BUGGING THE WORLD

摘要

It's a midsummer evening off the foggy coast of Maine. A small, black bird called a storm petrel swoops into an underground nest. Instantly, a tiny computer inside the burrow registers the bird's arrival and sends an alert through a wireless network. Throughout Great Duck Island, 200 similar computers linked together are tracking the weather, winds, and movements of these enigmatic birds, which for mysterious reasons prefer this island to all others. Naturally, the project, sponsored by Intel Corp., interests ornithologists. But it's far more important to the computing world: Duck Island is a laboratory for a new stage of computing known as sensor networks.