My DeLorme inReach can send a message with coordinates and then doesn't need to remain online and continue transmitting. (Of course, you want to keep it online so you can continue to communicate with SAR, but if the battery were to die they would still find you as long as you don't move from your transmitted location in your emergency call.) So a solar charger, etc. wouldn't even really be necessary, and it will stay online for quite a long time between recharges.
Many long distance backpackers will carry high capacity USB battery packs to recharge devices off rather than a solar charger, as they weigh less and involve less hassle and can generally last between town stops every 5 to 10 days (depending on what trail, of course).
I'm not familiar with all PLBs/satellite communicators but my inReach works internationally.
That does seem a possibility—or once she set up her camp she remembered the somewhat poor advice of staying put (this can be good if you're actively being searched for and likely to be found quickly, but once days or weeks have gone by can be bad to continue as your chances of being found decrease).
There are a lot of good ways to leave "telltales" you can follow once you're in a situation where you're lost. Branches forming an arrow on the ground back towards your camp, each within sight of the next, are an easy way to do it.
I'm not aware of a similar thing in the US. And depending on the remoteness of your location, you may get an indication of a good signal (3+ bars) but still be unable to transmit or receive a text. It's common in the mountains where I hike and backpack to get "ghost bars" like that which suggest you should be able to send and receive messages but only a tiny percentage ever get through, if any.
The US has actually several emergency networks, a cellphone even without a valid sim card can still be used to dial 911 this is part of every cellular standard.
But in more common cases when you are outside of the coverage of your carrier and with roaming disabled/no roaming partners you will still see Emergency/SOS displayed on your phone.
Besides 911 there are probably a few other emergency numbers in the US which are open on all cellphones, as well as the emergency broadcast system which will display push notifications on every modern cellphone in such cases as natural disasters.
It's not dangerous if you have navigational skills. Most people, however, do not, or haven't developed theirs very effectively. I see it myself sometimes with other hikers at the front of a group—they take a wrong turn and suddenly have no idea where they are and start freaking out rather than just backtracking. Fortunately they're in a group, generally of people who can navigate and do know where they are, but when someone with poor navigational skills gets into that situation it usually leads to panic and bad decisions.
It's not at all extraordinary that a hiker of her age decided to go backpacking alone (which in this case she didn't—she was with someone else who left). It's a very common thing for people to solo hike and backpack. Carrying a small amount of gear is not a problem either—it's the norm. But navigational tools of some sort, even just a micro compass and a map, are generally considered an essential.
> It's not dangerous if you have navigational skills.
I'm ex-military so this point is probably why I don't understand the mindset, I just had navigation slammed into me time and time again. And we weren't allowed GPS so you got it right and you learning to recover if you did screw up.
> It's not at all extraordinary that a hiker of her age decided to go backpacking alone (which in this case she didn't—she was with someone else who left).
Another articles mention she started without them and stayed at a lodge with a number of other people so definitely took the decision to go alone. I guess the buddy/buddy thing is built into me too.
> Carrying a small amount of gear is not a problem either—it's the norm.
Another article mentioned she was carrying less than the normal 35lbs. Obviously I'm not sure what the norm is so defer to your experience.
Please don't do this. I see people doing it, even going so far as to leave flagging tape on obvious, maintained trails so they don't "lose their way". And usually people don't remove it after. It makes an area trashy, especially when done unnecessarily—and saying you should do it whenever you go off-trail is very unnecessary.
If your navigational skills are poor enough that you can't trust yourself to walk off-trail without getting lost, use a passive system like running a GPS receiver during your hike so you can backtrack along its track until you find your trail.
They're growing in popularity, but they're expensive and some of the popular ones (not PLBs specifically, but satellite trackers & communicators) like SPOT and DeLorme inReach have monthly subscription fees as well. Someone who isn't out alone all the time may not feel they can justify the cost.
I carry an inReach and find it fantastic. I've never used it for an emergency (though an emergency leading to a late-night Air Force helicopter rescue of someone in my hiking group several years ago prompted me to purchase it) but it's fantastically useful for text communication with friends and family in areas with zero cell reception, as well as (very recently added) weather forecast downloads for your precise location. And in the event of an emergency, being able to communicate details about your situation is very useful sometimes.
You can also rent a PLB/sat communicator for relatively reasonable prices (<$40/week) if you only hike occasionally and owning one and paying monthly wouldn't make sense.
I'm a very regular hiker and backpacker, and while I always feel bad in situations like this, I also always feel that people who get lost so easily that they can't find the trail—especially one so developed as the Appalachian Trail—after stepping off it for a few minutes shouldn't be hiking alone, or should be using some sort of navigational aid to help avoid that happening. She wasn't initially hiking alone, but she should've left when her hiking partner did if she wasn't competent enough to navigate solo.
Perhaps I'm unusual among hikers, in that I hike off-trail regularly, hunt for lost and abandoned trails for fun, and am a trailwork volunteer with the Forest Service, but I cannot understand how people get lost. If you lose the trail, you simply go back the way you came until you find it again. And yet people get lost all the time.
Apparently Maine is singularly treacherous for hikers due to the density and scale of it's woods.
I've seen comments from many experienced hunters/hikers how say they live/hike in the woods up there and all of them mentioned how easy it would be to become disorientated.
I wonder if a "road pressure" map would be useful to encourage people to know what they are doing. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in Michigan where there are developed roads all over the place. When there's (even moderately trafficked) roads 1/2 mile away in 3 directions, you aren't very lost, so I've never felt the need to be incredibly well prepared. When it's 5 miles in one direction the thought process needs to be a little different.
But why if it's done for science it's unethical, but when done by news stations, politicians, advertising agencies, motivational speakers, salesmen, etc. it's suddenly ok?
> when done by news stations, politicians, advertising agencies, motivational speakers, salesmen
Each of those are cleary identified.
If Facebook wants to put a little icon next to each "experimental study" status update which disclosed the party that funded the study, it would be different.
Even in "science", some studies are funded and others are not.
Are you even serious? Stating that mass media manipulation is overt and identifiable... The HN stopped to be self-correcting if one happens to hate Facebook, Google or LinkedIn.(not that I like them personally)
Any ad, political speech, sales pitch, pr/journalism etc. that you see today is identified by a named author/publisher/vendor byline. Assessment of possible manipulation is left as an exercise for the viewer, who can decide whether to ignore the communication.
There are any number of technical means by which:
(a) opt-in permission could be requested in advance of a study
(b) opt-out option could be advertised in advance of a study
(c) start and end dates of non-optional study could be disclosed
This is about CHOICE of participation, not the NATURE of the study.
"Who can decide whether to ignore the communication"
Wow... Not understanding basic theories of communication and human irrationality that doesn't allow lots of data to be processed and accepted without critical thought.
"opt-in permission could be requested in advance of a study"
Wow... Not understanding basic theories of psychological and sociological studies that state subjects should not be informed about the study or their behavior will change.
Standard rules of ethics for experiments on human subjects say that (with a few exceptions) subjects should always be informed about the study. If that changes the subjects' behavior such that the study is no longer valid, it's the researcher's obligation to come up with a better design that works in the face of informed consent, or to give up and study something easier.
It's been fairly well established that "I wanted to learn something" isn't an adequate excuse for doing things to people without informing them or receiving their consent.
Before you talk about peoples' "clueless 'ethics'", you might want to read the professional standards of the field, for example the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code. The section on "informed consent to research" is here: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=11#802
Users of Facebook see it as a neutral platform for communicating with people they know. Consumers of the things you listed know it's top-down messaging coming from people they don't know or necessarily trust.
So, there is a difference. It's still a complex question, though -- is filtering or prioritizing based on emotional sentiment really different from what they are already doing with inserting ads and such?
I see it this way: they did a study, so it's fair.
Were they to filter posts by emotional sentiment as a part of their normal operations, I'd find it unethical, or at least something I might not want. But I'm totally fine with them subjecting users (including myself) to random research studies, as those are temporary situations, and with Facebook's data sets, they can have great benefits for humanity.
Perhaps Facebook should provide an opt-in option to for user to be a subject of various sociological experiments at unspecified times. I'd happily select it.
All Facebook users have agreed to be part of research experiments. It's in their ToS. If you got people to agree to allow you to enter their homes for research it wouldn't be unethical for you to do so.
ToS are a copout, and in my eyes a tragedy of the modern legislature around software services.
Every single company in the world knows very well that 99.99% of their userbase won't read the ToS, and use this to do whatever they want with their users' information and privacy.
There needs to be dramatic improvements in that area.
Oh lord, not this "break into the house" fallacy again.
Your FB profile is not your house; it is just some data you have shared with FB. FB decides what to do with the data: how to share it, where to share it, when to share it, who to share it with, etc.
Everybody knows that FB _already_ manipulates the feed to change your mood: to make you more engaged with the site; to make you click more on ads; etc. It's been doing this basically for ever.
But they _already_ manipulate the feeds with the specific intent of increasing user engagement: to get more views, to get more ad clicks, more time spent, etc.
Many long distance backpackers will carry high capacity USB battery packs to recharge devices off rather than a solar charger, as they weigh less and involve less hassle and can generally last between town stops every 5 to 10 days (depending on what trail, of course).
I'm not familiar with all PLBs/satellite communicators but my inReach works internationally.