Starfish Hopes to Prevent Children From Being Left Behind in Hot Cars

As reported by AL.com: A Birmingham tech startup, Studio Whale, says it has a solution to the horrific accident of hot car deaths among infants and toddlers that we've been hearing about so much this summer. 

A UAB enterprise software developer and new father, Mathew Brian Sheets, has developed an application in the interest of his infant son.

Meet Starfish.

   

Starfish is a small weight-sensor that fits into a child's car seat. The sensor links via Bluetooth to an application on your iPhone or Android device. Once you place your child into the car, Starfish sends you a notification that the child is in his or her car seat.

Once activated, Starfish sets up a "geo-fence" around itself with a 20 foot radius. If you leave (or your phone leaves) that geo-fence while your child is still in the car seat, you'll receive a notification alarming you of your deadly mistake. 

If you haven't responded to the notification within five minutes, Starfish will notify your list of emergency contacts. 

On their Kickstarter page, Studio Whale says that 85 percent of its design and engineering process is completed, with a working prototype, and a manufacturing partner ready to go.

They are looking for $15,000 in funding for their first production run. At the time of this publication, Starfish had just passed the $1,000 mark with 25 days left to go.

Of course, Starfish can only protect children left in the car unintentionally. Roughly 20 children have died since the beginning of 2014 due to hyperthermia (heat stroke). 

California Legislature Mulls Curbs on Use of Aerial Drones by Paparazzi

As reported by the LA Times: When singer Miley Cyrus recently spotted a mysterious drone hovering over her Los Angeles home, she posted video of the aerial intruder on Instagram, complaining that it appeared to be a new tactic by the paparazzi.

The incident, in which Cyrus was photographed in her backyard, was no surprise to Patrick J. Alach. He is legal counsel for the Paparazzi Reform Initiative, a group representing celebrities and others that has persuaded lawmakers to tighten laws governing photography of those he represents.

The use of aerial drones equipped with cameras to catch celebrities at home and in other private places is "a huge concern, especially for public figures who want to have some privacy in their backyards," Alach said.

A proposal pending in the Legislature would prohibit the use of aerial drones to collect video, photos and audio from celebrities and others in a way that violates their privacy rights.

The concentration of entertainment-industry figures and paparazzi in California has led to other restrictions on photographers. One enacted last year made it illegal to photograph a celebrity's son or daughter without consent if it causes substantial emotional distress.

"Having a district that covers Los Angeles, we have plenty of paparazzi issues as it is, without having drones hovering over nightclubs or restaurants," state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) said.

Some media groups object to further restrictions.

"For the most part, these laws are written so overly broad and vague that they impede and infringe upon news gathering," said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Assn. "They couch everything in the terms of the paparazzi," but drones, like helicopters, can have legitimate news gathering purposes, he said.

Osterreicher said adequate privacy laws already exist, and the commercial use of drones is already prohibited in federal airspace by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in the process of developing guidelines for their use by next year.

The FAA estimates that 30,000 drones will fill the nation's skies in less than 20 years as public and private uses are allowed.

Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Monterey Park) introduced the pending state legislation. It would build on existing state law against invasion of privacy by photographers using enhanced devices such as telephoto lenses or long-range microphones.

Chau noted that the law does not clearly address the emergence of drones, and it could be argued that they are not enhanced devices. His bill would remove the enhancement element, extending the law to any device, including drones.

"As we continue to push the boundaries of technology by developing devices that grant us access to previously inaccessible locations and allow us to perform otherwise difficult tasks from a distance," Chau said, "we are also pushing the boundaries of personal space and privacy."

Those in the paparazzi business disagree on how drones should be used.

The pictures of Cyrus in her backyard were offered for sale to a major photo broker, who told The Times he declined to purchase them because he does not buy photos of people on their private property.

The broker, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of liability, said he uses drones to take shots of celebrities' homes for a website as long as no individuals can be seen in the pictures to raise personal privacy issues.

On the East Coast, operators of the website 247paps.tv boasted of using a drone to get video of actress Selena Gomez in March when a shoot for an Adidas ad was blocked from photographers' view.

In Los Angeles, celebrity photographer Giles Harrison last week took pictures in public places of rocker Steven Tyler and actor Pierce Brosnan. But he said it would be "creepy" to use a drone to get an image of someone in their backyard.

"There are certain lines that paparazzi shouldn't cross," Harrison said, "and I feel that the use of drones to photograph celebrities more than crosses that line."

Another veteran Hollywood photographer, Eric Ford, said that if the proposed California law is enacted, he will have to reconsider the possibility of getting a drone to stay competitive. But he said there may be times when drones are justified.

"I totally understand if you are the person being photographed that that could maybe be unsettling," Ford said. "The only thing I would say to that is: If you don't want to be photographed doing something, just be inside your house."

Fighter Jets and X-47B Drones Practice Rapid-Fire Launches Together

As reported by Fox News: The U.S. Navy recently conducted its first successful tests of drones and jets operating together aboard an aircraft carrier. The test flights, which took place Aug. 17 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, focused on assessing whether unmanned drones could be deployed quickly and safely alongside manned fighter jets.

Despite tight space and time constraints, the X-47B drones and the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets performed well in the tests, according to the U.S. Navy.

In urgent situations, fighter jets must take off and land in quick succession. That means that when one jet is taking off, another is close behind it, shielded from the blast of the first jet's engines by huge metal shields called "jet blast deflectors," according to online defense magazine Breaking Defense. As soon as one jet takes to the air, these metal walls are retracted and the next jet taxis onto the aircraft carrier's catapult. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

When landing to refuel, a jet must automatically disconnect from the cables that help it come to a stop. This makes it possible for an aircraft to get out of the way quickly so that another jet can land behind it.

For manned aircraft, the Navy has the precise timing needed to deploy a whole squadron of fighter jets down to science. But in the past, getting a drone to fall into this hectic rhythm has been a challenge, according to Breaking Defense.

"Our goal was to minimize the [X-47B's] time in the landing area and improve the flow with manned aircraft in the landing pattern," said Lt. Cmdr. Brian Hall, the flight test director for the X-47B drones. Hall said that to achieve this goal, the X-47B aircraft, which flew for the first time in 2011, needed a few upgrades.

Most of the X-47B's improvements focused on decreasing the time it takes for the drone to get out of the way of piloted aircraft after landing on the aircraft carrier. This is no easy feat, since a drone has only about 90 seconds to clear the landing area before another aircraft comes speeding down behind it.

For the recent test flights, the drone's operating software was updated, thus speeding up the time it takes for the aircraft to fold its wings and clear the landing area. Other improvements to the physical design of the plane also help move the drone out of the way as quickly as possible.

Getting drones and jets to work seamlessly and safely together is crucial to the success of the Navy's so-called carrier air wings naval aviation units comprising aircraft carriers and the different kinds of aircraft they carry said Capt. Beau Duarte, program manager for the Navy's unmanned carrier aviation office.

"Today, we showed that the X-47B could take off, land and fly in the carrier pattern with manned aircraft while maintaining normal flight-deck operations," Duarte said.

This type of cooperation between drones and jets will be tested several more times, according to a statement from the U.S. Navy. The next challenge includes performing all of these same tasks in the dark of night a procedure known as "night deck handling."

After Ferguson, Police Should be Wearing On-Body Cameras

As reported by The Verge:After conflicts between protestors and police in Ferguson, Mo. yesterday — particularly in the wake of militarized police officers arresting Washington Post and Huffington Post reporters working in a nearby McDonald's — some have suggested that on-body cameras should be more widely used among on-duty police. The theory is that by recording every situation and every conflict that an officer encounters, law enforcement and citizens have an unquestionable account of what really happened. It might also stop an officer from crossing the line.

The Verge produced a story and documentary last year about Axon Flex, perhaps the most advanced of these on-body police cameras, and the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. In that story, civil rights attorney Scott Greenwood talked about his work to establish concrete rules regarding on-body police cameras. I asked him to talk a little about how on-body cameras couldn't helped the situation in Ferguson last night.

"The proper use of OBRS is going to be a very important part of how these agencies restore legitimacy and public confidence."

"On-body recording systems [OBRS] would have been incredibly useful in Ferguson," he says. "This is yet another controversial incident involving one officer and one subject, a minority youth who was unarmed," a reference to Michael Brown, who was killed by police on August 9th. "OBRS would have definitively captured whatever interaction these two had that preceded the use of deadly force." Armed with footage from an on-body camera system, it's possible that police would've had no option but to take swift action against the officers involved — or if Brown's behavior wasn't as eyewitnesses describe, perhaps protests wouldn't have swelled in the first place. Instead, the citizens of Ferguson are left with more questions than answers.

Moving forward, Greenwood doesn't see how on-body cameras can be avoided. "I see no way moving forward in which Ferguson police do not use OBRS," he says. "The proper use of OBRS is going to be a very important part of how these agencies restore legitimacy and public confidence."

There need to be rules, of course — and in his capacity working with the ACLU, Greenwood has helped to sketch out some of those rules. But when situations like Ferguson emerge, it seems reasonable to think that more transparency and more public records are what's needed, not less.

Internet of Things (IoT) and Autonomous Vehicles in the Hype(r)-Cycle

As reported by MemeBurn: Technology research house Gartner has released its annual hype cycle graph, which shows where various technologies are in terms of maturity, business benefit and future direction. This, the 201th edition of the hype cycle, shows that right now we’re really excited by technologies like autonomous motoring and data science and are becoming disillusioned with things like NFC and cloud computing.

Perhaps most intriguing though are the technologies that lie on the axes of inflated expectations and those heading up the slope of enlightenment toward the plateau of productivity.

In the case of the former, the trend that stands out is the Internet of Things. Over the past couple of years we've been told that this trend, which refers to the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing like devices within the existing Internet infrastructure, would massively improve the way we collect data and do business.

Its position on the graph does not however mean that it’s not doing those things, just that our expectations around the Internet of Things are way higher than the technology is currently capable of delivering. The same is true of natural language question answering. There can be no doubting the fact that it’s helped make things easier for some businesses but the fact that no seems to be in too much of a rush to replace their call centers suggests that we could soon start to become disillusioned with it.

The hope for these technologies is that they will eventually be able to overcome their over-hyped expectations and eventual disillusionment to hit what Gartner calls the plateau of productivity. In this stage, technologies may not seem as exciting as they once were but they do become an every day part of the way we do business.

The most familiar technology in this section of the graph is speech recognition, which has found its way onto our phones and is making increasingly prominent appearances in our cars. The same will likely happen to enterprise 3D printing and 3D scanning in the near future.

While Gartner says that it’s worth bearing the Hype Cycle’s trends in mind, the stages the various technologies represented on it are at are not universal. “Many early adopters have embraced quite advanced technologies, such as autonomous vehicles or smart advisors,” says Hung LeHong, vice president and Gartner fellow. “While they continue to improve nexus-related areas, such as mobile apps – so it’s important to look at the bigger picture.” 

FAA Advises Pilots on GPS Problems as Air Force Training Jams Signals

As reported by Alaska Public Media: The Air Force is jamming Global Positioning System signals periodically around military airfields in Alaska during Red Flag training exercises now under way in and around Eielson Air Force Base. Officials say the GPS interference testing could affect other devices that rely on GPS.

The Federal Aviation Administration is advising pilots flying around Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Greely and Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson over the next few days to expect unreliable or unavailable signals for their aircraft’s GPS set.

Air Force Lt. Col. Allen Knapp says it’s being done to prepare Air Force pilots to operate in environments in which GPS is not available.

“In a modern contested environments, most of the modern battlefields that our will face, the reception of GPS is definitely not guaranteed,” Knapp said. “It’s something that is going to be up for grabs. And it helps to have our airmen experience GPS being denied here in a training environment, like Red Flag, prior to an actual engagement where they lose their GPS reception.”

The FAA has issued several advisories in recent days informing pilots about the periodic GPS interference testing around the military airfields over the next 10 days, during Red Flag.

The agency says pilots may experience GPS problems at different times and at different altitudes. But the F-A-A says pilots should expect anomalies anywhere within 365 nautical miles from Fort Greely, up to 40,000 feet. Knapp says pilots should also expect GPS anomalies today through Friday within 150 nautical miles of Eielson, at 40,000 feet; and within 120 miles of JBER, at 40,000.

This week’s GPS interference testing around Eielson and Greely is being conducted from mid-morning to around 12:30 p.m. and again from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. daily. The schedule will vary beginning this weekend, with once-a-day testing scheduled for some days.

FAA officials ask pilots to report all GPS anomalies they encounter during the testing to the agency’s Anchorage Center to help them measure the extent of the problem.

Knapp says the Air Force jamming should not affect cellphones or other mobile devices. But he says motorists will encounter problems with their vehicle’s GPS sets is they’re near any of the three military air bases during the tests.

He says members of the public may also notice problems when using devices that rely on GPS for time calibration.

“I can’t tell you that we categorically we will not affect anything else,” Knapp said. “More and more, technologies are drawing upon that (GPS) and using that for the services they provide.”

The FAA says additional Notices to Airmen will be issued throughout the testing period to keep pilots apprised of any changes in plans for the testing.

WorldView-3 Satellite Will Upgrade Google's Earth Images

As reported by NBC News: DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite, due for launch today from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop an Atlas 5 rocket, should provide pictures of Earth that are twice as sharp as the current standard — and that could generate a new round of buzz about pictures of the planet. Google, Microsoft and other online mapmakers are among DigitalGlobe's best-known clients for Earth imagery. The RV-sized WorldView-3 satellite is capable of 30-centimeter (1-foot) black-and-white resolution, which beats the 50-centimeter resolution for pictures fromWorldView-2. DigitalGlobe had to get clearance from the federal government to sell the sharper images to civilians.

The pictures won't be good enough to reveal license plates, but "we can tell you whether it's a truck, or an SUV or a regular car," Kumar Navulur, DigitalGlobe's director of next-generation products, told NBC News. Other applications include multispectral imaging for agricultural or urban planning, and cloud-piercing infrared views for tracking fires. You can watch the launch online at 2:30 p.m. ET, courtesy of United Launch Alliance, but you'll have to wait until 2015 for the best satellite images.