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First Cell Phone for Dogs
revelCyllufyalP writes "A company called PetsMobility has come out with PetCell, the first cell phone for dogs. The phone will allow users to call their dogs in case the dog gets away and also includes a GPS tracking device if the dog doesn't respond to the call. In addition, the PetCell will feature GeoFence, which will alert owners whenever their dogs wander outside a prescribed area. Will the PetCell actually prove useful to dog owners or is it just another cheap gimmick?"
Kitty goes out, Kitty comes back in.
Except when Kitty gets run over, or sneaks onto a truck bound for Vladivostok, or urinates on the wrong car, or gets caught by animal control, or... Quite apart from the lack of consideration towards your neighbours (people can be allergic, phobic or just plain don't want kittycrap in their yards), it's not good petkeeping to let it run free either.
If you want to have a cat in a city, keep it indoors or walk it leashed. Seriously. Just like with dogs, if they are trained to wear a leash as kittens they have no problem with it.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Gimmick, yes; cheap, no.
It's bought and used by hunters. They get the dog's position sent to them via SMS and can call the dog up to hear what he's up to (barking at a bear), but the main reason for the phone is the SMS capability. The alternative up to now has been a transmitter and triangulation gear, but that's slow and cumbersome. How else do you propose the owner would get the GPS info, if not from some kind of transmitter on the dog?
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.. So we deveice being mentioned is NOT the first one.
http://www.pointersolutions.com/eng/hunting.htm
My dad bought one for his dog last summer.
it's based on benefon esc gps-enabled mobile phone,
and has been on market for couple of years now.
the kit contains two phones, one wiith full phone functionality ( for the hunter ) and one without keyboard and display ( for the dog ).
the hunter can see where the for is going from his map display, and can also call a call and listen if the dog is barking.
Not everyone lives in a city. Our cat runs free, as do most other cats in the neighbourhood. Given the fact that I live in of a small town* that's perfectly okay as long as one doesn't mind the occasional slaughtered bird on the doorstep (hey, it's supposed to be a present after all). Of course I wouldn't let a cat run around in a large city, but then again I'd probably not keep a cat there in the first place.
* In Germany, the town is considered rural; according to American standards it's probably a suburb - after all it's only 30 km (18.7 mi) from the next large city.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The cellphone part is overboard, but I'd argue that the GPS tracking feature could help dog owners be even more responsible.
Without the cellphone part, how is it supposed to send the GPS coordinates back to you?
I won't be buying one of these, however, unless they take out the cellphone portion and make it into a GPS transmitter and receiver.
You must have watched too many bad movies. There's no such thing as a GPS transmitter. GPS modules are passive devices - they listen for satellite signals and work out their location by accurate timing measurments and comparisons. GPS does not send any data to the satellites, nor does it provide any mechanism for remote tracking - that's what the cellphone part is for.
No the real issue is whether the dog is responding in particular to the command or to the person. It has been well established that dogs can understand vocabulary. IE a word as an abstract meaning. Thus they do not need a person to understand that fetch *object* only means fetch it if a certain person asks it in a certain way. If you doubt this go look into it. There was a story about a border collie not to long ago that recognised dozens of objects... that is in a room full of these objects if you asked the dog to fetch a specific one it would find it and bring it back, and bring back nothing if it was not to be found.
As for recognising a voice on the phone. Hell some people can't do that and just like you wouldn't necesarrily do something some unrecogniseable person asks you to do niether will a dog. On the otherhand a dog may be more willing if they are trained to do more. Also they may recognise (perhaps even mistakenly identify) the voice and then be willing to do anything they would normally. Also the dog may be unwilling to seperate the voice from the presence of the person. Same thing happend to people with the invention of the phone in the first place. But we deal with abstraction better than dogs.
I always find it funny when people insist that a dog does not understand a command given by someone they don't know. They seem to be unable to understand that the dog is quite capable of deciding they are not someone they have to obey. Some will respond to any attention just like some people. And some are loyal to one person.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Possibly, but there are over 100 000 elk hunters in Sweden alone, most of them with one or more dogs. I know of several with this kind of product already and many more with the old style . A good hunting dog can easily cost a few thousand USD, not to mention the emotional ties to it that you get after a while, so a few hundred is a very reasonable price for something like this.
a barking dog could likewise scare away the quarry
Elk hunting dogs specifically are trained to bark at the elk to make it stand still and look at the dog to distract it from noticing the hunter. After a while, the hunter learns to recognize the type of bark, if the dog has found an elk or is in distress, for example.
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...and do you have any idea which parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are passing through your body right this second? More often than not, at vastly higher radiated power levels than any cellphone is capable.
Find yourself a spec-an and plug it in some time.
Seeing as how females don't have testicles, I can see why they might be bleeding if you tried to "castrate" them.
Hope you haven't been practicing this at home or anything.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
I believe the GSM compression is just a linear-predictive coding model. It's band-limited (low pass), but that really doesn't qualify as a psycho-acoustic model like music CODECs are. Here's a link to a summary of audio CODECs for telephony: http://www.broadcom.com/products/software/mobmm_au diocodecs.php
Are you sure about this? If you did your thesis on canine audio perception or something like that, I would gladly defer, but that just doesn't sound right.
For instance, I've dealt with humans of varying hearing acuity. Those humans with a wider frequency range of hearing tend to find it easier to understand speech, whether in person or over the phone. Additionally, those humans with "better" hearing also tended to find it easier to deal with impairments and limitiations in the channel than those whose hearing was more limited.
I know we're talking different species here, but human experience suggests that wider range of hearing implies improved understanding of speech.
Can anyone offer a citation or some expert knowlege on this subject?
I am not a crackpot.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/06/11/MNGTL73SSM28.DTL
Or perhaps you could take the time to actually look it up. Yes dogs respond to tone. So do people, go ask ten people to do something rudely, then ask another ten people politely. Compare your results. Just because they do does not suggest that is ALL they respond too. For instance hunters often train to hand signals, because the dog can see them from a distance where voice commands are impractical. Herders have long used a combination of hand signals and whistle sequences. This is not one data point. This is a tradition that dates back centuries.
As for words specificlly, the example of Pico and other similar research have shown that many animals (not just dogs) can develop vocabulary in the sense of understanding that a word refferes to a specific object.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Steve Wozniak's old company is, of course, Apple.
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