New Driver's Seat Monitors Your Heart, Knows When You're Falling Asleep

As reported by MotorAuthority: Soon, your car may know your heart rate—and may take control from you if it doesn't like what it sees.

A new project from Nottingham Trent University in the UK is working on an electrocardiogram (ECG) built into the driver’s seat to detect heart rate and determine when the driver is too fatigued—or worse, falling asleep—in order to improve road safety.

The technology uses circuits integrated into the seats, called Electric Potential Integrated Circuits, or EPIC. Developed by Plessey Semiconductors, the EPIC circuit can measure heart rate, respiration, and more to monitor alertness and health.

Plessey business development director Steve Cliffe told industry trade publication Innovation in Textiles, "We are extremely excited to be working with Nottingham Trent University on this TSB funded program. For the first time it will be possible to reliably and robustly extract electrophysiology signals using Plessey EPIC sensors in an automotive environment without direct contact with the body."

Ideally, the system could be integrated with active cruise control, lane-keeping functions, and more, to take over if a driver ignores or fails to respond to the car’s warnings about alertness.


EPIC automotive sensors could monitor driver alertness for safety. Image via Plessey Semiconductors.

The result? Accident mitigation or avoidance in cases of driver fatigue, and potentially other situations, such as heart attack, as well. There's a certain element of discomfort for some when thinking about their car knowing so many intimate details of their biology, especially if it has the ability to take control from the driver, but at the same time, the EPIC sensors, applied in this fashion, could save lives.

The technology is still in a nascent phase, with materials challenges like conductive textile technology required for the ECG electrodes woven into the seat backs. This is the area of research being investigated by researches at NTU.

Due to complexity and cost, the initial applications are expected to come in the commercial driving arena, helping to ensure truck drivers stay safe behind the wheel.

Eventually, it could expand into the private automobile market, likely starting at the high-end luxury realm as so many other new technologies do.

New Miniaturized GPS/Galileo Anti-Jamming Technology

As reported by GPS World: Chemring Technology Solutions has developed miniaturized GPS anti-jamming technology it has dubbed GINCAN. GINCAN is designed to combat illegal GPS jammers and is based on the adaptive antenna concept used by military systems. GINCAN has a chip footprint of six millimeters squared.

GINCAN’s reduced size and weight will significantly cut power usage and cost, the company said, making it ideal for combating the widespread problem of low-powered GPS jamming. GINCAN can be integrated into a range of applications, including in-vehicle satellite navigation systems and cellular technology, and can be used for the protection of the critical infrastructures which rely on GPS to provide positioning and timing.

GPS jammers have already been developed to interfere with the European Union’s Galileo system, which will provide European satellite navigation independently from the Russian, USA and Chinese systems by 2019. Chemring Technology Solutions, based in Romsey, England, has anticipated this problem and its GPS anti-jamming technology will also support systems using Galileo.

Once the preserve of the military, there is now an increasing demand for GPS protection in the civilian market as illegal GPS jamming equipment becomes widely available on the Internet. The £1.5 million government-funded Sentinel project, designed to measure GPS jamming on UK roads, recorded more than 60 individual jamming incidents across six months at a single location. Such attacks could seriously impact industries, including maritime, aerospace, the emergency services and even stock market trading.

“Many years of developing GPS protection technology for the military has enabled our research and development team to miniaturize anti-jamming technology,” said Martin Ward, product manager, Chemring Technology Solutions. “GINCAN can now be easily integrated in to a range of applications to provide effective protection against jamming devices.

“As we become increasingly reliant on GPS technology, and low-cost jammers are proliferating, so a potential time bomb is being created. Chemring Technology Solutions is now able to offer the answer to this problem with jammer protection at a reduced size, weight, power and cost footprint.”

GINCAN is an export controlled product and subject to UK export restrictions.

SpaceX Rocket Launches Six Satellites, and Completes Reusibility Test

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor: The private spaceflight company SpaceX launched six commercial satellites into low-Earth orbit on July 14th in a mission that was expected to include a key rocket-reusability test.

The company's Falcon 9 rocket streaked into space from the pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1515 GMT) Monday, carrying six spacecraft for the satellite-communications firm ORBCOMM.

The satellites are the first members of the OG2 (short for "ORBCOMM Generation 2") constellation, which should provide a big upgrade over the current OG1 network, company officials said. SpaceX is expected to launch a total of 17 OG2 craft using the Falcon 9. [See photos of the SpaceX launch]

The OG2 satellites, which weigh about 375 lbs. (170 kilograms) each, were built by Sierra Nevada Corp. They're destined for an elliptical orbit that will take them between 382 and 466 miles (615 to 750 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

A successful delivery of the OG2 satellites may have been the main objective of Monday's launch, but it wasn't the only one. SpaceX also aimed to bring the Falcon 9's first stage back to Earth in a soft ocean-splashdown, to test out and advance reusable-rocket technology. It was not clear immediately after liftoff how well this test went.

Developing fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicles is a key priority of SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk, who has said that this breakthrough could slash the cost of spaceflight by a factor of 100. In doing so, reusable rockets could help open the solar system for manned exploration, perhaps even making a Mars colony economically feasible.

SpaceX attempted a similar first-stage return during the last Falcon 9 liftoff in April, which blasted the robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station on a cargo mission for NASA. That test went well; data showed that the rocket stage did indeed make a controlled landing in the Atlantic Ocean, though rough seas destroyed it before recovery boats could reach the splashdown scene.

Monday's launch was originally planned for May 10, but the cancellation of a pre-launch Falcon 9 static-fire test and scheduling constraints pushed the liftoff back by about two months. The launch also comes on the heels of SpaceX receiving certification from the U.S. Air Force of its Falcon 9 rocket after three successful flights, a major step in the company's plan to compete for U.S. military satellite launch contracts. 

How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy Small Business

As reported by Wired: Washington DC-area residents with a hankering for lion meat lost a valuable source of the (yes, legal) delicacy last year when a restaurant called the Serbian Crown closed its doors after nearly 40 years in the same location. The northern Virginia eatery served French and Russian cuisine in a richly appointed dining room thick with old world charm. It was best known for its selection of exotic meats—one of the few places in the U.S. where an adventurous diner could order up a plate of horse or kangaroo. “We used to have bear, but bear meat was abolished,” says proprietor Rene Bertagna. “You cannot import any more bear.”

But these days, Bertagna isn't serving so much as a whisker. It began in early 2012, when he experienced a sudden 75 percent drop off in customers on the weekend, the time he normally did most of his business. The slump continued for months, for no apparent reason. Bertagna’s profits plummeted, he was forced to lay off some of his staff, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Only later did Bertagna come to suspect that he was the victim of a gaping vulnerability that made his Google listings open to manipulation.

He was alerted to that possibility when one of his regulars phoned the restaurant. “A customer called me and said, ‘Why are you closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday? What’s going on?’” Bertagna says.
It turned out that Google Places, the search giant’s vast business directory, was misreporting the Serbian Crown’s hours. Anyone Googling Serbian Crown, or plugging it into Google Maps, was told incorrectly that the restaurant was closed on the weekends, Bertagna says. For a destination restaurant with no walk-in traffic, that was a fatal problem.

“This area where the restaurant is located is kind of off the beaten path,” says Bertagna’s lawyer, Christopher Rau. “It’s in a wealthy subdivision of northern Virginia where a lot of government employees live on these estates and houses with two- or three-acre lots … It’s not really on the way to anything. If you’re going there, it’s because you've planned to go there. And unless you know that the place is going to be open, you’re probably not going to drag yourself out.”

Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn't own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither.

Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere.

Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.

But by then, Bertagna says, his business was in a nose dive from which he couldn't recover—service suffered after the layoffs, and customers stopped coming back. He shuttered the Serbian Crown in April 2013.

Bertagna puts the blame for his restaurant’s collapse on Google, and he’s suing the company in federal court in Virginia. His lawyer’s theory is that a competing restaurant sabotaged the Google Places listing to drive away the Serbian Crown’s customers, and he argues that Google turns a blind eye to such shenanigans. Google’s lawyers scoff at the lawsuit. “The Serbian Crown should not be permitted to vex Google or this Court with such merit-less claims,” they wrote in a filing last month. (Google didn't respond to repeated inquiries for this story)

For a number of reasons, the claim is probably doomed in court. But the premise of the lawsuit—that the Serbian Crown was sabotaged online—isn't as far fetched as it might seem.

Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website. In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. In a typical case in 2010, Buffalo-based Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry saw its Google Maps listing changed to “permanently closed” at the exact same time that it was flooded with fake and highly unfavorable customer reviews.

We narrowed it down as to who it was. It was another jeweler who had tampered with it,” says Barbara Oliver, the owner. “The bottom line was the jeweler put five-star reviews on his Google reviews, and he slammed me and three other local jewelers, all within a couple of days.”

Oliver’s Google Maps listing was repaired, because she had something Bertagna didn't have: a web consultant on retainer feeding and caring for her Internet presence. That consultant, Mike Blumenthal, says he’s countered a lot of similar tampering over the years.

“I had a client whose phone number was modified through a community edit,” says Blumenthal, who closely tracks Google Maps’ foibles in his blog. “It was a small retail shop—interior design. I traced it back to a competitor who left a footprint.”

These attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowd-sourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

Google seeds its business listings from generally reliable commercial mailing list databases, including infoUSA and Axciom. Once it’s in Google’s index, a business owner can claim a listing through Google and begin curating it for free, adding photos, hours of operation, a website address. Once your have that relationship with Google, the company will up-sell you on paid advertising, which, after all, is Google’s financial lifeblood.  

But if you ignore your Google Maps listing, you’re inviting trouble. Ordinary users can submit community edits to your listing with details like operating hours—as Barbara Oliver discovered.

A screenshot of a spam locksmith positioned in the ocean three miles off the San Francisco coast.

Blumenthal says Google has gotten much better at policing malicious edits, to the point where they’re rare today. “Most of these problems of community edit abuses were in the 2010 and 2011 range,” he says. Fake map listings are a less tractable problem. Google allows anyone to enter a new business into Maps, and to place it wherever they like. The company keeps the listing invisible until it’s been verified through old fashioned snail-mail. Google sends out a postcard with a PIN code, and the business owner activates the listing by typing in the PIN.

The system has loopholes though, and troves of money-hungry spammers looking for weaknesses. In February, an SEO consultant-turned-whistle-blower named Bryan Seely demonstrated the risk dramatically when he set up doppelganger Google Maps listings for the offices of the FBI and Secret Service. Seely channeled the incoming phone calls through to the real agencies while recording them.

The stunt got a lot of attention. The Secret Service told Seely he was “a hero” for showing them the vulnerability. But despite the coverage Seely says some of his methods remain operable today. He proved it to me by creating a cheeky Google Maps listing in my name at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The heat died down and almost all of the holes are still open,” Seely says.

Seely’s guess is that Serbian Crown was indeed a victim of Google Maps sabotage. “People do it all the time—people have even offered me money to get listing spammed or banned,” he says. “There are legitimate businesses being put of out business.”

Demonstrating causation between a bad Google Maps listing and Serbian Crown’s decline is going to be hard, though. For one thing, the restaurant’s Yelp listing—also a big factor in choosing a dinner reservation—is packed with abysmal, almost frightening, reviews. And there are any number of reasons a restaurant—even an old, established one—can fail, as Google’s lawyers pointed out an angry June 17 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

“As the complaint tells it, The Serbian Crown restaurant was forced to close its doors not because of rising rents, difficulty sourcing ingredients, declining quality, poor service, changing tastes, poor business decisions, increased competition, or any of the other myriad reasons that can cause an established restaurant to struggle,” wrote attorney Creighton Macy, of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

“Rather than accept that restaurants, even longstanding ones, sometimes fail, the owner of this particular restaurant looked around for someone to blame,” the lawyer wrote. “Who did he settle on? Google.”

Even if Bertagna can prove the facts, as a legal matter Google is probably untouchable because of Google Maps crowdsourced nature. A federal law called CDA 230 gives Internet services broad immunity from claims stemming from user-contributed content.

For his part, Bertangna says he hopes to reopen his restaurant some day and begin serving lion again. “It’s like a veal. We served it with a white mushroom, sauce and vegetables.”  Google Maps is not optimistic about his chances. Today Serbian Crown’s listing reads simply, “Permanently closed.”

Power Loss Created Trouble Aboard Galileo GNSS Satellite

As reported by GPSWorld: Galileo GSAT0104, the fourth in-orbit validation (IOV) satellite, has been set “unavailable until further notice” according to the European GNSS Service Centre. International observers (not associated with the European Space Agency, ESA) including those of the International GNSS Service tracking the satellite have not detected a signal from GSAT0104 since May 27. A constellation update appeared June 26 at www.gsc-europa.eu/system-status/Constellation-Information.

Speculation by unofficial sources is mounting that something is wrong with the satellite, in particular with its passive hydrogen maser, used for timing the signal for synchronous transmission with other Galileo satellites. The hydrogen maser has “a known problem” according to one source. This is why the web site shows GSAT0104, also known as FM04 and E2, as currently using a rubidium atomic frequency standard.

European Space Agency (ESA) officials further stated on July 3 that they would power-on the satellite again sometime this week (July 7–11) to continue investigating the problem. That investigation has been ongoing since the shutdown but has not identified a cause; officials state they have established that it is not related to the on-board atomic clocks.

The four IOV satellites currently aloft differ in both technology and manufacturer from the next phase of Galileo satellites to be launched. Two of these newer generation are at the Guyana spaceport awaiting a possible late August lift-off date.

Don't Fly Your Drone in Front of the NYPD

As reported by The Verge: Two men were arrested for flying a drone too close to a New York Police Department helicopter in New York City, but the police and the drone pilots are telling different stories.

The cops say the drone was flying 2,000 feet over a major bridge just after midnight earlier this week. The drone pilots say they weren't flying nearly that high.

Wilkins Mendoza, 34, and Remy Castro, 23, say they were flying their DJI Phantom 2 only about 300 feet in the air when a police helicopter started pursuing the little drone. "We're trying to get the drone away from the helicopter, and it keeps on following the drone," Remy's brother Jonathan told The New York Daily News. "We have video proof that we are not following him, he's following us."

The DJI Phanton 2 can reach heights of 2,000 feet, but it's more commonly flown at much lower altitudes. Its limited battery life also would have forced it to land after about 20 minutes.

The two pilots have been charged with felony reckless endangerment, a serious crime that implies a risk of death and disregard for human life. The drone came within 800 feet of the helicopter, close enough to lead to a collision if the drone were above or in front of the helicopter.

Drones, or quadcopters, are treated like model aircraft. Flying them is legal for now, as the Federal Aviation Administration considers which rules and standards should apply to the new class of flyers.

Uber Cuts The Price Of UberX By 20% In New York City, Making It Cheaper Than A Taxi

As reported by Business Insider: Now we know why car-hailing app Uber raised a whopping $1.2 billion in funding: It's starting a price war with its rivals.  

Uber announced in a blog post on Monday it would cut the prices of its UberX service in New York City by 20% — but it’s only for a limited time. 

Uber says this makes it cheaper to use UberX than taking a traditional yellow taxi.

It provided a comparison chart to show how much cheaper UberX will be for drivers commuting to various parts of New York City.

UberX, Uber’s cheaper service usually hosted by regular people driving basic sedans rather than fancy black cars, also cut its rates by 25% last week in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. As a result of that announcement, Uber said its service was effectively “45% cheaper than a taxi.”

Consumers like Uber’s aggressive pricing strategy but competitors — and some of its own drivers — are not as happy. Uber drivers have complained about price cuts, arguing they actually work for less than minimum wage (the company argues otherwise, stating drivers can be paid anywhere between $75,000 and $90,000). They’ve also said Uber’s rating system is inherently flawed and unfair, since drivers that receive bad ratings from their passengers — with any reason, or none at all — can get booted from the service without warning.

There have been protests of Uber in San Francisco, London, and Milan. 

Even though the price cuts are temporary, one wonders what would happen if Uber tried price cuts again in the future since the drivers are the ones that suffer from lower costs. It’s an interesting model, but its sustainability remains a big question mark for the disruptive car service.