The new Rino 530s are out. With much better radio range and beautiful color screens, they are far nicer to use than the older models. So what do you do with your old 110 or 120? I decided to give mine to the dog.
Tuesday, BB and I both wore rinos during an airscent training problem (area in black). It was neat being able to poll his distance and location. In the dark, it’s hard to know where he is — that and he is sometimes hundreds of meters away. Check out the data. His top speed was recorded as 21 mph. He covered 1.72 miles in the time it took me to cover .48 miles. Wow!
[GP:Morgan Run]
(Click to download quicktime movie, 345kb) (Click to download avi movie, 1.07MB)
This simulation shows both of us in 60x speed working the area. Color indicates elevation changes… so you don’t need the topo map view.
There is a portion of this event that I did not record. At the end, under the tree cover BB’s GPS lost a signal for about a minute. So I didn’t capture the re-find.
How did I make this movie? I used the wonderful TopoFusion mapping application to produce the simulation.
After much trial-and-error, I produced the movie using theDivx codec at 30 fps rendered as an avi. The production tool was Camtasia Studio. Yes, you can use a lower frame rate… but you don’t really want choppy playback for watching the dog work.
The AVI works on windows fine and will play using VLC on the mac. It even plays on my Archos personal media player fine… though cropped a bit. I’ve also provided a QuickTime movie for Mac users. The video lasts about 1 and 1/2 minutes and the AVI file size is a little over 1MB. Camtasia studio is pricey. You could probably get away with using Wink and the 3ivx codec for free. Ideally, we can convince the people at TopoFusion to include a video record mode for their multitrack playback.
What’s next? Both GPS and video from the dog. The challenging technical problem with this is that, if TopoFusion doesn’t handle skips in time very accurately in playback mode, the two videos will be of different length… and well… and there are more issues to work out.
UPDATE: I posted these originally with a topographic map background. The quality recording came out much smoother. However, the aerial view is actually more informative, so I replaced those files.
The SWGDOG is a committee of scientists, government agencies, private industry, and working dog specialists with the aim of establishing best practices for the use of detection teams. (I assume the primary focus is on canine detection teams, but could extend to other species or even non-biological detectors).
SWGDOG recently released a draft of terminology and general guidelines for review until mid-February 2006. I’ve read the terminology fairly careful and am quite pleased!
Here is the definition of drive:
Propensity to exhibit a particular pattern of behaviors to particular stimuli. Drives can be enhanced or diminished through experience (i.e. training, environment, etc.), but they can never be created or eliminated. Expression of the relationship between the inter-environment of the animal which includes genetics and the external environment which includes experience.
Propensity to exhibit a particular pattern of behaviors to particular stimuli. Drives can be enhanced or diminished through experience (i.e. training, environment, etc.), but they can never be created or eliminated.
Expression of the relationship between the inter-environment of the animal which includes genetics and the external environment which includes experience.
This makes the oft-heard expression working in drive quite vague. I understand the intent, but incorporating scientific rigor to dog training seems a very positive direction!
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