
Administration (FMCSA)

As reported by LandLine: The never-ending warfare over the hours of service may very well be coming to a close as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld all but one provision of the regulations in an opinion filed Friday, Aug. 2.

The decision responds to a pair of challenges brought against the regulation. The first challenge was filed by the American Trucking Associations and the second was filed by the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Public Citizen, and the Truck Safety Coalition.

The 22-page decision written by Judge Janice Rogers Brown concludes with Judge Brown being very clear that the court upholds the lion’s share of the current hours-of-service regulation.

“It is often said the third time’s a charm. That may well be true in this case, the third of its kind to be considered by the circuit. With one small exception, our decision today brings to an end much of the permanent warfare surrounding the HOS rules,” Judge Brown wrote.

However, she did not credit the rule-making processes followed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

“Though FMCSA won the day not on the strengths of its rule-making prowess, but through an artless war of attrition, the controversies of this round are ended.”

New Hours of Service rules currently require a
controversial 34 hour restart
provision for most long haul truck drivers.

The decision vacates one small provision within the regulations.

Short-haul drivers will not be subject to the 30-minute off-duty break requirement.

“In all other respects, the petitions of both the ATA and Public Citizen are denied,” Judge Brown wrote in the decision.

Where it stands
The current hours-of-service regulations, which went into effect July 1, essentially stay as is thanks to the court’s ruling – minus the exemption for short-haul drivers.

FMCSA will have to publish the exemption in the Federal Register defining specifically what "short-haul" operations are and who the exemption will apply to. Until that happens, the exemption is basically just "ordered" by the court and not the rule of the road, yet.

For the rest of the industry (except for livestock haulers and Department of Defense loads that are also exempt) rest breaks are mandated for drivers during the workday if the driver has been on duty for eight consecutive hours. The regulation also mandates that the 34-hour restart provision must include two overnight periods of 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. in the restart. The restart is also restricted in the new regulations to only once per seven days.

The US House of Representatives' Transporation finance bill would have potentially defunded the new HOS regulations - however, the finance bill didn't have the votes to pass - so it was withdrawn.

Is China wiring Africa for surveillance?

Africa represents one of the largest growth markets left
for communications and computing in the world.

As reported by Motherboard:  Some in the US have long expected that China's massive telecom company Huawei is developing tools for the Chinese government to commit cyber-espionage around the world. Now that Huawei's getting serious about its expansion into Africa, eyebrows are being raised again.

In 2012, a House committee labeled Huawei a national security threat, and the US government has accused the firm of nefarious surveillance practices many times in the last several years. That includes accusing it of helping the Iranian government monitor its citizens and quash dissent, and having ties to the Taliban. Each time the company has denied the allegations, and government investigations consistently fail to turn up any hard evidence.

But now Huawei has invested billions of dollars in Africa over the last two decades, providing affordable cell phones, internet access, and telecommunications networks to the continent. Over the last few months Huawei has closed major deals in Africa to get more areas on the grid. The company says it's bridging the digital divide, but others suspect it's wiring the continent for surveillance.

China's Huawei has been restricted from entering into the
US markets for phones and communications infrastructure.

The loudest concerned party is former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden, who has repeatedly raised warning flags about Huawei's suspected espionage. "The Chinese see themselves in a global economic competition with the United States, and they see real advantages of at least having the possibility of exploiting African networks in the future," he told Foreign Policy in late July.

At this point, Huawei supplies back-end telecommunications equipment—wi-fi routers, mobile networks, communications hardware—to a third of the world. The thinking goes that if you build the infrastructure, you can easily build backdoors to get in and ascertain information. And not only is China laying the brick, so to speak. In many cases it's also running the networks for the African governments. If the allegations are true that Huawei provides a direct line to Beijing, it's about to have a huge peep hole into Africa.

"Even if there aren't any backdoors, which is a large hypothesis, just the Chinese state having access to the architecture of your system is a tremendous advantage for the Chinese should they want to engage in any electronic surveillance, any electronic eavesdropping," Hayden told FT.

Earlier this month, Hayden again accused Huawei of spying at the Chinese government's behest, saying he had the evidence to back it up, but the company fired back, calling the allegations  "tired, unsubstantiated, and defamatory."

Hmm, government backdoor access to data through communications technology. Where would the NSA get an idea like that? It could be tempting to assume that 40 years in the CIA and NSA is making Hayden see spies around every corner, but whether or not Huawei is involved, the Chinese government has been named the world leader in cyber-espionage.

Evidence or no, the suspicions are strong enough that regulators continue to block Huawei from entering the US market, despite the manufacturer's best efforts to break in. 

Light channels bring GPS-like technology indoors

As reported by the Boston Globe - Imagine this: You step into a vast department store to buy a new blender, and your smartphone leads you straight to the right aisle, and then lights up with a coupon for the KitchenAid model to your left.

The one remaining on the shelf has already been opened, so using your phone again, you summon a store clerk who finds a fresh box out back. Then you quickly pay with a wave of your phone over a small, glowing box that serves as a checkout register, which automatically adds points to your rewards account.

Welcome to the future of brick-and-mortar shopping, made possible by a GPS-like technology that works inside buildings and is made by Boston tech start-up ByteLight. But instead of beams from satellites that can’t penetrate walls, ByteLight uses LED light bulbs, now in so many stores, to transmit data via their pulsing light waves to the camera in a smartphone.

“The opportunity for indoor location is enormous,” said ByteLight chief executive Dan Ryan. “Right now, it’s a bit of a Wild West scenario, in that there’s a million different technologies that are trying to figure out a solution for this. Nobody’s quite gotten there yet, but we think there’s going to be an incredible opportunity.”

Indeed, indoor location technology is a huge emerging field with stiff competition and many of the biggest names in the business. Google Inc. has designed its maps application to help Android users navigate through more than 10,000 buildings worldwide — including airports, shopping malls, museums, and college campuses.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

The In-Location Alliance, a collaborative effort by mobile giants Nokia, Samsung, and Sony, and 19 smaller companies, is working on an indoor navigation system that determines a user’s position via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, by triangulating distances between hotspots and mobile handsets.

And Apple joined the fray in March when it bought indoor location start-up WiFiSlam for $20 million.

“What they lack,” Ryan said of ByteLight’s rivals, “is the ability to put a dot on the map that’s accurate, and that’s the piece that ByteLight fills in.”

Google says it can pinpoint a user’s location within several meters. Apple’s newly acquired WiFiSlam is accurate to about 8 feet. ByteLight says its margin of error is less than a meter.

Several large retailers are testing ByteLight’s navigation technology as a tool for improving employee efficiency, but customers are not yet using the system, Ryan said. He declined to name the companies.

Further along is the glowing box — ByteLight’s light field communication device, which is designed to outperform the much-hyped near field communication, which uses radio signals to perform tasks such as contactless payments within stores. But near field communication is unsupported by many mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone, whose aluminum backing blocks radio frequencies.

By contrast the ByteLight box uses light waves for such transactions, and is compatible with every camera-equipped smartphone. The company says its glowing box will make its commercial debut Wednesday at 100 retail locations in Shanghai.

Ryan and cofounder Aaron Ganick began thinking seriously about LED data transmission as undergraduates at Boston University, where they worked at the school’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

“This entire world is shifting over to LEDs,” Ryan said. “So you’re going to have this enormous infrastructure that’s deployed across every single building in the entire world. What can we do with that? What opportunities become enabled?”

The pair figured out a way to manipulate the pulsing light waves emitted by LED bulbs so they send data as they flicker. Using microchips mounted to the bulbs, the ByteLight technology causes the LED bulbs to flicker very fast — too fast for the naked eye to see — and, in doing so, to communicate information to a smartphone through its camera lens. The communication between light bulb and smartphone enables shoppers using a retailer’s mobile application to navigate through a store, receive special offers on the products in front of them, or be located by a sales representative.

Ryan said the duo realized after some experimentation that “LEDs’ digital nature means that you can switch [the lights] on and off so fast that you can transmit a data signal to a user indoors.”

Ryan and Ganick devoted themselves full time to ByteLight in 2011, a year after graduation, when they were accepted by the Summer@Highland accelerator program hosted by Highland Capital Partners in Cambridge. Last year, the company announced $1.25 million in seed funding, led by VantagePoint Capital Partners of San Bruno, Calif.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

“At some level, it allows retail to really return to its roots,” Ryan said. “The origins of retail were general stores. You went down to the local store, the owner knew your name, knew what you liked. That aspect was lost as we transitioned to this big box model of retail. Now, when you combine indoor location with mobile phones, you can customize the shopping experience.”

White House Vetoes Ban on Sale of Some Apple iPhones, iPads

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration on Saturday vetoed a U.S. trade body's ban on the sale of some Apple iPhones and iPads, a rare move that upends a legal victory for smartphone rival Samsung Electronics Co.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman made the decision to veto the ban on the Apple devices, citing concerns about patent holders gaining "undue leverage." He said Samsung could continue to pursue its patent rights through the courts.

The action marked the first time since 1987 that a presidential administration had vetoed a product ban ordered by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The ITC had ordered the ban on some older-model Apple iPhones and iPads in June after finding the products infringed a Samsung patent.

The ban had raised concerns among U.S. antitrust enforcers as well as some technology companies and lawmakers. They questioned whether companies should be able to use their essential technology patents to block rival products from the marketplace.

Apple on Saturday praised the administration for "standing up for innovation." The company had argued to the trade representative that the ban was inappropriate because Samsung had committed to license its patented technologies that were included in industry wide standards for wireless devices.

Once close business partners, Samsung and Apple have become increasingly intense rivals, sparring over the market for smartphones around the globe, with much of the momentum accruing to Samsung in recent months.

The rivalry has spilled into the courts, where barrages of competing patent claims have been lobbed in both directions. Last year, Apple won a jury trial and $1 billion in damages against Samsung over iPhone patents.

Samsung said Apple was the one that started the global patent wars between the two companies. It said the iPhone maker had sought to avoid paying for licenses of Samsung's patents.

The ITC, which has jurisdiction over certain trade practices, is an appealing legal option for patent holders, particularly tech companies, because the trade body can issue orders banning the importation of products that infringe upon another company's patents. Legal observers say it is easier to win an import ban at the ITC than it is to win a federal court ruling that would block product sales.

The ITC ruled against a key Apple theory across its recent litigation, which seeks to limit plaintiffs from using a broad class of patents to win injunctions against sales of infringing products. Such patents are submitted to industry groups that are setting key technology standards, and are deemed as essential to create products in certain categories—such as creating handsets that can communicate using a particular generation of cellular networks.

Apple has argued that in return for becoming part of an industry standard, companies usually promise those groups to license use of their patented technology under fair and reasonable terms.

But the ITC said Apple's argument wasn't valid, potentially hurting Apple's continuing efforts to change the way standards-based patents are used in legal cases.

The ITC order would have barred the U.S. sale or import of some Apple products still on store shelves, including a version of the iPad 2 made to work on AT&T Inc.'s network, and the iPhone4, which runs on AT&T and T-Mobile USA's airwaves.