The beating heart of Galileo

Despite the setbacks to the European Space Agency's 'Galileo' satellite project, they still continue to publish positive information on the developments. In this latest release, they discuss Galileo's time-accuracy:

Galileo, Europe’s twenty-first century navigation system, also relies on clocks – but they are millions of times more accurate than those earlier timepieces.

The operational Galileo satellites will carry two types of clocks – passive hydrogen masers and rubidium atomic frequency standards. Each satellite will be equipped with two hydrogen masers, one of which will be the primary reference for generating the navigation signals, with the other as a cold (non-operating) spare...

...As a by-product of satellite navigation’s need for accurate timekeeping, Galileo will also be able to offer precision time services to be used, for example, in the time stamping of financial transactions.

Read in full from the ESA: Hyper-accurate clocks – the beating heart of Galileo

Mobile Phone Air Pollution Monitor

I like this one - another example of converging the use of mobile phones for environmental monitoring:

Squirrel is a Bluetooth-enabled gadget that monitors pollution, being developed by Shannon Spanhake and colleagues at the University of California San Diego and Calit2. MedGadget reports.

"Squirrel fits in the palm of your hand and can be clasped to a belt or purse. The small, battery-powered mobile device can sample pollutants with its on-chip sensor.

Using a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, the device connects to the user's cell phone. A software program called Acorn allows the user to see the current pollution alerts through a screensaver on the cell phone's display.

...The phone also periodically transmits the environmental data to a public database on the Internet operated by Calit2."

Via Smartmobs

Iraq veteran wins blog prize

The Guardian reports in 'Iraq veteran wins blog prize as US military cuts web access' how Colby Buzzell was awarded the £5,000 Lulu Blooker prize for My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which was voted the best book of the year based on a blog:

The memoir was drawn from a blog he kept while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, in which he portrayed the texture of daily life there, from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.

The paradox of Buzzell's victory is that it quickly follows the revelation that the Pentagon has introduced new rules restricting blogs among soldiers, fuelling speculation that live and unadorned combat writing from the field such as Buzzell's may be the last of its kind.

The new rules require all would-be "milbloggers", as soldier-publishers are called, to submit blog entries to supervising officers before posting them. That turns on its head the existing rules which allowed soldiers to post freely, with the onus on them to register their blogs and to alert officers to any material that might compromise security.

What is significant here is that the US Pentagon is now restricting soldier bloggers in what they write, as well as restricting Army computers from accessing such sites as MySpace and YouTube - but they seem fine to let them carry on surfing 'the web for pornography' - good influences for war??

Digital Planet 14 May 2007

This week's Digital Planet broadcast:

The how and how-not-to guide to sending emails. Faceless, the movie made entirely from CCTV footage. News of a search engine that steers you towards classical music. And how second life protests brought the Chilean capital to a standstill

Download podcast here

Bandwidth leap for British forces

The BBC reports in 'Bandwidth leap for British forces' that UK forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have started using a new satellite system that will see a dramatic improvement in their communications capability:

They are now sending voice, images and other data over the Skynet 5A platform. The spacecraft, which was launched in March, is part of a £3.6bn project to upgrade the super-fast connections between command centres.

"It's making a clear difference already," Brigadier Simon Shadbolt at the Ministry of Defence told BBC News. "In Afghanistan, where we've been using the system probably more than in Iraq, our troops have seen a noticeable increase in capability."

Skynet 5A was launched from Kourou in French Guiana on 11 March.

Click here to see how the system will be deployed

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Digital Planet May 07 2007

On this week's Digital Planet:

A Wiki to bring the results of scientific research to the masses; the Wi-fi Alliance and how it maintains standards; the latest devices to keep our information secure from InfoSec 2007; and a website called Sellaband.com which encourages fans of unknown artists to contribute small amounts of money for a proper recording session


Download here

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Tagging Tokyo's Streets

Tokyo is going to experiment with a ubiquitous computing project that could transform the city, as well as spearheading the way into how urban spaces are navigated:

A capital city without road names is a huge handicap. Collectively, the Japanese (especially trainee post workers) and bewildered visitors have spent decades lost in Tokyo's labyrinthine arteries - most, literally, without a name...

...Heading the project is Tokyo University professor Ken Sakamura -who, with the aid of the Japanese government, is well on his way to building the world's first truly public ubiquitous computer network. It's "an infrastructure for the 21st century", he says, adding that it will see our everyday landscape guide us, inform us and generally hold our hand in an increasingly puzzling world.

Sakamura foresees scenarios resembling those in the film Minority Report, where the hero passes intelligent ad boards and shops in the mall which acknowledge him by name and try to flog him stuff. However the real-life version, in Japan at least, will be less intrusive, Sakamura insists....

"With this system the user is in complete control. As a user of such a network we will see our enviros us," Sakamura says. "We seek only to chip or tag objects and the environment, never people. With this system you can choose to read which you wish. The ubiquitous communicator - the pocket device you use to read the information around you - can only read and write, which means your identity is protected."

Read in full: Tagging Tokyo's streets

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Wiki politics

Online journal 'Re-Public' has gone live with a new special issue on Wiki politics. It covers a range of short essays from open source politics, to Panarchy, and collective intelligence. Some examples are:

Ward Cunningham - Wiki and the rise of gift economies

Paul Hartzog - Panarchy and the wiki-fication of politics: The age of panarchy is upon us

Kingsley Dennis - The new agoras: ‘Wikis’ as a form of collective intelligence

A highly recommended read!

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Second Life 'child abuse' claim

In the past I have posted positively on the 'goings-on' of Second Life. Now, it is with concern that I refer to this latest development which opens up the virtual sphere to abuse - the abuse of 'virtual children':

Second Life is being investigated by German police following allegations that some members are trading child abuse images in the online world. The investigation follows a report by a German TV news programme which uncovered the trading group and members who pay for sex with virtual children... The investigation also uncovered so called "age play" groups that revolve around the abuse of virtual children.

Read in full from the BBC - 'Second Life 'child abuse' claim'

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A Tiny Revolution

RFID tags is in the news again as more and more retailers are beginning to use them in their stores. The latest is Marks + Spencer - now perhaps the rest will follow?

This summer, Marks & Spencer will start tagging suits at 120 UK stores. The labels will do the same job as a bar code at the checkout, but will also improve distribution; "smart" shelves will know when stocks are running low.

A future where every box of eggs and pint of milk comes with a microchip is being predicted. "It will happen," says Raghu Das, the chief executive of IDTechEx, an independent RFID consultancy firm in Cambridge. "But we think that day is decades away because it's harder to justify the cost of tagging low-cost items. It's just too expensive to start putting silicon chips on every piece of throwaway packaging."

Read in full: 'New advances in microchip technology are creating a tiny revolution'

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Spy plane against global warming

Now here is a potentially beneficial and/or draconian use of mobile surveillance strategies - monitoring how households use their heat!

Spy-in-the-sky cameras are being used to identify householders who are wasting the most energy and to shame them into turning the central heating down. Thermal images of homes have been taken by a light aircraft fitted with military spy technology to record the heat escaping from people’s houses.

Maps identifying individual homes have now been placed on the internet to encourage occupiers to reduce their wastage and carbon emissions by fitting insulation and turning the thermostat down. Haringey Council, in London, has become the first authority in England to place house-by-house thermal maps on the web, after the example of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Making the information available to the public is intended to raise awareness of how much energy is being used needlessly, putting up bills and contributing to global warming.

From The Times - read in full:

'Spy plane employed to shame owners of heat-loss homes'

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Automobiles of the future - the networked car

The fully networked car was the theme of a recent conference that addressed whether automobiles of the future would include such things as buttons to access virtual reference services, library databases, and more:

the number of cars continues to rise around the globe. In 2006 alone, some 46 million passenger vehicles were produced worldwide, according to OICA (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles), which comprises national associations of manufacturers. These cars need to share roads and resources efficiently. The environment needs to be protected, traffic flows controlled and people kept safe. And increasingly, drivers expect to keep in touch with the outside world when travelling.

Part of the answer to these issues will come from advances in information and communication technologies (ICT). To examine how cars and ICT are converging, a workshop was held in March by World Standards Cooperation — which brings together ITU, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Read more and get links to conference papers from the site - 'The Automobile as a Networked Info Tool; Real Time Traffic'

Via Smartmobs

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More tracking of motorists in Britain

Yes, this subject just never seems to go away...it seems almost inevitable that motorists in Britain will be tracked within a decade if the government goes ahead with controversial plans to manage traffic flow and introduce road fees for drivers:

The plans were unveiled in November in a report on future transportation policies designed to help cut traffic congestion. The plans prompted 1.8 million people to sign an electronic protest petition.

Monitoring would be via a combination of static cameras to capture license-plate details, electronic tags in vehicles that would be read by roadside monitoring stations and global positioning system satellites to read on-board transponders.

"You will need 10 years at a minimum for a national rollout," Phil Blyth, professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University, told reporters. "I do not see many other options available to us to manage our transport system."

Read in full - 'British motorists face spy-in-sky monitoring'

Mobile Media and Communication

'Mobile Media and Communication' is the current special issue of the PsychNology Journal (Volume 5, Number 1, pp. 1-99) that includes the following papers as full pdf downloads:

Is It Fun to Go to Sydney? Common-Sense Knowledge of Social Structures and WAP by Ilpo Koskinen

Texters not Talkers: Phone Call Aversion among Mobile Phone Users by Ruth Rettie

Discourses on Mobility and Technological Mediation: The Texture of Ubiquitous Interaction by Giuseppina Pellegrino

Mobile Fantasies on Film: Gathering Metaphoric Evidence of Mobile Symbiosis and the Mobile Imaginary by Kathleen M. Cumiskey

And we should point out that Giuseppina Pellegrino was recently a visiting academic to CeMoRe who gave some talks and shared the office with the hoster of this blog!


Thanks to Smartmobs for the link
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Phones studied as attack detector

USA Today has an article titled 'Phones studied as attack detector' that looks at using mobile phones as sensors to detect environmental dangers:

The government is researching whether the best defense against a chemical, biological or radiological attack might one day be right in everyone's hands — or on their ears.

Homeland Security officials are looking into outfitting cellphones with detectors that would alert emergency responders to radiological isotopes, toxic chemicals and biological agents such as anthrax.

"If it's successful, it'll change the way chemical, biological and radiation detection is done," says Rolf Dietrich, deputy director of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, which invests in high-tech solutions to secure the nation against terrorist attacks. "It's a really, really neat thing."

Via Smartmobs

Mobilities, Space, and Inequality

Institute of Sociology, University of Basel 7 - 8. September 2007

Cosmobilities Network Conference 2007

Mobilities, Space, and Inequality

The social arrangements of space and social inequality have always formed intriguing associations, yet the dynamics introduced by modernization, globalization, migration, and social change in relation to space and inequality have not received sufficient attention in the social sciences.

Developments in communication and transport technologies are offering new possibilities of social arrangements and inequality structures in time and space. As a result, new spatial settings and functional overlappings are possible, e.g. working from home, travel time as working time, long distance relationships, etc. Accordingly, spatial mobility constitutes a number of different types of mobility. Of interest are not only the different types of mobility but also their relations to each other, as well as to social inequality structures and their dynamics more generally.

For Conference Program, Paper Abstracts & Registration Form link here

Global-warming tourism

Now this is something to read and believe - a mobility convergence of tourism and climate change: creating travel holidays to witness climate change - how paradoxical is that?!

The effects of climate change are leading to a distinctive new form of 21st-century travel: global-warming tourism.

A US tour company will be running a special trip this summer to view Warming Island, the remarkable new feature of the Greenland coast produced by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and featured on the front page of The Independent last week.

Betchart Expeditions of Cupertino, California, a company specialising in natural history tours and safaris all over the world, is mounting a 12-day voyage to the new island, 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle, led by the man who discovered it in 2005, the veteran American explorer Dennis Schmitt.

Travellers will set out in September from Reykjavik in Iceland and sail in comfort on board the 50-passenger expedition ship, MVAleksey Maryshev across the Denmark Strait to the island's location half-way up Greenland's remote east coast.

Read the full story in

'A holiday at the end of the Earth: tourists paying to see global warming in action'

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Google funds plug-in hybrid vehicles

Its sobering to see that innovative Google is also sponsering the alternative transport sector. In this post from Green Car Congress:

The California Cars Initiative (CalCars) has received a two-year, $200,000 grant from Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, to support its work in educating the public regarding plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs).

CalCars is a Palo Alto-based nonprofit startup promoting plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). It characterizes itself as a hybrid, focusing both on public policy and technology development, and harnessing buyer demand to help commercialize PHEVs.

CalCars is also partnering with OEMTek, a provider of components and conversion systems for electric and hybrid vehicles, including plug-in hybrid vehicles.

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A Wireless Sensor City

TechReview looks at A Wireless Sensor City in how wireless sensor nodes mounted on telephone poles could collect data on pollutants, weather, and traffic. One of the first projects to use the network will monitor airborne pollution near industrial sites:

The network, called CitySense, will be an open test bed on which anyone can run experiments, says Matt Welsh, a professor of computer science at Harvard.

The plan is to install 100 general-purpose nodes onto the streetlights of Cambridge, drawing power from the city's infrastructure. Already there are five installed on Harvard's campus and five at BBN's facilities. Each node will be relatively large--about the size of a Mac Mini computer. A node will include a PC that runs the Linux operating system and a couple of gigabytes of flash memory as a hard drive. And instead of using a common low-power wireless-sensor protocol called Zigbee, CitySense nodes will use standard Wi-Fi radios; two radios will be in each node, one for management and control of the network, and the other for experiments. And, Welsh says, virtually any type of sensor will be able to connect to the nodes.

This shows the increased move towards sensor networks to monitor both natural, man-made and technological systems.

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Larger Cities are Smarter

ScienceDaily has a post titled ''Large Is Smart' When It Comes To Cities' that examines some new research which sees larger cities as being the source of the solutions to their problems:

The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development.

This will require thinking about cities in new ways, they add. The old way of thinking about cities is as if they are an organism, which consumes resources and grows in size. Oftentimes, cities are referred to as its own ecosystem and many use the metaphor of it acting like a biological organism, Lobo said. But the team found that this was a false metaphor.

"The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down," Lobo said. "They use less energy, they don't move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling."

"In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite," he added.

Interesting research here...

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