SpaceX Falcon Rocket Lifts Off With Thaicom Satellite

As reported by Reuters: A Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday to put a commercial communications spacecraft into orbit for Thai satellite operator Thaicom.  

The 224-foot (68-meter) tall rocket burst off its seaside launch pad at 5:06 p.m. EST (2206 GMT), soaring through overcast skies as it headed toward the satellite's drop-off point more than 55,000 miles (88,500 km) above Earth or about one-quarter of the way to the moon.  

From that position, the 6,649-pound (3,016 kg) Thaicom 6 satellite is designed to lower itself to about 22,300 miles (35,888 km) above Earth and shift the angle of its orbit so that it can be permanently stationed to beam high-definition and digital television services to customers in Thailand and surrounding areas.  

The satellite, built by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp , also is equipped to provide other communications services for customers in Southeast Asia and Africa, including Madagascar, Thaicom's website shows.  

Including launch services and insurance, the Thaicom 6 satellite cost about $160 million, according to Thaicom. So far, about two-thirds of the satellite's capacity has been sold, according to Thaicom.

Monday's launch was the second in just over a month for Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX.

In December, the California-based firm, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also serves as chief executive of Tesla Motors car company, launched its first commercial communications satellite, staking a claim in a global satellite launch industry worth about $6.5 billion a year, a study by the Satellite Industry Association trade group shows.

So far, privately owned SpaceX has sold about 50 commercial launches worth about $40 billion. About 25 percent of the flights are for NASA, which hired SpaceX, along with Orbital Sciences, to fly cargo to the International Space Station, a $100 billion research complex that flies about 250 miles (about 400 km) above Earth.  

SpaceX's next flight, slated for late February, will be the third of 12 station resupply missions under its $1.6 billion NASA contract.

Orbital Sciences, which holds a separate $1.9 billion NASA contract, is preparing to launch the first of its eight station cargo runs on Wednesday. The company's Antares rockets fly from a commercial spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia.

Before Monday's launch, Falcon 9 rockets had flown seven times, all successfully, though on its first cargo flight to the station, in October 2012, one of the rocket's nine first-stage engines shut down prematurely.

Other motors compensated, and the rocket was able to deliver its Dragon cargo ship to the intended orbit without a problem.

SpaceX is working on three parallel programs to expand its business and cut costs, including reusing its first-stage boosters. However, a proposed demonstration to restart the engine so it could cushion the splashdown into the ocean was not attempted on the Thaicom 6 mission, said SpaceX spokeswoman Emily Shanklin.

HEAVY-LIFT FALCON MISSION

In addition, the company is working on a 27-engine, heavy-lift Falcon rocket as well as a version of its Dragon cargo capsule that can carry astronauts and other passengers to the space station.

A Falcon Heavy demonstration mission from SpaceX's second launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is slated for 2014, the company's website shows.

A successful mission on Monday also could clear SpaceX to enter a lucrative competition to launch U.S. military reconnaissance and communications satellites, a service now exclusively provided by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Potential Government Mandated GPS Tracking Devices In Cars Prompt Privacy And Cyber Hacking Concerns

As reported by the Inquisitr: GPS tracking devices, also referred to as vehicle tracking systems, may soon be mandatory in all new cars, and concerns over either federal or state mileage tax have begun anew. 

In just a few weeks, federal government officials could approve the GPS “safety devices” installation requirement. In addition to privacy concerns raised by those who oppose the tracking devices, fears that cyber hackers could “take control” of vehicles and the roadways are also emerging.  

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication devices are currently being debated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, according to ABC News. A V2V system allows cars to “talk to each other” and are being touted as accident prevention devices by supporters. Those opposed to the techno gadgets most often consider them an example of government overreach, data mining, and a citizen tracking initiative without a warrant.

A recently released study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) claims that V2V devices could offer warnings to drivers that could potentially prevent 76 percent of multiple vehicle accidents. According to highway collision statistics, there are approximately 5.3 million car accidents and 32,000 drivers and passengers killed in wrecks in a common year.

An excerpt from a recent GAO report about vehicle tracking systems reads:

“The continued progress of V2V technology development hinges on a decision that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to make in late 2013 on how to proceed. … One option would be to pursue a rule requiring their inclusion in new vehicles.”

GAO Physical Infrastructure Director David Wise went on to add that the success of smart cars and the GPS tracking technology is dependent upon vehicles possessing the same system so they can talk to each other while on the road. Wise also acknowledged the controversial privacy concerns the V2V systems propose, “Privacy is the real challenge. Who has access and how do you secure the data?”

The government staffer also noted the possibility of a cyber hacker gaining access to the system and literally wreaking havoc on highways across the nation. Such a possibility also brings to light potential national security and terrorism concerns. During such a cyber warfare scenario, a domestic or foreign terrorist could hack into the V2V system of a tractor-trailer carrying explosive or toxic materials and essentially create portable bombs. The vehicle tracking systems also reportedly have the capability to record alleged traffic violations and mail tickets to drivers. If a V2V system thinks that a driver engaged in a rolling stop or drove one mile over the speed limit, a ticket could soon appear in the vehicle owner’s mailbox.

The possibility of a mileage tax was raised and hotly contested by rural residents late last year. The vehicle tracking systems now under consideration by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) appear to make such a new tax a far more likely possibility. Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Tea Party have been vocal in their opposition to a mileage tax. Americans who live in an area where they can walk, bike or hop on a bus to get to work, the doctor, or the grocery store may not understand how expensive a mileage tax would be for the folks who live in rural areas.

Several states unwilling to wait until the federal government decides whether or not to mandate the tracking devices opted to initiate their own pilot programs. In Oregon, approximately 5,000 drivers agreed to install V2V type devices in their cars and pay mileage fees instead of gas taxes during the study. New York City is considering a similar program and Nevada also recently completed a smart car pilot program. A group dubbed the I-95 Coalition, which consists of 17 state level transportation departments, are pondering how to implement a GPS tracking device system in cars in their respective states.

Wi-Fi Location Analytics To Play 'Bigger Role' in Business Intelligence

As reported by Trade Arabia: Wi-Fi based location analytics will play a bigger role for organisations to help increase business intelligence, define security policy, and improve customer/user experience, said an expert.

Nader Baghdadi, regional director MENA, Ruckus Wireless, pointed out that analytics will become more important specifically to correlate the myriad data points from clients.

He has also forecast a continued adoption and integration of BYOD solutions and device management; and an increase in the adoption of 802.11ac Access Point (AP), mainly driven by more 802.11ac-enabled devices.

Baghdadi said enterprises continue to look to service providers for a managed Wi-Fi service to address issues with network complexity, new services, and a skills shortage in many IT shops.

Work will continue on policy solutions that will help smartphones to select between Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity, he stated.

Seamless Wi-Fi handoff will become a reality with technologies like 802.11r and 802.11k making their way into mobile devices and APs, allowing Wi-Fi to emulate the hand-off experience that is currently available through cellular services.

He also pointed out that no matter how much network capacity is put in place through a combination of cellular and Wi-Fi  it will likely never be enough.  More spectrum and spectrum sharing ideas are required, along with ever greater wireless network capacity.

Corning’s Antimicrobial Gorilla Glass Can Help Kill Bacteria On Your Smartphone

As reported by GigaOM: Corning has developed a new type of Gorilla Glass that can actually inhibit the growth of algae, bacteria, mold and other microbes on your glass-covered devices.

It’s no secret that smartphones are gross. More than 59 percent of phone users have confessed to using their device in the bathroom, and those are just the people willing to admit as much to a survey.

Bathroom habits aside, we use our smartphones so much, and in so many different places, it’s hard not to see them as purveyors of bacteria and disease. Luckily Corning, the manufacturer of Gorilla Glass, is doing something about this. On Monday the company unveiled the world’s first antimicrobial Gorilla Glass.

Corning’s new Gorilla Glass is formulated with ionic silver, an antibacterial agent. Corning claims it’s implementation of the glass with silver can inhibit the growth of algae, bacteria, fungi, mildew and mold.

According to CNet, the glass might be able to repel up to 99.9 percent of bacteria. It’s completely safe to use, and Corning even had its claims verified by the EPA last year. Best of all, unlike antibacterial wipes or sprays, the ionic silver doesn't wear off within just a few seconds. And Corning was able to add the silver while preserving the properties of Gorilla Glass, so it’ll still provide the same level of protection.

Corning’s antimicrobial glass is currently being tested with a number of manufacturers for various applications, and will be shown off at CES in the RoomWizard by Steelcase, a web-based room scheduling system. The glass can be installed on any number of electronic devices such as cell phones, tablets, computers, calculators, telephones, and other electronic display panels. Corning mentions that other common usage scenarios might include frequently touched surfaces in health care and transportation industries.

In addition to the antimicrobial Gorilla Glass, Corning last week announced the manufacturing readiness of a 3D glass-forming technology for 3D-shaped Gorilla Glass. This could make Gorilla Glass a strong candidate in the burgeoning field of curved-screen wearables.

In One Colorado Community, A Smartphone App Could Save A Life

As reported by CPR.org: Anyone in Arvada who's trained in CPR can sign up to get an alert if someone nearby is in cardiac arrest.  

The idea: The app user might get to the scene faster than first responders.  And time is critical when it comes to restarting the heart.

PulsePoint is an app that was developed by a fire chief in Northern California after one night when he was eating dinner and heard sirens nearby.

The fire chief learned later that a next-door neighbor was in cardiac arrest and had he known, the fire chief could have used the portable defibrillator in his car.  

Arvada is currently the only community in Colorado using PulsePoint and about 350 people signed up to receive the alerts after PulsePoint launched there last summer.

The city's fire department administers the app and Arvada Fire Department spokesperson Scott Pribble explains that for the user, the app is fairly simple. 

"[Imagine] You're shopping at Old Town Arvada, or you're at church, and somebody collapses and somebody else calls 911," Pribble says. “If you're within walking distance, you'll receive a text message on your phone."

That text message shows the victim's location and the location of the nearest publicly available defibrillator on a map. 

For privacy reasons, the app only activates if the victim is in a public place and users aren't asked to go into anyone's home.

It cost the city of Arvada about $5,000 to deploy PulsePoint but the product typically costs about $10,000. 
Pribble says the app has been activated twice in the six months Arvada has been using the service.

In both cases, Pribble says CPR was not necessary or even possible because of the condition of the patients. 

"They had died much earlier and if you don't do CPR in the first 10 minutes, it's not effective," Pribble says.

Pribble expects the crowdsourcing app to grow in effectiveness as more communities -- and more users -- sign on. 

Other fire departments are watching to see how well PulsePoint works in Arvada before they move adopt the service.

According to Pribble, Poudre Fire Authority in Fort Collins and Eagle County are among Colorado communities that may adopt the system. 

"We know that eventually someone's life will be saved," Pribble says. 

The Most Dangerous Things to Do on Your Phone While Driving

You are eight times more likely to crash, or nearly crash when
dialing your phone if you're a novice driver - this new study
suggests.

As reported by The Atlantic: If Werner Herzog hasn't already convinced you not to touch your phone while driving, perhaps this will. Dialing a cellphone is the most dangerous thing you can do in a car, according to a new study from the New England Journal of Medicine, and increases your risk of crashing or nearly crashing eight-fold.

Researchers collected 12-18 months of driving data from 42 newly licensed teenaged drivers from southwestern Virginia, as well as from 109 more experienced motorists from Washington, all driving cars that had been outfitted with cameras, accelerometers, and GPS devices.

A team of analysts evaluated the records for evidence of a crash, defined as any physical contact with another object, or a near-crash, defined as a last-minute maneuver that challenged the physical limitations of the vehicle to avoid a collision. These "near-crashes," the study authors write, are reliable surrogates for crashes. They then correlated the car movements with the camera footage of the drivers, evaluating them for actions like talking on a phone, dialing a phone, looking out the window, or adjusting their radio.

In all, the drivers got into 73 crashes and 612 near-crashes during the study period. Among the novice drivers, dialing a cellphone made them 8.32 times likelier to get into a crash or near-crash.  Meanwhile, the odds were "8 times higher when reaching for something besides their cellphone; 7.05 times higher when trying to grab the phone; 3.9 times higher when looking at something on the side of the road (including cars involved in other crashes); and 2.99 times higher when eating," the LA Times reported. Drinking and adjusting the radio were deemed relatively safe.

Among the experienced drivers, dialing a cellphone was the only activity that increased the risk of a crash or near-crash —it made a collision 2.49 times more likely.

One reason for the elevated risk is that our brains are not actually designed for multitasking — most people can only focus on one activity at a time. More teens now die from texting while driving than from drinking and driving.

Here's a look at the odds breakdown for each of the activities studied:

If texting and Web browsing seem surprisingly benign on this list, that might be because the younger drivers were tracked between 2006 and 2008, before smartphones arrived on the scene and prompted a rise in texting and emailing.

Still, the elevated odds of crashing while texting—3.87—isn't worth the risk.

Florida Provides GPS To Protect Those Fighting Wildfires

As reported by the Orlando Sentinel: The 19 firefighters who died in an Arizona wilderness blaze last summer and two rangers who perished in a North Florida forest fire in 2011 were victims of similar perils: an afternoon eruption of unexpectedly fierce fire and an ensuing communications breakdown.

To prevent a repeat of such tragedies, the Florida Forest Service is equipping its frontline firefighters with GPS units that provide location points on supervisors' laptops.

The agency thinks the system is the first of its type in the nation. It will give crews, especially those on bulldozers who plow fire lines, a virtual way to see through the "fog and friction" of wildfires.

"It's a tool in our toolbox to make sure we know where our firefighters are to the best of our ability," said Sean Gallagher, manager of the service's Orlando district.

The Yarnell Hill Fire north of Phoenix took the lives of 19 elite crew members called hotshots, resulting in the one of the nation's highest death tolls for wilderness firefighters.

The Blue Ribbon Fire north of Lake City at the Georgia state line in June 2011 claimed two veteran bulldozer operators, the highest single fire toll for the Florida Forest Service.

Reports from the primary investigations of both fires provide harrowing details of much that went wrong within time frames that spanned only minutes.

In short, the 19 hotshots were hiking across rough country as winds whipped up by a storm sent a wall of flames to meet them.

The two Florida rangers, both operating bulldozers, were killed after one of them reported on his radio that "I'm stumped," or stuck on a tree stump.

Flames overran both crews so quickly that only some of the Arizona firefighters had time to deploy their personal fire shelters, and neither of the Florida rangers used their foil-coated blankets.

In both incidents, supervisors had only a rough idea of the firefighters' locations during the final minutes of their lives. The heavy volume of radio calls made communication difficult, and an airborne spotter at the Florida fire had trouble finding crews because of smoke.

Jim Karels, Florida Forest Service director and lead investigator in the Arizona disaster, said the two fires were similar in a key respect.

"When you look at the Blue Ribbon and the Yarnell fires and just about as far back as you want to look in history, the vast majority of these fires are in the late afternoon when there's real potential for a blowup in the fires," Karels said.

"That's when we have to be at our peak, and a lot of times that's when we've been working hard all day and maybe we aren't watching as closely as we need to be," he said.

The Yarnell Hill Fire investigation report described events as shrouded in fog and friction, a military term for the chaos of battle.

To cut through the fog and friction, the Florida Forest Service has been rolling out its Asset Tracker System, equipping all of the nearly 400 bulldozers and fire engines statewide with GPS receivers and radio transmitters. System software will be installed in the laptops of nearly 60 supervisors.

Ralph Crawford, assistant chief of forest protection, said the largely home-built system will cost nearly $2 million but won't have major, ongoing costs because it doesn't rely on cellphone or Internet service.

Among the first crews equipped with tracking units were those responding to the Blue Ribbon Fire. But the system was still new, and only one of the ill-fated bulldozers had a location transmitter.

Since then, the system has been refined, and its capabilities are becoming more apparent, said John Kern, a deputy chief of field operations.

Every 30 seconds, the units blurt out an electronic warble, confirming that a packet of data containing unit identification, location, speed and direction had been transmitted by a 40-watt radio able to reach supervisor laptops within 2 miles.

The system doesn't provide a complete picture of a wildfire; the blaze, for example, isn't outlined on maps depicted on laptop screens.

But Kern said supervisors are learning to correlate the GPS tracking data with their knowledge of tactics used when fighting fires with bulldozers. Supervisors also will know where to direct a helicopter to drop water should trouble occur.

"If one of our guys calls in, 'I'm stuck and about to be burned over,' we'll know where to go," Kerns said.