Tag Archives: GPS
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Parental-control phones
In the context of the debates about banning mobiles for school children, the issue of phones that constrain use has become relevant. The NYT has done a full survey of the options available to parents in the US, an excerpt of which is given below. Why doesn’t someone do a similar survey for India, Sri Lanka, etc.?
Now for some real cellphones. The new LG Rumor from Kajeet (kajeet.com) is a texting phone for children, and it includes interesting features that everyone can appreciate.
First and foremost, Kajeet offers parental controls to prevent unauthorized incoming or outgoing calls. The service also includes a WalletManager system that allows parents to add talk time to the service weekly, like an allowance, as well as TimeManager, which limits calls to certain people at certain times. The phone also includes GPS mapping so parents can track children on the go.
The phone costs $180, and unlimited texting and 150 minutes of talk time costs $20 a month. A basic plan costs $5 a month for 10 minutes of talk time a month.
Another wireless carrier, Sprint, also offers a similar family-locator plan. The service works for all Sprint and Nextel mobile phones and allows ..read more
Coming to a mobile near you soon: Facebook, Hi5 and Orkut (Now showing mygamma.com)
Mobile social networking is still a small part of the way people use their cell phones, but industry officials expect that use will grow, and not just for teenagers who want to text their friends or send short video clips.
Analysts and network providers said that workers will adopt mobile social networking, following the way social network sites, such as Facebook, have begun to grow within workgroups that rely on desktop computers. These experts also expect that there will be affinity groups, such as doctors, engineers, lawyers or even baseball fans, who are linked with wireless devices.
Mobile social networking makes sense because mobile devices are personal and they are taken everywhere, offering the potential for transmission of quick ideas or images. Mobile social networks will (and some already do) put video, GPS, text, voice and collaboration into the palm of a user’s hand.
For example, a business traveler at a conference in an unfamiliar city could be walking past an appealing restaurant. Using mapping and location technologies, the traveler could almost instantly send a quick note to 10 friends in her workgroup to “meet here in 15 minutes for a meal.” Or the hungry traveler could record a video of herself standing ..read more
2/3rd of 2004 Tsunami wave height caused by Horizontal Forces
“Scientists have long believed tsunamis form from vertical deformation of seafloor during undersea earthquakes. However, seismograph and GPS data show such deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake was too small to generate the powerful tsunami that ensued. Song’s team found horizontal forces were responsible for two-thirds of the tsunami’s height, as observed by three satellites (NASA’s Jason, the U.S. Navy’s Geosat Follow-on and the European Space Agency’s Environmental Satellite), and generated five times more energy than the earthquake’s vertical displacements. The horizontal forces also best explain the way the tsunami spread out across the Indian Ocean. The same mechanism was also found to explain the data observed from the 2005 Nias earthquake and tsunami. ”
Indonesia tsunami detection system
CORDIS : News Funded by the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the DEWS project will aim to strengthen early warning capacities in the region by building an open and interoperable tsunami early warning system for the Indian Ocean.
The system to detect tsunamis will be based on an open sensor platform and integrated sensor systems for earthquake (seismic), sea level (tide gauge, buoys) and ground displacement (GPS land stations) monitoring.
These sensor systems will be one of the most important innovations in the project as they will be responsible for sending reliable data from the seafloor to the warning centre.
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Scientist who foretold the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami warns of possibility of another in Northern Bay of Bengal
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Tsunami concern for Bay of Bengal
Now, Phil Cummins, lead author on the Nature paper and a geologist at Geoscience Australia, believes this is not the case.He said: “I reviewed the geological literature and found the evidence for a lack of tectonic activity along the Myanmar coast was not compelling.”
Historical evidence
Recent GPS data, he said, suggested that the plate boundary was at sea in this area, hidden below thick layers of sediment.
The days of SMS are numbered?
The days of SMS are numbered now that mobile email access is becoming a commodity, research firm Gartner says.
Long the preserve of businessmen in power suits, mobile email is about to hit the masses with one in five email users accessing their accounts wirelessly by 2010, according to Gartner.
Monica Blasso, the firm’s research vice-president, said mobile email had moved beyond the BlackBerry and was increasingly a feature of even low-cost mobile phones, driving consumer adoption.
“By 2012, wireless email products will be fully inter-operable, commoditised and have standard features,” she said. “They will be shipping in larger volumes at greatly reduced prices.”
Today there are less than 20 million wireless email users worldwide, but this will grow to 350 million, or 20 per cent of all email accounts, by 2010, she said.
Mapping disaster research
NSF EXPLORATORY WORKSHOP ON SENSOR BASED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR EARLY TSUNAMI DETECTION, Maui, Feb 9-10, 2006
What I learned during my visits to the Civil Defense Center and the Tsunami Museum in Hilo and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach in Hawai’i last January greatly contributed to the disaster communication research program undertaken by LIRNEasia in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Therefore, I welcomed the opportunity to step back and reflect on the research program a year later, also in Hawai’i.
The occasion was a workshop funded by the National Science Foundation of the US. It was organized by Louise Comfort, Daniel Mosse and Taieb Znati, all at the U of Pittsburgh. Louise is from Public Policy and has been working on disasters for a long time. Daniel and Taieb are in computer science and new to the field. I really liked Daniel’s fixation on time lines. That is critical to the whole enterprise of warning.
I had some reservations when I first received the invitation, but was persuaded to attend. All I knew about sensor-based networks was what I learned from Tilak Illangasekera and Anura Jayasumana in the course of our work on early warning systems for dam-based ..read more
Satellite Radio for Hazard Warning Demonstrated to Sir Arthur Clark
Colombo, Sri Lanka, 8 November 2005: An addressable satellite radio system for hazard warning was demonstrated to Sir Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo, Sri Lanka this week. It has been designed by WorldSpace, Inc., in collaboration with Raytheon Corporation of the US, at the request of LIRNEasia, a Sri Lankan research organization. The satellite radio is the first device to incorporate the Common Alert Protocol (CAP). The radio set can be switched on from the master control, and converted from a conventional radio to a specialized hazard alert system. The equipment was field tested in Sri Lanka, including at several Sarvodaya villages that were affected by the Asian Tsunami of December 2004. It was apt that the first demonstration of this new technology involved Sir Arthur – who first proposed the idea of communications satellites in geostationary orbit exactly 60 years ago. WorldSpace uses satellites in this ‘Clarke Orbit’ to transmit high quality digital broadcasts. The latest innovation will place satellite communications in the service of hazard warning through a low cost, low maintenance radio set capable of receiving WorldSpace transmissions. Sir Arthur said: “The best tribute we can pay to all who perished or suffered in this disaster is to heed its ..read more
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