GPS World, March 2017

OUT IN FRONT 6 GPS WORLD WWW GPSWORLD COM MARCH 2017 WWW GPSWORLD COM EDITORIAL Editor in Chief Group Publisher Alan Cameron editor@ gpsworld com 541 984 5312 Managing Editor Tracy Cozzens tcozzens@ northcoastmedia net 541 255 3334 Senior Digital Editor Joelle Harms jharms@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3780 Digital Editor Allison Barwacz abarwacz@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3796 Art Director Charles Park CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Innovation Richard Langley lang@ unb ca Defense PNT Michael Jones mjones@ gpsworld com European GNSS Tim Reynolds treynolds@ gpsworld com Professional OEM UAV Tony Murfin Geospatial Eric Gakstatter egakstatter@ gpsworld com GeoIntelligence Art Kalinski akalinski@ gpsworld com Survey Tim Burch and Dave Zilkoski Wireless LBS Insider Janice Partyka jpartyka@ gpsworld com BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNT MANAGER Michelle Mitchell mmitchell@ northcoastmedia net 216 363 7922 DIGITAL OPERATIONS MANAGER Bethany Chambers bchambers@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3771 WEB DEVELOPER Jesse Malcmacher jmalcmacher@ northcoastmedia net 216 363 7925 MARKETING MANAGER Scott Gebler sgebler@ northcoastmedia net 216 363 7932 PUBLISHING SERVICES Manager Production Services Chris Anderson canderson@ northcoastmedia net 216 978 5341 Senior Audience Development Manager Antoinette Sanchez Perkins asanchez perkins@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3750 Reprints Permissions Brett Petillo bpetillo@ wrightsmedia com 877 652 5295 Circulation Subscriber Services gpsworld@ omeda com USA 847 513 6030 NORTH COAST MEDIA LLC 1360 East 9th St Suite 1070 Cleveland OH 44114 USA President CEO Kevin Stoltman kstoltman@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3740 Vice President of Finance Operations Steve Galperin sgalperin@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3705 Editorial Directors Marisa Palmieri mpalmieri@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3764 Marty Whitford mwhitford@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3766 VP Graphic Design Production Pete Seltzer pseltzer@ northcoastmedia net 216 706 3737 MANUSCRIPTS GPS World 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verify any claims or other information appearing in any of the advertisements contained in the publication and cannot take any responsibility for any losses or other damages incurred by readers in reliance on such content Published monthly Facts I n life few things are certain In family love and friendship fewer Add more people workplace groups associations government society nations war and the complications multiply the certainties scarcen Some things however remain fixed and true We call them facts They are not subject to denial or claims of fakery They can sometimes be distorted or their interpretation disputed but at the end of the day they remain what they were at the beginning Facts True They do not require a majority to believe in them nor even a powerful minority They exist outside belief heedless of the powers of persuasion cajolery hucksterism The facts do not always to their detriment speak for themselves Reason does not always prevail But the facts continue to exist ruling the operations of the universe It has been said that journalisms duty is to print the facts and raise hell Chicago Times 1861 I submit to you that it is a scientists duty and an engineer is a scientist to live and practice by the facts to preserve the facts if necessary To raise hell That may be a matter of taste or personal style But to see that the facts are known shared publicly available that can be undertaken without uncomfortable or unpleasant hellraising Guerilla archiving and data rescues have mushroomed across the United States in response to fear that the U S government will remove facts it dislikes from its own websites All day hackathons are organized by volunteers the events focus on downloading federal science data sets particularly those related to climate change from government websites and uploading them to a new site datarefuge org an alternative source for data Theyre also feeding tens of thousands of government web pages into the Internet Archive a nonprofit digital library with the mission of universal access to all knowledge And of course someone has devised a custom built app specifically for this purpose Climate change data has a geospatial aspect and much of it was collected with GPS equipment Positioning coordinates lie at the heart of so much key information So an attack on carefully assembled scientifically overseen data can be interpreted as an attack on the validity of global positioning technology Whether or not we take it personally we should be wary of any attempt to deny or abolish any facts anywhere Weve seen this before in other forms The LightSquared episode in 2011 12 produced blatant denials of the physics of radio frequency waveforms for personal and institutional profit We dont yet know if this is happening again whether government data has been erased or simply moved elsewhere Whether or wherever they appear or disappear the facts continue to exist and perhaps they deserve more respect than theyve been getting MarchforScience com April 22 BY Alan Cameron