Color us flabbergasted, but tower climbing is being deemed "the most dangerous job in America" by Edwin Foulke Jr., head of the Occupational, Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). A recent look at the industry found that five climbers perished during a 12-day span this spring, bringing the grand total to seven in 2008. Of course, there are already remarks that the recent rush to expand 3G networks could be somehow connected, with Craig Lekutis, president of WirelessEstimator and a former tower industry manager, stating that the "recent spate of accidents must be viewed as an industry-wide cause for concern, both on the carrier and climber levels." In order to help bring awareness to the intrinsic hazards, OSHA is pushing a "Tie or Die!" campaign -- which, honestly, sounds a bit brash on the surface -- but we're all for reminding folks to anchor down that somehow have the ability to forget.

[Image courtesy of Verizon Wireless]

Although cellphone tower location registering has been used in courtrooms for some time, we just knew that the GPS capability and morewould be put forth for use in cases where even better location granularity is required. Well, what do ya know: it's here. For alleged murderer Darryl Littlejohn, he knows it all to well. While movement from tower to tower is not exactly a new strategy for attorneys to use when arguing cases, it's use as an alibi can go either way. Critics say that rush-hour wireless traffic can shunt signals to towers that cause accurate tracking to be obfuscated somewhat, while others say criminals can plant their handsets away from crime locations for later use as an alibi. Yeah, we love when lawyers begin grasping the technical ins and outs of wireless towers and advanced tracking methodologies.

Proving once again that wireless technology isn't all bad, researchers from the University of Tel Aviv have determined that cellphone towers are as good as, if not better than, traditional meteorological techniques at measuring rainfall patterns. The team took data already documented by the carriers about each tower's signal strength over time and compared it to information that had been collected by radar and rain gauges, and found that not only did the towers accurately detect the electromagnetic disturbances inherent to storms, but that the degree of change in signal strength was directly proportional to actual rainfall. While widespread utilization of this data could probably have an immediate effect on forecasting if combined with current methodology, the researchers have an even more ambitious goal of detecting signal variations from the end-user -- that is, on consumers' handsets -- for aggregation into even more precise and localized reports once weather-related changes can be teased out from among the many other signal strength variants.

[Via Slashdot]