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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

Charters operate independent of direct district control and are free from some rules that govern traditional schools, including adherence to L.A. Unified’s union contracts.

10 days of release time for any teachers conducting union business, said union president A.J. Duffy. But the union didn’t win the right to an arbitration hearing for teachers who had exhausted administrative appeals for resisting a transfer to another school. Duffy said some thorny issues remained to work out, but these could be taken up in negotiations over the coming months.

Cameras don't make you feel more secure; they make you feel twitchy and paranoid. Some people say that the only people who don't like school cameras are the people that have something to hide. But having the cameras is a constant reminder that the school does not trust you and that the school is worried your fellow classmates might go on some sort of killing rampage.

Some people say youngsters are more disrespectful than ever before. But if you were in an environment where you were constantly being treated as a criminal, would you still be respectful? In high school, one of my favorite English teachers never had trouble with her students. The students in her class were the most well behaved in the school--even if they were horrible in other teachers' classes. We were well-mannered, addressed her as "Ma'am," and stood when she entered the room. Other teachers were astonished that she could manage her students so well, especially since many of them were troublemakers. She accomplished this not though harsh discipline, but by treating us with respect and being genuinely hurt if we did not return it.

The Library and a few good teachers are what kept me from dropping out.

Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13" MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad.

Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said. Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

When the iPad was released earlier this month, reviewers were quick to tout its advantages for reading books, watching movies and browsing the Web. What they overlooked, though, was its potential to change the lives of people with autism.

But the past couple of weeks there’s been a rolling stone gathering lots of moss- and that stone is Scoop.it.

Well, I haven’t seen much happen with Scoop.it and educators for the past few months, but then something big happened: Scoop.it launched Scoop.it for Education.

I know many educators are fond of Paper.li, another link/newspaper tool, but I’ve never found  that paper-like experience to be of much value, because it’s so… bland.