More Mobile Phones Mean Fewer World-Wide Deaths from Natural Disasters

As reported by Quartz: Fewer people were killed or affected by natural disasters than in any other year in the past decade, according to a report (pdf) released Oct. 17. In 2012, some 15,706 died, compared to 37,907 in 2011 or almost 304,474 casualties in 2010, according to the International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC, and Red Crescent Societies.

The smaller death toll is in part because last year didn't see brutal disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 230,000 dead in South and Southeast Asia, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, each of which killed over 100,000. But we can also thank cell phones for last year’s smaller disaster-related death toll, according to the IFRC report.

In the Philippines, for example, which is struck by about 20 typhoons a year and whose population is scattered over thousands of archipelagos, mobile phones have been especially helpful. (Today, the number of cell phone subscriptions outnumber people.) The country has set up a surveillance system to send disaster damage reports and other data to emergency health officials via text messages. Before Typhoon Bopha—a category 5 super typhoon with winds of 280 km/h (175 mph) landed last year, authorities were able to evacuate some 41,000 citizens as well as quickly rescue people after the storm struck, thanks to cell phones and other communication technology. Even though Bopha was the most powerful storm the country had experienced up to that point, its death toll is behind that of eight other storms that hit before 2012. So far this year, 11 people have been killed during the worst typhoon of the year.

The idea of “humanitarian technology” has been picking up steam over the past few years. There are 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world. And if proper planning is in place cell phones in particular could be one of the most effective means for authorities and rescue staff to communicate with the public during emergencies and natural disasters. (One caveat is that after disasters hit, communication infrastructure, including cell phone towers, is often knocked out of service.) Earlier this month, mobile phones helped relief workers in India coordinate one of the country’s largest evacuation efforts ever and helped citizens dodge the worst of Cyclone Phailin.

There’s room for more use of mobile phones in rural areas where people traditionally get their news from their neighbors and relatives. As more people in rural regions as well as in developing countries subscribe to cheap cell plans, they can get disaster and safety information directly and quickly. Moreover, locals—in both rural and urban areas—are usually responsible for the bulk of the rescue efforts during the first critical hours after a natural disaster. These de facto first responders would be further helped with phones that help them reach or consult with health workers and aid agencies.

Smartphones, GPS Part of Scientist's Smoking Cessation Research

As reported by EurekaAlert: We use them to text, tweet, post and, sometimes, make a call. Now, smartphones are helping with public health research.

A recently published smoking cessation study conducted by a researcher affiliated with the University of Houston includes a technique called "geo-mapping," which makes use of GPS technology to pinpoint a study participant's location and the location of tobacco retail outlets nearby.

The study was published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

"We're examining the possible mechanisms underlying the relationship between being close to a tobacco retail outlet and not being able to successfully quit smoking," said Lorraine Reitzel, associate professor of health in the UH College of Education. "We think it's because tobacco retail outlets might cue a greater urge to smoke within the person attempting to quit, maybe because of product advertising, a learned association between the retail outlet and purchasing cigarettes, or simply the greater availability and access to cigarettes that a close retail outlet provides."

Reitzel is part of a growing health department at the college. Recruited from MD Anderson Cancer Center, her research focuses on understanding individual and environmental influences that lead to health risk behaviors. She's interested in developing tobacco dependence interventions for low socio-economic areas and groups.

"I'm interested in better understanding whatever is preventing these smokers from successfully quitting, and then learning how to tailor treatments or public policy to help them," she said.
Participants carried a smart phone to collect data about their real-time, in-the-moment experiences throughout their daily travels during the quitting process. The study examined data collected from them before quitting through one week after their "quit day."

"When people were answering questions about their urge to smoke, we knew where they were," she said. "We used that information to better understand what the tobacco retailer outlet environment was like around them at the same moment they were describing their urge."

The smartphone research suggested that it wasn't the number of locations to purchase cigarettes that increased the urge to smoke, but the proximity of the closest tobacco retail outlet to the participant's home. When people responded from home, those living closer to tobacco retail outlets reported greater urges to smoke than those living farther from outlets.

"From a policy perspective, this suggests that if we are going to help people quit smoking, especially those in lower income areas, which tend to have a higher prevalence of tobacco stores, we need to think about disallowing the sale of tobacco products in close proximity to residential areas to make it more difficult to get tobacco when the urge to smoke strikes," Reitzel said. "If people can't access cigarettes within three to five minutes, the urge to smoke usually passes."

Reitzel's research was funded by the UT Health Science Center School of Public Health, the American Cancer Society and MD Anderson Cancer Center, among others.

"Many people try to quit smoking upwards of eight, nine, 10 times before they're successful," she said. "For the rest of their lives they have to be vigilant and fight to stay tobacco-free."

E911 Location Technology may not be Accurate Enough for All Emergencies

As reported by GCN: There is a great deal of interest in tracking the location of mobile devices. Commercial carriers use location information to deliver services such as targeted advertising. The public safety community needs it to pinpoint 911 calls from mobile phones and to track personnel in the field.

The challenge is making wireless location technology accurate enough for use in life-and-death situations.

Polaris Wireless, which provides higher accuracy wireless location data for 911 call centers using its RF pattern-matching technology, is experimenting with the feasibility of using commercial GPS-only services for some public safety applications. It is “good enough” for some uses, not for others.

We often assume that the Global Positioning System that provides location data for many smartphones and navigation applications is very accurate. But GPS [for smartphones] has limitations when not assisted by other technologies, although they often are not noticed by users.

Government standards call for accuracy of at least 7.8 meters at a 95 percent confidence level. That’s about 26 feet, which is not bad. But atmospheric conditions, the local environment and the quality of the receiver can change that dramatically.

The Federal Aviation Administration has found that some receivers can locate a user to within three meters, horizontally. But for vertical information — determining what floor someone is on inside a building — forget about it. Likewise, if there are buildings, trees, mountains or other obstructions in the way — anywhere except in a flat, open-sky environment — GPS accuracy can quickly drop to the tens of meters.

Accuracy to within 50 meters is useful for some things, but for it’s not good enough for public safety. There are a number of technologies to improve accuracy, such as Polaris’s OmniLocate RF pattern-matching service, but although they show “significant promise,” they are not yet dependable enough for first responders answering 911 calls, according to a Federal Communications Commission study.

The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council conducted tests late last year in the San Francisco Bay area to establish a baseline of current capabilities of three commercial location technologies.

“Even the best location technologies tested have not proven the ability to consistently identify the specific building and floor, which represents the required performance to meet public safety's needs,” the report said. “This is not likely to change over the next 12 to 24 months.”

Companies See Market for Systems To Counter GPS Jamming Devices

UAV RF communications testing in an anechoic chamber.

As reported by Space News: The proliferation of GPS jamming devices is creating a market for countermeasures, both in the defense and commercial sectors, industry officials say.

Companies are testing and rolling out new systems to counter the threat, either by overcoming jamming signals or by identifying and locating their source, they say.

In a speech at the annual Air Force Association conference on Sept. 17, Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, which operates the 30-plus satellite GPS constellation, highlighted jamming as an increasingly common problem.

“Lots of jammers [are] out there for GPS,” Shelton said. “In fact, you can buy a jammer on the Internet. By the way, that’s illegal, but you can find them on the Internet and lots of adversaries around the world have GPS jamming capability so we’re going to have to learn to fight through GPS jamming.”

Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver, prime contractor for the next-generation GPS 3 satellite system, has said that the new satellites will have eight times the jamming resistance of their predecessors. The GPS 3 satellites are slated to begin launching in 2015 but it will be several more years before that system is fully deployed.

In the interim, companies are seeing growing demand for systems that counter jamming threats to both military and civil GPS signals.

“We've seen enough of it [that] we think there’s a market,” said Kevin Farrell, general manager of positioning, navigation and timing at Exelis Geospatial Systems of Rochester, N.Y.

A fairly common Chinese made GPS jamming device that
can be found on the Internet.  Purchasing or operating one in the
USA is illegal.  In the EU using one is illegal, but they can still be
purchased.

Exelis has been testing a product called the Signal Sentry 1000 that detects and locates GPS interference sources and allows users to notify law enforcement. 

As an example of the proliferation of commercially available GPS jamming devices and the problems they pose, Exelis officials have regularly cited so-called personal privacy GPS jammers, which are commonly used by truckers so employers will not know where they are. If enough trucks equipped with these devices were parked at an active shipping port, they could wreak havoc on signals used by maritime traffic. 

Exelis officials said interest in the Signal Sentry 1000 has been particularly strong among airports and law enforcement agencies. The company is in active discussion on two possible sales of the system, they say.

Joe Rolli, Exelis’ program manager for Signal Sentry, said the technology used in the program could eventually lead to military applications.

Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., is also working on a new product for its GPS anti-jam line called MiniGAS. Executives are touting it as the company’s lightest and smallest GPS anti-jamming system that helps overcome interference. On Sept. 11, the company announced its first contract for demonstrator units of the new system but did not name the customer.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, has been working on improved antenna solutions that would withstand jamming. In July, the Navy conducted a test in which it mounted a small antenna system on a unmanned aerial vehicle and subjected it to heavy interference. While there was no formal report on the outcome, Mark Burroughs,  navigation lead for the communication and GPS navigation program office at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., described the results as “very good.”

While many anti-jam units are about the size of a Frisbee, this system was about the size of a hockey puck, Burroughs said. The smaller size would allow the Defense Department to add another layer of protection, particularly on smaller vehicles.

The Navy plans to evaluate a series of anti-jam options, Burroughs said.

Experts and industry officials said one of the problems facing the military is accurately attributing the jamming to an adversary.  While new technology may be able to pinpoint exactly where jamming is coming from, it creates questions about whether individuals or groups are acting alone or on behalf of an adversary.

This can be an important distinction given what Shelton had to say about options for countering GPS jamming threats.

“Certainly tactics, techniques and procedures can help. Antenna designs will help as well,” he said. “But let me tell you also that big jammers are called targets. As they radiate and perform their operations, we can identify, geolocate and destroy those targets in a campaign.”

GPS, Rear-View Camera in Motorcycle Helmet

GPS, digital audio, and hands-free phone systems have become
common in cars, but motorcycles have largely been left behind.
Now, Skully integrates these feature and more in a new motorcycle
helmet.

As reported by CNet: Using GPS on a motorcycle usually involves looking down at a portable navigation device on the handlebars, but Skully Helmets wants to update that experience. The company developed the Skully P1 motorcycle helmet, which gives riders a heads-up display and integrates not only GPS, but a rear-view camera, hands-free phone system, and voice command.

According to Skully's press materials, the display is not in the rider's primary field of vision, and appears as if it were floating 6 meters ahead.

The helmet runs a modified version of the Android operating system, which comes loaded with navigation and Bluetooth connectivity. With the helmet paired to a smartphone through Bluetooth, the rider can use voice command to make phone calls and start music playback.

A heads-up display shows the rider turn-by-turn directions or the image
from a rear-view camera.

The heads-up display can also show the image from an integrated rear-view camera. Skully notes that this camera has a 180 degree field of vision, so the rider can also see when it is safe to change lanes.

Skully will show off the P1 helmet this week at the Demo 2013 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The company did not say when the helmet would become available, or list a retail price.

Scientists Develop Underwater Wireless Internet For ‘Deep-Sea’ Communication

As reported by International Business Times: You can hardly walk through a café, subway station or even a public park without picking up WiFi on your smartphone. Almost anywhere you turn, there’s a wirelessInternet network to greet you. But there’s one spot the mobile Web can’t go: underwater.

Water poses a problem for wireless communications, which employs almost the same technology as walkie-talkies, cell phones and other mobile devices to convert the 1s and 0s of computer code into radio waves. Radio waves travel poorly through water, UCSB’s ScienceLine noted, especially at the frequency the Internet requires.

While very low frequency radio waves – waves with a frequency between 3 and 30 kilohertz – are used in submarine communication systems, Internet radio waves have to transmit at frequencies of 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz in order to accommodate larger data (How Stuff Works).

A prime example of the limitations of underwater communications is the robotic vehicle sent down to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The vehicle needed a very heavy and expensive cable attached to it in order to communicate with a boat 12,500 feet, or about 2.4 miles, above it.

Researchers from the University of Buffalo are developing a way to wirelessly transmit the Internet underwater. According to Phys.org, they recently tested a system in Lake Erie, just south of downtown Buffalo, N.Y. They submerged two 40-pound sensors into the water, and then communicated with them wirelessly through a laptop.

“A submerged wireless network will give us an unprecedented ability to collect and analyze data from our oceans in real time," Tommaso Melodia, a University of Buffalo associate professor of electrical engineering and the project’s lead researcher, said in a press release on the university’s website. “Making this information available to anyone with a smartphone or computer, especially when a tsunami or other type of disaster occurs, could help save lives.”

Current underwater communication technology, like that used by the Navy and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, relies on sound waves.  

NOAA’s tsunami sensors, for example, located on the sea floor transmit information to buoys on the surface through the use of acoustic waves. Technology on the buoy then turns that information into radio waves.  

The university’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, a U.S. government agency that sponsors research in non-medical fields of science and engineering, including the recently shuttered Antarctic research program.

The reason for developing underwater wireless Internet isn't so you can scuba dive and shop Amazon at the same time. Researchers hope that by improving underwater communication, they can make improvements in tsunami detection, pollution monitoring and offshore oil and natural gas exploration. 

World’s Fastest Wireless Network Hits 100 Gigabits per Second, Can Scale to Terabits

As reported by Extreme Tech: German researchers have combined photonics and electronics to create a world-record-breaking wireless network that can send and receive data at a heady 100 gigabits per second (Gbps). This beats the same team’s previous world record of 40Gbps. At 100Gbps, or a transfer rate of 12.5 gigabytes per second — ten times faster than Google Fiber — you could copy a complete Blu-ray disc in a couple of seconds.

To achieve such a sizable data rate, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) used a massive swath of bandwidth at around 240 GHz — close to the terahertz frequency range. To create the signal, two laser beams (carrying the data) are mixed together (using a photon mixer made by NTT Electronics). An electrical signal results, where the frequency of the signal (237.5 GHz in this case) is the difference between the two optical signals. A normal antenna is then used to beam the signal to the receiver, where a cutting edge chip fabricated out of fast-switching III-V transistors (pictured below) is required to make sense of the super-high-frequency signal.

KIT’s 100Gbps wireless network is exciting for two reasons. The first is the most obvious: Yay, faster download speeds! Second, because the wireless signal is generated by a laser signal, it’s an ideal technology to tack on the end of a fiber network. For example, if you have high-speed fiber coming into a telephone exchange or mobile base station, you could then use KIT’s wireless tech to cover the last mile to your home. So far, KIT has only created a 100Gbps network over a distance of 20 meters in the lab — but last year’s 40Gbps world record was set using similar hardware over a range of one kilometer, across the rooftops of the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Perhaps most importantly, though, KIT transmitted 100Gbps using a single data stream. In the case of conventional WiFi, a single connection — between your router and laptop, for example — in reality consists of dozens of data streams, which are squeezed over the same channel with clever techniques such as multiplexing and MIMO (multiple antennae). These same techniques could be used on KIT’s 100Gbps data streams, boosting total link speed to terabits per second — or entire Blu-ray movies in just a fraction of a second. (See: Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second.)

Both the 40Gbps and 100Gbps world record were part of the Millilink project, a project funded by the German government to bring broadband internet connections to rural and under-connected areas. The project’s entire budget was just two million euros ($2.7 million). It makes you wonder what could be done to the abysmal state of rural internet access in the US and elsewhere if we actually invested some money into it.