GPS, Maps and Medicine — Happy For What I Get

High-tech navigation devices such as Global Positioning System units specialize in giving directions, but William Folk thinks the GPS gizmos can also help guide high school students to a better understanding of living cells.

Folk, a professor of biochemistry and a senior associate dean for research at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine, and a small group of colleagues plan to incorporate GPS and other devices into a science curriculum they are developing called Maps in Medicine….

Interesting read here. I’m not 100% clear on the concept of the connection between the way cells “know” their place and how to get to it and the way GPS knows it’s position, but then if I already was, what would there be for professor Folk to teach, eh?

Given the abysmal level of science education most US high school students get steps like Dr. Folk’s plan are to be rewarded, in my view.

GPS and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can certainly be of great value to the medicine and public health fields in ways beyond cellular (that’s the cells in you body, dude, not the Nokia that’s glued to your ear) behavior. Tracking the domiciles of patients with infectious diseases, locating they mysterious “pockets” where some forms of cancer and birth defects seem to develop, right down to the nitty-gritty aspects of providing better, faster and cheaper emergency medical transport being just a few that come to mind.

map On!

It’s Not Idle To Think About Idling

One of the things some GPS system purveyors mention in their “how you’ll save money” sales copy is fuel savings via control of excess idling. I was stuck in traffic for a bit yesterday and I got to thinking about idling and why it’s kind of important that people keep it up higher in the business consciousness than it normally is.

Many of the “save fuel” suggestions and technologies revolve around a zero sum game. You can save gas by slowing down, but of course you also take longer to do your tasks, running the risk of overtime, late deliveries, unhappy drivers and irritated customers.

You can save fuel by using a smaller vehicle for deliveries. But then you wind up running into capacity problems, possible increased maintenance because the vehicle runs at or over capacity more often, and for some vehicles, you just can’t substitute .. there are no suitable smaller alternatives.

You can save fuel by driving less. Sometimes this is a good option, but suppose you’re a delivery company with trucks on the road and you decide to save 20% per week by not making deliveries on Fridays? Hmm, let;’s think that through. You won’t save 20% of your mileage because you’ll have to make more trips on Monday through Thursday to get the orders out. You will certainly annoy customers who will (rightly) perceive this as a win for you, lose for them situation. And what will you do with the drivers on Friday? Pay them not to work? Cut their weekly pay 20%? Neither one sounds like a very good option to me. Of course in the special case of a school bus operation you can always put out a notice to the parents that they have to “do their bit” to conserve fuel (for you) by driving their kids themselves on Fridays. Ought to be good for a heck of a laugh … for the few minutes it will take for the superintendent to prepare your pink slip

But there is one technique that will absolutely save and will not hurt your business in any way. Educate your drivers, enlist their aid in improving the business’s bottom line and install a GPS system that is optimized to measure and report on idling. You drive the same routes the same days. Your drivers keep driving whatever speeds are legal .. or you know about it. And the savings are real.

I never equipped a fleet where we didn’t find an hour or more per week excessive idling. Often there were some much more egregious waters in the group of vehicles. An hour is a gallon or more of fuel … not to mention the extra wear and tear on the engine, which many now agree is substantial.

Reducing idling is one of the easiest changes you can make in your fleet operation … or even in your own driving. The much sought-after hybrid cars have a lot of jazzy technology, but one of the biggest gas saving techniques they use is so simple it’s almost a “Homerisim”. Turn off the engine when the car is sitting still more than 30 seconds or so. Yes, even at a long traffic light. Those minutes add up and the “extra, optional equipment” is already bought and paid for … you thumb and forefinger turning off the key.

This may have been a random thought, but it wasn’t an idle one.

Don’t Neglect The Legal ROI Of GPS

Transportation attorney Clay Porter told attendees of CCJ’s Spring Symposium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday, June 6. “Trucking companies should stop hauling freight and spend more time fighting lawsuits – you’d be a lot more profitable.” …. Read the full eTrucker article on trucking legal risks here.

I’ve extracted and made a few comments on some of Attorney Porter’s points. They make good reading if you have vehicles on the road … company owned, employee owned, common carrier or not for hire … you still face some tremendous liabilities as soon as an employee turns a wheel in aid of your business.

These are some of the more common tactics Porter has seen used recently by plaintiff’s attorneys trying to win large damage claims against companies with vehicles involved in accidence.

“Log speeding.” Bad logs can result in incorrect times, where strict mathematical calculations of miles traveled during a particular period might result in an incorrect conclusion of overly excessive speed…

You’ve seen me mention time and time again how prevalent inaccurate or “swindle sheet” Hours Of Service (HOS) logs are used in the trucking business. One consequence that will show up for sure is if the driver shows departure from a point at a certain hour but then has a second log that shows he departed much later in order to “buy” some extra driving hours. If the log at the time of the accident shows the truck had to average say, 100 mph (and yes, this is common) then how is the company’s lawyer going to convince a jury that the driver was driving safely? With million-dollar judgements common a $500 GPS logging the truck’s true hours and speed would look like a pretty good investment “after the fact”.

Carriers “permit” violations of the hours-of-service regulations if they fail to have management systems in place that effectively prevent such violations. “There is an actual accounting cost to some of these safety issues,” Porter said. “The alternative is to start moving away from these problems.” …

Again, I’ve commented on this issue often. I’ve been working with GPS for years, sold systems for years, and have yet to see a trucking company who didn’t have a problem in this area. You don’t even need a tragic accident to throw yourself into the Federal sop pot with this issue. If a driver cheats and gets caught s/he gets fined and possibly loses his or her Commercial Driver’s Licence *CDL), but the employee gets nailed too … there are a lot of Federal and Sate laws with verbiage that goes something like “…management shall not suffer or permit such practices … “. In today’s world you have to be responsible for things you can’t monitor properly unless you measure remotely. Don’t think you are wasting your time reading this if you aren’t operating over the road trucks, either. The rules for commercial vehicles which stay close to home can be extremely complex … even if your driver’s don’t have to carry a log book … and if I can find these rules you better believe the lawyer who is out to sure you is going to be able to find them too.

Speed management. Companies should have systems in place to control speeding…

This is a real no-brainier. Speed kills, so reducing speeds will save lives and other, less serious accidents. Also, speed costs significant money in excess fuel costs, tire wear and other vehicle maintenance issues. Even if there were no Hours Of Service rules and you never had to worry about getting sued a proper GPS tracking system will pay for itself in speed-related savings alone. I have never yet seen a fleet that did not show measurable decreases in fleet-wide average speeds after installing GPS tracking. And you all know by now what my old friend Dr. Drucker used to say:

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.

Hey, Why Not? The US Isn’t Unique In Wasting Government Funds

This is becoming a more ludicrous soap opera every day.  It is hard to believe the number of people in technologically equal (in cases even superior) countries and hard-nosed, highly profit-oriented lands that can not see the forest for the trees.

Originally France (I suspect highly motivated by its huge, wasteful and “old AT&T-like” telecommunications giant Alcatel) supported a totally superfluous and extremely wasteful carbon-copy of the US built, implemented and funded GPS.  The main reason anyone could really articulate was for the Glory of France, so far as I can see.  Because even a French “beltway bandit” like Alactel knew the EU countries would balk at the stupendous and un-needed tax burden of a government-funded effort, they cooked up a completely ignorant and un-workable scheme that would have the contractors building out the system on their own money, to be recovered by “profits” from charges made to use an otherwise totally free world-wide utility.

Last months someone within the consortium of contracts finally put down the mouthpiece of the hookah they were smoking (they had to be on some kind of drugs to think they could make this work) and figured out that there were no profits waiting in the future and stopped pissing way their shareholder’s money on this nonsense.

Now, if you believe Time’s sources, a significant portion of the citizenry of the European Union is in favor of going ahead with this boondoggle using government (that means individual taxpayer’s) funds.  Amazing.

There is no lack of invention necessary in this world. Even in the narrower spectrum of space and electronics.  If France and the rest of the EU want to spend money to make themselves look good they could do something about Greenhouse Gasses, cancer, childhood mortality, or (Princess Diana certainly wishes they had done this) a method to inhibit drunks from driving. 

Why not enjoy the GPS for what it is and enhance technology for the future instead of slavishly copying what is already an old design and enslaving their grandchildren with government debt just to be able to fly the French (oops) EU banner on it?

Google Has Lost The Bubble And GPS Won’t Find It For Them (Part 2)

Yesterday I probably ruffled a few feathers when I asserted that Google was exhibiting all the signs of a ship, not yet rudderless, but certainly with no steady hand on the helm.  A few may not have liked by comments about Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, but I really don’t care if anyone (including Eric) likes them or not.  The fact is, when you are looking for a CEO for a huge company, and especially a company which is like no other that has grown like a gasoline fire, you want a CEO with a proven track record.  When you have been the CEO and/or a mover and shaker in top leadership for the companies Eric has, and they drop from market leadership to the depths of obscurity like Eric’s past ventures have, I submit your track record is pretty shabby.

Google makes money from essentially one thing and one thing only, selling advertising space.  The cornerstone of Google’s profitability comes from their AdWords program.  With AdWords anyone, anywhere in the world, can enter some information on a simple web sign-up form, type in the text of the ad they want to appear and in minutes the ad will be on display world-wide.  It’s a fantastic concept, so different to the other models of advertising that it has made Google a fortune.  It has been a boon to millions of businesses as well, because the companies who didn’t know how to use commercial advertising, didn’t have the budget to do so, didn’t have the time, are now on an equal footing with anyone else.

The other part of Google’s unique formula for success is the fact that they are virtually the only purveyors of advertising media who, in effect, continually offer a money-back guarantee.  If you sign up for AdWords you agree to enter an internal bidding process which decides where your ads will appear and how frequently.  You agree to pay enough per action (click) and John Q.Public’s ad an appear ahead of General Motors.  The implicit guarantee, though, is that since Google charges by the action taken, if your ads don’t get clicked, you don’t pay a dime.  Try getting a deal like that from the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated.  (Note: Google does also sell “traditional” CPM ads … pay per thousand impressions, etc., but the AdWords “pay per click” model is the foundation of the company.)

So, you (if you’re Google) have essentially a license to print money.  The profits roll in … seen Google stock prices lately.  What do you do next?  Expand your wildly successful program?  Figure out new formulas for charges and payouts?  Well, in fairness, Google has done some of that.  But the really astounding move they made more than a year ago was to announce to the world they were going to take the broadcast radio ad market by storm by using GPS locations of vehicles to play “Location Based” advertisements.  Sounds great, until you analyze the “dream” a little:

• Although some may argue the point, radio, if not dead, is a comatose market.  The potential for growth is nothing even remotely resembling the potential for growth of Internet advertising.
• Google “wrote the book” on Internet advertising, although they don’t “own the Internet” they are, and will continue to be a formidable force.
• Google knows squat about radio advertising.  Manny’s Ad Agency and Storm Door Repair Co. in Dogpatch, USA knows more than Google does.  Google is rich so they can, of course, buy expertise, but the new hires will know nothing (much) about Google, the Internet or the issues in melding one established set of business rules and principles with another.
• Google knows less than squat about GPS location of vehicles, the key element of Eric’s flawed venture.  If tracking vehicles was all that common and all that easy it would already be a big business.  Tracking enough vehicles to make a location based advertising scheme viable is expensive and it is damn hard work.  I’ve been doing it for years and if it were easy, I’d be rich.

Enough!  I think I’ve made my point  Eric and the rest of the leadership at Google have forgotten a very old principle, summed up by an old Southern US saying … “If you can do what you say you can do, you ain’t bragging.”  So, from now on, try doing something first and then “bragging” when it’s done.

Read Everything Before Doing Anything … Even With GPS

 Ever been the victim of one of those clever school exercises where the teacher hands out a list of numbered instructions, the first one being “Read everything before doing anything”?  Of course most of the class doesn’t, performs all sorts of silly tasks that the list calls for, and then find that the last instruction said, “Ignore all the previous instructions and sit quietly in your seat”.

When I posted yesterday regarding the Mobio Networks Cheap Gas Widget, I woulda, coulda, shoulda look through more of their web site, becuase I made the erroneous assumption that the widget was not GPS-driven by choice.  I find it is not GPS-driven by several reasons, none of them reluctance to use the technology … so my apologies to anyone at Mobio who felt slanged.

The first reason just chaps my hide … I’ll be writing more on this subject, for sure.  The consumer pays for a phone with GPS capability, pays the carrier a substantial charge to sue that capability, we all pay taxes to make the GPS system free for use … and then the carriers hold the customer’s own data up for ransom?  Interesting.  What holiday is it this weekend?  Our veterans fought for what?

The second reason I also found interesting … and proof that it pays not to be a one-trick pony … GPS is not always the best answer for location based solutions.  Read Mobio Networks FAQS answer on why they don’t use GPS for the Cheap Gas Widget (at least for now) here and you may learn something … I sure did.

Ya’ll have a great Memorial Day weekend and don’t worry, Mr. GPS never sleeps, there will be plenty in the “new posts” column when you get back to the office next week.

Overdue Credit

Just a quick little post to remind folks that this Internet thing we frequent here is a community much more than it is a bunch of individuals.  From time to time I am able to string a few coherent words together, occasionally they make sense and from time to time I even get it right.  Most of my knowledge and ideas sprig from resources on the ‘Net.  And there’s no bigger repository of fact in one place when it comes to consumer level GPS and the communications arts than:

http://gpsinformation.net/

This site is a labor of love by Jack Yeazel  N4TEB, Joe Mehaffey  W2JO and Dale DePriest

There are links to virtually everything you could ever want to know about personal GPS and a whole, whole lot more. DO NOT go there if you have any appointments coming up soon or you have promised to clean out the garage, because you will spend time there.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the call signs I included after Jack and Joe’s names, these are there Amateur Radio call signs.  Amateur Ham) radio is probably endangered in some ways by the Internet, I know more than few Hams who now spend all their time on line rather than on air … but it’s a great hobby and a very worthwhile resource in emergencies, and I take my hat off to Hams everywhere.

We now resume our regularly scheduled programming

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