Shipping Box Begins World Tour

BBC News is following a shipping container around the world for a year to tell the story of globalization. In the project, the BBC plans to deliver content for television, radio, and online audiences, telling the individual stories behind what makes the global economy tick.

“We have painted and branded a BBC container and bolted on a GPS transmitter so you can follow its progress all year round as it criss-crosses the globe,” said BBC business and economics editor Jeremy Hillman. “The Box will hopefully reach the U.S., Asia, the Middle East , Europe, and Africa, and when it does, BBC correspondents will be there to report on who’s producing goods and who’s consuming them.”

The project is titled simply The Box, after a book of the same name by Marc Levinson that tells the story of how the standardized shipping container changed the face of world trade. The BBC is asking for those who spot the BBC-branded box to send in photographs.

Tech’s Usefulness Follows You to the Grave

GPS is being used to record the exact coordinates of 4,782 plaques and headstones at Akatarawa Cemetery in the city of Upper Hutt, reports The Dominion Post of Wellington, New Zealand. The precise locations of the plots will be accompanied by photographs of each headstone on the council’s website, where it will link with existing cemetery records.The resource, available in November, is designed to be a resource for both relations and researchers. People will be able follow the coordinates to plots of interest, or print out a map with the names arranged in rows, cutting down on lengthy searches for ancestors or people of interest.

Johnny Who? GPS technology has made the list of 60 cultural landmarks on the Beloit College Mindset List, an annual compilation that offers a glimpse of the world as seen through the eyes of each incoming class of college freshmen, reports the Associated Press. Besides GPS always being available, this year’s students grew up knowing only Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.” Harry Potter could be a classmate, they have always had caller ID, and IBM never made typewriters.

The school started producing the list in 1998 to remind professors that references familiar to them might draw blank stares from students.

Turtle Power. A box tortoise with a GPS tracker attached helped police bust a suspected marijuana-grower, reports WUSA-TV. Minding his own business, the tortoise wandered into a secret cannabis patch in Rock Creek Park outside Washington, D.C. A ranger in charge of the reptile, being tracked for research purposes, discovered the field when he retrieved the tortoise from a remote area of the park. Park police set up surveillance and later arrested a man on suspicion of growing the plants.