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Courtney Force raced into the history books Sunday, May 24 2014 at the 26th annual NHRA Kansas Nationals at Heartland Park Topeka winning the Funny Car title and securing the 100th victory for female professionals in the premiere NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series. It was Force's second attempt at earning this important win. Last week Force fell to teammate Robert Hight in the Southern Nationals final round in Atlanta. Today against Cruz Pedregon the third year driver was not going let this opportunity slip through her fingers again.
"This is huge. You could see the emotion on my face after I lost last weekend. It is a big deal and it is a milestone for women. Every girl out here wanted to get it. It was close every girl put her heart out there to try and get it. I was crushed after last weekend because I thought to myself that opportunity will never come again and that chance to get 100 will be gone forever," said an excited Force. "I am still trying to soak it in right now. I have to thank my team and all my sponsors. Once my dad and Robert went out today you could see all those colors coming over to our pit area and thrashing on my car. I want to thank all them and all the crew chiefs. They gave me a good consistent race car all weekend and that is what we were missing from the start of the season."
The win was not without some self-inflicted drama. Force admitted that nerves and pressure were at an all-time high as she rolled her Traxxas Ford Mustang up to face the two-time Mello Yello Funny Car champion. As she tried to give herself every starting line advantage she inadvertently lit the pre-stage and stage bulbs before Cruz had a chance to pre-stage. This racing faux pas weighed heavily on Force both before and after she ran.
"I almost screwed up on the starting line. I almost failed at my job. I was so nervous and the pressure was through the roof. I was pulling up to the starting line and all I was thinking was Cruz got a hole shot on Robert (Hight). I didn't want to lose on a hole shot, too," said Force. "There was a lot on the line. I wanted to roll in a little deep on my pre-stage. I screwed up and rolled it too much and lit both bulbs before he was even staged. Luckily, I left when I needed to. I apologized to Cruz and I sure as heck wasn't trying to screw him up. I screwed myself up. Luckily we got away with it today."
This was Courtney Force's first win in three final round meetings with Cruz Pedregon to whom she lost in the final at the last race of 2012 at Pomona and the first 2013 race at Las Vegas. It's the second time she has gone wire-to-wire for a win as the No. 1 qualifier. She also won from No. 1 at Pomona in 2013. This was the first time in her career that she reached back-to-back finals. It was the 231st Funny Car win for John Force Racing and continued a streak of 15 consecutive final rounds for the team and now four wins in a row.
"Last week I was in seventh place in the points and now I have shot up to fifth with a shot at the top three. Everybody is close together. All I am trying to do is create the Grand Canyon gap between me and the No. 11 driver. That is all I really care about," said Force. "We are inching forward every weekend. Two go to back to back finals for my team is huge. I think this is a big weekend for women all together. Brittany and I were No. 1 qualifiers Erica Enders Stevens was so close today in Pro Stock. It just shows that we can dominate fields."
The fact that she had come so close to getting the 100th win last week Force was asked in the media center if that loss entered her head before the final. The 2012 Auto Club NHRA Rookie of the Year was candid in her response to the media.
"I was thinking about it. That was all that was running through my head. I was thinking about going to another final and thinking about what happened last weekend. That sucked and you don't want that to happen again. I was telling myself to not lose my focus," added Force. "Don't think about the 100th win. So now I was already thinking about it. You try and not screw up. You try and clear your mind. You look at the fans and think I am in the greatest place on earth. I get to be at an NHRA track and I get to drive one of these hot rods and there are little girls coming up to my ropes to wish me luck.
Fourteen women have contributed to the victory total. Four in Funny Car, one in Pro Stock, three in Pro Stock Bike and six in Top Fuel. Shirley Muldowney secured the first pro win June 13, 1976 so it spans 38 years. There have been four wins by women this year prior to Courtney; two each for Erica Enders Stevens (Pro Stock) and Alexis DeJoria (Funny Car). Pro Stock Motorcycle racer Angelle Sampey, also a three-time world champion, has earned the most victories among the 14 women, claiming 41 Wally trophies during her distinguished career.
Force was the No. 1 qualifier, set low ET and Top Speed on the way to her fourth career win which ties her with sister Ashley Force Hood. The Traxxas Ford Mustang driver defeated Dale Creasy Jr., Jeff Arend and Tommy Johnson Jr. to reach her final round race with Pedregon.
At each NHRA national event when a JFR team qualifies No. 1 a lucky fan that has signed up at the JFR "Win with Force" display located in Nitro Alley will be eligible to win the BrandSource No. 1 Qualifier Award, a front loading washer and dryer set. If a JFR driver wins the event a different fan will win the 55" flat screen TV Winner's Circle Award from BrandSource. At the end of the season a grand prize winner of the "Win with Force" Sweepstakes will be awarded a 2014 Ford Escape S-Series.
For the fifth time in 2014 JFR has raced to the Winner's Circle. With this win, Courtney Force also put a 55" flat screen TV in the hands of Rolanda Fuemmeler, of St. Joseph, Missouri, compliments of BrandSource and the "Win with Force" promotion. This was the sixth TV given away in the first eight races of the season for JFR.
NHRA Mello Yello Series victories by female drivers: (from NHRA.com)
1. Shirley Muldowney, Top Fuel, June 13, 1976, Columbus, Ohio
2. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Oct. 10, 1976, Ontario, Calif.
3. Muldowney, Top Fuel, June 12, 1977, Columbus, Ohio
4. Muldowney, Top Fuel, July 16, 1977, Englishtown, N.J.
5. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Aug. 7, 1977, Montreal
6. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Feb. 3, 1980, Pomona, Calif.
7. Muldowney, Top Fuel, June 8, 1980, Columbus, Ohio
8. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Sept. 21, 1980, Seattle
9. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Oct. 19, 1980, Ontario, Calif.
10. Muldowney, Top Fuel, March 15, 1981, Gainesville, Fla.
11. Muldowney, Top Fuel, April 26, 1981, Atlanta
12. Muldowney, Top Fuel, March 14, 1982, Gainesville, Fla.
13. Lucille Lee, Top Fuel, April 25, 1982, Atlanta
14. Muldowney, Top Fuel, June 13, 1982, Columbus, Ohio
15. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Aug. 22, 1982, Brainerd, Minn.
16. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Sept. 6, 1982, Indianapolis
17. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Feb. 13, 1983, Pomona, Calif.
18. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Oct. 16, 1983, Irvine, Calif.
19. Muldowney, Top Fuel, Oct. 15, 1989, Phoenix
20. Lori Johns, Top Fuel, Feb. 4, 1990, Pomona, Calif.
21. Johns, Top Fuel, April 22, 1990, Atlanta
22. Johns, Top Fuel, May 6, 1990, Memphis
23. Johns, Top Fuel, May 5, 1991, Memphis
24. Shelly Anderson, Top Fuel, Sept. 19, 1993, Reading, Pa.
25. Anderson, Top Fuel, Feb. 6, 1994, Pomona, Calif.
26. Anderson, Top Fuel, May 5, 1996, Richmond, Va.
27. Anderson, Top Fuel, Aug. 4, 1996, Seattle
28. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 15, 1996, Reading, Pa.
29. Cristen Powell, Top Fuel, May 18, 1997, Englishtown, N.J.
30. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 28, 1997, Topeka, Kan.
31. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 17, 1998, Englishtown, N.J.
32. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 20, 1998, Reading, Pa.
33. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 11, 1998, Memphis
34. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, March 21, 1999, Gainesville, Fla.
35. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 16, 1999, Atlanta
36. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 25, 1999, Englishtown, N.J.
37. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 27, 1999, St. Louis
38. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 10, 1999, Memphis
39. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 9, 2000, Las Vegas
40. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 7, 2000, Atlanta
41. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 18, 2000, Columbus, Ohio
42. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, July 16, 2000, Denver
43. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 9, 2000, Englishtown, N.J.
44. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, March 25, 2001, Houston
45. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 17, 2001, Columbus, Ohio
46. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, July 8, 2001, Pomona, Calif.
47. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, July 22, 2001, Denver
48. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 3, 2001, Indianapolis
49. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 7, 2001, Reading, Pa.
50. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Nov. 11, 2001, Pomona, Calif.
51. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 5, 2002, Atlanta
52. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 2, 2002, Chicago
53. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 30, 2002, St. Louis
54. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 2, 2002, Indianapolis
55. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 16, 2002, Reading, Pa.
56. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 27, 2002, Las Vegas
57. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, March 16, 2003, Gainesville, Fla.
58. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 13, 2003, Houston
59. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 1, 2003, Chicago
60. Karen Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 18, 2004, Houston
61. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 16, 2004, Atlanta
62. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Aug. 1, 2004, Sonoma, Calif.
63. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 10, 2004, Reading, Pa.
64. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Nov. 14, 2004, Pomona, Calif.
65. Karen Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 10, 2005, Houston
66. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, June 26, 2005, St. Louis
67. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 18, 2005, Reading, Pa.
68. Melanie Troxel, Top Fuel, Feb. 12, 2006, Pomona, Calif.
69. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, March 19, 2006, Gainesville, Fla.
70. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 2, 2006, Houston
71. Troxel, Top Fuel, April 9, 2006, Las Vegas
72. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, May 21, 2006, Columbus, Ohio
73. Karen Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Oct. 1, 2006, Richmond, Va.
74. Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, March 18, 2007, Gainesville, Fla.
75. Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 1, 2007, Houston
76. Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, April 29, 2007, Atlanta
77. Melanie Troxel, Top Fuel, May 6, 2007, St. Louis
78. Troxel, Top Fuel, Sept. 16, 2007, Memphis
79. Peggy Llewellyn, Pro Stock Motorcycle, Sept. 23, 2007, Dallas
80. Ashley Force Hood, Funny Car, April 27, 2008, Atlanta
81. Troxel, Funny Car, May 18, 2008, Bristol, Tenn.
82. Hillary Will, Top Fuel, June 1, 2008, Topeka, Kan.
83. Ashley Force Hood, Funny Car, March 29, 2009, Houston
84. Force Hood, Funny Car, Sept. 7, 2009, Indianapolis
85. Force Hood, Funny Car, Sept. 6, 2010, Indianapolis
86. Karen Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle, July 24, 2011, Denver
87. Erica Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, July 1, 2012, Chicago
88. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, Aug. 5, 2012, Seattle
89. Courtney Force, Funny Car, Aug. 5, 2012, Seattle
90. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, Aug. 19, 2012, Brainerd, Minn.
91. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, Sept. 30, 2012, St. Louis
92. Force, Funny Car, Feb. 17, 2013, Pomona, Calif.
93. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, Feb. 24, 2013, Phoenix
94. Force, Funny Car, June 23, 2013, Epping, N.H.
95. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, Sept. 29, 2013, St. Louis
96. Alexis DeJoria, Funny Car, Feb. 23, 2014, Phoenix
97. DeJoria, Funny Car, March 30, 2014, Las Vegas
98. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, March 30, 2014, Las Vegas
99. Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock, April 27, 2014, Las Vegas
100. Courtney Force, Funny Car, May 25, 2014, Topeka
Women in NHRA Drag Racing, a brief history:
The following women (listed in alphabetical order by category) have competed in the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series:
Top Fuel (18): Vivica Averstedt, Dannielle DePorter, Vicky Fanning, Gina Ferraro, Brittany Force, Rhonda Hartman-Smith, Lori Johns, Kim LaHaie, Lucille Lee, Shirley Muldowney, Shelly Payne (Anderson), Cristen Powell, Leah Pritchett, Sue Ransom, Joanne Reynolds, Rachelle Splatt,
Melanie Troxel, Hillary Will
Funny Car (14): Alexis DeJoria, Vicky Fanning, Courtney Force, Ashley Force Hood, Rodalyn Knox, Paula Martin, Shirley Muldowney, Paula Murphy, Cristen Powell, Leah Pritchett, Susie Spencer, Melanie Troxel, Della Woods, Carol Yenter
Pro Stock (6): Erica Enders-Stevens, Grace Howell, Judy Lilly, Lucinda McFarlin, Shay Nicols, Shirley Shahan
Pro Stock Motorcycle (16): Dawn Matthews Baugues, Connie Cohen, Vicki Farr, Lori Francis, Linda Jackson, Anne Hansen, Elvira Karlsson, Peggy Lewellyn, Dawn Minturn, Stephanie Reaves, Angelle Sampey, Angie Smith (McBride), Karen Stoffer, Katie Sullivan, Valerie Thompson, Holly Wallace
Female leaders in victories:
1. Angelle Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle 41 (first at Reading 1996, last at Houston 2007)
2. Shirley Muldowney, Top Fuel 18 (first at Columbus 1976, last at Phoenix 1989)
3. Erica Enders-Stevens, Pro Stock 8 (first at Chicago 2012, last at Houston 2014)
4. Karen Stoffer, Pro Stock Motorcycle 6 (first at Houston 2004, last at Denver 2011)
5. Melanie Troxel, Top Fuel-Funny Car 5 (first at Pomona 1 2006, TF, last at Bristol 2008, FC)
6. Shelly Payne, Top Fuel 4 (first at Reading 1993, last at Seattle 1996)
Lori Johns, Top Fuel 4 (first at Pomona 1 1990, last at Memphis 1991)
Ashley Force Hood, Funny Car 4 (first at Atlanta 2008, last at Indianapolis 2010)
Courtney Force, Funny Car 4 (first at Seattle 2012, last at Topeka 2014)
10. Alexis DeJoria, Funny Car 2 (first at Phoenix 2014, last at Las Vegas 1 2014)
11. Lucille Lee, Top Fuel 1 (Atlanta 1982)
Cristen Powell, Top Fuel 1 (Englishtown 1997)
Peggy Llewellyn, Pro Stock Motorcycle 1 (Dallas 2007)
Hillary Will, Top Fuel 1 (Topeka 2008)
Female pro series world champions:
Shirley Muldowney, Top Fuel -- 3 (1977, 1980, 1982)
Angelle Sampey, Pro Stock Motorcycle -- 3 (2000, 2001, 2002)
Suggested Links
- Driving Skills for Life presentation given by Courtney Force
- Land speed record holder Valerie Thompson to appear at Phoenix motorcycle show
- Erica Enders-Stevens posts world-record fast pass in Gainesville
- Brittany Force makes first Top Fuel final round appearance


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I have been flirting with quilting for the last 20 years and now I finally have the time to get to work. The Block of the month class is wonderful because it is introducing me to blocks and techniques that I either didn't know about, or was afraid to try. I hope to use Craftsy to enhance my technique and allow me to evolve as a quilter.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Yes, the headline is correct, apparently Taco Bell has been working on serving beer but in a new spin-off company under U.S. Taco Co. & Urban Taproom. Unfortunately, plans to have a taproom came to a standstill leaving this new adventure with just serving soda-pop for now. But the company still intends to premiere beer milkshakes paired with tacos. (Thank god!)
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the first location chosen is in Huntington Beach, Calif., but they couldn't secure a liquor license due to the city's newer, more rigorous liquor laws they are in the middle of adopting. Patrons will now have to wait to enjoy those blended drinks of Guinness milkshakes paired with the perfect taco. The taproom had plans to open with taco beer pairings like a blueberry beer from Maine paired with a lobster taco, according to Venessa Wong, a food and drink contributor. She was also able to sample a "milkshake with Cinnamon Toast Crunch with tequila caramel sauce." Holy milkshake booze-A-rama!
It's not the first fast food chain to offer alcoholic beverages, but it is the first of fast food chains to consider a beer taproom, and the name "Urban Taproom" is fitting. Until the liquor license is obtained taco and beer-lovers will have to patiently wait and pair their favorite tacos with soda.
The Business Insider published a design concept photo which depicts an Urban loft-like restaurant. With yellow, turquoise, and some mint green floors; the color scheme will encite the senses to eat, drink and enjoy. Perhaps having a cool retro lightbulb sign hanging on a focal wall that reads, "EAT TACOS," helps to send some type of subliminal message to the mind, after a few beer milkshakes, to eat more tacos.
So far the "Urban Taproom" team said they went through more than 100 sodas in a week in search of the perfect ones for the restaurant. The main goal is to "serve 50 beers, and four to six will be on tap," and the team is out scouting other locations in Southern California, according to Businessweek.


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Click here to see what a Universe Day group in San Francisco did at a previous annual Universe Day. Just like "Earth Day" events, we encourage you to invent your own local awareness celebrations, gatherings, creative partnerships with organizations, educational events, and community events. We dare you to inspire outside-the-box on ways to promote awareness for effectively reducing carbon emissions by using the new universe evolutionary perspective to create a more sustainable planet.
Please send us information about the local Universe Day events that you are creating at firstname.lastname@example.com and we will let others know about them.
We have a new story of the Universe. Our own presence to the Universe depends on our human identity with the entire cosmic process. In its human expression the Universe and the entire range of earthly and heavenly phenomena celebrate themselves and the ultimate mystery of their existence in a special exaltation. Science has given us a new revelatory experience. It is now giving us a new intimacy with the Earth.
— Thomas Berry
Authors and Luminaries Comments on the Universe for the 3rd Annual Universe Day
Universe Day is a unique and utterly special celebration, where the universal Ground of Being itself, underlying and giving rise to all of manifestation, is celebrated, honored, and given thanks for. Unlike parochial and specific-cultural celebrations of Spirit,
this is a celebration of cross-cultural and trans-individual Being itself, manifest so beautifully and exquisitely in the elegance, truth, goodness, and beauty of the entire universe itself and its extraordinary evolution, which is nothing less than Spirit-in-action. Please come and join us in this wonderfully important and profound celebration, this coming December 31
-- Ken Wilber
Ken Wilber is the world's leading "integral" philosopher. The author of such titles as A Brief History of Everything (1996) and A Theory of Everything (2000), his philosophy integrates body, mind, soul, and Spirit with self, culture, and nature. Integral philosophy is rapidly becoming a powerful presence in fields as diverse as politics and spirituality, psychology and business, medicine, and art. Revered as the "Einstein of consciousness," Wilber has written sixteen books exploring different facets of human development and cultural evolution.


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According to Jeff Blake, Chairman of Sony Pictures Worldwide Marketing & Distribution, the next installment of Spider-Man will come to you in 3D. Set for a July 3, 2012 release date, the newly rebooted Spider-Man movie will be directed by Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer). Although a release date and director have been set, there is still no word yet on the cast. Early rumors have brought up names such as Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron to be the next Spider-Man. One name that was thought to be true was Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief). However, the rumors of Lerman being in talks with Sony to play Spider-Man was proven to be false when a representative of Sony Pictures said, "No offers have been made, nor have any business discussions been made with Lerman."
Spider-Man was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko back in 1962 and made his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15. It was Marvel's highest selling comic and was followed a year later by its own series, starting with Amazing Spider-Man #1. The title has becomes Marvel's top selling series. Today, a fairly mint condition issue of Amazing Fantasy #15 or Amazing Spider-Man #1 can fetch anywhere from $10,000 to well over $100,000 at auction.


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- About this Journal ·
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International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 212741, 13 pages
Security Visiting: RFID-Based Smartphone Indoor Guiding System
College of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Received 18 June 2013; Revised 30 November 2013; Accepted 16 December 2013; Published 19 January 2014
Academic Editor: Yunhuai Liu
Copyright © 2014 Hong Zeng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper presents a security visiting guiding system SVG composed of RFID, smart phone, and Wi-Fi signal widely available. The SVG system can provide visitors with the map of a given building, so that the visitor can easily find the target under its guide. It can also protect user's privacy location information by cryptographic two-dimension code and RFID. The two-dimension code can be easily obtained by a mobile phone and it authorizes a visitor to obtain the navigation service of SVG. The visitor receives the permission from his host and makes a date through SVG. Then, SVG will navigate both the persons to meet at any place in the building. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates and evaluates the SVG security scheme. We conduct an attacker model and test the ability of the scheme in protecting user's location security.
1. Introduction
Recently, people have achieved universal interpersonal communication with the help of modern devices, such as mobile phone and Internet. It brings huge benefits and convenience to the human relationship. However, such improvement on interpersonal communication might be abused so that the private information and property are divulged or lost. Especially, deliberate attacker or thieves always take advantage of a weak point in some open occasions. For example, some offices or labs can be arbitrarily accessed in many universities. Thus, some instrument and apparatus may often be misplaced and lost, or even be stolen sometimes. In this case, as such valuable devices may be lost, the open offices or labs will not be well used by the students. In another case, some private information, such as phone number or personal address, can be leaked when a stranger visits a host. The host may be willing to meet the stranger in a public place rather than personal addresses. Meanwhile, the host does not know the stranger and do not want to leak his personal phone number. This is another challenge.
This paper considers two scenarios: meeting stranger and managing valuable things, such as instrument and apparatus. These two scenarios seem to be not related to each other but the common point between these two scenarios is that a host meets/tracks an unknown or uncontrollable object. There are technologies to ensure that strangers can find each other by smartphones given the condition that the phone numbers are known [1]. In this paper, we address the same situation without the personal phone number being leaked. Considering another scenario, valuable objects in an open place could be easily lost. Previous work designed a tiny device equipped on valuable things, such as TV or sofa, so the tagged object can be tracked in case that it is stolen [2–4]. The proposed system will not only detect the stolen valuables, but also alarms before an object is moved away from the building. In this way, the object can be found as early as possible. Furthermore, we combine these two scenarios together and design a system to address the above challenges in these two scenarios.
In this paper, we present a novel security visiting guiding (SVG) system based on a combined system of smartphone and RFID. Based on this system, a host can meet strangers easily while his personal information will not be leaked. At the same time, the system can also manage the valuable objects so that they will not be lost. SVG consists of two parts: hardware and software. The hardware part is composed of RFID tags, readers, smartphone, and a server. The software part is a security visiting service, which runs on the server. The server also has a database storing the information of objects, such as a device or mobile phone, and each object is also assigned a unique number. The SVG system is usually equipped in a building or a lab. Thus, the server stores the map of the building or the lab, and a computer terminal which is located at the entrance of the building. When a stranger comes into the building and wants to meet a host over there, he can register in the system from the front desk client. After he obtains the host's affirmation, the system assigns him a temporary number. SVG uses the temporary numbers and the host's number to guide both of them. Even when they are moving, SVG can suggest them the shortest path and help them meet each other as quickly as possible.
The contribution of this paper is as follows:(i)this paper designs a security visiting guiding SVG to protect personal information while offering guiding service;(ii)SVG combines RFID and smartphone and uses Wi-Fi signal widely available. It can also manage objects and track their position in case the they are lost;(iii)we design a system for security visiting guiding. The system can offer visitor the map of a given building so that the visitor can conveniently find its target according to the map under the guide of SVG;(iv)this paper demonstrates and evaluates our SVG security scheme. The attacker model is introduced to test the ability of the scheme to protect user's location security. This model uses the entropy metric to quantify the privacy. The experiment results show that the entropy under our scheme can provide a good quantitative location privacy protection for users.
In the following context of this paper, we first introduce the background and our motivation in Section 2. Section 3 surveys the related work on location and location security. We present the design of our system in Section 4, and the evaluation results of our system are presented in Section 5. The whole paper is summarized in Section 6.
2. Background and Motivation
Nowadays, strange interviewers often enter personal offices or rooms in some company office buildings and school teaching/research buildings because these buildings are open for common people. Among these visitors, some are welcomed or dated in advance, such as students who want to meet teachers in a teaching or research building. Others may be not.
Although there are sign tables to indicate the office room numbers for people who work in a building, these persons do not always stay at their offices and interviewees unfamiliar to the buildings may spend much time on looking for a specific room. The private location information of these persons was provided openly, not guaranteed to be safely used. Meanwhile some unwelcomed visiting may interrupt the normal working or even threaten the safety of these persons. Although people can date by the traditional ways including communicating with each other by emails or phone calls in advance, it will take much extra time for some welcomed and strange interviewers to find the rooms of their interviewees when the interviewers are not familiar to the structure of the building, in which their interviewers are now located.
In recent years, many works designed new location approaches for smartphone users [1, 5–9] under the indoor scenario. The common target of these previous determines the latitude/longitude of the user by using Wi-Fi, FM, and so on, which are widely available in office or school teaching/research buildings. The previous works can help an interviewer find his/her interviewee by updating their locations frequently. But the application in this paper does not need the accurate location information but the logical location, such as office room number. Previous works [10–12] designed methods to identify the logical locations (Starbucks, Walmart, and RadioShack) instead of the coordinate-based localization. Constandache et al. designed an interesting system, called Escort, to guide a user to the vicinity of a desired person in a public place [1]. This idea of this system Escort is quite similar to that of this paper and it may lead to long delay or complex calculation since it learns the walking trails of different individuals periodically. These previous works can localize the coordinate-based or logical positions for users by smartphone but did not consider the privacy protection of individual users because the personal information, including personal position and time, phone number, and so on, may be revealed and abused in the process of localization.
Existing research has explored some methods to protect the privacy of users' locations. These methods can be broadly viewed in four different approaches [13], including -anonymity [14, 15], pseudonyms and mix zones [16, 17], path confusion [18], and hiding stars [19]. However, a person has to receive some strange interviewees sometimes in our system. In other words, a pair of trusted persons must know the location of each other. So these previous works did not meet the security requirement in our system. It motivates us to design a new system to offer the location information to authorized person and navigating one person to meet other persons meanwhile protecting the personal information during the process of localization. To ensure offering logical navigation for users while protecting their personal information, we design a system to allow authorized visiting and to prevent those unwilling visitings. This system bridges the connection between a host and an authorized visitor while protecting the hosts personal information from being revealed. Under this scenario, the system offers location information for both users to meet each other as quickly as possible. On the other hand, those unauthorized users cannot be offered localization information of both himself and the host. Our design aims to offer location and visiting service for the authorized persons while protecting their personal information by using the fare-free signal from widely available devices, such as Wi-Fi, in indoor scenario.
Nowadays, many office and teaching/research buildings are open so the personal privacy must be more carefully protected than those enclosed. Meanwhile, our system offers location service for those authorized persons so that a visitor, especially a strange visitor, can find his host quickly. Considering a scenario as the example shown in Figure 1, a visitor B is going to visit a host in room R311. Under this scenario, there are several cases, as listed below, that may often happen. When the visitor B is a stranger, he does not know whether the host C is in his room or not at the moment he arrives at his office. B does not know C's phone number but knows his name. This case is quite common; for example, students may look for their teacher in their university. In this case, B wants to obtain the certification from C about at least two questions. Does C agree to meet B? If yes, where is C so that B can find C quickly? C may not want to reveal his personal phone number to B though he agrees to meet B. Even if B knows C's room and phone number, B may require C's agreement to meet and must know where C is now. Although C may be now in Building No.1, he will not be in the Room R1311 of this building.
Therefore, the protection of personal information is necessary and location service can offer convenience for people meeting. Our system makes better use of the indoor infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi, in office or teaching/research building since such infrastructure is widely available nowadays. Meanwhile, we explore various lightweight sensors (e.g., microphone, accelerometer, etc.) on mobile phones to enable automatic and intelligent data collection in order to help the protection of personal information and the accurate location service.
3. Related Works
3.1. Location
The problem of indoor localization has been well researched by smartphone in recent years [1, 5–7]. Since the GPS information is hard to be available under the indoor scenario, techniques based on observation of signals from radio beacons, including Wi-Fi [20], cellular base stations (such as GPRS), or acoustic background spectrum [6], showed the most promise.
Tarzia et al. proposed an ambient sound fingerprint called the acoustic background spectrum (ABS) to determine a mobile phone's indoor location even when Wi-Fi infrastructure is unavailable or sparse [6].
Constandache et al. designed and implemented Escort, a system that guides a user to the vicinity of a desired person in a public place [1]. They only used an audio beacon, randomly placed in the building, to enable a reference frame and did not rely on GPS, Wi-Fi, or war-driving but accelerometer and compass measurements on smartphones. Similar works were also given to delete the reliance on Wi-Fi infrastructure and war-driving [21, 22].
Breaking away from coordinate-based localization, authors in [10–12] propose ways to identify logical locations (Starbucks, Walmart, and RadioShack), as opposed to physical coordinates (as in GPS). The rationale is that a large class of applications do not care about the latitude/longitude of the user; instead they desire to know the "place," where the user is located. These and several other works [23, 24] emphasize the broad and evolving nature of localization technology, driven primarily by the fast changing landscape of mobile, pervasive, people-centric computing.
There are lots of works using the signal of Wi-Fi to locate the position of users or clients [20, 25–31]. Another works analyzed the localization of the users in RFID systems [7, 32, 33].
Chen et al. proposed a framework that supports the group guiding service; that is, several members followed the track of a leader in a mixed group by RFIDs and wireless sensor networks [34]. A response mechanism will be built between leader and members, and a group guiding protocol is presented. The design enables reliable group guiding at low cost and low traffic load.
Nowadays, rfid-based positioning methods have been proposed. Wang and Katabi presented the first RFID positioning system to pinpoint the exact location of a tagged object combined with the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and dynamic time warping (DTW) techniques [35]. Xu et al. designed and implemented an RF-based device-free passive localization strategy using active RFID nodes and reached 97.2 percent accuracy and 0.36 meters average error distance [36].
3.2. Location Security
Many works have been put on protecting the security of individual location [13–16, 19, 37, 38].
-anonymity provides a form of plausible deniability by ensuring that the user cannot be individually identified from a group of users [14]. Alternate formulations such as CliqueCloak wait until at least different queries have been sent from a particular region [15].
Gruteser and Liu provided pseudonyms and mix zones method, by which each new location is sent to the LBS with a new pseudonym, and then the LBS may have difficulty following a user [16]. However, frequent updating may expose a pattern of closely spaced queries, allowing one to easily follow the user [17].
Hoh et al. extended the method of mix zones to path confusion by resolving the same-place same-time problem [18]. Path confusion will decide to not release the users' locations at all if insufficient anonymity has been accumulated after an interval. But it poses the risk that, for significant intervals of time, users' locations will not be exposed to the LBS. Naturally, service from the LBS will be unavailable for this entire duration.
When these previous methods try to obscure the user's path by hiding parts of it, Meyerowitz and Choudhury obscured the user's location by surrounding it with other users' paths [19]. In order not to require changing the LBS server architecture and third party privacy-protection servers, Shokri et al. developed a scheme MobiCrowd that allowed LBS users to reduce their exposure while they continued to receive the location context information that they need [39]. MobiCrowd achieved this by leveraging on peer collaboration: the user can get information from nearby users and can thus avoid getting exposed to the LBS server. This paper adopts a quite simple and effective method to protect users' location and information by hiding the individual information, which is quite different from previous works.
4. SVG System Design
This section describes the structure of our SVG system and presents techniques to deal with the challenges described in Section 1.
4.1. System Overview
Our SVG system is composed of the following components shown in Figure 2.
4.1.1. Location Server
As shown on the left side of Figure 2, the location server contains three functions: localization service, personal information, and building structure storage. The server stores the digital maps of building structures, which are preprocessed and stored in the server in advance. The personal information of the persons, who work in the building (such as phone or room number), can be stored in advance or updated online. The server also provides localization service to those authorized persons.
4.1.2. Security Protection Server
The security protection server provides the service to protect the private information for the people, whose personal information was stored in the location server and the location of both visitors and their hosts. It contains a security protection mechanism to establish the connection between a visitor and the server by one time of hand-shaking. The visitors, who agree to have meetings by their hosts or were registered in the location server, are authorized to obtain the localization service. The mechanism ensures that the authorized users can localize themselves or their hosts so that they can know their location and find their hosts as soon as possible.
4.1.3. Security Protection Mechanism
In many common visiting, the personal information, such as his current location and phone number, is reluctant to be shared. In our system, we design a QR code-based mechanism to protect personal information and to authorize visitors to download the building map from the location server to personal smartphone. We hide the personal information in a QR code so that each individual has his corresponding code. The QR code form is shown in Figure 3(a) and the generated two-dimensional code picture is shown in Figure 3(b).
These personal information and their codes are stored in the location server. On the other hand, the building map is previously drawn and stored in this location server. When a visitor is authorized by his host through the QR code offered on the terminal at the front door in Figure 1, he can download the building map and obtain the location serve.
4.1.4. System Security Scheme
Meyerowitz and Choudhury [19] divided the testing area into regular 10 m*10 m pixel and designed and implemented a "Cachecloak" security privacy engine to protect the mobile cars' location information from being attacked by hostile. Our SVG system scheme adopts the similar method to protect the hosts' location information besides the above RFID and QR code. Each floor of the building was partitioned into two kinds of cells: bidirectional corridor as one kind of cell and the intersection among the corridors and stairs as another kind. Each cell is allocated a 3*3 historical matrix , and as one of the elements of the matrix. The initial data of the matrix can come from the historical database from multiple users. Each element of the matrix means the number of times entering from cell and exiting to cell .
Therefore, given the entering cell , the conditional probability exiting for cell is
Then, the probability exiting for cell is
Through the scheme, we can forecast the most possibility of arriving at cell . The entire location information will then be sent to the server.
4.1.5. Visitor and Host Users
Host users refer to those users registered in the location server, who work in the building. Visitor user refers to any person, who is going to visit some hosts in the building or just want the localization service. Naturally, a visitor user initiates a meeting by querying his host through the security protection server.
Next, we give an example in Figure 4 and demonstrated the detail work process of our system. In the scenario of this example, user A wants to visit B and is not sure where B is now. So he wants to know where B is now and how to find him. If A is not familiar with the building where B works, it would be more difficult for A to find B. Our system can offer service to A and help him find B quickly by a terminal, which is preciously placed at the entrance of the building as shown in Figure 1. Through the terminal of our system, A asks B's confirmation to meet as shown in Figure 4(a). During this process, in order to protect B's personal information (e.g., personal phone number), A is not sure whether B will want to meet him or not and he does not know the accurate position B will be located at. Thus, A can query through the terminal connecting to a server, which contains the location server and security protection server. The security protection server then sends a message to B through the Wi-Fi APs (as shown in Figure 4(a)). If B agrees to meet A, the security protection server feeds back to A and offers A an encrypted two-dimensional code (as shown in Figure 4(b)). Only A can use the camera in his smartphone to get B's information by scanning the picture and inputting his password. Others cannot unlock the picture without the password.
4.2. Hybrid Localization
In indoor environment, GPS signal is weak or unprocurable so those GPS-based localization methods are not precise enough. Other localization methods, such as cellular base stations (such as GPRS) or acoustic background spectrum [6], can offer precise location information for users. But they can only offer location for individuals and cannot show the relative positions of several persons. For example, when A tries to find B, the quite useful information for A is B's position relative to A. In the scenarios of visiting, the precision of these above methods is relatively low. In our system, we combine precious localization methods and help users to find each other at two stages. At the first stage, we use Wi-Fi-based localization methods [30, 31] to guide visitors to get close to each other when the distance between them is long. At the second stage, Wi-Fi-RFID-combined method [34] is used to shorten the searching time when host and visitor are close to each other. In this line-of-light range, it is quite easy to find each other.
4.3. Navigation Time
The navigation time is an important metric to measure the performance of our system. Users are willing to find their host in a time as short as possible. The navigation time, in this paper, is defined as the interval from the moment a visitor is authorized to access our system at the terminal to the time that he finds his host.
5. System Implementation and Evaluation
We implement a prototype system on the Android platform by using two kinds of experiment methods in the experiment scene. We test and evaluate the system performance. We first present the experiment setup in Section 5.1, then we describe the experiment scene in Section 5.2. Experiment results are given in Section 5.3. We present the overall performance of searching time using the system comparing to that not using the system in Section 5.4. Finally, the evaluation of privacy quantization based on the attacker model is presented in Section 5.5. The following subsections give more details about the experiment methodology and findings.
5.1. Experiment Setup
As shown in Figures 5(a) and 5(b), we implement the application on the Android 2.3 platform with ZTC mobile phone, RFID transceiver GZ100-NR01, and RFID perception-location tag WS-CT-06. The ZTC has a 192 MB RAM and 528 MHz 7201 processor. The GZ100-NR01, using 2.4 GHz wireless communication frequency, has more than 30 m wireless communication distance. The WS-CT-06 is ultra-low power RFID tag, its power transmission is less than 1 mW, and communication distance reaches more than 40 m.
We implement the localization and security protection application on the DELL PowerEdge 2950 PC server with 2 GB memory and Intel Xeon E5405 processor. The sever established communication connections between terminal and server and server and mobile phone by socket technique to provide five kinds of serve, including foreground serve, mobile phone serve, RFID serve, data encryption, and database management, as shown in Figure 6.
5.1.1. Foreground Serve
Foreground serve requests message from terminal and interacts information between server and terminal. It uses user-defined communication protocol and the communication port number is 8000. Foreground serve responds to the request of terminal by command-line format "command-XX*XX*".
It has three types of commands: (1) find-AA*BB*, (2) code-XX*, and (3) pic-.
In "find-AA*BB*" command, "AA" describes the information of host, such as name and RFID ID number. "BB" represents the information of visitor, such as visitor's name and main content of visiting. "*" means the space between AA and BB. The command is to represent the procedure in which the visitor wants to visit the host; he or she should input some information listed above, and the backend server will analyse the information according to the command format and feed back the search result to the visitor using the returned value of the finding command. The find command has five returned values: −1, 0, 1, 2, and 3. "−1" means that the host is offline, "0" means search failure, "1" means that the host refuses meeting, "2" means successful search and the visitor is ready to input encrypted key, and "3" means the server receives the encrypted key successfully and is ready to send encrypted two-dimensional code picture to the visitor.
In "code-XX*" command, "XX" means the encrypted key, the command tells the server that the visitor will send the encrypted key to it and anyone else will not get the information of the two-dimensional code picture through his mobile phone without the encrypted key.
"pic-" command shows that the server will send the two-dimensional code picture with encrypted key to the terminal, and the visitor can get the two-dimensional code picture through his/her mobile phone's camera by the self-designed Android application software.
5.1.2. Mobile Phone Serve
Mobile phone serve processes the data interactions between the server and mobile phone, including mobile receiving command from the server or updating data to it. The default communication port number is 6000. The function provided by the mobile phone serve is to realize the control to mobile phone. There is only two commands: Call and Error. The "Call" command tells the host user that there is a visitor who wants to visit him/her and requests the host user to authorize whether he/she is allowed to visit or not. The "Error" command is only a debug command which is called only when the application of the mobile phone serve goes wrong.
5.1.3. RFID Serve
RFID serve receives the tag information such as the RFID transceiver's ID and tag's ID number. The information will provide the help for computing the host's location; the default port number is 6666. The format of received information is as follows:
RFID Transceiver IDTAG ID number1TAG ID number2TAG ID NUMBERN.
5.1.4. Data Encryption
The system will encrypt the host's location information by means of two-dimensional code through data encryption model; the two-dimensional code picture is less than 4 MB and can only be recognized by the visitor who knows the encrypted key; we use the UTF-8 coding mode to encrypt the key.
5.1.5. Database Management
The database management model stores and manages the basic information, including name, phone number, RFID tag's ID number, and two-dimensional code picture.
5.2. Experiment Scenario
We do our experiments at building no. 1 at the campus of Hangzhou Dianzi University. The building is U-shaped, where the north rooms' number of the building is even, and the south is odd. The structure of each floor of the building is the same. There are stairs on both north and south sides and the elevator lies in the south. To fairly undertake the experiments, the volunteers begin to find the host by stairs instead of elevator, and we count the consumed time by stopwatch. Figure 7 shows the plane structure of each floor. We use existing base stations () and place several RFID readers (); the terminal computer is placed at the entrance hall. First, an access request by the visitor was sent to the host; after the host approved it (as shown in Figure 8(a)), the server would send a cryptographic two-dimensional code picture to the foreground (in Figure 8(b)); the visitor inputed the password (in Figure 8(c)) and decoded the two-dimensional code picture (in Figure 8(d)) to get the position information of the host.
5.3. Experiment Results
We construct two kinds of experiment scenarios: one is that the host is in one room and his or her position is unchanged, the other one is that the host's position is dynamically changed. Some volunteers are familiar with the host, and the others are unfamiliar. They can search the host by the host's name or his/her RFID tag ID number. We have done two groups of experiments, respectively, in each of scenarios, which are (1) the host's friends want to find him/her, but they are not familiar with the building; (2) some strangers want to find the host and they are not familiar with the building too. To eliminate accidental factors, several runs of the same experiments are carried out in our work.
5.3.1. The First Class Experiment
The position of the host user, C, is unchanged in every experiment. Two volunteers A and B want to visit C at the same time; they are both familiar with C, but are not familiar with the building and do not know where C is. A and B begin to search for C from the entrance hall at the same time. A uses the system, and inputs C's name through the terminal application to find C and B does not use the system. We compare with the time needed to find C for A and B. We will do several experiments by changing the static position of C.
5.3.2. The Second Class Experiment
The position of C is unchanged in every experiment. Another two volunteers D and E want to visit C at the same time, but they are both strangers to C and do not know where C is. D and E begin to search for C from the entrance hall at the same time. D uses the system and inputs C's RFID tag number through the terminal application to find C and E does not use the system. We compare with the time needed to find C for D and E.
5.3.3. The Third Class Experiment
The position of C is changed dynamically in every experiment. Two volunteers A and B want to visit C at the same time, they are both familiar with C, but are not familiar with the building and do not know where C is. A and B begin to search for C from the entrance hall at the same time. A uses the system and inputs C's name in the foreground application to find C and B does not use the system. We compare with the time needed to find C for A and B.
5.3.4. The Fourth Class Experiment
The position of C is changed dynamically in every experiment. Another two volunteers D and E want to visit C at the same, but they are both strangers to C and do not know where C is. D and E begin to search for C from the entrance hall at the same time. D uses the system and inputs C's RFID tag number in the foreground application to find C and E does not use the system. We compare with the time needed to find C for D and E.
5.4. Performance Evaluation
5.4.1. Localization Accuracy in Different Places
First, we use the APs placed in the same room to measure the localization accuracy in the same room. And then, the same experiment is done in the corridor by the off-the-shelf APs deployed in different rooms and corridor. We specially take into account both the complicated multipath effect and the shadowing fading brought by wall shield. We plot the probability and cumulative distribution of localization error across 10 positions by FILA method [30], as shown in Figures 9(a) and 9(b). The average error is about 1.5 m and the maximum error is less than 3 m.
5.4.2. Searching Time and Efficiency
We collect the real time-consuming data based on the above experiments and present the final performance evaluation result. Figure 10 shows the real application of the system when the host's position is changed. After the visitor arrives at the place near room 325, he finds that the host has moved to room 320 by his smartphone application, so he changes his route and reaches the appropriate place to meet the host. Figures 11 and 12 show the experiments result and performance analysis. Figures 11(a) and 11(c) show the time needed for familiars and strangers. Figures 11(b) and 11(d) show the efficiency improvement of the first and second class searching by using the system. The time needed and efficiency performance of the third and fourth class searching are shown in Figure 12.
When the host's position is unchanged, Figure 11(a) shows the time needed that familiars want to find the host in the building without SVG versus with SVG by inputting the host's name. In Figure 11(b), the average searching efficiency is increased to 25 percent. When strangers want to find someone in the building without the system, we can find in Figure 11(c) that it will need more time comparing to Figure 11(a), if both strangers and familiars use the SVG system, the searching time needed is almost the same, and Figure 11(d) shows that there is about 35 percent efficiency improvement for strangers searching with the system. From Figures 11(a) and 11(c), we can find that if familiars and strangers use the SVG system for positioning and searching, the time needed is almost invariant, but if not, the searching time will be significantly increasing in doing the same thing, and the farther the host is from the entrance hall, the more time it will take if we do not use the SVG system.
But when the position of the host is changed dynamically, Figure 12(c) shows that it will take more time to find the host without the system than Figures 11(a) and 11(c) for familiars and strangers, and the time needed is slightly increased by using the system compared to Figures 11(a) and 11(c). When the position changed smoothly, such as in the same floor, our SVG system needs less time to find the host while the system without SVG needs more. On the other hand, for the strangers, when the position of the host changes greatly, the time needed in the system using SVG will be much lower than the systems without SVG. From Figures 12(b) and 12(d), we can find that there is about 45 percent increase of searching efficiency performance, respectively, by the SVG system.
From Figures 11(a), 11(c), 12(a), and 12(c), we can find that when the destination where the visitor wants to find is near to the foreground, such as room 105 on the first floor, it took almost the same time for strangers and familiars to get to the destination. But if the destination is far from the foreground, the strangers will spend more time without the SVG system. At the same time, we also find that there are some dots far from the curves in Figures 11 and 12; it means that it is deviated from our expected time. There are some influential factors such as Wi-Fi connection quality, two-dimensional code pictures size, and communication distance. First, in the building, Wi-Fi communication often disconnects and it will make the communication quality between the terminal and server and server and visitor become abnormal. Second, when the two-dimensional code picture size comes close to 4 M bytes, it will take more time to transmit the picture from the server to the terminal.
5.5. Attacker Model and Privacy Metrics
5.5.1. Attacker Model
We suppose that the attacker has access to the same historical matrix . First, we associate a probability vector with each cell existing in the map. The three elements of , as shown in (3), represent the probability that one user entered from side to cell , Now, we define a transition probability , which means the probability that cell reaches cell from one side of cell . Then, the can be expressed by Through the attacker model, the attacker will determine the possibility that the user might go in any specific direction.
5.5.2. Privacy Metrics
A trace-based simulation tool VANETMobiSim [19] was brought to simulate the realistic scene of our building by the SVG security scheme. The existing map of the building was loaded into VANETMobiSim; each floor is divided into five cells and has six paths. The location information is stored in the trace file of VANETMobiSim.
We use the location entropy to quantify privacy based on the attacker model. The location entropy is defined as the number of bit as follows: Entropy is valuable for location privacy because it gives a precise quantitative performance of the attacker's uncertainty. is easy to understand the different place where the user will be. It will give the attacker more difficulty in acquiring the location information of the user when the value of increases.
Five nodes, randomly placed at the map, had been used to test the performance of our SVG security scheme for 20 minutes, as shown in Table 1. The simulation results show that the mean value of the is still less by 6 bits under our SVG scheme and has notable increasing after the system is under attack for 5 minutes. It is difficult for the attacker to know where the user is, because he would find that it will spend much more time to get the correct location information among 64 different information.
In our future works, we will continue to construct a more stable communication network and improve the network transmission quality. We will try to use the 3G network to improve the network throughput.
6. Conclusion
This paper has presented a prototype SVG system using Wi-Fi, RFID, and commodity mobile phones. The proposed system provides cost-efficient solutions to indoor guiding and security visiting. We comprehensively evaluate the system deployed on the Android platform. Through the experiments, the evaluation results demonstrate that our system can shorten the searching time and protect user's privacy.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.
This work is supported by the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant no. 61190113, the Young Program of NSFC under Grant no. 61003298, the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation under Grant nos. Y1101336 and LY12F02005, and the open funding of the National Key Lab of Sonar Science and Technology in Hangzhou City under Grant no. KYB070512005.
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The gown itself is gorgeous but my cathedral length veil was custom made by the bridal boutique I bought the gown from and has hand-sown Swarovski crystals. The veil was made for the dress and it's breathtaking! The veil was $1200 and I am selling it for $600, but if you'd like the gown and the veil I will sell them both for $2000.
- Alterations: Very slight alternations-the gown had to taken in around the bust, waist and sleeves but it did not require hemming. I also was alternered to that it can be bustled (and the bustle stayed in-tact!) I am 5'8'' and wore 1.5 inch heels. At the time of my wedding I weighed 118 pounds and wore a size 2 or 4.
- Preservation Method: I had the dress and veil professionally dry-cleaned and preserved. It has not been removed from the sealed box. While I will accept returns if you choose to do so it will be at your cost and an additional $150 to have my gown and veil "re-preserved."
- Terms of Sale: Returns Accepted
- Original Owner: Yes
- Has Original Receipt: Yes
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Will Ship to: Anywhere at Seller Expense
- Payment Methods Accepted: Escrow.com
Please read our BUYER'S GUIDE before purchasing a dress online.


text:
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Fair Express: The OC Fair Express offers weekend bus service to the fair through Aug. 11. One-way fare is $2 from the Metrolink station, 1039 N. Pacific Center Drive. Buses run hourly from 2:30 p.m. to midnight on Fridays, 9:30 a.m. to midnight on Saturdays and Sundays. Information: octa.net.
Art Marroquin, 714-704-3769


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Korea: a new great power?
Author: Artyom Lukin, FEFU
Some South Koreans like to see their country as an emerging great power, but can the Republic of Korea really claim this status? To answer this question one needs to identify the essential qualities of a great power.
First, a state must be able to defend its basic security and sovereignty without relying on other powers or international institutions. Sufficient military capability, perhaps including nuclear deterrents, is crucial. By some estimates, South Korea has the best army in Asia. But in the realm of national defence, Seoul still critically depends on the United States.
Second, an aspiring great power needs both hard power (including material and demographic resources) and soft power (an attractive political and cultural image) to have global influence. South Korea boasts the 13th-biggest economy, with its rate of growth overshadowing that of the Western world. But although South Korea, particularly its pop culture, is already noticeable internationally, its soft power is yet to become a global force.
Third, the country must show willingness to proactively shape global processes and the international order. South Korea is eager to enter the rank of nations that define the rules in world politics and the international economy. For instance, Seoul has successfully sought to host premier international events, such as the G20 and nuclear security summits. Seoul has also been steadily increasing its contribution to development aid and international security missions.
Fourth, great power status should be confirmed by membership of the most influential international groupings, such as the United Nations Security Council or the G20. Although the incumbent UN secretary-general is from South Korea, Seoul is a long way from attaining a permanent seat on the Security Council. Nonetheless, the ROK has become a prominent member of the G20 and plays a major role in Asia Pacific regional institutions.
Despite remarkable growth in its economic, political and military standing over the past several decades, South Korea falls short of great power status. This becomes clear if one compares the ROK with second-tier great powers, such as France. South Korea loses out to France on all key measures. Population-wise, there are 50 million South Koreans versus 65 million French. South Korea's GDP of US$1.1 trillion is overshadowed by France's US$2.7 trillion. In military–strategic terms, the crucial difference between Seoul and Paris is France's ability to independently provide its own security, underpinned by the French nuclear arsenal.
For all its global ambitions and comparatively dynamic economy, South Korea is not on the verge of becoming a great power. The best it can hope for is to establish itself as a strong middle power. However, great-power-hood could be achieved by a unified Korea.
The combined population of South and North Korea would be 74 million, much bigger than France's or the United Kingdom's. Although there is a widespread belief that unification with the destitute North would damage South Korea's economy, the opposite may turn out to be true. The South will have to spend a lot of money on the North, but the investments will pay off, as the North has an abundance of the most precious economic resource: labour. Rather than hurting Korea's economy, the unification would boost the nation's development, significantly raising its GDP.
The reunification of the North and South, both possessing formidable armed forces, would certainly increase Korea's military–strategic weight. The most intriguing question is whether the new Korea would maintain the DPRK's nuclear legacy. Finally, whereas the two Koreas currently divert a huge amount of resources to the North–South confrontation, after unification they would be free to use these to raise their country's international standing.
Granted, all this would only be possible if unification occurred and Korea acted as a unitary player on the world stage, even if internally it resembled a confederation. The notion of Korea as a new great power might even serve as an added incentive to unify.
How would Korea's regional neighbours respond to the prospect of Korea as a new great power? China is unlikely to be pleased; Beijing considers the Peninsula its sphere of influence. Korea's emergence as another Asian great power may also hamper China's drive for hegemony in East Asia. Japan would hardly welcome Korea's great power transformation. Japan's relationships with both the North and the South are precarious and Tokyo does not want another strong competitor in Asia. The United States has a stake in the emergence of a strong counterweight to China, but Korea becoming a great power may terminate or at least transform the US–Korean bilateral alliance. Washington is likely to support the unification only if the new Korea remains pro-American.
Russia seems to be the only Northeast Asian power which has no reservations about the Korean unification. A united Korea would remove a flashpoint near Russian borders. Korea as a great power would also be instrumental in balancing China's potential hegemony and guarding against a possible recurrence of Japanese imperialism. The unified Korea's surging economy could also increase demand for the Russian Far East's commodities.
For a long time, Korea was a pawn, often a victim, caught in great powers' rivalry. Now it has a chance to acquire great power status for itself. Whether this chance is realised depends partly on the other major powers, but largely on the Koreans themselves.
Artyom Lukin is Associate Professor and Deputy Director for Research at the School of Regional and International Studies, Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia.
The full version of this essay is available here.
Post a comment
East Asia Forum welcomes comments, both for adding depth to analysis and for bringing up important new issues. Original comments adding insight and contributing to analysis are especially encouraged.
The editors retain the right to refuse and edit comments at any time.


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For those who aren't familiar with the term "staging", it consists of privately deploying your code to a production server (or a clone of your server) so you can make sure nothing is going to break when you go live.
I usually stage my code on domain staging.example.com where example.com is my production domain.
The problem I frequently run into is when some of the application logic depends on the domain name, especially if the domain name is hard coded somewhere.
How do you deal with that situation, assuming you staging and production environments are on the same server?


text: Boy, have times changed over the years. This is a pit scene and track clean up shot of the High School Nationals way back in 1985. Back then, Brad New was a busy young man. Not only did he work the starting line, pictured cleaning up grease sweep as a member of the starting line crew and starter (25 years ago), but he also competed in the High School Series for Borah High. It's just amazing looking back at the pit area as it appeared all those years ago.


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Hamptons Property Fight Brings Indignant Tears To Terry Semel's Eyes
It's the injustice. The indignity.
Former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel and his next-door neighbors on Further Lane in East Hampton, Jonathan and Peter Sobel, have been fighting in court for at least four years. The issue: a little extra house Semel built on his eight-acre property. You would think that the Sobels would just let it go—that's what Terry thought, too. But no. Instead it has erupted into "World War III," he told the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals last week.
He approached the board meekly, speaking quietly at first. "I was hoping to come here for a peaceful summer," he said. His voice quavered and broke at moments as he spoke, but he ended on a louder note saying that he would pursue the fight he says his Further Lane neighbors began. "I don't care how long it takes or how much money it takes," he said.
Some might say the tearing up and a "World War III" analogy is over-the-top — after all, what we are talking about is real estate in the Hamptons. But Terry will tell you, there are parallels.
I Among them: Injustice. Indignity. Oppression. The curbing of a man's basic human freedom to build himself a massive mansion on a slip on sand in commemoration of his life on earth. This battle with the Sobels is like Semel's Vietnam, his Afghanistan, his Iraq. It's a quagmire, but he is soldiering on, because he knows it is the right thing to do. Others might buckle, others might look for an easy way out, but not Terry. He will stay strong: "If somebody wants a fight, they picked the wrong person," he said.
Former Yahoo Exec Promises Fight [East Hampton Star]
Earlier: Warring Hamptons Neighbors Stay on Their Sides of the Fence


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Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian
Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian
This was the single greatest concert I have ever seen in my life. This beats R.E.M. in the MIT gym on the Preconstruction tour when they were young and hungry and wanted to kick some ass. This beats Dizzy Gillespie at the Blue Note two months before he died; that was more important, perhaps, but Diz had no chops left and it was kind of sad. This beats being at the taping of "Rapmania" at the Apollo in 1989, where everyone who was anyone in hip-hop was tearing it up and the hardcore Harlem crowd was booing L.L. for being soft ("don't call it a comeback" my ass). This even beats watching Boozoo Chavis and Beau Jocque in a battle of the bands at the Rock'N'Bowl in New Orleans.
George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic
4 Sep 2002: Orpheum Theater Madison, Wisconsin
This, people, was the Mothership. I've been waiting to see this concert since I was in 7th grade and saw P.Funk footage on some ABC special about music. All my friends were like "Oh my god did you see Springsteen on that thing he was runnin' all over the place he's so cool" and all I could think was that I had to see George Clinton live sometime before I died. Or before he did.
And so when I walk into Madison's newly revamped Orpheum Theater with my brother—to whom I had the honor and duty of introducing to the P when we were growing up in semi-rural Oregon—I only have two fears. One: was there any way that George Clinton could live up to my lofty expectations, now that he's 60 and more famous for his samples and his hair than his actual music? And two: would my Madison people live up to the lofty expectations of a P.Funk audience? If this were a summer concert, I wouldn't think so, but college just got back in session, which means that this is the first big show of the school year for UW students, which means kids are gonna go wild tonight.
The show starts right on time with the THC Mercenaries, a three-man rap squad from New Jersey. They are backed by three of the younger members of the P.Funk collective on drums and bass and guitar, and at first it seems pretty clear that the backing band was the best thing going on. They're energetic and all, and I appreciate the fact that the three MCs have different flows and different stage attitudes, but they seem thrown at the lack of crowd response, and their choruses lack any kind of hook, even with the live band. So I go out to get us some beers . . . and return to a different group entirely. When I return, the rappers sound better and stronger and cooler, the band is serving the rhymes rather than the other way round, hands are waving in the air as if people just don't care, etc. I'm thinking that "Summertime in '97" could be nice on the radio. Someone with money better snap 'em up with the quickness.
But then they are done, and the place starts buzzing hard. Techies and musicians are walking around the stage randomly, but then a couple of them pick up guitars and instruments and start playing. Before we know it, it was on. (No, they don't use the spaceship set anymore. Get over it.) An insignificant funk jam began, as people keep coming out onstage, some toting their instrument cases or gym bags, chatting with each other, some still tuning up. But as the stage starts to fill—six, seven, eight, nine musicians—the jam gets more and more serious, hard, tough.
That's the secret of the Parliament/Funkadelic approach: the trivial is the significant. The old-timers are there: Lige Curry on bass switching off with Billy "Bass" Nelson, Cordell "Boogie" Mosson and Blackbyrd McKnight and Michael Hampton on guitars, Eric "Razor Sharp" Johnson on keyboards and Frank "Kash" Waddie on drums—but they're playing right along new members, most of whose names weren't mentioned but who are obviously playing in the coolest finishing school in the world. It's an apprenticeship, it's a collective, it's a working band containing sixty-year-olds and twenty-somethings. (By the end of the show, I count 19 different singers and musicians onstage at the same time.)
We all go nuts when Garry "Doo-Wop" Shider saunters out onstage. Most people, I imagine, are just psyched to see "the diaper guy" who they'd heard about from others who'd seen a show, and that's cool. I mean, it's hilarious: a middle-aged guy with a huge gut (and the most spectacular outie I've ever seen) wearing nothing but a big white diaper with "PFUNK" written on it. But Shider has been the secret weapon of P.Funk forever, as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, and Clinton's right-hand man. And that's the way he plays it throughout, coordinating everything, moving people's guitar cords for them and checking to make sure microphones are working and smiling at the crowd and leading the chants and playing a beautiful blue guitar. The man is amazing. And he's wearing a diaper.
So we don't even miss George when Doo-Wop steers us through "Make My Funk the P.Funk", which turns into "Funkentelechy" when the three female vocalists come out: Sheila Brody looking Detroit fabulous, Kendra Foster in a flapper dress and floppy hat, and Kim Manning doing hippie hottie Phish-y dancing. We segue right into "Bop Gun" and then "Gamin' On Ya" (during which a tripping college student passes out in my aisle and is carried out by a house manager) and Foster starts off on a vocal solo and it's all rolling right along . . .
. . . and then, like a mummy from the tomb, George Clinton appears from behind the stage and starts making his way up to the front. He takes his time, because he can, and because it's cool. We can see every funked-up yellow and orange and green extension sprouting from his head, and we can tell he's got a bemused look in his eye even though he's wearing the darkest glasses ever made. And when he finally reaches the microphone and commands us to raise our hands, you know our hands are in the air. "Madison!" he yells, and we scream and make the devil-heavy-metal sign with our fingers. "It's gonna be so funky in here!"
I think the music only stops maybe four times during the entire show. Some of these dudes have been playing together since the late '60s, but their show isn't anything like a Dead noodlejam—it's incredibly tight, like a James Brown show, but it never feels conducted: people know what to do, and they do it. When it's time for Brody and Clinton to join in on a call and response of "The shit ain't over!, they hit it for as long as they need to, and then Clinton nods his head and they move on to a Manning solo—way too many Stevie Nicks movements, but great vocals, and genuine happiness in Clinton's smile ("Didn't my white girl do good?" is all but said out loud) and then suddenly Eric McFadden is wailing away on an electric mandolin solo. Yeah, you heard me right.
And it's all Loud As A Motha: the three horns are juiced heavily, the synth squiggles are assaulting, and every guitar solo is heavy and overmodulated and feedbacky. Hampton's having some trouble at first, starts screwing up on some of his solos and laughing at his own futility, but he ends up figuring it out. Just about everyone leaves the stage for his blistering 15-minute "Maggot Brain"—middle-aged friends of mine can't take the volume and bolt, but I look around to see nothing but jaws hanging open in astonishment at his technical bravura and pure soul. Then he leaves, and McKnight, who was a temporary member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, gets his own solo; at this point, my ears are ringing so badly that it sounds like he's playing two screechy tones for the entire piece, but I can see his fingers flying back and forth, and it looks like he's blowing it out, so we clap anyway.
The band is back to rip through "Flash Light," which gives Carlos McMurray the chance to dance around in the Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk suit. (Dude's got some Serious Abs. Hate him.) We're shrieking "Flash Light" every time Clinton tells us to, but our voices are shot, so he tortures us and makes us do that for about three or four hilarious minutes. Then that drum beat comes in and we're smack-dab in the middle of an epic version of "(Not Just) Knee Deep", which contains an interpolated version of "Sentimental Journey" for Foster to wail on while George starts tangoing with some college girl in a long red slinkdress. The look on his face as he does this makes everyone laugh and smile so hard I can hear faces cracking and defenses melting all over the hall.
Hell, I know I'm gushing. I know I'm supposed to be more intellectual about this, more detached, more clinical. I know I'm running the risk of turning off people who think music is all about suffering and angst and "difficulty." But those people suck anyway, and I don't care. This was the best band in America, maybe the best live band in American history, playing funky metal music that is more avant-garde and influential and "difficult" than anyone will ever give them credit for. This was everything I had every hoped it would be from the time I was in 7th grade. This was three and a half hours of communion at the only church that matters.
And it woulda been more, too, had not the bastards who run the city decreed that the microphones be shut off at midnight. I'm gonna run for mayor.
Lucky Chops "Buyo" (video) (premiere) // Music
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Rats, Writing, and the Nature of Evil: A Night With Stephen King
// Re:Print
"Stephen King and George RR Martin prove to be a dynamic duo on King's End of Watch tour.READ the article