The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story where some Carnegie Mellon students and a professor are working on a  project to use GPS units and Telemerty devices to enhance football officiating by providing more exact readings on where the ball was at all times and when it was caught and by whom.  This technology could also help with training by allowing coaches to analize how their players throw and catch.

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Imagine watching a football game in WorldWind…. or Google Earth!

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Shashdot has a roundup of two iPhone applications that and bringing “smooth as the Google Maps application” but using OSM map data instead.

First is Route-Me an application written completely written in objective-c using CoreAnimation.

An application that is on the iPhone store that uses Toute-me core code is GPS Mission. GPSMission is a GPS bassed game for users to play with others.

A story from /. about two Indian cartographers that have been arrested and charged with violating the Official Secrets Act.

According to ATS officials, Mahesh and Anil claim to be employees of Biond Software Ltd, a Dombivali-based software company in Mumbai. They were caught from Khambhalia on Saturday night as they were travelling in a car fitted with a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device. They also had some area topography maps and a laptop containing distance charts, digital maps of Guajrat coastal line and even Wagha border.

So, finally got a GPS for the car over the weekend.  The local (within a 1.5 hour driving radius) Office Max is going out of business and had their GPS units 30% off.  So, picked up a Navigon 2100 for cheaper than the black friday ads.

Not going to review it, it has been out a while and others have done better reviews anyway.  But I am inpressed by three things: Navteq maps (Huge plus, and the reason I got this brand).  Voice directions, tell you what road you will turn onto (instead of “Right 500 yards”).  And route recaculation, I was expecting it to go “Off Route” when I picked a new way to go.  But it just recaculated my route and displayed it within a few seconds of turning.

For a low end unit, it is doing everything I wanted.. with no fluff features.

Finally got around to watching last Friday’s Survivorman and I remembered what I had posted back int he summer about the Boy Scouts wanting to know why they had to learn to read a map when they had GPS units now.

In the episode last night, he and a partner went out as hunters doing an overnight, deep woods hunting trip and just used GPS units to mark their route and where each other were.  What he did then is what a lot of people would do, leave the GPS on too long and have no spare batteries.  So by the second day, they had no means of finding each other or their way back.

While this episode showed more on just surviving than finding a way out, it still was a good example on why you should always have backup’s to a GPs unit that does not rely on technology.

The other night I was watching the “Ivory Tracker” episode of Shadow Force and they were making heavy use of small GPS tracking units hidden in contraband Ivory and tracking it’s location (and therefore the location of the smugglers) in Google Maps.

While they don’t mention the name “Google” or “Google Maps” or show anything with a Google logo on it, you can tell by looking at the map and the marker icons that it is a Google Maps page.  They made a lot of use of the aerial imagery, being able to say that they are located at a specific house.

I am guessing they are using some online service to take the GPS tracker information and put it online so they can track the units, they didn’t go into detail about the background information.