GPS World magazine (an outstanding resource, by the way) published the outline below. I’ll fill in some of the spaces between the out;ine bullets with my personal experience .. or critiques (smile)
Fathers group opposes GPS devices for restraining orders
By Amy Lambiaso/ State House News Service< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Lt. Gov. Kerry got mixed reviews as she continued her push for the state to attach electronic tracking bracelets to certain people who violate restraining orders.
Healey’s bill requires Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking as a condition of probation for people convicted of violating a restraining order issued due to domestic relations concerns. It is necessary to curb the “genuinely staggering” statistics of domestic abuse cases here each year, she said last week …
iSECUREtrac Awarded GPS Monitoring for Florida DOC
Tuesday November 8, 8:35 am ET
OMAHA, Neb., Nov. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — iSECUREtrac(TM) Corp. (OTC Bulletin Board: ISEC - News), an industry leader in offender monitoring solutions utilizing global positioning systems (GPS) and wireless technologies, announced today that the Florida Department of Corrections has awarded iSECUREtrac the Global Positioning Satellite Electronic Monitoring Services for the northern half of Florida. The award, which is pending final contract approval, is for three years with an option to renew for an additional three years at the department’s discretion…..
JACKSONVILLE - Witnesses and GPS tracking led officers to five men, two with a history of crime, who now face charges for the beating death of a University of Florida student after the Florida-Georgia game this past weekend.
http://tinyurl.com/9k3av
Mentone parolee arrested in pilot program
Joe Nelson, Staff Writer
An electronic ankle bracelet worn by a high-risk sex offender from Mentone tracked his whereabouts to the University of Redlands and several high schools, prompting police to arrest him on suspicion of violating his parole. The Oct. 27 arrest of Seth Chamberlin, 25, made him the first person in the state to be arrested under a new pilot program mandating that high-risk sex offenders wear the global positioning system, or GPS, bracelets.
The one-piece electronic ankle bracelets, called BluTags, weigh 6 ounces and are about the size of a computer mouse. They are waterproof, have tamper-resistant straps and an alarm that activates if an attempt is made to remove the device…..”With a high-risk sex offender, our first priority is to make sure public safety is protected and prevent any additional crimes,” Jennings said. “As far as civil rights and privacy, we follow the law, but high-risk sex offenders are not entitled to the same privacy and rights as we are.”
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We applaud this effort. Again and again these questions of ‘rights to privacy’ come up with respect to convicted, hardened criminals. I realize the country has far too many lawyers, so some of them have to spend their time finding ways to protect those who don’t deserve protection, but in this case the good guys won.
A known offender caught snooping in a prime hunting ground for another victim. Hat’s off to those who recognized potential victims have more rights than convicted offenders.
So what in the world is a “mashup’? Well in internet terms it means taking a site that provides a service and adding on another service or two. In the past few months, Yahoo Maps and Google Maps have been running neck and neck trying to gain market share as the place to go when looking up a street address on a map or finding a business location.
Google rather ’stunned’ the formal mapping/GIS world when it went ahead and published an API (Application Programmer Interface) to the world for the usually expected internet price … free. Recently, Yahoo, being left in the dust by applications (and hence web traffic and advertising revenue) going to Google-based sites has been forced to open up their API as well.
What kind of mashups are out there today? You name it, everything for a page that shows all the cars for sale on eBay on a map (so you could plan a trip to inspect them, perhaps) to graphic depictions of sex offender’s homes.
What has all this to do with GPS? Well quite a bit, really. Both Yahoo and Google accept queries for locations natively in latitude/longitude format … as you would get from a GPS receiver. This allows people to post their trips, special locations, etc. on a map … even when there’s no street address to be found. More importantly, it’s building a whole new generation of ‘location enabled’ web users .. folks who a few years ago would hardly look at a map now view them every day and even are learning the rudiments of coordinate systems.
The only time I ever feel a slight bit sad at growing old is the thought that I might bot be here 20 years from now to see how some of this shapes up. I’ve been watching GPS and mapping very closely for the last 20 years and it’s been a wild ride.
The Timation system was designed to address some of the ‘holes’ in Transit that were caused by Transit’s special purpose specifications. Here’s some good background:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/timation.htm
The difference in usability and performance caused by the time base infrastructure came home to me very clearly when I worked in Cheyenne Mountain during the 1980’s. We maintained a ’super-secret’ doomsday radio system that required very precise timing to stay in sync with other radios in the network. If a failure caused the system to lose it’s timing, a technician had to fly to Colorado Springs with a big atomic clock in the airline seat beside him and we’d have to carry the clock to the radio, deep inside the mountain, and “inject” time.
It was not only a hassle, it was an expense that out unit had to bear .. and the technician and his companion “Mr. Clock” were authorized first class airline accommodations because of the clock’s size. Even general officers are not allowed to book first class commercial flights, so you can imagine how PO’d the colonel got at the hits on his travel budget.
One day we had a ‘lost time’ event and I called the office to arrange for a visit from “Mr. Clock”. No need, they said, call these fellows up at the Air Force Academy, they have a GPS receiver. “What the heck do I need a nav system for?” was my response, “the radio is bolted inside 16090 feet of granite, we didn’t lose the radio, only it’s timing.”
Well, I did call the GPS guys and was amazed at how a (at that time) a briefcase sized box replaced the atomic clock by receiving the time signals from the few satellites then flying. The radio was back on line in a day instead of a week and the commandeer never bitched about the cost … great stuff, GPS, even in the dark old days.
