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[rayzentz AT aim.com]

I've been telling students and parents at the treatment facility where 
I work that children can be tracked this way, and have been able to for 
several years now.  My soon to be 14 year old daughter will be 
recieving a cell phone, for her birthday... <g>

Ray


-----Original Message-----
From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 9:53 am
Subject: [Homestead] Individual tracking-carbon footprint



No comment....( I am not thinking, at all, of governmental and 
corporate
application)..........................bobford

*************************************************************************
*


Mobile phones to track carbon footprint:
----------------------------------------

Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as 
slipping a
mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has 
developed
software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to 
work out
automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then 
calculate your
impact on the environment.

Carbon Diem's inventors claim that, by using GPS to measure the speed 
and
pattern of movement, their algorithm can identify the mode of transport 
being
used. It can therefore calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that a 
journey has
emitted into the atmosphere – without any need for input from the 
traveller.

The system's inventor, Andreas Zachariah, a graduate s
tudent of the 
Royal
College of Art in London and chief executive of the Carbon Hero 
company, said
that Carbon Diem is the world's first automated carbon calculator.

Because it keeps a constantly updated diary of a person's carbon 
emissions,
Zachariah said that a user can easily track their environmental impact 
and, if
they choose, modify their behaviour to lower-carbon alternatives.

"We're facilitating people to make little changes and allow those 
changes to be
noted and registered and possibly shared," he said. "If lots of people 
realise
we're in this marathon [in tackling climate change] and we're not 
running alone,
then we actually think people will be motivated to stick to changes."

He has tested the software in Nokia and Blackberry phones, using 
computer
algorithms to predict the kind of transport a person is taking. He 
claims that
in tests over the past year, the software was almost 100% accurate in 
working
out when people were on airplanes or trains; it was between 65-75% 
accurate at
guessing when people travelled on buses.

Zachariah said he had the idea for Carbon Diem when he tried to work 
out his own
carbon footprint using the many online calculators available. These 
usually
involve manually entering the details of type of transport and the 
length of a
journey.

"The whole process is so painful," Zachariah said. "That's when I 
realised it
had to be effortless."

Zac
hariah believes companies could also benefit from the software, as 
firms
committing to reducing their environmental impact may need to collect 
travel
data on their employees. He accepts there could be concerns over 
privacy but
says the software can be used to record only the carbon impact, not the 
actual
routes.

Friends of the Earth's climate campaigner, Robin Webster, said: 
"Individuals
have an important role to play in tackling climate change - and 
technologies
like the Carbon Diem could help people cut their carbon footprint."

The European Space Agency (Esa) gave the Carbon Diem software a 
regional award
last year in its European satellite navigation competition. It will 
launch
commercially in spring next year.




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