GPS Tracking ROI

From the current C|Net news, and interesting article that proves governments can, at least some of the time, come to their senses:

A committee of Parliament members has called for a full review of the U.K.’s involvement in the European Galileo satellite-network project.

In a statement released on Monday, Gwyneth Dunwoody, chairperson of the Transport Sub-Committee in Parliament, said that it would be “folly” for the U.K. to pursue the project until a review is completed.

The cost of Galileo was planned to be $4.38 billion but the Transport Sub-Committee believes that this could spiral to $20.73 billion.

The European Commission “is poised to spend billions in taxpayers’ money on a satellite system, without any realistic assessment of its costs and benefits,” Dunwoody said. “We must have independent and up-to-date evidence that proceeding with Galileo is worthwhile.”…

Indeed!  Welcome to planet Earth, Ms. Dunwoody, the rest of us have been here all along.  I’ve written a number of times (here, here and here for a few samples) about the insanity of the Galileo project and the way my mind is boggled at how people way more educated than I and way more experienced in business and government than I can not seem to make the most rudimentary cost/benefit analysis.

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My friend Brendon recently posted something interesting about some quality time he spent with his son. Made me think about how important the (very soon) upcoming GIS Day is to parents and children. GIS day is a showcase for all sorts of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and GPS (Global Positioning System) systems and applications. But it’s also a showcase of our world … a place where we as a world people are often woefully ignorant.

I’ve been working with maps and map-based information systems for more than 40 years now. The geographic awareness level of otherwise well educated people, especially my fellow Americans is woefully inadequate. For most of my life schools, from elementary to the graduate level have treated geography and earth sciences as some sort of eoteric “geek” niche that only a tiny subset of the student population would or even should be interested in. Many US high schools don’t even teach teach geography … how utterly absurd.

I’m taking these few minutes today to remind you that there is not a single scientific discipline that’s more important for us as a world population to learn, and learn well, than the structure and systems of our home. Language skills, business administration, computer science, nursing, elder care, on and on are a list of important, interesting and often very important disciplines … but especially for a child growing up today … not a single one of them means squat if we, as a world population don’t learn the ways of our planet and how to “operate it”. So, here’s my advice for 14 November 2007. It doesn’t matter if you are a taxi driver reading this blog to learn about how to defeat the autocratically-imposed GPS tracking system in your cab or a Phd. in software development reading to get an occasional chuckle from my frequent technical faux pas … you have a mission.

• Find a GIS Day event that interests you. The “finder” is here, there are activities in more than 78 countries, including all 50 US states, so I won’t accept the “there’s nothing near me” excuse.
• Attend. Take along your children (young or old), if you have none, borrow one … you will do nothing more important this month that instill a sense of wonder and learning in a child … they are the one who are stuck with the mess we have made of our world.
• Learn, enjoy, bond
• When you return home, visit you children’s school, or your alma mater and ask the principal or dean why you didn’t meet her/him at the event. (If you’re one of the lucky ones whose school is “with the program”, praise that person … powerful feedback is very important.
• Write me and tell me what was good (or bad) about this assignment. I’ll be happy to feature your story and if you school or company is one of the “enlightened ones” I’ll be double-happy to feature what you did to participate.
• Mandatory: Have some fun!

More GIS Day resources:

http://www.gisday.com/index.html

http://www.gisday.com/showcase/websites.html

Sometimes the best articles in a little specialized niche like GPS Tracing for business ROI aren’t written about the niche itself at all.  I do a lot of online commerce work and one of my indispensable tools is PayPal … a great service for both buying and selling product anywhere in the world.

With millions of payment transactions per day you can expect PayPal has their share of disputes between buyers and sellers.  I was just reading their corporate blog (you have a corporate blog too, don’t you?  see me after the meeting ;-)) and came across this great piece by Colin Rule, their director of online dispute resolution:

Ship with delivery tracking
I sometimes joke that tracking numbers resolve more disputes on PayPal than our entire Resolution Services team does.  If you get tracking on a package you send, log into PayPal and insert the tracking number into the transaction’s details.  Or even better, use PayPal shipping and the tracking number will be automatically inserted.  This way, if buyers are worried because they haven’t received the item yet and are thinking about filing a dispute, they’ll be presented with the updated tracking information (pulled directly from the shipper’s website, including the date you sent the item) and they’ll be reassured that the order is on its way.  They may even decide not to file the dispute, and you’ll have worked a problem out without even realizing it was ever there. (My emphasis)

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Sorry I didn’t see this for a couple days.  Just a note to update a previous post of mine about the latest and greatest GPS satellite added to the GPS constellation:

November 5, 2007
The modernized Global Positioning System Block IIR (GPS IIR-M) satellite, launched from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 17, has been declared fully operational for military and civilian navigation users around the globe, following a successful on-orbit checkout by a combined U.S. Air Force/Lockheed Martin team.
The satellite, designated GPS IIR-17M, is the fourth in a series of eight Block IIR-M satellites that bring new capabilities to military and civilian users of the GPS system. Each GPS IIR-M satellite features a modernized antenna panel that provides increased signal power to receivers on the ground, two new military signals for improved accuracy, enhanced encryption and anti- jamming capabilities for the military, and a second civil signal that will provide users with an open access signal on a different frequency…  Full press release on this new satellite for the GPS constellation here:

17M was only launched on the 17th of October.  In 19 days (including weekends and holidays)  it’s filly tested, “burned-in” and declared operational.  May not sound like much to you, but it sounds like a lot to me.  I’ve been around space launch for nearly 30 years.  It used to take weeks and months for a “new bird” in any system to come on-line.  Even commercial, profit-oriented satellite launch corporations (who, by the way, normally depend on Air Force launch facilities and the Air Force Satellite Control Network to get their birds aloft and into orbit to begin with) very seldom equal the kind of time line the USAF and their support contractors now routinely achieve.  My hat is off to the team, it’s no small feat and it all to often goes unnoticed.

Won’t be long before you are getting ready to file those income taxes.  (If you use GPS tracking you’ll pay less, by the way), and no one likes to pay taxes … so when you are moaning at the size of the bite Uncle Sam is taken out yet again, remember that some of your government agencies are working hard to give you a great ROI (Return On Investment).

With the Help of GPS, Amazonian Tribes Reclaim the Rain Forest

A member of the Trio tribe, he’s leading me through the rain forest near his village in southern Suriname — a two-hour Cessna flight from the closest road. At the foot of a large tree that dangles a cascade of liana vines, Wuta points his GPS toward the sky: no signal. He fiddles with a button and a few minutes later gets a reading. He relays the coordinates to a fellow Trio cartographer beside him, who dutifully jots them down. Wuta then tramps on, demonstrating how he and other tribesmen have charted, by foot and canoe, some 20 million acres of land here at Amazonia’s northern fringe… read all the Wired story on Tribesmen Mapping Their Own Forests here:

It’s no secret that GPS was originally developed and fielded by the US Military as a tool to aid in all military activity, from search and rescuer to aiming precision weapons.  There aren’t a lot of military, war-oriented systems that have worked so well and certainly none that I can think of that have evolved to serve the public good, in all nations, than GPS.  It is today’s exemplar of of Isaiah 2:4: …”and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks …

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Some of you young “whipper-snappers” out there may not realize that there was once a significant industry in the US comprised of companies making horse whips and riding crops in all shapes and sizes.  Week after week, years after year they just kept cranking out those whips.  To them “innovation” was making the same size whip with less leather, or perhaps “designer colors” to appeal to the young singles among the buggy set.

Guys like Henry Ford, Charles and Frank Duryea., Ransom Olds and many others started producing these noisy, cantankerous and smelly “horseless carriages”, but nobody in the “real” industries of the day took much notice.

Got any buggy whips stock in your 401K portfolio?  Hope not.  But don’t be too sure.

When names like Control Data, Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General and Sperry/Univac where the blue chips of the computer industry a technology known as magnetic tape data storage came into its own.  There were even hot companies like Storage Technology Corporation who made millions emulating just the magnetic storage devices … mainly tape … of the “big guys” and selling their product as better, faster, cheaper.  If you travel in the circles that sometimes gets you access to the IT facilities of big corporations today you’ll often see magnetic tape “monsters” still grinding away. “making do” with the technology of the CIO’s fathers, simply because change is hard … just as very few buggy whip CEOs had enough foresight to get their product designers working on something 20th century.

OK, Dave, what has all this to do with GPS Tracking ROI?  Fair question, and here’s what prompted me to take this trip down memory (no pun intended) lane:

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Here’s a story that I am sure has been given wide circulation in the US … maybe even wider than it deserved … but when a teacher runs off with a student, especially a 13 year old student one can hardly expect the news media to keep things quiet.

I recall reading about this a couple days ago and wondering myself, just how will those two hide, where will they go, how long will it take the law to find them … and then I realized the boy had family in Mexico … and like many Anglos I thought to myself, wow, if they get across the border, the poor boys family, they might never be found.

But the “brilliant” teacher involved, in addition to being absent during all her classes on ethics, honesty and the protection of children is certainly not a reader of the blog.  She wants money, she cranks up he cell phone and has the boy ask for money from relatives … geez maybe she wanted him to cook and clean for her too … but she never heard about cell phones being locatable.  Bingo:

The two were located through a global-positioning device on Peterson’s phone, Arenas (the Mexican state police official who detained Peterson) said.

D’oh, as Homer would intone.  I mean the fact that this woman demonstrably violated her trust (I don’t need to add the usual editorial ‘alleged” disclaimer, she up and took him to Mexico) is proof that she’s not only immoral but also stupid … in addition to US laws on kidnapping doesn’t she know the US has very strong laws on crossing international boundaries to engage in sex with children?  Those laws aren’t only to penalize “dirty old men”, they apply to dirty young women as well.  So, displaying about the same degree of intelligence she has used so far, she uses her GPS-equipped cell phone.

Thank the good Lord she did and thanks also that the boy is safe.  What do you rabid pro-privacy, anti-GPS activists think now?  Were Kelsey Peterson’s “rights” violated?  Frankly, I think not, but I’m certainly willing to listen to opposing viewpoints.