Waze is worth it - if only for the crowd-sourced traffic report

An example of the crowd-source traffic
information  on Waze that allowed us to
identify the need for an alternate route.

Reported by Thomas L. Grounds with iTRAK: While taking a drive up to Denver Colorado this past weekend, I was able to test out the Waze application I had downloaded for free on my iPhone.  Waze is a GPS based navigation app which provides turn-by-turn navigation, as well as user submitted travel times and route details.

Driving from Colorado Springs to Denver is typically a 30-40 minute drive each way.  On the way up to Denver, my wife and I noticed that traffic was fairly slow and heavy on I-25 headed south.  On our way home, my wife asked if I could check the traffic on I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs - so we could potentially take an alternate route at Castle Rock, just south of Denver.

Once we were beyond that point we were essentially committed to staying on I-25. I quickly explained why traditional traffic updates were a potential problem for us - that most of the updates come over special receivers on FM, Bluetooth or satellite radio systems, and generally cost a monthly fee to subscribe to.  Since we don't often travel outside of our area, this isn't really cost effective.

Additionally, not all areas are covered by the service. Heavily populated areas like LA, and New York - certainly, but probably not the small areas that we typically drive to on the weekend.  So, the question was - could a smartphone app save the day?

A screen shot of the response we
received from the new Google Maps
application on my iPhone.

I initially checked the traffic using a Google Maps app - but it indicated that it didn't have coverage for our particular area - which was surprising since the Denver metropolitan area covers a fairly large geographical area and has more than 2.6 million people in the vicinity.  I also checked my twitter account to see if the Denver Post had any updates that might have been relevant; there were several about local flooding, but none that seemed applicable to our drive down I-25.

Then I switched to Waze.  When asked for a route to my home (a setting it had created just after the app was downloaded), it quickly came up with a route down I-25 for us.  But when I checked the crowd-source traffic information it gave us the bad news - traffic was at a stop on the highway.

Lucky for us the information came back in enough time so that we were able to setup an alternate route home through Sedalia CO on highway 67; a rough and mountainous road through Deckers CO, but much more scenic - and perfect for a weekend drive.

It looks as if Waze does not quite have all of the traffic information integrated into the routing application yet.  The app continued to try and route us down I-25 to the traffic jam till we forced a route to Sedalia, and then to Deckers before heading home.  Nevertheless, the update regarding the traffic, and our ability to avoid it made it worthwhile.

Waze is being acquired by Google in a buyout estimated to be worth about $1B USD.

Wuhan uses GPS to address food waste pollution

As reported by Zdnet.com: The Chinese city of Wuhan (武汉) [referred to as the Chicago of China] is equipping waste collection trucks and trash cans with a digital weighing and GPS device to combat the problem of "gutter oil", or illegally recycled cooking oil.

The initiative will begin operations from December when legislation mandating the integrated collection and processing of kitchen waste kicks in, according to a China Daily report Monday. The new regulation defines edible oil waste as a combination of water and oil collected from kitchen ventilators, oil water separators or sewage facilities.

The integrated system will monitor all waste in the Hubei (湖北) capital [meaning 'north of the lake'], including food leftovers, scrap materials, and edible oil waste from food and beverage outlets, canteens, and factories dealing with food processing and production. It must be implemented in all restaurants bigger than 80 square meters.

Companies will be set up in each district to manage the collection and transport, Chen Jian, director of construction for the Wuhan Urban Management Bureau, said in the report. He added that anyone or organization found in violation of the regulation will be subject to fines.

The China Daily report noted that 621 vehicles, of which 195 will be used for edible oil waste, and 25,800 garbage cans--which all food facilities are required to use--will be equipped with the GPS and weighing system.

Chen explained that to ensure no food waste is collected to make gutter oil, the system which records GPS as well as weight data will be installed on the collection trucks, garbage cans, and oil cans of oil-water separators. "We can clearly know what the vehicles are doing, how much food waste is loaded or uploaded, and can track the vehicles with a click of a mouse in the office," he added.

The devices will measure the weight of the food waste and the data kept for at least two years, as required by the new regulation, by the producer, waste collector, and transporter and processor of the food waste.

"If the weight of the food waste collected from a restaurant decreases sharply, we will investigate where the food waste goes," Chen said, adding that the new initiative is forecast to handle 60 percent of the city's food waste by end-2015.

The daily kitchen waste output in Wuhan is 1,100 tons, 55 percent that of the country's capital Beijing. The Hubei capital plans to build five waste treatment facilities, with capacity to process 200 metric tonnes of food waste each day. These plants will also produce methane and compost from the food residue.

The integrated collection and processing will also reduce pollution from the food waste to the abundant water resources, said Yu Xiao, vice-president of Wuhan Environment Sanitation Science Research Institute.

Wuhan has a 3,500-year-long history, and is one of the most ancient and civilized Metropolitan cities in China; more ancient even than Beijing.  "The famous cooking culture in Wuhan results in a large amount of food waste, which puts the large number of lakes and rivers in the city under pollution risk, as food waste usually will be deserted after the oil is extracted before the integrated collection and processing," he said.

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.