Weekly Videos and Assignments

Assignments:

• Attended Orientation Session on January 8.
• Purchase textbook entitled "Wireless Crash Course" in UAB Bookstore
• Read Chapter 17 in textbook.
• First video lectures will be available beginning next week.
• Each weekly assignment will be sent out during each weekend or Monday at the latest for the following week.

Assignments:

• Read Chapters 1,2 and 3 of the textbook Wireless Crash Course.

• A Tale of Two Technologies
  

• Smart Phones as Computers
  
• Wireless Concepts
  

• Historical Overview of Cellular Technology
  
• Three Generations of Cellular
  

• Read Chapters 6 and 7 of the textbook Wireless Crash Course.

• Hardware Platforms
  
• OS Platforms
  

Quiz 1 will be administered this week in the Thursday lab at 7:30 P.M. in room CH435. The scope of the quiz will be the lecture and reading content assignments through week 5. The quiz will consist of online multiple choice questions.

• Application Development Tools
• HTML and JavaScript
• Android

• Location Aware Mobile Computing
  
• Mobile Messaging

• Mobile Multimedia
  
• M Commerce
  

• One of the most novel and interesting recent developments in wireless technology is the application being delivered by a company named Space Data Corporation. This company is offering wireless services to truckers and oil companies using cell tower transceivers that are attached to balloons and released for moving up into the stratosphere where they eventually burst and return to earth under a small parachutte. The useful life of each transceiver is about 24 hours before bursting. About 10 balloons a day are released across the southern U.S., with each providing a coverage of thousands of square miles as it soars up to a maximum altitude of 20 miles. The company hires mechanics that work at small airports and farmers to do the balloon releasing each day. They pay $100 for each transceiver that anyone retrieves tracking it using GPS technology. The transceivers are apparently worth about $1,500 each. See the following link for more details: Balloon Enabled Wireless Technology


• Qualcomm has announced a new family of Snapdragon chipsets that are designed for next-generation mobile phones. The chips utilize Scorpion microprocessors that run at 1 GHz and include a universal modem that supports 2G and 3G broadband handsets for either CDMA or GSM networks. The chipsets also support WiFi and Bluetooth, a variety of broadcast formats, display capabilities like XGA and WVGA, audio support for MP3 and GPS, and up to 12 Megapixel-resolution cameras. The chipsets are already being adopted by HTC and are being demonstrated using Windows Mobile and Linux.

Quiz 2 will be administered in the Thursday lab this week at 7:30 P.M. in room CH435. The quiz will cover the videos and reading assignment content of week 6 through week 8. It will be online and consist of 25 multiple choice questions. You should have received a list of example study questions by email to help you focus your study.

View the following videos:

• Mobile Enterprise
  
• Mobile Power Issues
  

Assignment:
Read the following short article:

• . An active cell phone is in constant communication with the tower and consumes small bursts of energy once every second or so to check for incoming calls. The transmit power is adjusted to the signal strength. If the cell phone is close to a repeater tower, little energy is needed to communicate. Moving further away or entering an environment with high electrical noise, such as a shopping mall, hospital or factory, more energy will be required. An analogy can be made to sitting in a restaurant. In a quiet establishment the voice can be low, but as the crowd grows, everyone needs to talk louder to be heard. Living in sight of a tower has advantages and your battery will run longer between charges. In essence, towers are the best friends to cell phone batteries. Even the placement of a cell phone in your house has an effect on runtime. Short standby times have been observed after moving to a home basement bedroom. If possible, leave your cell phone in an upstairs room facing a tower. When traveling by car, don’t place your cell phone on the floor. Instead, raise it closer to window level but avoid direct exposure to the sun, as heat will harm the battery.

View the following video:

• Wiki Technologies
  

Assignment:
Read the following three articles:

• Federal law enforcement would like for the government to be able to obtain real-time tracking information on citizens using location data provided by mobile devices without showing probable cause. During the month of March 2008 lower court judges have denied their attempts. Location-based services were predicted to be the "killer application" of m-commerce, but it has not happened yet. However, an explosive market is still believed to be in the near term. For example, the location-based services market has been predicted to grow exponentially between 2006 and 2010.
  
  The LBS market in the U.S. has been driven more by regulatory agencies than user demand. The Federal Communications Commission issued the E911 mandate in 1996 with the goal of improving emergency responses to wireless 911 calls by the determination of the caller's latitude and longitude. The goal is providing the coordinates of the 911 caller. U.S. cellular providers have been fined for not meeting the targeted goal of 2005 for implementation. Meeting the requirements of this mandate will provide the technical foundation for LBS in the U.S.


• Read the following online article How the Web is Transforming Itself - Part III. This web page is required reading. The links on the page are optional.


• Read the following online article Blackberry News

• The Mobile Workforce
  

• Mobile Security
  
• E-Books
  

• IBM India Research Laboratory researchers are attempting to bring the Internet to rural India by creating a "spoken Web" that taps mobile phones to get around such problems as illiteracy. "Conventional approaches have only looked at taking the existing Web and making it available on mobile devices," says Tapan Parikh of the University of California, Berkeley. "This is an opportunity for making an entirely new kind of Web." The spoken Web is conceived as a network of voice-based Web sites or VoiceSites, which can only be accessed by phone and require nothing from the user apart from the ability to speak and listen. Making VoiceSites easy to create was a critical component of the spoken Web, and users are guided through the process by VoiGen software that is accessible through a phone number. A number for the created VoiceSite that serves the same function as a URL is assigned, and anyone who calls the VoiceSite number receives a welcome message recorded by the VoiceSite owner and instructions for navigating the information. VoiGen creates links between VoiceSites by prompting the user at predetermined points to supply the phone number and a brief description of related sites, and transfers between sites are managed by IBM's hyperspeech transfer protocol. The use of complicated voice recognition software was deferred in favor of a small vocabulary and structured interaction to ensure that the system always recognizes the context of the spoken words.


• According to a report from research and banking firm ThinkPanmure, AT&T Mobility plans to sell up to 7 million femtocells from ip.access Ltd., a picocell and femtocell infrastructure vendor based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. According to ThinkPanmure, AT&T signed a contract with the firm for up to $500 million in femtocells over the course of five years, and will sell the devices for as little as $100 each. A spokeswoman for AT&T did not comment on the report specifically; however, she said the largest carrier of the nation is examining the potential benefits of femtocells through lab tests, and plans to conduct a femtocell trial later this year. Representatives from ip.access were not immediately available to comment on the ThinkPanmure report. Femtocell technology has caused a notable stir in the wireless industry. Femtocells essentially are tiny base stations that can be sold to individual phone users. Femtocells can be installed in homes or offices, and transmit cellphone traffic through a high-speed Internet connection. Femtocells work much like Wi-Fi hotspots, except they power transmissions over a wireless carrier licensed spectrum. Thus, femtocells raise a number of potentially troublesome issues for users and carriers, including the management of radio interference between a cell tower and a femtocell; radio interference between different femtocells, such as in an apartment building; and roaming between femtocells. Nonetheless, femtocells could solve one of the biggest headaches wireless carriers face: indoor coverage. The installation of a femtocell in a home or office would eliminate the need for a carrier to cover that same space, and offloads the cost of the equipment onto the user. And a number of carriers have embraced the technology. Sprint Nextel Corp. was the first out of the femtocell gate in the United States; the carrier in September introduced its Airave femtocell from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. for $50 along with a monthly fee. The product allows users to make unlimited calls over their femtocell connection. When the Airave launched, it was only available in Denver and Indianapolis. The carrier expanded distribution to Nashville in October. T-Mobile USA Inc., though, is taking a slightly different tack. The carrier last year introduced a dual-mode calling service that allows users with GSM/Wi-Fi phones to place calls over their Wi-Fi network for free. Although AT&T would not comment on its UMA plans, Current Analysis analyst Peter Jarich said that if the carrier placed UMA software on its iPhone "they'd probably see a great uptake and they could eventually leverage the core network kit to support femtocell network integrations as well." ThinkPanmure said GSM operators will roll out femtocells on a broad scale by next year.

• Cloud Computing Services
  

• New advances in smart phones and wireless technologies are providing opportunities for the accelerated development of mobile health (m-health) which is seen as the single most effective driver for the health IT industry. The objectives of m-health are to improve he quality of healthcare, reduce medical errors, empower patients and reduce healthcare costs. Historically the healthcare system has been slow to adopt advanced technologies such as electronic medical records, but the near term outlook is more hopeful with the new incentives built into the 2009 Economic Stimulus Package that are intended to accelerate the adoption of technology that will implement the aforementioned objectives of m-health.


• The technological vision for m-health includes several components that are outlined as follows:
  • Ability for healthcare practitioners to determine a persons healthcare insurance and the co-pay required.
  • Temporary storage and transmission of a cre set of continuity of care data including allergies, medications, test results and plan of care.
  • One click communication between patients and healthcare providers.
  • Web resource of details discussed during physician visits.
  • Movement toward Health 2.0 web technology where patients whare their symptoms and reactions to medications and detailed pain and disease observations on the web.
  • Ability of emergency responders to document details and send to the hospital in advance of patient arrival.

• Cell Phone Radiation Concerns
  

Reading assignment:

• Review article and a ranking of cell phones according to radiation levels


• The Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette


• By Dan Briody, Info World Magazine May 26, 2000
• There comes a time in any technological revolution when some basic guidelines need to be laid down. It happened when e-mail exploded on the scene and people started to learn some basic dos and don'ts around the new medium. For example, if you copy the boss in on an e-mail message to a colleague, it means that you are through kidding around. No one teaches these things in company training; they are just things that get learned. Well I've reached the point with cell phones where I feel the need to lay down the law. There are some real abuses of wireless technology being perpetrated all around us, and the time has come to create some social order out of the cell phone chaos. This is by no means an exhaustive list simply because as the technology evolves, new annoying traits will surely emerge. But commandments usually come in tens, so think of this as the first Ten Commandments of cell phone etiquette, with amendments to follow:


1. Thou shalt not subject defenseless others to cell phone conversations. When people cannot escape the banality of your conversation, such as on the bus, in a cab, on a grounded airplane, or at the dinner table, you should spare them. People around you should have the option of not listening. If they don't, you shouldn't be babbling.


2. Thou shalt not set thy ringer to play La Cucaracha every time thy phone rings. Or Beethoven's Fifth, or the Bee Gees, or any other annoying melody. Is it not enough that phones go off every other second? Now we have to listen to synthesized nonsense?


3. Thou shalt turn thy cell phone off during public performances. I'm not even sure this one needs to be said, but given the repeated violations of this heretofore unwritten law, I felt compelled to include it.


4. Thou shalt not wear more than two wireless devices on thy belt. This hasn't become a big problem yet. But with plenty of techno-jockeys sporting pagers and phones, Batman-esque utility belts are sure to follow. Let's nip this one in the bud.


5. Thou shalt not dial while driving. In all seriousness, this madness has to stop. There are enough people in the world who have problems mastering vehicles and phones individually. Put them together and we have a serious health hazard on our hands.


6. Thou shalt not wear thy earpiece when thou art not on thy phone. This is not unlike being on the phone and carrying on another conversation with someone who is physically in your presence. No one knows if you are here or there. Very disturbing.


7. Thou shalt not speak louder on thy cell phone than thou would on any other phone. These things have incredibly sensitive microphones, and it's gotten to the point where I can tell if someone is calling me from a cell because of the way they are talking, not how it sounds. If your signal cuts out, speaking louder won't help, unless the person is actually within earshot.


8. Thou shalt not grow too attached to thy cell phone. For obvious reasons, a dependency on constant communication is not healthy. At work, go nuts. At home, give it a rest.


9. Thou shalt not attempt to impress with thy cell phone. Not only is using a cell phone no longer impressive in any way (unless it's one of those really cool new phones with the space age design), when it is used for that reason, said user can be immediately identified as a neophyte and a poseur.


10. Thou shalt not slam thy cell phone down on a restaurant table just in case it rings. This is not the Old West, and you are not a gunslinger sitting down to a game of poker in the saloon. Could you please be a little less conspicuous? If it rings, you'll hear it just as well if it's in your coat pocket or clipped on your belt.


Well, I'm all thou-ed and thy-ed out, so there you have it: the first 10 rules of using your cell phone. Most of these seem like common sense to me, but they all get broken every day.


Week 16 - April 27




• No assignments this week.
• Quiz 3 will be administered this week during the regular scheduled lab time of Thursday evening at 7:30 PM in room CH435.