Policeman Issues Nearly 800 Tickets for Texting and Driving

As reported by WBS: A Gwinnett County Georgia police officer has given more tickets for texting and driving than any other officer in the state.

Amanda Cook spoke with the officer about how drivers are making it so easy for him to give the tickets.

Gwinnett County Police Officer Jessie Myers said if you do anything on your phone besides make or receive a phone call, he will pull you over. He said the most common place to catch you in the act right at traffic lights.

“I’ve written almost 800 tickets for unlawful communications device this year," Myers said.

Myers expects he'll reach 1,000 tickets by year's end.

"Probably not going to be hard for me to do at the pace I'm on," Myers said.

Myer said he sees most people typing away on their phones while waiting at red lights.

"Most people think they're safe there," Myers said.

However, he said it’s still illegal.

"At a red light, you're still driving. according to the law. You're on a roadway, behind (the wheel of) a car, in charge of it, with a vehicle in drive," Myers said.

Myers said most people don't realize you can't access any Internet or web-based data while driving.
"All applications are web-based to some extent, including navigation," Myers said.

One driver said she was just using her phone's GPS. The law forbids that and Myers issued her a ticket.
"That's right. You can't use your (phone) navigation while driving. Unless it is a GPS-only device, such as Garmin or Tom Tom, something that is not used as a communication device," Myers said.

The officer told us a little trick he uses: If he can't see your screen directly, he just counts the number of times you touch your screen.

“If it’s beyond 10, they're not making a phone call," Myers said.

Eight hundred tickets later, Myers hopes some drivers have learned phones are for phone calls only.

"This may stop them from picking up their phone five miles down the road or three days from now,” Myers said.

Venice’s Famed Gondolas To Carry GPS Tracking Devices

As reported by International Business Times: Once again, modern technology has removed another piece of charm and romance from our lives. Venice’s famed gondolas -- the very symbols of old European gentility -- will now be fitted with Global Positioning System devices to prevent the kind of accidents that killed a German tourist two months ago and to alleviate the heavy traffic that clogs the Most Serene city’s waterways.

The Local reported that Venice’s municipal officials became concerned about maritime safety after a German professor died after the gondola that carried him collided with a “vaporetto” waterbus, a much larger vehicle that is operated by Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano, the city’s public transportation system.

Joachim Vogel, 50, was killed on Aug. 17 on the Grand Canal near the famed Rialto Bridge while riding on a gondola with his wife and three children that smashed into a waterbus. Vogel later died of his injuries in a hospital, while one of his daughters, a 3-year-old, also sustained some wounds. In the wake of that tragedy, two gondoliers and three vaporetti pilots were placed under investigation by police. There have reportedly been several other near-misses since that deadly crash.

To address safety issues, effective Nov. 4, each gondola will include not only a GPS tracking device (to monitor its movements and speed), but will also carry an external number plate and reflectors to make them more visible after dark. The city has already installed 40 CCTV cameras along the Grand Canal to observe and identify gondolieri who violate the rules of the water.

“We have no alternative; we can no longer pretend that the problem does not exist,” Ugo Bergamo, Venice’s transport councilor, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper of Milan. “We are continuing to reduce water traffic by 50 percent [at] the crucial point of the Grand Canal, that which comes from the municipality of Pescheria and which includes the Rialto Bridge.”

Under the new policies, about 5,000 vessels – including water taxis -- will be mandated to have the GPS devices installed.

Bergamo noted that prior to the new measures, gondolas were only identified by numbers located inside the craft which could not be seen by surveillance cameras. "Gondoliers will also have to have an identity card. The GPS will serve to control speed, but also to leave a trace of the journey they have carried out,” he added.

The Independent newspaper of Britain reported that Bergamo also will request that gondolas cease lining up in rows to solicit tourists and intends to remove jetties that protrude too far into the canals. Corriere della Sera described the heavy traffic that typically plagues tourist-choked Venice. Every 10 hours, some 1,600 boats – including 700 taxis and 200 gondolas – pass under the Rialto Bridge alone.

The mayor of Venice, Giorgio Orsoni, has warned that water traffic has reached dangerous levels, particularly during the busy summer tourist season, and that the problem “needs to be dealt with.” “There’s a problem over the regulation of water traffic that needs to be addressed,” he said. “I’m very saddened about what has happened,” referring to the death of the German tourist.

In addition, given that the gondolier involved in the August fatality, Stefano Pizzaggia, was found to have cocaine and cannabis in his system, other gondoliers may face regular blood and urine tests.

It is unclear how the gondoliers themselves will respond to the new measures. According to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Aldo Reato, president of the gondoliers' association, said he will reserve judgment on the new rules.

But Venice, which attracts some 60,000 visitors daily in the summer, is facing even bigger problems to its survival than just wayward gondolieri. City residents have long complained about the huge cruise ships that enter the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea, raising fears of accidents and potential fatalities -- as well as damage they cause to the fragile infrastructure of the town by increasing pollution, causing tides that erode buildings, and ruining the medieval landscape by towering over its landmarks.

According to a report from Deutsche Welle of Germany, over the past 15 years, Venice has witnessed a 439 percent increase in cruise dockings – the port is, in fact, the top cruise destination in all of Europe. "Tourism is a double-edged sword," Peter Debrine, head of the World Heritage and Sustainable Tourism Program at Unesco, told DW. "You can't have those kind of [tourism and cruise ship] numbers come into a [port] and not have a negative impact."

As a result, some Venetians have decided to pack up and leave. "Venice is a small place, without a lot of space," said Matteo Secchi, spokesperson for Venessia, a citizen's advocacy group in Venice. "The number of tourists is going up every day, every year, including people coming from the cruise ships. There's too many people in Venice during a normal day." Indeed, since the 1950s, the population of Venice has fallen by two-thirds. "Venice has started to be a city only for the tourists," added Secchi. "And so all the Venetians have left for the mainland. There are [now] more Venetians on the mainland than in Venice."

But Debrine conceded that Venice’s dependence on tourist revenue makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ban cruise-liners entirely. "Venice's economy is almost entirely dependent on tourism," he said. "They need the tourists. But, it is also essentially a museum that needs to be preserved. A balance has to be struck." According to the Cruise Venice Committee, more than 650 ships visit the port annually and their passengers spend more than 150 million euros ($203 million) every year. The cruise industry also employs about 3,000 Venetians. "If we don't fix these problems, Venice will be like Disneyland - just a park for the tourists without people living there," Secchi said. "During the day, you [can] visit the city, and at night, we [will] close the park like in Disneyland."

Late last month, some fed-up Venetians staged a protest by diving into the Giudecca Canal to block the passages of some cruise ships. About 50 people dressed in wetsuits, supported by about 1,000 onlookers, managed to stall cruise ships for over an hour. "The demonstration was a great success and we now hope the government will take advantage of this momentum and kick the cruise ships out of the Venice Lagoon," said a spokesman for the protesters, Silvio Testa, according to the Telegraph.

Testa also said that in one day, a Saturday, he saw 12 ships enter the port – nine of which weighed more than 40,000 tonnes, the maximum limit established for ships by government decree. "The time for decisions has arrived, the big ships must go as soon as possible," threatened the mayor.

A Cure for Urban GPS: a 3-D Antenna

Round receiver: This soccer-ball-size antenna can allow
more accurate GPS readings by distinguishing signals
that have come directly from a positioning satellite from
those that have bounced off buildings.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: A new antenna design being tested by the U.S. Air Force could make GPS significantly more reliable and able to function in dense urban areas where GPS accuracy is weak. It might even allow the technology to work indoors in some cases.

Good GPS readings are hard to get in cities because of the multipath phenomenon: signals from positioning satellites bounce off buildings and other structures. That confuses GPS receivers, which calculate their location by knowing exactly how long it took for signals to arrive from satellites overhead.

A signal that has bounced takes longer to arrive than it would if it had traveled directly, muddying a receiver’s math and sending location readings off by tens or hundreds of meters. Smartphones and in-car GPS units often have to work out their true location by analyzing maps and by getting a series of readings over time.

The Air Force Institute of Technology is now trying to tackle that problem with an antenna able to recognize and ignore multipath GPS signals. The project builds on a design invented by Locata, a company based in Canberra, Australia. The institute is testing the company’s soccer-ball-sized proof-of-concept prototype, and plans to adapt it into versions that could conform with the frame of a Humvee or aircraft, or be built into helmets.

As the U.S. military tries to automate aircraft and other vehicles, it must rely on GPS to know where they are. Nunzio Gambale, cofounder and CEO of Locata, says that what the Air Force develops stands a good chance of trickling down to civilians, since most GPS technology in smartphones and navigational aids originated with the military.

“The requirements of the military are now converging with the requirements of Apple and Google,” he says. “Everyone wants to use these location tracking-devices indoors and in urban areas where people say GPS will never work.”

Locata’s antenna has many different elements that can be activated individually. In the current prototype there are 80 such elements positioned around a sphere. Switching on each element individually for about one millisecond makes it possible for a receiver to sense not only the strength but also the direction of incoming signals, by comparing what is detected by the elements on different parts of the antenna.

That makes it possible to ignore GPS signals that have bounced in favor of pure ones coming directly from a satellite. “It’s like the blinders coming off,” says Gambale. He believes that in some circumstances the new antenna design could even allow GPS readings indoors, where multipath effects are extremely strong and the signals from positioning satellites are extremely weak.

Constructing antennas from multiple elements isn’t a new idea. But such designs traditionally had each element controlled by its own radio, causing different elements to interact with one another in ways that required complex additional processing to clean up. In Locata’s design, all elements connect to a single radio. The sequence of signals it produces from different antenna elements can be processed relatively easily.

Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas geopositioning lab, says that Locata’s design shows promise because it can be so much cheaper than previous attempts to address the multipath problem. However, he cautions that this approach to antenna design requires a large receiver, so for now it will be practical only in military applications.

Locata is leaving it up to the Air Force to work out how practical the 3-D antenna can be. Gambale says his company is instead focused on using the technology to improve a competing technology to GPS: a system of ground-based location beacons that allows location readings to within centimeters (see “Ultra-Fine Location Fixes”). Last year the U.S. Air Force commissioned a Locata system for the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Locata is also working to sell systems to companies that operate mines and warehouses.

GNSS Receiver Module Tracks Multiple Satellite Constellations

Linx, the GM Series of autonomous, high-performance GNSS receiver modules is designed for navigation, asset tracking and positioning applications of all kinds. Based on the MediaTek chipset, the modules can simultaneously acquire and track several satellite constellations, including the United States GPS system, Europe’s GALILEO, Russia’s GLONASS and Japan’s QZSS. Operating at a 16 mA tracking supply current, the receiver modules provide exceptional sensitivity, even in dense foliage or urban canyons. Hybrid ephemeris prediction can be used to achieve cold start times of less than 15 seconds. By combining this feature with very low power consumption, battery life is maximized in battery-powered systems. With an output of standard NMEA data, the receivers are completely self-contained requiring only an antenna, and they power up and output position data without any software set-up or configuration. Also available is a GPS Master Development System connecting a GM Series Evaluation Module to a prototyping board with a color display that shows coordinates, speedometer and compass for mobile evaluation. A USB interface allows simple viewing of satellite data and Internet mapping, as well as custom software application development.

Too Much GPS Data Can Inhibit Fleet Management Reporting

Managing data well is the main game in fleet management today. Companies need to tread carefully because excessive administration of vehicle use can quickly lead to staff communication problems and waste.

At the same time, the massive amount of information that is being generated by Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers in vehicles can lead to organisations having too much data and not enough answers. 

GPS is a US government-maintained satellite navigation system that provides location and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. The system assists military, civil and commercial users around the world and is accessible to anyone with a GPS receiver.

Depending upon the position update rate, a fleet of 50 cars equipped with GPS can generate a huge amount of data, including information about the location, speed, performance and maintenance situation of vehicles. Distilling this information down and making good use of it is often a reporting challenge, according to the director of research and communications at the Australasian Fleet Managers Association, Ken Thompson.  Too much data can be as much of a problem as too little data - since a fleet manager needs to review and understand the implication of the data - such as where a vehicle has been, and where it has stopped as well as how fast it has been moving.  Redundant data can make this analysis a significant challenge.

Thompson says GPS-generated data is particularly effective in monitoring vehicle efficiency and safety.

He says some organisations put GPS sensors into vehicles that are commonly used in remote locations so they know exactly where the vehicle is at all times.

“GPS is also used to monitor the speed of vehicles – if staff are working on unmade roads and are limited to a speed limit 40 kilometers an hour because of the roads, a connection can be made through the GPS to tell the organisation the speed limit has been exceeded,” he says. “If you have a vehicle that is carrying valuable material, for instance, you can geo-fence that. You can set parameters about the physical area in which it can operate. If the vehicle moves out of the area, then a report is sent to the organisation.”

Automated management systems are now widely used to co-ordinate vehicle maintenance and driver education.

Using fleet telematics companies can work to ensure that the right ­vehicles are used for specific tasks, and that costs and ­accident rates are reduced, by introducing reward recognition for good performance.

Speaking at a recent meeting of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, Malcolm urged fleet operators to encourage the discussion of fleet and driver performance matters at sales meetings. Employees can also be tested on road rules and provided with driver education awareness updates with online tools, he says.

Online risk management tools are an effective way of reducing accidents and gathering data to identify problem areas around company cars. But employers who think they can simply install a flashy intranet system and then forget about their duty of care responsibilities are mistaken. Risk management tools help organisations assess risk. But under Australia’s occupational health and safety regulations, the responsibility remains with the employer.

To protect themselves from potential litigation, employers need to combine online education with one-on-one driver training, including refresher training, and have measurable processes within a written policy that applies to all employees.

“One of the most powerful driver education tools is private coaching,” Malcolm says. “Drivers sit with a coach who observes them, and asks why they are drinking coffee while driving, or why they are following too close [to the vehicle in front].”

Automated maintenance management systems are also having a significant positive impact on the bottom line.

Technological changes in once-overlooked maintenance facilities and regional fleet centers are spreading through the entire enterprise, leaving productivity and profitability improvements in their wake.

Some parts and pieces of today’s maintenance management solutions have been around for decades.

What is changing the game when it comes to impact is the integration of various technology tools to create a seamless flow of asset management data that has the power to move maintenance from a reactive function to a predictive-based function.

For the past decade, the focus of fleet managers has been on taking all the different sources of maintenance-related data – including data from on-board vehicle sensors and motor industry supplier systems – and aggregating them.

The entire order-to-delivery process is being automated in many fleets. The aim is to join up all the dots so that everything from bills for material, to the maintenance work order, to the mechanic in the shop, to parts inventory management, to accounts payable is integrated. Thompson says the use of GPS is allowing certain transport operators to embrace a truly predictive maintenance world. He says public bus operators in the US use GPS to monitor how many times a bus door is opened. The gathered information is then deployed to pre-plan the maintenance and tire-change programs, according to whether a bus route involves frequent or infrequent stopping.

The great advantage of predictive maintenance regimes is that logic can be applied to data to create probabilities of failures. In doing this, fleet asset utilization is kept high.

Some information in this report was provided by the Financial Review: 

The Rise of Wearable Tech

Shipments of Wearable Technology Devices will Reach 64 Million in 2017

As reported by GIS User: According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, sales of smart glasses, smart watches and wearable fitness trackers reached 8.3 million units worldwide in 2012, up from 3.1 million devices in the previous year. Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 50.6 percent, total shipments of wearable technology devices are expected to reach 64.0 million units in 2017. Today wearable fitness and activity trackers constitute the vast majority of the shipments. By the end of the forecast period, smart watches are predicted to incorporate much of the functionality of these and will then be the largest wearable device segment.

“A perfect storm of innovation within low power wireless connectivity, sensor technology (such as GPS), big data, cloud services, voice user interfaces and mobile computing power is coming together and paves the way for connected wearable technology” said Johan Svanberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight. The first generation of products appeal to specific markets and certain use cases, but refinement in design, technology and connectivity will broaden application areas and speed up market adoption. Initially, the wrist is the most attractive location for wearable devices, which is shown by the success of the Pebble smart watch and the popularity of wristband activity trackers such as the Nike Fuelband and the Fitbit Flex. “However, today’s devices need to evolve into something more than single purpose fitness trackers or external smartphone notification centers in order to be truly successful” continues Mr. Svanberg. Berg Insight predicts that wearable technology will shift from being smartphone accessories into becoming proper stand-alone computing devices. Furthermore, closeness to the body and always aware capabilities will enable them to be more than merely miniaturized smartphones.

Google, Sony and Samsung have already launched products and other major players such as Apple and LG are expected to soon enter the market. Wide market availability of wearable devices also raises privacy concerns. “It is still uncertain where lines should be drawn, but as in the case with most new technology, individual users and solution providers have the responsibility not to misuse the capabilities enabled by wearable tech” concludes Mr. Svanberg.