GLONASS Loses Control Again
Well every constellation has it's problems, but this is might be an indication of reoccurring issues. Since satellites are basically space magic we often do not think about how often we use it. If you have a smart phone or if you work with GNSS receivers at all then you are accessing GLONASS. As individual instances it is not that big of a deal that some satellites are transmitting as unhealthy, but if it is reoccurring then virtually everybody who travels by plane, relies on a phone, or makes money telling people where things are will have one armed tied behind their back.
Why smart streetlights are the gateway drug for smart grids (and smart cities)
I am just going to keep obsessing over smart grid tech. It seems pretty straight forward to me. If you can drop your energy consumption by even 50% you can then use that saving to recapitalize into other technologies. Above that smart grids allow greater control over the utilities themselves. Taking from the article, what if you could change street light illumination to indicate to emergency vehicles the location of the incident. It could speed up response times in suburban or rural areas where emergency personnel might not be familiar with the layout.
Wearable Device Maps Energy Efficiency of Buildings
Alight I think I buried the lead on this one. This is pretty exciting. It might be backpack sized right now and probably incredibly expensive and unwieldy and difficult to use, but so were GNSS receivers back in the day. As the tech gets smaller and cheaper and easier to use you could have professionals and amateurs across the planet tapping into this technology and creating high end maps of buildings. One might ask, "But you already have the building blueprints." And that is true, but sometimes those get lost. If a building is old enough and enough turnover has occurred the box or electronic storage that contained that information might have been thrown away. Also, the plan is never how it ends up. I have worked enough trench monitoring jobs to know that when they dig you are bound to get utilities that are not where they are 'supposed' to be.
Couple this with other technologies and you could use this for outdoor highly obstructed locations. I could see archaeologists using this in forest environments or trenches and map massive areas in high detail passively. Imagine if you could record quality data and have a spatial data automatically digitized. Great time saver and has a lot of room for scale-ability and redundancy. Add augmented reality and you might be recording site information at a level of detail you never could before.