Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Netflix Rebounds From 2011 Stumbles By Listening To Audience


Audie Cornish talks to Brian Stelter, media reporter for The New York Times, about the success of Netflix and how the video streaming company has turned itself around.



Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.


AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:


We have a few more numbers for you now from a superstar tech company that stumbled painfully and publicly back in 2011 but appears to be on solid footing again. I'm talking about Netflix. Now, remember when the company changed its prices and divided its DVD rental and streaming services, and then quickly reversed course when customers howled?


Well, yesterday, Netflix released its third-quarter earnings. In just the past year, the company's stock price has more than tripled. For the first time in the U.S., its streaming service has reached and passed the 30 million subscriber mark. And it earned 14 Emmy nominations for its original programs, including "House of Cards" starring Kevin Spacey.


(SOUNDBITE OF SERIES, "HOUSE OF CARDS")


KEVIN SPACEY: (as Francis) As for me, I'm just a lowly House majority whip. I keep things moving in a Congress choked by pettiness and lassitude. My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving. But I won't have to be a plumber much longer. I've done my time. I've backed the right man.


CORNISH: For more on the rise and fall and rise again of Netflix, I'm joined by Brian Stelter of the New York Times. Hey there, Brian.


BRIAN STELTER: Hi there.


CORNISH: So, I'm going to start in the middle back in 2011. What did Netflix and its then embattled CEO, Reed Hastings, do to get the company back on track after what were, you know, basically an embarrassing and damaging couple of months?


STELTER: I think the answer might be embedded in your introduction, when you were talking about how Netflix reversed course once it heard from its customers. Netflix listened to its customers and has continued to listen to its customers ever since. And that might be part of the secret to its success.


CORNISH: And he didn't just listen, he apologized, right? I remember that.


STELTER: That's right. A rather unusual public apology from a chief executive of a big company. Sometimes that's rather refreshing for people to see. But Netflix is quite good at knowing what its customers want and quite good at pleasing its customers by giving them more of what they want. Lately, its original programming strategy is evidence of this. By having original shows like "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black," Netflix is giving customers a reason to come back. And that sort of customer-centered strategy is probably partly the answer to what got them back on track.


CORNISH: Now, Brian, you write about an interesting challenge for Netflix, one that they're still trying to overcome. You call it the TV two-step. What is that and what are they doing about it?


STELTER: You know, it's every time you go from watching cable to watching something on Netflix. You have to pick up the remote control, change the input on your television, hope that the other box you've hooked up to your TV actually works. That's the two-step that many people know how to do, but many people don't know how to do. And what Netflix would like someday is to have a button on your normal remote control that pulls up Netflix automatically.


It'd like to be accessible through the cable set top box experience that most people are used to. It'll be nice for Netflix to show up on the on-screen guide right next to NBC and Fox News. Now, that's probably a long ways off, but Netflix is now talking to cable operators about making that happen, and it'll probably happen someday.


CORNISH: We've learned it's dangerous, frankly, to predict the future of a company like Netflix. I mean, a lot of people wrote them off two years ago. Do you see any warning signs now that this resurgence itself is fragile?


STELTER: The more bearish analysts that cover Netflix say that the concern for the company going forward is that it is spending an enormous amount of money on programming, mostly by licensing shows that have already been on television elsewhere. For example, "New Girl" and "Breaking Bad," you know, these sort of catch-up shows that are on Netflix. But it's also spending a lot on original programming like "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black." And these more bearish analysts say that Netflix is going to have to walk a tight wire of sorts to make sure it can afford all of the promises it's made basically to pay for this programming while it continues to gain subscribers. They say it's going to be a challenge for Netflix to keep its balance sheet in a comfortable place.


CORNISH: That's Brian Stelter, a reporter for the New York Times. Brian, thank you so much.


STELTER: Thank you.


Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.


NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NprProgramsATC/~3/e-euQyeafgQ/story.php
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What To Watch For In The World Series


David Greene talks to NPR's Mike Pesca about this year's World Series, which starts Wednesday night in Boston.



Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.


DAVID GREENE, HOST:


For the first time since 1999, the two teams with the best record in baseball will meet in the World Series. The Boston Red Sox host the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway Park tonight.


Enough said, let's bring in NPR's Mike Pesca. Hey, Mike.


MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hi.


GREENE: You're going to be at the game.


PESCA: Yes.


GREENE: So we have the two teams with the two best records. That has to tell us something about his World Series. Or maybe in this crazy world of sports it tells us nothing.


PESCA: Or in the crazy sport of baseball, actually you're right, it kind of doesn't. I mean you mentioned 1999, that was a stinker of a World Series. The Yankees swept the Braves. The Braves had a much better record even than the Yankees did. And then you go back to some recent series were teams that were wildcards and, quote-unquote, "snuck in" like in 2002. The Angel/Giants that went seven - that was a great World Series. So yes, there's not a whole lot of correlation.


In general the correlation between the regular season and the postseason often becomes tenuous. We see things like great players through the regular season slump. We see nobodies delivering the clutch. And that's because the baseball season is so long, it gives us a false sense of how good or bad anyone could be on a given day.


I mean if a guy is a 300 hitter that says what? Oh, that guy can hit. But if you take any seven-game snapshot may be he's a 180 hitter over that snapshot. You know, it's more likely he'll be a 320 hitter or a 300 hitter but there's far from a guarantee in the sport of baseball.


GREENE: So we'll watch to see who the heroes that will emerge.


PESCA: I'm being paid to, yes.


(LAUGHTER)


GREENE: Well, let's start with the St. Louis Cardinals. I mean a franchise that just a stays right towards the top. What makes them so good?


PESCA: That's it, steady efficiency. I mean they have a great farm system. They have so many good pitchers that they have Shelby Miller, a young 15-game-winner. He's like the sixth guy on their staff. They're very good from top to bottom. They have few weaknesses. They have the Cardinal Way which has been derided a little bit for its arrogance. I don't know if the players themselves buy into it, as much some of the very proud fans do.


But they do have an ethic of success and culture in getting things done. And they are a model organization in this sport.


GREENE: Well, besides the beards that the Boston Red Sox players have grown to bond together, what gives them the chance to come on top of the Cardinals?


PESCA: I think looseness. I think, you know, sheer talent from top to bottom. I think their strategy of hitting crucial game-winning grand slams in the last series, if they could light upon that strategy again...


GREENE: That would work, two of them and the American League championships series.


PESCA: Yes. And it has this great study in contrasts because you know Boston, which is this real loose team which is a team with a lot of characters who embraces them. And you have the Cardinals, a team that, you know, Adam Wainwright - starter in Game 1 - set up one of his last opponents, Adrian Gonzalez, was behaving in a Mickey Mouse fashion by being too enthusiastic. Some Cardinals players also criticized the Yasiel Puig for perhaps over-celebrating, and not knowing how the game should be played.


So, you know, you have this contrast between those who criticize others for being Mickey Mouse, and the Red Sox who are just plain goofy.


(LAUGHTER)


GREENE: Goofy and slow, right? I mean one thing we know about this we know about this World Series with the Red Sox involved, we're going to have some long games.


PESCA: They are pretty fast on the bases but, man, do they take their time. Clay Buchholtz, even with no one on base, their pitcher takes between like 18 and 26 seconds to deliver a pitch, one-nothing games going almost four hours. The Red Sox do take up a lot of your patience. But then, I guess, they deliver the big dramatic hits when it counts. Still, could we do that here in three and a half hours, guys? Is that too much to ask?


(LAUGHTER)


GREENE: The journalists who are going to be at Fenway tonight, you guys grow beards or something to bond over this whole thing?


PESCA: I can't help it. I got a five o'clock shadow at two.


GREENE: Nice, can't wait to see it. NPR's Mike Pesca, who will be at tonight's game at Fenway Park Game 1 of the World Series. Mike, thanks.


PESCA: You're welcome.


Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.


NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.


Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/23/240163081/what-to-watch-for-in-the-world-series?ft=1&f=3
Tags: ABC Family   dancing with the stars   september 11   Jenna Wolfe   National Tequila Day  

European Commission to push EU leaders on single telecoms market


By Foo Yun Chee


BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Creating a single telecoms market in Europe and cutting the cost of doing business over the Internet could boost the region's economy by 4 percent by 2020, the European Commission will tell EU leaders this week.


The push from the European Union's executive, when EU leaders meet on October 24-25, comes as Neelie Kroes, the EU's telecoms commissioner, makes a fresh attempt to overhaul the bloc's telecoms sector.


Following Brussels' success in curbing the cost of using mobile phone use, she now wants to cap the price of cross-border fixed-line calls in Europe, where the commission says technology and telecommunications make a smaller contribution to the economy than in the United States or China.


Kroes also wants EU veto power over national auctions of mobile spectrum, and to make it easier for operators to charge companies such as Google more for carrying heavy loads of data at high speeds.


But her blueprint needs the blessing of 28 EU governments before it can become law. Time is running out because lawmakers in the European Parliament, who also need to sign off on the law, break up in April for elections in May.


In a letter late last month to EU leaders, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso spelt out his priorities in the sector.


"Digital services and telecommunications are crucial drivers of growth and productivity across all sectors of our economies,"


he wrote.


"However, we are not yet getting the most out of the potential for our single market in telecommunications and online and in these industries the EU is losing ground to our international competitors."


In a report that will be presented to EU leaders, the Commission will outline the potential benefits.


"By 2020, Europe could add 4 percent to its GDP by stimulating the fast development of the digital single market," officials write in the report, seen by Reuters.


Public authorities could cut costs by 15-20 percent by moving to e-government, they add.


Barroso's drive may be greeted with skepticism. Kroes has been criticized by national regulators who are concerned about losing power to Brussels, and companies have also been lukewarm.


(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by John O'Donnell, John Stonestreet)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/european-commission-push-eu-leaders-single-telecoms-market-122340781--sector.html
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MicroStrategy revamps BI software for bigger data sets, faster visuals


Keeping up with the ever-changing nature of business intelligence, MicroStrategy has revamped and expanded its line of BI software to incorporate big-data analytics and desktop visualization. 


"We're delivering a substantial new set of functionality," said Kevin Spurway, MicroStrategy's vice president of industry and mobile marketing.


[ Learn how to use new analysis tools and abundant processing power to gain insights from the massive volumes of corporate and external data in InfoWorld's Big Data Analytics Deep Dive. | Discover what's new in business applications with InfoWorld's Technology: Applications newsletter. ]


The company has rebranded and upgraded its flagship BI application, now called the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform, and has introduced a new desktop application designed to allow business analysts to easily parse large data sets from different sources. 


MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise 9.4, a significant upgrade from MicroStrategy 9.3.1, includes a new capability the company calls data blending, which allows users to combine data from more than one source; the software stores the data in working memory without the need for a separate data integration product.


"Previously, we were able to combine data from different sources, but it required work from IT. Now any business user can grab data from different sources and bring them together with only a few clicks," Spurway said. 


Also new: The dashboard panel has been upgraded. It now can update data in real time and can display multimedia files such as videos. 


The new platform comes with a range of connectors for various types of big-data repositories. It can connect with the MongoDB NoSQL data store as well as Hadoop distributions from Hortonworks, Intel and Pivotal. 


Analytics Enterprise now comes with the R statistical programming language, increasingly used for statistical analysis. Geographic Information System (GIS) software and service vendor Esri have provided a set of map skins and cartographic markers that can be used for geographic renditions of data sets. 


MicroStrategy also has improved the performance of the software. The application can now fit 10 times as much data in memory as the previous version could, and the self-service querying now runs up to 40 percent faster. 


In addition to updating its core enterprise software, MicroStrategy has also released a free tool to help business analysts fetch data from various sources and copy it directly to their desktops.


With the newly released MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, users can grab data from relational databases, multidimensional databases, cloud-based applications and Hadoop deployments. Once on the desktop, the data can then be compiled into visualizations, such as basic pie charts, maps, graphs and various matrices.


The software can also provide a dashboard for users, allowing them to watch changes within data sets. Users can also export their charts and metrics as an image file or PDF document. The software runs on Microsoft Windows and does not require MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise to operate. To work with larger data sets, a user should have 2GB or more of working memory on the computer, Spurway said.


The new desktop software was designed to compete with other increasingly popular self-serve, data-discovery desktop visualization tools offered by Tableau and others, Spurway said. 


MicroStrategy is hoping that, over time, organizations that use the free product will see the need for the advanced capabilities found in MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise, such as predictive analytics, the ability to maintain data consistency across all analysis tools, and the ability to get real-time updates of data, Spurway said.


Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's email address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com.


Source: http://images.infoworld.com/d/business-intelligence/microstrategy-revamps-bi-software-bigger-data-sets-faster-visuals-229354?source=rss_business_intelligence
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Aereo is now available for Android!

Aereo is now available for Android! At least, it is if you're running 4.2 and live in New York City, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, or Salt Lake City.

Read more...


    






Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/DbQys21JV6I/aereo-is-now-available-for-android-at-least-it-is-if-1450591910
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Happy Birthday, Copy Machine! Happy Birthday, Copy Machine!




Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET.



 




Copy machines can be found in every office, and most of us take them for granted. But 75 years ago, the technology that underpins the modern photocopier was used for the first time in a small apartment in Queens.


Inventor Chester Carlson used static electricity created with a handkerchief, light and dry powder to make the first copy on Oct. 22, 1938.


The copier didn't get on to the market until 1959, more than 20 years later. When it did, the Xerox machine prompted a dramatic change in the workplace.



The first commercial model, the Xerox 914, was bulky and cumbersome. It weighed nearly 650 pounds. It was the size of about two washing machines and was prone to spontaneous combustion.


But even literally going up in flames wasn't enough to kill the product. In fact, it was in high demand.


"There was a distinct need for simple copying like this, and it just took off," says Ray Brewer, historical archivist for Xerox Corp. "We sold thousands of these machines, and the demand was such that we were manufacturing them in large quantities."


Brewer says the popularity of Xerox technology abroad inspired more clandestine uses for the copier. Some machines actually had miniature cameras built into them during the Cold War for the purpose of spying on other countries.


Back at home, the copier was proving to be a godsend for secretaries. One Xerox commercial features a female secretary saying:




"I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button. Anything he can see I can copy in black and white on ordinary paper. I can make seven copies a minute. ... Sometimes my boss asks me which is the original, and sometimes, I don't know."




Author and historian Lynn Peril says the machines had to have been "fabulously liberating."


"Oh my god, you didn't have to work with all the lousy carbon paper," she says. "You could just take it and put it on this glass surface, and press a button and you've got as many copies as you wanted."



The beauty of the technology, Peril says, was that it saved time for office workers without making their workplace role obsolete.


Angele Boyd is a business analyst at the International Data Corp. She says copier technology created a more democratic information system.


"Until then, you needed to go to a press or you needed to go to a third party external print shop to produce that kind of quality output," she says.


The core technology in the copier, later transferred to printers and scanners, has remained the same since the 1930s.


Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/23/239241106/happy-birthday-copy-machine-happy-birthday-copy-machine?ft=1&f=3
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Time is ripe for fire detection satellite, say UC Berkeley scientists

Time is ripe for fire detection satellite, say UC Berkeley scientists


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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

21-Oct-2013



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Contact: Robert Sanders
rlsanders@berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley



Improved and cheaper sensors, faster analysis software make satellite feasible




As firefighters emerge from another record wildfire season in the Western United States, University of California, Berkeley, scientists say it's time to give them a 21st century tool: a fire-spotting satellite.


Such a satellite could view the Western states almost continuously, snapping pictures of the ground every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited wildfires. Firefighting resources could then be directed to these spots in hopes of preventing the fires from growing out of control and threatening lives and property.


The UC Berkeley scientists have designed such a satellite using state-of-the-art sensors, written analysis software to minimize false alarms, and even given it a name the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit (FUEGO). They're hopeful it can be built for several hundred million dollars, either by government or private entities.


"If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker and more easily, including preparing for evacuation," said fire expert Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental science, policy and management. "Wildfires would be smaller in scale if you could detect them before they got too big, like less than an acre."


Stephens, physicist Carl Pennypacker, remote sensing expert Maggi Kelly and their colleagues describe the satellite in an article published online Oct. 17 by the journal Remote Sensing.


"With a satellite like this, we will have a good chance of seeing something from orbit before it becomes an Oakland fire," said Pennypacker, a research associate at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, referring to the devastating 1991 fire that destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Berkeley and Oakland. "It could pay for itself in one firefighting season."


With global warming, Stephens said, wildfires are expected to become more frequent and more extensive. This year alone, California's firefighting arm, CAL FIRE, has responded to over 6,000 wildfires, 1,600 more than average, according to tweets by the department's information officer Daniel Berlant. Wildfire-prone areas stretching from Spain to Russia could also benefit from their own dedicated satellites.


Updating an outmoded system


Fire detection today is much like it was 200 years ago, Stephens said, relying primarily on spotters in fire towers or on the ground and on reports from members of the public. This information is augmented by aerial reconnaissance and lightning detectors that steer firefighters to ground strikes, which are one of the most common wildfire sparks.


"Even today, most fires are detected, in some way or another, by people," he said. "Even the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park this past summer was detected by someone who saw a smoke column."


But satellite technology, remote sensing and computing have advanced to the stage where it's now possible to orbit a geostationary satellite that can reliably distinguish small, but spreading, wildfires with few false alarms. Pennypacker estimates that the satellite, which could be built and operated by the federal government, like the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES); as a partnership between government and the private sector, like the Landsat satellite program; or by a private company alone, would cost several hundred million dollars a fraction of the nation's $2.5 billion yearly firefighting budget.


The idea of a fire detection satellite has been floated before, but until recently, detectors have been prohibitively expensive, and the difficulty of discriminating a small burning area from other bright hotspots, such as sunlight glinting off a mirror or windshield, made the likelihood of false alarms high. Today, computers are faster, detectors cheaper and more sensitive, and analysis software far more advanced, making false alarms much less likely, according to researchers.


"Simply put, we believe we have shown that this kind of rapid, sensitive fire detection of areas bigger than 10 feet on a side is probably feasible from space, and we have evidence that the false alarm rate will not be crazy," said Pennypacker, who has designed sensitive satellite-borne detectors for 40 years. "Our work requires further testing, which we are eager to do."


The approach is similar to what Pennypacker and colleague Saul Perlmutter used 20 years ago to search for exploding stars to study the expansion of the universe. In that case, they created an automated system to compare consecutive images of the night sky to look for new points of light that could be supernovas. Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics, shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which proved that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.


How it works


"In concept, this is a simple system: a telephoto camera, an infrared filter and a recording device. We are just looking for something bright compared to the surroundings or changing over time," Kelly said. "Then, we do these rapid calculations to determine if one image is different from the next."


Pennypacker and graduate student Marek K. Jakubowski developed a computer analysis technique, or algorithm, to detect these differences in space and time and to distinguish them from bright lights that might look like fires. This involves several billion calculations per second on images taken every few seconds, covering the entire West every few minutes. The new paper reports on tests of this algorithm using existing imagery from real fires, but the team hopes to get funding to test the system on a fire that is starting, such as a prescribed burn.


"The point is, satellites like Landsat and GOES provide great information after a fire starts; they can focus and monitor a fire by looking at smoke plumes, fire spread, hot spots at the edges, etc.," Kelly said. "FUEGO is designed for early detection of smaller fires. Right now, we lose a lot of time because fires are already big by the time we see them."


###


The FUEGO design, for which UC Berkeley has filed a patent, was developed with funds from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.


Other authors of the paper are Michael Lampton, a research physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory; Robert Tripp, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics; and Christopher Schmidt of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Pennypacker, Lampton and Tripp are also members of the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.




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Time is ripe for fire detection satellite, say UC Berkeley scientists


[ Back to EurekAlert! ]

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

21-Oct-2013



[


| E-mail

]


Share Share

Contact: Robert Sanders
rlsanders@berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley



Improved and cheaper sensors, faster analysis software make satellite feasible




As firefighters emerge from another record wildfire season in the Western United States, University of California, Berkeley, scientists say it's time to give them a 21st century tool: a fire-spotting satellite.


Such a satellite could view the Western states almost continuously, snapping pictures of the ground every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited wildfires. Firefighting resources could then be directed to these spots in hopes of preventing the fires from growing out of control and threatening lives and property.


The UC Berkeley scientists have designed such a satellite using state-of-the-art sensors, written analysis software to minimize false alarms, and even given it a name the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit (FUEGO). They're hopeful it can be built for several hundred million dollars, either by government or private entities.


"If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker and more easily, including preparing for evacuation," said fire expert Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental science, policy and management. "Wildfires would be smaller in scale if you could detect them before they got too big, like less than an acre."


Stephens, physicist Carl Pennypacker, remote sensing expert Maggi Kelly and their colleagues describe the satellite in an article published online Oct. 17 by the journal Remote Sensing.


"With a satellite like this, we will have a good chance of seeing something from orbit before it becomes an Oakland fire," said Pennypacker, a research associate at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, referring to the devastating 1991 fire that destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Berkeley and Oakland. "It could pay for itself in one firefighting season."


With global warming, Stephens said, wildfires are expected to become more frequent and more extensive. This year alone, California's firefighting arm, CAL FIRE, has responded to over 6,000 wildfires, 1,600 more than average, according to tweets by the department's information officer Daniel Berlant. Wildfire-prone areas stretching from Spain to Russia could also benefit from their own dedicated satellites.


Updating an outmoded system


Fire detection today is much like it was 200 years ago, Stephens said, relying primarily on spotters in fire towers or on the ground and on reports from members of the public. This information is augmented by aerial reconnaissance and lightning detectors that steer firefighters to ground strikes, which are one of the most common wildfire sparks.


"Even today, most fires are detected, in some way or another, by people," he said. "Even the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park this past summer was detected by someone who saw a smoke column."


But satellite technology, remote sensing and computing have advanced to the stage where it's now possible to orbit a geostationary satellite that can reliably distinguish small, but spreading, wildfires with few false alarms. Pennypacker estimates that the satellite, which could be built and operated by the federal government, like the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES); as a partnership between government and the private sector, like the Landsat satellite program; or by a private company alone, would cost several hundred million dollars a fraction of the nation's $2.5 billion yearly firefighting budget.


The idea of a fire detection satellite has been floated before, but until recently, detectors have been prohibitively expensive, and the difficulty of discriminating a small burning area from other bright hotspots, such as sunlight glinting off a mirror or windshield, made the likelihood of false alarms high. Today, computers are faster, detectors cheaper and more sensitive, and analysis software far more advanced, making false alarms much less likely, according to researchers.


"Simply put, we believe we have shown that this kind of rapid, sensitive fire detection of areas bigger than 10 feet on a side is probably feasible from space, and we have evidence that the false alarm rate will not be crazy," said Pennypacker, who has designed sensitive satellite-borne detectors for 40 years. "Our work requires further testing, which we are eager to do."


The approach is similar to what Pennypacker and colleague Saul Perlmutter used 20 years ago to search for exploding stars to study the expansion of the universe. In that case, they created an automated system to compare consecutive images of the night sky to look for new points of light that could be supernovas. Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics, shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which proved that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.


How it works


"In concept, this is a simple system: a telephoto camera, an infrared filter and a recording device. We are just looking for something bright compared to the surroundings or changing over time," Kelly said. "Then, we do these rapid calculations to determine if one image is different from the next."


Pennypacker and graduate student Marek K. Jakubowski developed a computer analysis technique, or algorithm, to detect these differences in space and time and to distinguish them from bright lights that might look like fires. This involves several billion calculations per second on images taken every few seconds, covering the entire West every few minutes. The new paper reports on tests of this algorithm using existing imagery from real fires, but the team hopes to get funding to test the system on a fire that is starting, such as a prescribed burn.


"The point is, satellites like Landsat and GOES provide great information after a fire starts; they can focus and monitor a fire by looking at smoke plumes, fire spread, hot spots at the edges, etc.," Kelly said. "FUEGO is designed for early detection of smaller fires. Right now, we lose a lot of time because fires are already big by the time we see them."


###


The FUEGO design, for which UC Berkeley has filed a patent, was developed with funds from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.


Other authors of the paper are Michael Lampton, a research physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory; Robert Tripp, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics; and Christopher Schmidt of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Pennypacker, Lampton and Tripp are also members of the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.




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Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uoc--tir102113.php
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