SpaceX Grasshopper Rocket Makes a Half-Mile Hop, Before Landing Again

As reported by NBC News: SpaceX's Grasshopper rocket prototype made another record-setting vertical takeoff and landing this week from the California-based company's test pad near McGregor, Texas. But what's really cool about Oct. 7's half-mile (744-meter) ascent and controlled descent is the amazing view from a remote-controlled hexacopter that captured the video clip.

This is what a rocket launch and landing is supposed to look like.

The 10-story craft is testing the technologies that would be required to have the first stage of a rocket fly itself back to base after launch. The Grasshopper consists of a Falcon 9 first-stage tank, Merlin 1D rocket engine, landing legs and a steel support structure.

Last month's launch of a Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket provided a real-world test of rocket reusability, and although the test wasn't completely successful, it's only a matter of time before SpaceX gets it right.Then everything changes.

Earlier Grasshopper tests:

• August 2013: Sideways test to 250 meters
• July 2013: Grasshopper rises 325 meters
• April 2013: Grasshopper at 250 meters
• March 2013: Grasshopper at 80 meters
• December 2012: Grasshopper at 40 meters
• November 2012: Grasshopper at 5.4 meters
• September 2012: First flight test at 2 meters

The American Highway Map is Dead. Long Live the American Highway Map.

It would seem, in the days of GPS, that the common
paper road map is obsolete, but it has not outlived its
usefulness to us as a nation. A look at an icon of the
American Century, in transition.

As reported by Esquire: Let us now turn our lamentations, in these days of creative destruction, to the lowly state highway map.

For the last several years, publication has been on the decline nationwide. In the waning days of the summer vacation season, the Missouri Department of Transportation cut the print run of its latest highway map from 5 million to 2.7 million in an effort to save about $350,000. This development carried the weight of portent. If it can happen in the Show-Me State—the Ozarks, in my experience at least, are not the sort of place that particularly rewards unguided navigation—it can happen anywhere.

It’s not just Missouri. In an informal poll (I sent an e-mail to all fifty state transportation department spokespersons; half a dozen or so responded), little hope emerged for the preservation of the printed state highway map. B.J. Doughty, spokesman for the DOT in Tennessee, cited “large amounts of leftover maps.” “We give out free maps every August at our state fair, and those numbers have dropped,” said Kevin Gutknecht in Minnesota. “Since discontinuing the service, we have not had much complaint,” said Lars Erickson in Washington State, where the last maps rolled off the presses in 2008.

The suspects are usual: technology, in this case particularly GPS. And the precedents are familiar: Video v. the Radio Star, Craigslist v. Your Daily Paper, Mobile Telephony v. Any Semblance of Civility. One by one, fast and then faster, the lifestyle tools of the American Century have become relics. For those of us old enough to remember, their decline has made a parlor game out of counting the household essentials our children will never know: a Polaroid, a phone book, a transistor radio—a parlor game, for that matter.

This, then, would seem to be the moment to mark the passage of an icon, dwelling in fond detail on the cartoon images of filling station attendants, and working in a small joke about how tough the darned things were to fold. According to James R. Akerman, director of the Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago, state governments, oil companies, motor clubs, and other organizations with an interest in the promotion of automotive travel produced “tens of billions” of road maps over the course of the twentieth century.

As a symbol of the promise of the highway, the maps burrowed their way into the national psyche. Dots moving along a map became a staple of road trip movies. John Steinbeck, preparing to tour the country with a dog named Charley, denounced travelers “so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.” Bruce Springsteen sang about Wanda, who worked at the Route 60 Bob’s Big Boy, sitting on his lap, wiping greasy fingers on a Texaco road map. Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, planning a long drive through Texas down to Mexico, studied his in dizzied ecstasy: “I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles… I couldn't imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all.”

In the heyday of the road map, “it wasn’t just about the mode of transportation,” Akerman told me. “It was how people felt about seeing the whole country.”

Nostalgia for that fading feeling suggests the existing maps will continue to trade hands among people like Wayne Stitt, a fifty-three-year-old bus driver from Richmond, Virginia, who has collected 4,241 of them, starting on a family vacation when he was twelve. “And I’m still looking for any one I don’t have yet,” he told me. “I hate to see anything just get thrown away.”

He is not alone. Last month, several hundred members of the Road Map Collectors Association gathered in Indianapolis—a fine motoring town if ever there was one—for their annual convention. A rare Grizzly Gasoline map, expected to sell for more than three hundred dollars, did not find a buyer. But “there were lots of other good maps available, so there was a lot of buying and selling and trading going on,” reported Terry Palmer, a sixty-year-old collector from Dallas. He was particularly heartened by the sight of a crowd around the dollar table, where the general public buys donated maps to support the group’s operations. “There were some young people buying,” he said. “That was neat to see.”

To Palmer, whose e-mail address makes reference to both the Road Runner and Route 66, road maps constitute a document of life’s experience. Upon returning stateside from service in Vietnam, he set out on a seventeen-state road trip, winding from New Mexico through Texas up to Maryland and back through Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Colorado. Aside from hanging on to the maps, which formed the base for a collection now numbering about thirty-five hundred, he came to a decision regarding a proposal. Diana said yes. They are still married. “If you keep a good map around,” he told me, “you’ll never have to stop and ask for directions.”

For those similarly inclined, other sources can be found. AAA, the motor club best known for fixing your grandmother’s flat tire, provides printed maps on request, including the detailed TripTik—something of an ur-Google Maps, now available in app form as well—preferred by anxious vacationers. “There is, and always will be, a great need for mapping and routing information,” said Desmond Jordon, a club spokesman, “even if the way many people choose to receive that information changes.” And Rand McNally produces millions of printed maps every year. Texas, California, and Florida, big states with big tourist attractions, sell the best. “State maps have declined, but not at the rate of the local street maps, which have been more impacted by Web and app mapping,” said Amy Krouse, a company spokeswoman. She expects demand to hold steady. Borrowing a term from computer science, she mentioned two “key use cases”: “sitting around the kitchen table, planning a trip,” and “as a trusted backup in the car—no battery required.”

But blaming a technological innovation for the demise of the highway map may oversimplify matters. The roads themselves have become more clearly marked. The burning desire to see the country by car, in a time of global warming and sharply divided red and blue political states, has cooled. And, of course, there are limits to the powers of GPS.

For the dwindling number of map devotees, freedom of a distinctly American variety lies beyond those same limits. “I think that, deep down, people still like the idea of being out on their own, traveling without any agenda,” Akerman said. “The map is a pretty powerful symbol of that.”

But then maybe the map is more than a symbol. Maybe the map is the thing itself. We have grown disenchanted with the pursuit of wide-open spaces. We have returned to the cities. We have lost the ability to appreciate or even handle isolation. When we must pass between metropolises on the ground, our cars all but drive themselves. We need the map, not to tell us where we’re going, or even where we've been, but to show us, in the distance between those big dots and stars, where we are.

Wireless Behemoths AT&T and Verizon Had Better Not Miss the Internet of Things

The vision looking forward for wireless networking
will need to be creative if carriers are going to
continue to rake in the huge profits they have seen
in the past.  The Internet Of Things (IOT) may be a
way for wireless carriers to avoid becoming 'data pipes'
for the next generation of innovators.

As reported by Businessweek: It’s been quite a wireless party over the past five years, with Verizon (VZ) bringing in $319 billion (via Verizon Wireless) and AT&T (T) taking $291 billion. But the end of the telecom giants’ money-printing era may be in sight.

The frightening thing for wireless providers is that the world is running out of fresh consumers to pay for service. A report published on Thursday by technology market-research firm Ovum predicts that mobile industry revenue will decline for the first time ever in 2018. New connections will have slowed to about 4 percent annually by then, while wireless revenue will grow at less than half that rate, the study maintains.

This doesn't inevitably doom such companies as AT&T and Verizon, neither of which has suffered through a year with profit below $4 billion in more than a decade.

Indeed, Ovum hasn't taken into account the so-called Internet of things, in which wired consumer products and industrial equipment send and receive information over wireless networks. This report assumes that the telecom companies bring in no fresh revenue in this area—which decidedly won’t be the case. Ovum’s own unpublished estimates put machine-to-machine wireless revenue at $44 billion by 2018, up from $13 billion last year. That number could be overly pessimistic because it includes only industrial usage, not demand by consumer products with wireless connections.

The promise of Internet-connected factories, cars, and dog collars is no secret. Just this week, AT&T said it is collaborating with GE (GE) on Internet-connected industrial equipment. Some companies will make a lot of money here. But after years of reclining on ever-growing stacks of wireless revenue, will the telecommunications giants move quickly enough to maintain revenue and profits?

“The wild card is whether telcos can adapt quickly enough to take advantage before the opportunity gets usurped by others,” says Sara Kaufman, an analyst at Ovum who worked on the report. “Obviously the telcos have a huge compelling reason to make every effort to do that, but we’ve certainly seen that telcos, generally speaking, don’t move quickly and adapt.” Kaufman lays out two potential futures: one in which telecoms figure out a way to develop services for the Internet of things and one in which other companies do. In the first scenario, the party probably continues; in the second, telecommunications companies become dumb pipes selling connectivity at low prices to businesses that reap most of the rewards.

Recent precedents abound in which telecoms lost out by failing to exploit changes in how people use such wireless services as group messaging and voice-over-Internet calling. The Internet of things could represent a more fundamental shift. AT&T and Verizon need to figure it out.

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.