Thanks to alert reader Rocky Rawstern of Nanotechnology Now for pointing out this tidbit that showed up on Yahoo News, of all places:
A Canadian plan to cast a supersized net to enable Internet access across the province of Alberta is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers top communications "winnovation" for 2004.
With winners come losers. IEEE fellows designated a plan to deploy nine billion tiny airborne weather probes as one communications innovation that is destined to fail.
To pick this year's winners and losers, fellows of the nearly 400,000 member IEEE "considered the feasibility of the goals described by the project leaders themselves," Zorpette told NewsFactor. "We analyzed these goals in light of technical and technology-related factors: regulation, competition, relevant technology, market trends and more."
Based on the "smart dust" concept -- self-organizing networks of sensors that monitor chemicals in a factory or troops on a battlefield -- IEEE's loser in 2004 is the Global Environmental MEMS Sensors project, or GEMS.
"GEMS proposes a global network of tiny airborne probes to improve weather forecasting," IEEE editor Erico Guizzo told NewsFactor. "We talked to experts from several fields -- from nanotechnology to remote sensing -- and the conclusion was that such flying probes face huge technology barriers and that satellites could do a better job ... monitoring weather on a global scale."
Author Michael Crichton already raised concerns about smart particles attacking people in his book "Prey." Similar issues would plague the GEMS project, Guizzo explained.
"Deploying billions of these invisible and intrusive probes would certainly raise a number of political, environmental, health and privacy-related questions," Guizzo said.
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