GPS World - January 2008 - (Page 70)

SEENHEARD GNSS technologies in the popular media Students Debate Cell Requirement A school-mandated purchase of a GPS-enabled cell phone has stirred cries of “Big Brother” from some students, but in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre last spring others find it comforting that their whereabouts can be tracked., reports the Associated Press. At Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, students are required to buy the phone for $420 a year. With it, students can use a timer that instantly alerts campus police if not deactivated within a set amount of time, assurance for those crossing the campus late at night. In an emergency, the GPS technology can be activated instantly to alert police. The university contracted with New York-based Rave Wireless for the safety technology and Sprint for the cell phone service. So far, not many of the 13,000 undergraduates are using the feature. The timers get turned on only about five to 10 times a week. Alarms have gone off about once a month in the year since the system was implemented, and it was a false alarm every time. Campus police say they consider the false alarms training opportunities. Rave co-founder Raju Rishi said Montclair State was the first to use the safety feature, called Rave Guardian. A half-dozen other schools, including nearby Fairleigh Dickinson University, use similar systems. While students grumble about the cost, school officials say the school doesn’t profit from the deal. Farleigh Dickinson picked up the cost for its on-campus students. Rishi countered that campus police aren’t monitoring the movements of students who don’t turn on the GPS feature. “There’s no Big Brother,” Rishi said. “You need a subpoena to locate somebody against their will.” Geo Games Grow A November 27 article by Business Week discusses how the “surge in phones with builtin satellite navigation capability has sparked a wave of creative mapping and locating services” and highlights navigation games. Among the games mentioned is geocapsuling, suggested by GPS World’s sister consumer site GPSManiac.com as a way to get family members in on the location hunt. “Hide a gift — say, the keys to a new car — in a faraway place and put the coordinates on a card.” Other games mentioned are the granddaddy treasure hunt geocaching and geodashing golf, where players rack up points based on how close they get to 9 or 18 computergenerated points in a selected area (GPSgames.org says “the course creation engine does try to keep the holes out of the ocean”). Please Delete Me! Large rigs directed by GPS are coming to grief in rural English villages — hitting fences, shearing mirrors from cars, and becoming stuck, reports the International Herald Tribune. Tiny Barrow Gurney — an “alternate route” to Bristol Airport — gets 15,000 vehicles a day. Wedmore, with narrow streets similar to nearby Wiltshire pictured at left, has asked for routes through town to be removed from maps, but mapmaker Tele Atlas says it’s up to the villages to indicate what roads are inappropriate for trucks and tractor-trailers. Eventually, the relevant information — things like height, width, and weight constraints for truckers — could be integrated into map databases, but it could take years. COPYRIGHT 2008 QUESTEX MEDIA GROUP, INC. All rights reserved. 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Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of GPS World - January 2008

GPS - January 2008 Contents Out in Front Expert Advice The Money-Go-Round u-Nav Latest Acquisition Apples to Apples Global SBAS 2008 GPS Receiver Survey Advertisers Index & Company Directory The Manufacturer's Road Year of the Who Working Indoor Up and Down Good, Better, Best Marketplace Classifieds Seen + Heard

GPS World - January 2008

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