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HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.The creation of a global sensor system would be an incredible breakthrough – it could make our cities more efficient, save lives, and enable us to better understand, track, and combat climate change. As HP Labs senior researcher Peter Hartwell has stated, “If we’re going to save the planet, we’ve got to monitor it“.+ CeNSEVia Fast CompanyLead photo by Margie Wylie Comments RSS Comments RSS digg_url = 'http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/02/18/hp-invents-a-central-nervous-system-for-the-earth/'; digg_title = 'HP Invents a Central Nervous System for the Earth'; digg_skin = 'compact'; email this tweetmeme_url = "http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/02/18/hp-invents-a-central-nervous-system-for-the-earth/"; tweetmeme_style = "compact"; facebook this Related Posts

I’ll start by providing links to two articles (here is one, and here is the another), about teacher Monica Rankin using Twitter in instructional application at the University of Texas at Dallas. These are a few of many stories about Professor Rankin’s efforts (this highly covered case is what really triggered my perception that there were a lot of articles about Twitter in the classroom in recent weeks).

This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses instructor Cole Camplese’s use of Twitter, streaming Tweets from students on screen during lectures, as part of the instructional process.

HISTORY NOW is a quarterly online journal for American history teachers and students, launched in September, 2004. All issues are archived below: Issue One, September 2004: Elections Issue Two, December 2004: Primary Sources on Slavery Issue Three, March 2005: Immigration Issue Four, June 2005: American National Holidays Issue Five, September 2005: Abolition Issue Six, December 2005: Lincoln Issue Seven, March 2006: Women's Suffrage Issue Eight, June 2006: The Civil Rights Movement Issue Nine, September 2006: The American West Issue Ten, December 2006: Nineteenth Century Technology Issue Eleven, March 2007: American Cities Issue Twelve, June 2007: The Age Of Exploration Issue Thirteen, September 2007: The Constitution Issue Fourteen, December 2007: World War II Issue Fifteen, April 2008: The Supreme Court Issue Sixteen, June 2008: Books that Changed History Issue Seventeen, September 2008: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Issue

Earlier we talked about how a single botnet could harness more compute power than our largest super computers. Well, that's just the start of it. The amount of computer power available to the Ambient Cloud will be truly astounding.

By 2014 one estimate is there will be 2 billion PCs. That's a giant reservoir of power to exploit, especially considering these new boxes are stuffed with multiple powerful processors and gigabytes of memory. 7 Billion Smartphones By now it's common wisdom smartphones are the computing platform of the future. It's plausible to assume the total number of mobile phones in use will roughly equal the number of people on earth. That's 7 billion smartphones. Smartphones aren't just tiny little wannabe computers anymore either. They are real computers and are getting more capable all the time.

One Google exec estimates that in 12 years an iPod will be able to store all the video ever produced.