Firefighting Crews Should Have GPS Help

As reported by the Yuma Sun: When firefighters are working on wildfires, one would assume that those crews are equipped with the best, latest technology to keep them safe.

However, the investigation into the deaths of the 19 firefighters near Yarnell in June has shown that isn't always the case.

Investigators have said one way to keep firefighters safe in the future is with GPS tracking technology.

“Real-time information on the location of crews and the location of the fire, if those two things had been known, this accident could have been prevented,” said Bill Grabbert, a retired wildland firefighter, fire management officer and author, said in a recent Associated Press article.

Given the prevalence of GPS technology now, especially in smartphones, it’s unfathomable that it isn't being used to keep firefighters safe.

Officials have said that proper procedures were followed in Yarnell. But the report notes that when the hotshot crew died, an air-tanker was circling overhead. The command center thought the crew had decided to stay put, and the air-tanker was confused about their location, the AP reported.

GPS technology isn't perfect. According to GPS.gov, which is the U.S. government’s official website about the Global Positioning System, high quality GPS systems, combined with augmentation systems, can pinpoint real-time positions to within centimeters.

But, there are factors that can impact that accuracy, such as atmospheric conditions and the quality of the receiver.

However, wouldn't that technology be worth every penny? The payoff would be two-fold – better accuracy in firefighting, and, most important, protecting the lives of wildland firefighters.

For the families of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, there isn't anything that can be done to bring back their loved ones. And because of 30 minutes of radio silence prior to their deaths, many questions will be left unanswered.

But from their tragedy, officials can make changes to help protect other wildland crews in the future.

The next step should be equipping wildland firefighting teams with the best technology to keep them as safe as possible.

Insurance Privacy Collision: Data On How You Drive Can Reveal Where You Drive

As reported by ComputerWorld: If you haven’t heard of them before, use-based insurance (or so-called “Pay as You Drive” or PAYD) programs are all the rage in the auto insurance industry. They make a lot of sense: rather than penalize good drivers for the crummy driving of others (by averaging overall accident stats across a region), leverage on-board technology within the insured vehicle to monitor the miles traveled, speed, braking and other vital statistics to pinpoint good and bad drivers.

The technology allows infrequent, safe drivers to pay much lower premiums, while drivers who rack up tens of thousands of miles a month, or career around the roads at breakneck speeds to pay premiums that are appropriate given the amount of driving and their behavior behind the wheel. Insurers either install their own hardware in the automobile (like Progressive Insurance’s Snapshot program), or work with companies like OnStar that already have tracking and telematics hardware installed.

Most insurance companies who offer these programs are careful to say that they don’t record GPS data that tracks the movements of policy holders, or track their whereabouts. But researchers at the University of Denver show in newly published research that drivers’ movements are easily derived from the data insurance companies do collect, including vehicle speed, turns, time traveled and information such as traffic stops. The researchers found that “a number of trips can be geographically matched to their destination using simple driving features.”

A team of researchers at the University of Denver’s Department of Computer Science consisting of Rinku Dewri, Prasad Annadata, Wisam Eltarjaman and Ramakrishna Thurimella found that driving metrics, like other sensor data, can be highly revealing about individual behavior when collected in bulk. Their study used a commercial tracking device that was capable of collecting the time, driving speed and distance traveled. They then observed automobiles in the Denver area over a period of 15 days, comprising 30 trips ranging from 1 mile to 25 miles. 

With knowledge just of the origin of a trip, they found, they could accurately predict the destination of the journey absent any GPS data. They accomplished this using a strategy they called “stop-point matching,” on the theory that the pattern of stop points from a known origin will be more or less unique for any location, unless the layout of streets is very regular (such as Manhattan’s grid layout.)

The study could raise important data privacy questions for the (many) “pay as you drive” programs now being piloted, or offered to drivers – not to mention other programs that seek to match remote sensors and real-time monitoring with products and services. The data points collected by these remote sensing devices are what the researchers call “quasi-identifiers” – attributes that are “non-identifying by themselves, but can be used to unique identify individuals when used in combination with other data.”

Their findings align with other research, including a study by scientists at MIT and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, which found that mobile device data from just four, randomly chosen “spatio-temporal points” (for example, mobile device pings to carrier antennas) was enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals studied based on their pattern of movement alone.

The research doesn't suggest that PAYD programs should be banned – but it does put the onus on insurance companies to disclose the potential privacy implications of data collection to their customers.


“Privacy advocates have presumed the existence of location privacy threats in non-tracking telematics data collection practices; our work shows that the threats are real,” the authors say. 

“Enough information should be conveyed to consumers so that an informed decision can be made.”

Robotic Boat Hits 1000-Mile Mark in Transatlantic Crossing

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: “Scout,” a 4-meter-long autonomous boat built by a group of young DIYers, is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It is traveling from Rhode Island, where it launched on 24 August, to Spain, where all being well it will arrive in a few months’ time.

Scout has now gone about 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) of its planned 3700-mile (5900 kilometer) journey. Should it complete this voyage successfully, its passage will arguably belong in the history books.

I say “arguably,” because it won’t be the first time a robotic vessel has crossed the Atlantic: Scarlet Knight, a sea-going robot fielded by researchers at Rutgers University, did that in 2009. But Scout stands to beat out Scarlet in my mind, for several reasons.

You see, Scout would be the first robotic surface vessel to make this crossing. Scarlet was what is known as an oceanographic glider, which porpoises up and down, spending most of the time at significant depth.

Okay, maybe the distinction between a surface vessel and an oceanographic glider is too fine for the typical landlubbing roboticist to care about. But there are other reasons to disqualify Scarlet from the record book of autonomous Atlantic Ocean crossings. For one, Scarlet was launched from a ship about 50 miles offshore of New Jersey. And it was recovered by another ship far offshore from Spain. So it didn’t really make a continent-to-continent voyage at all.

If this sounds like a trivial point, then you’ve probably not done much blue-water sailing. Out in the middle of the ocean, there’s not much to hit. Close to shore, however, you’re in the shipping lanes, fishing boats are zigzagging around deploying nets or hauling them in, and recreational traffic increases enormously. If you’re sailing into a busy port, it can feel like you’re dodging giants in the final hours. So the fact that Scarlet didn’t have to endure the most risky parts of a transatlantic journey is significant.

If that’s not good enough for you, consider this: Scarlet could be remotely controlled. Indeed, soon after Scarlet put to sea, it became clear that there was a problem, one that was corrected by uploading some new parameters by radio. (Spectrum’s coverage of Scarlet describes this episode.) Now how autonomous is that?

Also, Scarlet required a pit stop. Off the Azores, technicians from Rutgers caught up with Scarlet to scrape barnacles off its hull. They did that in the water rather bringing it aboard ship. So technically, the glider’s journey was uninterrupted. Technically.

Scout is shooting for a transatlantic record under a different set of rules. It was carried off the beach and into the water by two guys on their backs—and only far enough out so that it’s keel would clear the bottom. Scout sends telemetry updates three times an hour using an Iridium transmitter, but no new instructions or parameters can be sent to it. It must navigate autonomously.

Completely autonomous operation means pesky little problems like that one that dogged Scarlet initially can’t be fixed after the fact, making the enterprise that much more difficult. The Scout team, too, realized their boat had a problem soon after it set off—a software glitch caused it to ignore many of the offshore waypoints that had been programmed in (the bug was in code intended to prevent the boat from backtracking should currents push it east of a given waypoint). But Scout got off okay and is still cruising toward Spain. The team is pretty sure that it is headed for a waypoint that lies about 150 miles west of its final destination, Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Although the construction of Scout’s hull is somewhat high tech—carbon fiber sandwiching Divinycell foam—the rest of the boat is comparatively simple. Solar panels mounted on the top of the hull charge a lithium-iron-phosphate battery, which in turn powers an ordinary trolling motor attached to the bottom of the hull. (In good DIY style, the motor was purchased at Dick’s Sporting Goods.) Under ideal conditions, the battery will gain sufficient charge during the day to power the boat’s motor throughout the following night. Under less than ideal conditions, the motor shuts down when battery voltage gets too low, and the boat just drifts until it can get charged up again.

Scout is plenty seaworthy even when it’s not under power, and there’s nobody to feed or entertain, so drifting with the waves for a few days is no big deal. Even raging storms shouldn’t be a problem: An angled upper deck and a hefty amount of lead on the bottom of the keel ensure that the boat will quickly right itself if it gets flipped over.

Scout’s builders also included a couple of simple fail-safe features. One is that the onboard computer (an Arduino, of course!) gets automatically reset every few hours. This should protect it from freezing up should there be a memory leak or other subtle problem with its code.

The other clever measure they took was to program the boat to stop and back up a little ways every five hours. Their thinking was that this maneuver could help to clear the keel and motor of any flotsam it might have picked up. They say that they tested this technique and that it works pretty well.

I hope so. In my estimation, Scout’s greatest challenge will come from encounters with marine garbage, in particular stray bits of fishing line, which could easily foul the prop. Sargassum, a common floating seaweed, could also cause trouble.

That Scout has made it more that a quarter of the way across is encouraging, though. As a great admirer of ambitious DIY endeavors, I will continue to monitor its progress across the increasingly rough North Atlantic over the next few months and cheer the little boat onward through wind and waves from the comfort of my warm and dry office.

The Large Hadron Collider Is Now on Google Street View

As reported by Motherboard: Honestly, I'd much rather see more locations (like the Galapagos) that are super-remote and rarely photographed added to Google Street View, or maybe some of the large part of the exterior world Google has yet to Street Viewify, but I'm not going to complain about my newfound ability to tour the subterranean corridors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the French and Swiss border. China has its own street view offering anyway.

Putting together a Street View tour of one of the largest and most expensive science projects in history wasn't a particularly easy task; the mammoth detectors and tunnels of the collider took two full weeks to photograph. “Every three meters, they took a six-sided panorama of the tunnel,” CERN photographer Max Brice told Symmetry Breaking. “Then we had to figure out the coordinates of every image. It came out to 6000 points for us to track.” This was in 2011; stitching everything together into the finished product took an additional two years.

That finished product is broken into five parts: four detectors (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE) and a large portion of the tunnel. 

Honeywell Wins $499 Million in GPS, Equipment Defense Contracts

As reported by the Motley Fool: The Department of Defense issued $10.92 billion worth of new and amended defense contracts on Friday -- a mind-boggling 113 separate contract awards in all. Of these, defense contractor and industrial conglomerate Honeywell (NYSE: HON  ) won two -- of significantly different sizes.

Honeywell's big win of the day was a $485.4 million sole-source, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to integrate platforms, upgrade, and test the Air Force's Embedded Global Positioning System Inertial Navigation System, or EGI. Honeywell will also provide technical support post-integration, training, and engineering support and will provide spare parts and conduct repairs on the system through Sept. 26, 2018. EGI is described as a small, lightweight piece of electronics that uses a "state-of-the-art Ring Laser Gyro inertial navigation system" plus GPS signals to figure out an aircraft's "precise position."

Honeywell's other award of the day, considerably smaller, was a cost-plus-fixed-fee task order worth up to $13.5 million to support the Marine Expeditionary Unit Augmentation program -- a project that the USMC describes as an equipment "prepositioning program," storing heavy equipment close to places on the globe where Marines may be required to fight on short notice. This contract in particular deals with equipment being prepositioned in Kuwait and runs through Sept. 30, 2014.

SpaceX Launches Falcon 9 Rocket, Its Largest to Date

Featuring nine engines, a longer first stage, and triple redundant flight
computers, new rocket delivers Canadian research satellite to orbit.

As reported by CNET: SpaceX launched its most powerful rocket to date on Sunday, a booster the company hopes will one day ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

The nine-engine Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, about 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles, at 9 a.m. PT, carrying a Canadian science satellite for placement in orbit. The 224-foot-tall rocket features a longer first stage and triple redundant flight computers. Sunday's launch was the first Falcon 9 mission to use a payload fairing to encapsulate the satellite.

"Launch was good," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Sunday. "All satellites deployed at the targeted orbit insertion vectors."

The Falcon 9 was launched from a mothballed launch pad formerly used to by they Air Force's Titan 4 heavy-lift rocket after undergoing nearly $100 million in modifications.

The rocket delivered to orbit Canada's 1,100-pound Cassiope space weather satellite, which will be used to gather data on space storms in Earth's upper atmosphere and assess their potential impacts on radio communications, GPS navigation, and other technologies.

Musk, who co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, co-founded SpaceX that same year and secured a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to provide 12 cargo flights to to deliver equipment and supplies to the International Space Station.

Cygnus Autonomous Supply Ship Reaches International Space Station After Delay

A video view from NASA TV shows the Cygnus cargo spacecraft
attached to the International Space Station's Canadian-built
robotic arm during its capture and berthing on Sunday.
At the time, both vehicles were travelling over the Indian Ocean.

As reported by USA Today: A second private cargo spacecraft berthed at the International Space Station on Sunday morning, fully establishing NASA's commercial resupply fleet.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano steered the station's 58-foot robotic arm to snare Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Cygnus freighter at 7 a.m. Eastern as the vehicles flew 260 miles above the Indian Ocean.

"It was really, really a pleasure," he said.

"It was really everything we would have wished for today," replied Cady Coleman, an astronaut communicating with the crew from Houston. "Thank you very much to your whole crew."

Parmitano should pull the Cygnus into a docking port around 9 a.m. to complete a voyage that began with a launch 11 days ago from Virginia.

The Cygnus made what appeared to be a flawless and uneventful final approach, a week later than planned after a navigation software glitch postponed the rendezvous.

The station's six-person crew is expected to open the Cygnus hatch Monday morning to begin unloading about 1,300 pounds of food and clothing and some student science experiments.

The Cygnus was flying for the first time on a demonstration mission for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

With the successful first flight, a second Cygnus could be called upon to fly Orbital's first resupply mission under a $1.9 billion contract in December.

Under the same demonstration program, SpaceX's Dragon capsule last year became the first privately designed and operated vehicle to visit the station, and SpaceX has completed contracted resupply missions.