Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Barometers in iPhones: Crowdsourcing weather forecasts 1

Submitted by cryptoz
cryptoz writes: Apple is now adding barometers to its mobile devices: both new iPhones have valuable atmospheric pressure sensors being used for HealthKit (step counting). Since many Android devices have been carrying barometers for years, scientists like Cliff Mass have been using the sensor data to improve weather forecasts. Open source data collection projects like PressureNet on Android automatically collect and send the atmospheric sensor data to researchers.

Submission + - How Lobby Groups Rejected the Canadian Government's Plan to Combat Patent Trolls (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Michael Geist reports that according to documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, the Canadian government quietly proposed a series of reforms to combat patent trolls including new prohibitions on demand letters, powers to the courts to stop patent forum shopping, and giving competition authorities the ability to deal with patent troll anti-competitive activity. The problem? Business lobby groups warned against the "unintended consequences" of patent reforms.

Submission + - If you're connected, Apple collects your data. No matter what. (github.com)

Submitted by fyngyrz
fyngyrz writes: It would seem that no matter how you configure Yosemite, Apple is listening. Keeping in mind that this is only what's been discovered so far, and given what's known to be going on, it's not unthinkable that more is as well. Should users just sit back and accept this as the new normal? It will be interesting to see if these discoveries result in an outcry, or not.

Submission + - The Largest Ship in the World is Being Built in Korea

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

Comment Re:Does it really improve local forecasts? (Score 1) 82

by cryptoz (#42131477) Attached to: PressureNET 2.1 Released: the Distributed Barometer Network For Android
You might be right, but I don't think so. If you look at the screenshot of the analysis tool in the blog post, you can see that even through all of the noise there is a *very* clear curve for Hurricane Sandy. Although, we do know that the data is very noisy and we are working with some professors who are researching this very topic (calibration of phone sensors for weather data collection). I think we will have useful data for short-term prediction. But if not, that's okay too. Science!

Comment Re:Needs isobar lines (Score 5, Informative) 82

by cryptoz (#42131439) Attached to: PressureNET 2.1 Released: the Distributed Barometer Network For Android
I agree completely! We are adding those as soon as we can. In the early days of the project, there was not enough data to build isobars. But now, we have enough and we are determined to add that feature. The project is built by me and volunteers in our free time, so it'll probably be a couple weeks or months before we get isobars in. Of course, pressureNET is fully open source and so if anyone feels like writing the isobar code and getting that feature done faster, we will welcome that too! Code is on github: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNET, https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETServer and https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETAnalysis.
Android

Submission + - pressureNET 2.1 released: The Distributed Barometer Network for Android (cumulonimbus.ca)

Submitted by
cryptoz
cryptoz writes: "Cumulonimbus has released a new version of their open source, global barometer network. The network is built around an Android app called pressureNET which uses barometric sensors in new phones (such as the Nexus 4, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S3, Note, and others) in order to build the comprehensive network. They plan to use the data to improve short-term weather prediction, and the gives a teaser of the new data visualization tool they are building."

Slashdot Top Deals

The first version always gets thrown away.

Close