Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.
“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,” geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at Riverside says.
So a few years ago, Cochran got in touch with Jesse Lawrence, a colleague at Stanford. They whipped up a program called the Quake-Catcher Network. It’s a free download that runs silently in the background, collecting data from the computer’s accelerometer and waiting to detect an earthquake.
Laptop accelerometers aren’t as sensitive as a professional-grade seismometers, so they can only pick up tremors of about magnitude 4.0 and above. But when a laptop does sense a tremor, it’ll ping the researchers’ server. “And when our server receives a bunch of those, we then say, ‘This is a likely earthquake,'” Lawrence says.
Pretty clever, and this is the sort of thing that is right-in my wheelhouse for things I think are cool- take something that already exists and put it to use doing something else useful. I was always a fan of the crowdsourcing of space research.
jl
Cole made it through another two hours.
All those dogs are probably keeping him safe. But most of them will be gone soon.
Edit: Cole should see if he can turn one those into a Tunch detector. Tunch is ‘bigboned’ as they say, and would probably produce some detectable shock waves, especially if he is getting ready to leap to finish off Cole.
Yutsano
One more intrusion by the gubmint into my private life!
/wingnut
gbear
Great. Next they’ll be detecting simultaneous orgasms.
Bob K
That’s interesting, I can just see a teatard with a sign reading “Gubmint – Handz off my labtop!”
Saw a neat bumper sticker in the library parking lot today. “Privatize Everything!” Isn’t that pretty much the direction we’ve been heading in since St. Ronald of Raygun brought Grover Norquist along for the ride?
Bill E Pilgrim
Wait, new laptops all have motion sensors?
Why does this make me think of that school surveillance story?
“I’m sorry, but improper activity has been, er, sensed, on your laptop. Come with us, both of you.”
jl
OT, but NYTimes has roundtable of experts (and McM too) on the Goldman Sachs civial case.
Not finished it yet, but so far, very informative. I have not not got as far as McM yet.
April 16, 2010, 3:31 pm What Goldman’s Conduct Reveals
By THE EDITORS
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/what-goldmans-conduct-reveals/
Edit: McM is Megan McArdle. Not sure how I came up with that. Trying a play on M and Ms or something. Smartass Fail on my part. McArdle offers a treatise on the case and Asymmetrical Information. That should be a hoot.
mr. whipple
Irony abounds.
gnomedad
Here’s a similar idea:
DBrown
@gnomedad: This is up their with … no, this is just so stupid that even teabaggers make more sense.
Kobie
@gnomedad: JUST LIKE IN TEH DARK KNIGHT
Seitz
Alright, a shout-out for UCR! Go Highlanders!
bago
There are also crowdsourced apps for computing cycles. Folding@home helps with bio research, and electricsheep renders cool screensavers.
Sly
@bago:
Folding@Home is one of the imaginative things ever developed. 52,000 Playstations make up about a quarter of one of the largest microbiology computer research network in the world, and all it requires is a small app that you can download onto the console for free.
SpotWeld
I wonder if they’ll start offering this as an iPhone app too.