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Microsoft Mathematics provides a graphing calculator that plots in 2D and 3D, step-by-step equation solving, and useful tools to help students with math and science studies.

Printing was considered vulgar and only for the poor. Many aristocratic bibliophiles refused to disgrace their collections with the presence of a non-manuscript text. It fell to the lower classes to recognize the importance of the printing press. And they did - by the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand printers had printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles.

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

But I have to tell you that despite all the pain in my neck this has been, I'm LOVING Diigo.  We are annotating the blogs as we read them and then dissecting what they mean.  Now imagine my little kids (6th graders you know) trying to understand that the geochemistry of this sediment can tell scientist about the cycling of sea levels...and this cycling is important to the coastal cities survival throughout the world.  We're just at the most basic places, but they are digging through...asking me questions and pulling out info they think is relevant.I have them write summaries and email those summaries from Diigo to me each weekend.  OK...not all are great.  But most of these kids "get it" and are pretty interested in the science being conducted.  I think they are also grooving on the conversation we get from highlighting important things from the blogs and then chatting (via the annotation commenting feature) about why it's important and what are the next things we should look for.

it may also be that in an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do

While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them

though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them