AIR: Area’s Immediate Reading

AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots.

Participants or “carriers” are able to see pollutant levels in their current locations, as well as simultaneously view measurements from the other AIR devices in the network. An on-board GPS unit and digital compass, combined with a database of known pollution sources such as power plants and heavy industries, allow carriers to see their distance from polluters as well. The AIR devices regularly transmit data to a central database allowing for real time data visualization on this website. The AIR devices are based on the Arduino platform.

Sensors of the Future Will Create The Matrix

The Matrix trilogy was one long paean to data visualization. As we all know, it began with the premise that life was a sophisticated simulation, virtual reality taken to the civilizational level. Except for a few Matrix die-hards that I’m sure exist, people don’t actually believe this is what the physical/geographical world actually is. But with new sensor technology, we could create the datasets that the movies hinted lay inside the world. Current efforts at revisualizing the world through specific environmental data collection — traffic flowmaps, real-time temperature maps — will expand into a much wider variety of fields over the next few years.

TinyOS and nesC

The TinyOS system, libraries, and applications are written in nesC, a new language for programming structured component-based applications. The nesC language is primarily intended for embedded systems such as sensor networks. nesC has a C-like syntax, but supports the TinyOS concurrency model, as well as mechanisms for structuring, naming, and linking together software components into robust network embedded systems. The principal goal is to allow application designers to build components that can be easily composed into complete, concurrent systems, and yet perform extensive checking at compile time.

TinyOS defines a number of important concepts that are expressed in nesC. First, nesC applications are built out of components with well-defined, bidirectional interfaces. Second, nesC defines a concurrency model, based on tasks and hardware event handlers, and detects data races at compile time.

Components
Specification
A nesC application consists of one or more components linked together to form an executable. A component provides and uses interfaces. These interfaces are the only point of access to the component and are bi-directional. An interface declares a set of functions called commands that the interface provider must implement and another set of functions called events that the interface user must implement. For a component to call the commands in an interface, it must implement the events of that interface. A single component may use or provide multiple interfaces and multiple instances of the same interface.

Mobile ATM

In many developing countries, particularly in rural areas, access to ATM services is enabled by M-ATM system with short time. As well as it enables more security regard to ATM transaction. Not only that M-ATM provide legally accepted evidence about the transactions. Without having any additional cost on the infrastructure, the existing mobile networks can be used to deploy this system. Since most of the people have knowledge to use mobile phones, customers can familiarize with the system easily. However system uses five mandatory SMS messages for a particular transaction. As well as commission must be paid to M-ATM agent. This commission should be paid by the customer. The cost of SMS messages can be distributed among the customer and bank. Anyway in bank point of view, it is economically advantage to pay for SMS messages instead of deploying traditional ATM machines. Finally we can conclude, this application would address a major service gap in developing countries that is critical to their social and economic development.