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Bosch and TomTom have come together to create high-resolution road maps based on radar signals. The product of the two companies' collaboration, a system called "radar road signature," is a move towards automated driving.
To form the maps, radar signals transmitted by driving cars are used to collect billions of reflection points bouncing off of surrounding structures like road signs and lane dividers. The radar data are then transmitted to a cloud-based server and integrated into a TomTom mapping system, which is then made available to cars on the road. According to Bosch, automated vehicles can use the radar-based map to pinpoint their lane location to within a few centimeters; the first data collection vehicles are expected to hit roads by 2020, starting in Europe and the US.
Read full story at engadget…
first published week of: 04/24/2023
Peter Dalbis has been alive for 76 years, and at least 50 of those were spent following directions in Rand McNally road atlases.
Dalbis didn’t stop using paper atlases when online competitors like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps came into vogue in the late ’90s, and he remains a stalwart Rand McNally supporter even in an era when almost everyone has a GPS device in their back pocket.
Dalbis and his wife, who are both retired and living in Oak Park, Ill., have crisscrossed the nation several times, for both family vacations and work trips, and they’ve done it all with the only atlas brand he trusts — even when that atlas has been wrong.
“Sometimes there were missing roads,” he admits. “Or a road on the map that didn’t technically exist. But we’d figure it out. You can’t be complacent with an atlas, not like those people who put all their trust in a GPS. We never drove a car into a swamp because our Rand McNally told us to, I’ll tell you that much.”
Those “missing” roads are just one of the reasons that Rand McNally, the largest commercial mapmaker in the US, has published a new North America road atlas every year since 1924. “Each new edition features thousands of changes that could reflect anything from road changes to a name change of a town or geographical feature update,” says Alexis Sadoti, a spokesperson for Rand McNally. The just-released 95th edition, which covers all 50 US states and Canadian provinces, is no exception.
Changes this year include updated information on Interstates 69, 95 and 11, an expanded view of the Jersey Shore and a new “detail map” of national parks like Grand Canyon and Yosemite.
Keeping the atlas as accurate as possible year to year, in a digital age when drivers expect their maps to give up-to-the-minute traffic updates, is no small task. “We have a fixed page and a fixed number of pages, so there’s not a lot of flexibility there,” says Tom Vitacco, who’s worked with the company for 33 years — first as a cartographer in the mid-’80s and today as the director of GIS (geographic information systems). “Every page has to fit states as big as Texas and as small as Delaware,” he tells me from Skokie, Ill., the world headquarters of Rand McNally.
Read full story at New York Post…
first published week of: 06/05/2023
Map Maker, the editing tool for Google's crowdsourced Maps, will disappear early next year, the search giant announced this week.
Introduced in 2011 in the US, Map Maker lets you add places, "lines" (like railroads or back alleys), and "shapes" (like a parking lot or laundromat) to a map. It's open to any cartography enthusiast or business owner who wants to make sure they appear on the map, but unlike Wikipedia, changes must be approved before they go live.
In a blog post, Google said that it will integrate Map Maker features directly into Google Maps by March 2017, at which point it will retire the standalone editing product.
Google Maps already offers basic editing capabilities, including suggesting updates or reporting a closed business. It does not offer the ability to edit roads or other geographic features. Google said it will update Maps to add road-editing capabilities and other features in advance of Map Makers' retirement. Starting this week, edits made in Maps will no longer show up in Map Maker for approval.
Read full story at PCMag…
first published week of: 04/03/2023
For most of us, “GPS” is that screen in our car or that app on our smartphone that helps calculate drive times, avoid traffic jams, locate a nearby restaurant or navigate unfamiliar neighborhoods.
What we know less about are all the thousands of effects GPS has on our everyday lives. Here are ten little-known ways GPS helps to keep us on course:
first published week of: 05/29/2023
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a huge decision in favor of privacy rights in America. On Tuesday, the court confirmed in United States v. Katzin (PDF) that federal authorities must get a probable cause-driven warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car.
Of course, the circumstances of this case may sound familiar. Indeed, the Supreme Court decided in January 2012 in the United States v. Jones case that attaching a GPS device to a suspect’s car without a warrant constituted unreasonable search and seizure. In the wake of that decision, the FBI turned off 3,000 such tracking devices. However, the Jones case did not provide a clear-cut ruling on whether a lower legal standard could conceivably apply. In the new case, Katzin, the court definitively answered that with a resounding no.
As Judge Joseph Greenaway wrote:
We thus have no hesitation in holding that the police must obtain a warrant prior to attaching a GPS device on a vehicle, thereby undertaking a search that the Supreme Court has compared to “a constable's concealing himself in the target's coach in order to track its movements.”
Read full story at arsTechnica…
first published week of: 03/20/2023
The United States is home to more than 2,600 branches of the YMCA, serving around 20 million members, or one out of every 16 Americans. It is perhaps the only institution so universal it can be identified by a single letter.
But this ubiquity presents a challenge. Every Y serves communities with different needs. In a diverse society, it can sometimes be difficult to discern those needs let alone satisfy them.
Adding to this challenge is the Y’s federated structure. YMCA of the USA (Y-USA), the national resource office for local YMCAs, provides support for the more than 800 independent nonprofits that operate each facility. “Because we are everywhere, decisions about where to invest can be difficult,” said Maria-Alicia Serrano, Y-USA’s senior director of Research, Analytics, and Insights.
Read full story at Esri Blog…
first published week of: 07/17/2023