IP: Triangulation

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

During my days at RAND , two of us, the name Hal Peterson hits my memory, 
developed a system for doing exactly this IN OUR SPARE TIME NOT FOT $6m.

We were reasonably successful given the computing of the time. We most 
likely wrote internal RAND reports on it. The methodology we developed 
would be much more real time effective with todays micros. I was at RAND 
during 1967-1968!!!

Dave


>X-Sender: dan@mail.lynch.com
>Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 16:33:18 -0700
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu, ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com
>From: Dan Lynch <dan@lynch.com>
>Subject: Triangulation
>
>>>       * Las Vegas, St. Louis, Charleston and Kansas City will split $6
>>>         million earmarked for gun surveillance technology. The plan is to
>>>         spend it on acoustic sensors scattered around downtown areas so
>>>         the location of a gunshot can be triangulated and located.
>
>
>
>This is very cool.  We all know that emerging (and existing) technology 
>can be used to protect us and/or to hurt us depending on the usage 
>chosen.  Since shooting a gun is using some very old technology as a means 
>to hurt/kill people, it is sensible to use something like acoustic 
>triangulation to pinpoint the position of the gun that was fired.  But 
>since acoustics also means any old sound it will also collect 
>conversations...  Hmmm?  We can wish that there will be too much data to 
>plow through but the curve of computing power is climbing rapidly and the 
>ability of humans to talk much faster is in doubt, so with word spotting 
>techniques obviously (almost) perfected by our spy agencies, this could be 
>a real 1984 scene.  Of course these detectors could be set to only record 
>gunshot like sounds and frequencies, but would we trust the collectors for 
>long?
>
>Cheers,
>Dan
>
>PS. With all the various buildings of different surface materials and all 
>the building ricochet variables this does look like an interesting math 
>problem.
>--
>
>Tel. 650-948-1344
>Fax  650-948-0757
>My assistant is Jen Karp
>Tel. 650-947-9688  jen@lynch.com



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