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Networking the Redwoods
linuxwrangler writes "SF Gate is reporting that ecology researchers are outfitting a grove of trees with tiny "micromote" sensors to monitor the light, humidity and other conditions as the trees grow. The sensors, running the open-source Tiny OS, form and maintain their own network. This test of the "Smart Dust" concept (mentioned on /. earlier) only uses 50 sensors but scientists hope to be able to deploy the sensors on a large scale to help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate."
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Yes, but do they run Linux?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!
In Soviet Russia, the redwoods network you!
Place smart sensors in the woods!
?????
Profit.
Does that include the $699 SCO license fee?
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A Beowolf cluster of Redwoods
to help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate.
Umm, last time I was in the area a few months ago, given the amount of pollution and traffic in the Bay area and north of the Bay area, I am not surprised the redwoods are dying off.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I love this idea. We need to keep these Majestic trees alive for future generations. I want to be able to go and visit these wonders of nature, and I want my children and their children to be able to see the Redwoods also.
And it's just so damn cool that we're networking the Redwoods to figure out how to keep them tickin'.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
...if a tree falls in those woods, and no one is around to hear it. Would it still make a sound?
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... to help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate.
Probably has nothing to do with Aaaarnold and the rest of the celebs driving around in diesel guzzling
Hummers.
Maybe they're dying because people keep trying to strap boxes to them, measuring temperature, humidity and who knows what else.
Wouldn't that be ironic.
Michael Sims, Domain Hijacking and Moral Equivalency by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net
How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.
The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.
Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.
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After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.
I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del
Scientists have found out that the reason that the redwoods are dying is because of a lot of sensors being fitted to the trees and radio traffic networks between them. This has been confirmed by sensors and radio networks between them.
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It ain't the pollution boy, it's the damn terrorists!
Who cares about the Kyoto agreement when there are countries like Afghanistan and Iraq to invade?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
But the trick is, you need data to counter the Republican "See no evil" arguments.
Remember when they said Global Warming was just a myth? But now they ackknowledge that Global Warming is real, but it's the result of natural causes. And then they say it's the result of natural causes, but it's not worth the cost to fix it?
Maybe they're dying because they're old? Does a tree have a life expectancy if they remain under perfect conditions? Some of the redwoods are hundreds of years old.
I knew nature had to hate SUVs.
This is cool but there are plent of other tree species that are more suited to the new Earth ecosystem mankind is creating. If the redwoods cant cut it, let the superior species trive.
...a redwood cluster of these.
Darn....who knew lawn gnomes could use chainsaws?
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Grickle-grass community when the Lorax confirmed that the redwood population has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all oaks. Coming on the heels of a recent Lerkim survey which plainly states that redwoods have lost more forest share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Redwoods are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Forestry Association comprehensive woodworking test.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
It doesn't fucking help that we chopped down a great deal of California's redwoods. Gee I wonder who's fault it is that they're disappearing, eh?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Woodworking with Rednecks... How many of those dying trees get harvested for timber?
Ok, so how many of us followed the link to Tiny OS but didn't go to the actual article? ;-)
TinyOS sounds like a neat project, but I'll be
more impressed when it gets ported to x86. I mean, even if the scheduler ballooned up to 500 bytes, the whole system would still be really small. Sorta like QNX.
(It is a joke... laugh)
How long till one of those tree hugging hacker hippies from Berkeley finds a way to DOS the woods rendering the whole project useless.
"help figure out why California's Redwoods are dying off at an alarming rate"
Maybe it is all the hippies wrapping chains around them and putting spikes through them?
You realize, of course, if scientists had used a slimmed down Windows variant prog to monitor trees this would have been roundly bashed. So I guess it's a good thing they're on the Linux tip, that way when they find the answer the whole world can find out about it by simply reading /user/bin/root/bash/faggotasstreestudy/gnaa/whatev erthefuck! Attention Linux luddites, invent something that doesn't take me 800 years to learn. Me and the trees will all be dead by then.
They all bought Silicon Valley stock during the dot-com bobble, and when it burst they got suicidally depressed?
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If the sensors ran Windows, would the trees fall over when it crashed?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The concept is new and untested, but I think we might see surprising results.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
SCO sued all trees for their use of "open-source" software, which is by definition the property of said company.
In a suit paralleling this one, SCO also sued all of humanity for intaking the air that was produced by biological plant-based systems that utilized code in violation of SCO's terms of agreement.
"A deepness in the sky", the prequel to the popular "A fire upon the deep" by Vernor Vinge, has these things in action in a cool application. (This is a Sci-fi book, just to clarify)
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
This isn't going to help us that much in figuring out why these redwoods are dying, because we have no climate conditions from when they weren't dying at an alarming rate to compare the current ones to. I'm not saying they won't be damned useful, but how about we sensor-network the things we would like to preserve before it's too late?
...protest
Since I'm sure most of /. is more interested in coding a 1 square inch sensor than protecting a 300 foot tree, here's some programming background on the little bastards (which I work with on a daily basis, as part of a sensor network research group in a VA university).
- the architecture
The motes run 4MHz or 8MHz processors, with built in memory. The amount of memory varies across mote models (currently Rene, Rene2, Mica, Mica2, Mica2Dot, and SmartDust) but we're talking 16KB to 128KB of program memory, 4KB to 16KB of data memory, and 4Kb to 8KB EEPROM for permanent storage. They have a short range radio capable of I believe 10kbps, and use an active message model to provide what we know as "ports", so that you can direct a message to a specific handler based on its message type. The packet sizes top out at 36 bytes. The motes are powered by two AA batteries, which can last a surprisingly long time if the radio is put to sleep. Your main means for debugging: 3 LEDs ... you can begin to imagine the headaches I face on a daily basis.
- the bridge
When deployed, most motes are programmed with routing protocols to autonomously establish networks, which are used for data aggregation and getting sensor readings around. The network is rooted at a basestation, a "powerful" PC without the restricted computation, communication and power limitations of a mote. This way any complex processing is offloaded to the PC, and the motes don't waste battery power doing stuff the PC can do instead. So what bridges this mote network to a PC? Well, it's a programming board. You plug a mote directly into the thing, and you hook up a db-25 to your parallel port, and a db-9 to your serial port. The parallel port is used to program the mote's instruction memory, and the serial port is used to receive messages sent by the mote to the PC. The mote that's hooked up to the programming board is loaded with code to translate RF packets to UART, and vice versa.
- sensing
Motes are equipped with 10-bit resolution ADC sensors which can read light and temperature. Other sensor boards can be hooked up to motes to read vibration, acceleration, and a bunch of other stuff. The motes commonly read their sensors, stuff the data in a packet, and send it along to the basestation for processing. That's the generic application model, at least.
- security
The main part of our research deals directly with implementing security in the sensor networks. This is far from easy, since you can't even store a public/private key in the mote's limited memory, let alone do anything with it. The protocols used are complex, involving securely distributing keys, efficient authentication protocols, and all this in 16KB of program memory (on Rene2s) INCLUDING the operating system! Just remember that the point isn't to stop a mote from being compromised, it's to realize it's compromised and drop it from the network. There are supposed to be thousands of motes in the network after all, so dropping a bunch won't hurt.
---
Here's hoping that background will help avoid the mass privacy paranoia that we /. readers love so much. At the time of this writing, motes aren't small enough or cheap ($250) enough to produce en masse, nor are they tiny enough to go unnoticed (remember the 2 AA batteries?). Yes, there are exceptions, but 1 square inch are the smallest production versions I know of (Mica2dots). And until they stop running on batteries, their biggest hindrance is their short lifetime, so they currently can't be constantly monitoring anything for months on end.
Aside: Take a look at the Spec. It could change that whole last paragraph. :)
As for the military surveillance stuff, that's what motes are ultimately designed for, to be dropped on
*blinking cursor*
Do we even need to bother doing this research to know why they are dying?
They are dying for the same reason 90% of our large fish are gone, frogs have 7 hind legs, mussels are jamming our water pipes, forest fires are ravaging our towns, and we are running out of fresh water.
That reason is that we are too fucking stupid to do anything except what gratifies us the most. So fight cancer with your shark cartilage, infest us with foreign species, empty out those ballast tanks, fight those needed forest fires, and take those 20 minute showers, cause we both know you are not gonna change a fucking thing you do to save the planet from yourself.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
... redwoods are dying!
The platypus possesses a spur on its hind legs that can be used to inject venom into another creature.
Pure oxygen, particularly at pressure - is poisonous to humans. Only when it's diluted and at the relatively low pressure of our atmosphere does it become our life-blood.
This is sort of the same issue. Human pollutants may account for 3% of the CO2 and other pollutants [*] worldwide - but it's likely to have a *huge* local effect in the area that it's released before it disperses. Don't forget that California's economy (if ranked alongside other countries separate from the rest of the US) - would be the 5th largest in the world.
I've also not seen many thriving redwood forests remaining after active volcanos have errupted or forest fires passed through an area - probably the major causes of CO2 release. So if humans can look after those natural resources that are left - we should. Gone is forever. They won't come back once the area has been paved over.
[*] The emphasis should probably be on the "other pollutants" killing the plants - especially since plants feed on carbon dioxide and sunlight to photosynthesise - this is basic biology (although some plants don't do this). CO2 levels damage other factors of the climate (eg: weather) more than plants - but the deforestation problem only makes the CO2 problem worse.
Do bears really shit in the woods? :)
Rus
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Damn ewoks, kill em, kill em all!
The sensor won't pick this up, but the executive redwood office furnitures doesn't help either.
Spanning tree?
Scientist 1: So, all the giant redwoods have died...
Scientist 2: Jawhol, even ze von I vaz keepig for my bar-b-q... terrible, terrible... but vat a lot of excellent vood!
Scientist 1: But, our smart dust worked!
Scientist 2: You hef ze data, zen?
Scientist 1: Five hundred and thiry terrabytes of it!
Scientist 2: That vill take years to process...
Scientist 1: Decades!
Scientist 2: Zank God for ze taxpayer. Zo, ve must be starting a New Project...
Scientist 1: Yes, I've already filled in the Grant Application Form, I just need your co-signature...
Scientist 2: Let me see: "Microsensors for Measuring Domestic Charcoal Consumption". You are meaning ze bar-b-queues?
Scientist 1: We also have a study on the long-term quality of Amazonian beef.
Scientist 2: A match made in heaven!
Scientist 1: And our first shipment of barbeques arrives next week...
Scientist 2: Pity ve didn't get ze beer study as vell.
Scientist 1: Well, I know this guy, see...
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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The destruction of the redwoods was being caused by MAXXAM corporation (parading as Pacific Lumber, Co) as they own many thousands of acres of redwoods and are determined to rape them for all they're worth. Funny, I didn't need any fancy gizmos to figure that out, I just had to take a trip to Freshwater, CA and watch the carnage.
I'll get me coat.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
When I did work-experience, they were using HP programmable calculators to log tree growth data. The backup was a printer like what you get on cash registers. Since the batteries failed one weekend, one of my jobs was to get all of these logs and re-enter them into a computer (an Apricot no less)
But you tell youngster that nowdays an' they'll nowt believe ye...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
First off, our relationship with naturally occuring forest fires need to change in a big way (and not by cutting down all the trees as our idiotic president suggested recently).
For a century we've been preventing forests from burning, a natural and necessary process because tree-hugging extremists can't bare to let them burn. I'm pretty sure the President's plan is not intended to make more trees, it's to cut down on the number of trees there are because these fires are becoming impossible to contain. We obviously can't burn them ourselves, we don't have the resources, so the smart, market way would to be to allow timber companies to thin out the overpopulated areas. Otherwise, these huge, deadly fires will continue to grow and kill more people and destroy more property.
Fortunately, data loggers are more benign than the other kind...
I was led to believe everyone in San Francisco is a pot-smoking tree-hugging hippie. You mean they have cars there now? Damn right-wingers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The trees have only started dying since we noticed the appearance of such mutant amphibians, therefore the frogs are causing the problem. QED.
If a tree downloads MP3s in the forest and no-one sees it, do the RIAA prosecute?
Am I the only one that is both annoyed and amused by a 4.5 megabyte tarball for something that's supposed to be a Tiny OS? I'd love to dig in and check it out, but it looks to me like it'd be wading into bloatware. Can any Tiny OS acolytes out there show me the light?
Now maybe they can send home some of those enviro-wackos living up in the trees.
Each tree is growing - or dying - slightly differently from its neighbouring trees due to different local conditions. This means we can study the differences between trees and relate them to differences in local conditions. If we can work out why some trees are doing better than others, then we have a chance of working out how to improve the conditions for the trees that are dying. The micromote project is collecting basic information on local conditions such as temperature and humidity which will enable this research to reach conclusions in the next couple of years.
Scroogle
The redwood trees are tough but that doesn't mean they're immune to any of the factors known to affect tree health. For example, one of the most basic factors affecting tree health is water supply. Any tree will start dying if water availability in its root zone is reduced below a survival threshold value. We know that compared to 50 years or more ago, California has been consuming more and more water, especially groundwater, to the extent that there are water supply arguments. In many places the water table has been dropping even during wetter years. This could be a pointer to the cause of the trees' problems.
Scroogle
There's a part of Death Valley called the Racetrack. Perhaps an exception could be made to the "no equipment in wilderness areas" policy for tiny sensors. For those that don't know, the Racetrack is an ultra-flat part of Death Valley known for a field of rocks that move around and leave tracks when no one is looking. No one knows why, and some of those rocks are pretty damned heavy. It would be great to leave some sort of remote sensors there to find out why they move.
Speaking of, has anybody considered doing a similar network to track the death of *BSD?
All's true that is mistrusted
Reading the name SmartDust, I kinda pictured something smaller -- at least where I live, you couldn't fit two AA batteries into a particle of dust. Well, I suppose that's why I'm not in marketing.
This is nothing new. Acorn computers have been around for a long time now.
Seriously, '90% of our large fish are gone'? If that's the case, then I have to assume we ate them, otherwise there would be a whole lot of stinking fish laying around. Do you cry when a shark eats a fish, or a killer whale eats a baby seal? 'But wait,' you say, 'those are part of a natural, balanced, eco-system.' What do you suppose we are? Animals? That's right. Did you know that over 90% of all species that have ever existed are extinct, due to 'natural' causes, before humans existed. Must have been those darn proto-human hominid thingies, huh.
And for your information, those mussels clogging our water pipes are there becasue they LIKE IT . Usually they hang out there because the heat makes them reproduce faster. You see, the survival drive is as fundamental to them as it is to us.
Lastly, don't assume that I'm completely against enviromentalism, or conservation. I'm against wacko-enviromentalists who twist data and make up facts to preach what usually boils down to communism or some other crazy scheme. Nobody really wants to destroy the environment. This isn't Captain Planet, where people want to destroy the Earth for the sake of being evil. I'll admit that often, while pursuing other goals, humanity has been irresponsible about pollution, but we all have to live here too. Tycoons don't want to drink dirty water anymore than you do, and most of them probably bathe in the same water that you do.
So, any non foaming-at-the-mouth comments?
Mark me troll, but isn't Java and Tiny an oxymoron? Someone help me out here...
It's a component-based OS, and there's lots of components you could use... (including support for different platforms and different sensor boards). However, only the components you actually use end up in your application.
There's also a bunch of Java code in the distribution for the PC side of things.
The 200 bytes is just the scheduler and initialisation code, any system components your application use are "extra".
Most of it looks like documentation and Java. The OS folder has 2.1 MB of source code, most of which is libraries (including O-scope and DB code) or platform-specific code (five platforms included).
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
> 'But wait,' you say, 'those are part of a natural, balanced, eco-system.' What do you suppose we are? Animals? That's right.
Humans are not part of one natural, balanced eco-system. We are the only species on Earth that can and has become a significant part of every eco-system. We are the only species that has ever changed the face of the earth so drastically in under 200 years. (meteors aren't species)
"Did you know that over 90% of all species that have ever existed are extinct, due to 'natural' causes, before humans existed."
Since humans have only been on earth for less than 1% of its 4.54 Billion years I would expect that that MUST be true. If we killed off every living thing on the planet leaving only people and machines your statement would still have to be true. 4.54 billion years is a long time. So now that we know it must be true, what does that have to do with anything? According to your logic since we're animals then if we blight the soil, pave the forests, pollute the air, and end up living shoulder-to-shoulder on a steady diet of soylent green, that too is then a natural process of animals. Yes it sure is, but certainly it's not the one we're shooting for.
"I'll admit that often, while pursuing other goals, humanity has been irresponsible about pollution, but we all have to live here too."
Capitalism by definition and in practice, is the pursuit of profit. There's your goal. Protecting our environment under a system that discourages it at every turn, (e.g. it cuts into short-term profits to do things in an ecologically conscience and sustainable way,) is extremely difficult. You don't need to be evil to consume a vastly disproportionate amount of resources compared to just about everything that came before you on this earth (Since you like that comparison). You just need to be born into the system. The very best you can do is try to fight it, e.g. bike to work along a busy road, eat vegetarian, turn off lights, etc.
And when we're extinct I'm sure a zenobiologist from Vogon 3 will come down some day and conclude that "due to the insurmountable drive built into the human animals by their own evolutionary process to consume and breed as successfully as possible, they quickly reached the same fate as many such species throughout the galaxy, they outgrew their planet before they could get off of it."
Conquering nature is, by definition, suicide.
P.S. - Yes, we ate them.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
We're able to run clocks and puny devices off potatoes, lemons - Japanese Scientists are even working on using human blood as a power source!
But with all of these power alternatives I think what would truly be revolutionary is to find a way to sap a little energy from these massive organisms that would supply just enough power for these sensors, or modified ones that use less power, and still not hurt the tree. It was mentioned in the article that future sensors may use solar power. Well, I would hope! And haven't scientists still not found the secret of how trees break down water without electricity or by other means for its energy process? That secret could very well make this sensing technology a part of the tree - an symbiotic implant. Not to mention, revolutionize a certain burgeoning fuel cell industry that is attempting to take hold here in the very needy US (specifically California).
This node sensor technology is really promising, I hope it really evolves into something more. Maybe even something that will physically help the tree, instead of just monitoring conditions around it.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
to the trees when they die? Do they go off to the mill to become deck lumber? If so, how hard would it be to disrupt the lifecycle of these trees on purpose? I'm NOT a conspiracy theorist. I am a BAUist (business as usual).
I bet the sensors are doing it.
Go spend some time among the giant redwoods, and you will discover:
They already talk to one another. They will talk to you, too, if you will just go there, stop what you are doing for a moment, and listen to them.
The first thing they will say to you is to remind you how little time you have left. (Compared to their natural lifespans, yours looks fleeting by comparison).