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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me

Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!

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October 28, 2008

Researchers Create a Distributed Earthquake-Detection Network

Seismologists at the University of California at Riverside and Stanford University are creating an earthquake-detection network on the cheap by using distributed-computing technology to link up laptop computers that have built-in motion sensors. The researchers’ Quake-Catcher Network has already detected several quakes — in Nevada in April and in Los Angeles in late July.

The system is the brainchild of Elizabeth Cochran, an assistant professor of seismology at Riverside. Volunteers download special software that quickly reports sudden motions to a central server on the Internet. If the server receives reports of sudden motions from several computers in different places simultaneously, it determines that an earthquake probably caused them.

Laptop manufacturers have been adding motion sensors — accelerometers — that protect data by turning off machines’ hard drives in case the machines are dropped. The earthquake-sensing software is only active when a computer is not in use for anything else. The software checks each laptop’s IP address to determine where the machine is located, and also checks to make sure the machine’s internal clock is accurate. —Lawrence Biemiller

Comments

1. Cool!! Accelerometers in laptops now, probably picking up on Wii technology. And then someone comes up with a really interesting useful application for their presence, an application that was probably never thought of in initially installing the technology.

   — DDVA    Oct 29, 09:53 AM    #

2. Colleagues/

   Quake-Catcher Network is an excellent example of Crowdsourced Citizen Science (CS). I have profiled QCN is my CrowdSource blog at

   [ http://crowdsourcepower.blogspot.com/ ]

   I plan to profile several other CS initiatives by the end of the year.

   /Gerry

   — Gerry McKiernan    Nov 11, 04:03 PM    #

3. nice

   — chaitu    Nov 19, 05:30 AM    #

4. nice…

   — chaitu    Nov 19, 05:31 AM    #

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