The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.

“The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,” said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.

The case is an appeal from a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said last year that the government was simply seeking too much information.

“Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course of a month,” wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg.

He added: “A person who knows all of another’s travel can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

. . . Google announced a free navigation service for mobile phones on Wednesday that will offer turn-by-turn directions, live traffic updates and the ability to recognize voice commands. The service will initially be available on only one phone, the new Motorola Droid, but will be expanded to more phones soon.

In a briefing on Tuesday in advance of its announcement, Google said that the service might be supported by advertisements in the future. That would make driving directions the latest form of information to shift from being a paid service to one that is ad-supported.

“This is consistent with a certain pattern of Google, where they are able to build volume and usage of a product and then subsidize it with advertising,” said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligent, a research firm. The losers, he said, were companies like TomTom and Garmin, along with the cellphone carriers, which offer navigation services by subscription.

Full story.

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 you to pinpoint children on an online map. It costs $5 a month to locate up to four phones, and the service can send you automatic notifications when children arrive at school or home.

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 in front of the restaurant and send the video clip along with the message so her workgroup friends would know what kind of restaurant to expect.

Read the full story in the Computer World here.

NASA TSUNAMI RESEARCH MAKES WAVES IN SCIENCE COMMUNITY

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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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.

Dr Cummins added: “Although these GPS measurements are sparse, these show that there is active deformation near the Myanmar coast that is consistent with a locked thrust-fault offshore, which is the type needed to generate tsunami.”

Computer simulation of tsunami
A computer simulation shows the havoc a tsunami could wreak
The geologist also looked at accounts of an earthquake that occurred in the area in 1762, which wrenched up parts of the coast by between 3-7m.

His computer simulation of the quake, which he believes would have measured magnitude 8.8, showed that a similar event today would have significant impacts.

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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.

Blasso added email-enabled phones traditionally lacked consumer-oriented features like cameras, music players, video players and GPS navigation, but this was not the case anymore.

Even the BlackBerry, once chunky and bland, now offers all of the above features in the new BlackBerry 8800 device. Other mobile email devices, like the Motorola MOTO Q 9h, the Palm Treo 750 and the Samsung BlackJack, were all designed with aesthetics, usability and fun features in mind.

The devices, Blasso said, were becoming more personal as the line between personal and professional life blurred.

Robin Simpson, mobile and wireless research director at Gartner Australasia, said mobile email access in Australia would soon be offered for free as part of mobile phone contracts.

“Once email becomes available more or less free of charge by default on your mobile handset, people will gravitate to that rather than just continuing to use SMS,” Simpson said.

He said mobile email uptake in Australia had been held back due to the high access prices charged by carriers, but recent price competition, particularly driven by Hutchison 3 and Virgin Mobile, indicated prices would drop rapidly.

“The interesting thing is that SMS, if you look at it in terms of actual cost for the data, is really expensive, and where we’re heading is you’ll get a free email package when you sign up to your monthly plan,” he said.

Asher Moses
July 27, 2007 – 12:35PM

http://www.theage.com.au/news/mobiles–handhelds/for-sms-the-days-are-numbered/2007/07/27/1185339221496.html

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 hazards (http://www.lirneasia.net/2005/05/dam-safety-expert-consultation-may-20/). I had been thinking about using advanced sensors and telemetry for hazard detection for a long time. The disasters and ICTs workshop I organized while at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre back in 1986 had this subject on the agenda; and Tilak and Anura responded to a specific request to talk about “electronic dust” in relation to dam safety. But still, that did not qualify me as an expert on the subject.

The agenda explained the rationale: the organizers began the workshop with presentations on the current state of tsunami warning in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India followed by presentations on the design of new systems, if any, in each of the four countries. They had a deputy minister from Indonesia and the head of the Meteorology Department in Thailand. From India and Sri Lanka, they had invited researchers. The idea was to get a good sense of the “demand” side and then develop creative ideas to “supply” the solutions.

In order to do justice to the first presentation I analyzed the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act (No. 13 of 2005) and the Disaster Management Roadmap published in December 2005 by the Disaster Management Center, created under that Act. Avoiding slipping into the conventional government mode of talking about the future, I analyzed the actual experiences of with tsunami warning in Sri Lanka (December 26^th, 2004; the fiasco of the non-functioning e-mail addresses and fax numbers of February 27^th, 2005; and the Nias Great Earthquake and the false warning of March 28^th, 2005).

The LK presentation was different from the others, because it said pretty much nothing about hazard detection and monitoring, other than to identify it as a necessary condition that LK hoped would be satisfied by international and regional action. This was not simply because of the focus on public warning in our own research; it was because LK is the only country among the four to not have an active program in developing a tsunami hazard detection capability. Shifting the emphasis from tsunami hazard detection to public warning was part of the thrust of LIRNEasia’s and Vanguard Foundation’s work in the aftermath of the tsunami (e.g., http://www.lirneasia.net/2005/02/learning-from-the-tsunami/).

Listening to the grandiose plans for placing large numbers of very expensive deep-sea sensor devices in Indonesia and the unrealistic deadlines of the peculiar India-only tsunami detection system, I was happy that my government had got it right at least once. In none of the other presentations did I hear what I wanted to hear: systematic analyses of how the systems worked (especially when specific actions were taken) in the “natural experiments” of December 26^th, 2004 and March 28^th, 2005.

I also presented the elements of the HazInfo Project we’re doing with Sarvodaya.

These sessions were followed by some excellent presentations on the state of tsunami detection: Walter Mooney of the US Geological Survey and Rhett Butler from Global Seismic Network talked about the worldwide network of seismometers, using pictures of the Pallekale site in their presentation. The importance of the Pallekale equipment for the Indian Ocean detection system was clearly evident. The Indian bureaucracy paranoidly continues to resist sharing seismic information, making the entire region a black hole, if not for PALK, as the Pallekale unit is fondly known. The Chinese are only slightly less paranoid, imposing a 100-minute delay on their data (thereby ruling that area out as a serious source of seismic information). Isn’t it ironic that the two most populous nations in the world take positions inimical to the preservation of human life in the name of national security?

Two thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by water, but except for one cable-based ocean-floor system near Hawai’i, all the other seismic sensors are land-based. Professor Kanamori from CalTech made a fascinating presentation on the potential of an alternative method of identifying tsunamis using GPS data to do a quick and dirty calculation of lateral displacements of land masses caused by really big earthquakes. Chip McCreery, the Director of the PTWC, talked about how they were planning to use a new tool based on the sophisticated model that gave us that powerful picture of the 2004 tsunami a few days later. Beautiful results from complicated models weeks later are nice, but do not save lives. What Chip described was a simple interface where the PTWC scientists would make some simple entries and the model would spit out information that was practically usable in identifying tsunami risk.

So it was clear that there is plenty of work to be done in improving tsunami detection; in reducing the false warning rate which stands at 75% in the Pacific Basin. Advanced sensor networks, including the motes that are “sown,” can play a very useful role. The NSF was not throwing its money down a drain. We, the people dealing with the gritty reality of public warning and evacuation, could easily tell them how important it was to get the false warning rate down. The hard scientists could get to work on improving the predictability of tsunamis, and of speeding up the communication of the hazard information to the national warning centers.

The tsunami is a peculiar beast. A cyclone/typhoon/hurricane can be predicted days in advance; at the other extreme, there will be a few minutes of unreliable warning on an earthquake, at most. Tsunamis sit in the middle of this continuum. Advance warning of around one hour is feasible for a teletsunami of the type that hit Sri Lanka in 2004. For Kenya and Tanzania, the period can be as high as 8-10 hours. But the same tsunami hit Banda Aceh in twenty minutes, making advance warning difficult to impossible. What was a teletsunami for us was a local tsunami for Banda Aceh.

Sometime early in the discussion this distinction between short-fuse and long-fuse disasters came up. Unfortunately, it did not get picked up as the central organizing theme for the work of the group, despite Daniel’s fixation on time.

In the case of long-fuse disasters, the hazard detection and monitoring system is (and should be) separable from the warning system. They have different qualities. In the case of short-fuse disasters, the two systems have to be unified. This was the distinction we made in the case of NEWS:SL (teletsunami; long-fuse) and the dam hazards project (short-fuse).

In the case of local tsunamis, the prevailing wisdom is “your feet are your signal; run for high ground.” Is it possible for advanced sensor networks to reduce the uncertainty in this situation? I think yes. This is a good case for long-term fundamental research funded by the NSF.

On the public warning side, there is no need for fundamental research at present. Just hard-nosed implementation will do. As we get this piece done, it’s possible that opportunities for fundamental research will appear. But they were not manifest at the meeting in Maui. All we had was a restatement of what everyone in disaster management had known for years. The best practices section of our NEWS:SL report sets out the principles.

But this is not to say that the public warning side will not benefit from fundamental research on the hazard detection and monitoring side. Improvements there will reduce the false warning rate and will also give the public-warning people more time to act.

But, in my view, there is no gain from simply mashing together the hazard detection and public warning systems for teletsunamis. These systems have different qualities and we will save more lives (this is the end objective, we must keep in mind) by improving their performance as separate systems. Unfortunately, the design of the second day’s deliberations did not allow this kind of discussion. The mashing together was a fait accompli.

So, not optimal in terms of intellectual output, but very good in terms of networking and finding out the state of the art on the hazard detection and monitoring side. I hope something good will come of all this.

The conference website is here