If you’ve been following along at home you know that at Safecast we’ve been thinking about measuring air quality for quite some time. More than once we’ve jumped in only to be disappointed with the results, pushing us back to square one. One of the key tenets at Safecast is that we must be able…
Sensor Network
Safecast X Shuttleworth
As some will already know the Shuttleworth Foundation has been a gracious supporter of Safecast and helped make our recent 4 year anniversary event possible. As one of their Fellows I’ve been fortunate to get to meet with and work with a brilliant collection of people from around the world working on similar openness-focused, potentially…
Vice Japan Covers Recent bGeigie Build Event
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vZUg1HEKI4 Recently, we held a build your own bGeigie Nano workshop at our offices in Shibuya, Tokyo. We’d been talking to the great folks at Vice Japan for a while and they decided they wanted to join the workshop and build a geiger counter for themselves. We were fortunate that schedules worked out and Yuka…
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Monitoring Fallout Decay
One of the great utilities of the Safecast project is the ability to collect and analyze environmental data on an unprecedented scale. As Safecast passes the two year mark with collecting radiation data in Japan it is now possible to begin to look back over the changes in radioactivity across different parts of the country…
The bGeigie Nano Kit
The biggest limitation Safecast has faced in collecting data is the limited availability of our workhorse device, the bGeigie. The design works great, but it’s expensive (each one costs us about $1000) and time consuming (building one can take an entire week) which results in us having limited numbers of them to keep in use.…
Citizen science and air quality monitoring in Tokyo
As you may have recently heard, the city of Beijing recently went off the scale for established measurements of the amount of particulate matter in the air. As of the 13th of January the U.S. embassy, the only publicly reporting monitoring station in the city, measured a concentration of 886 micrograms per cubic meter (To give…
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Information, Misinformation, Disinformation (or, "These aren't the droids you're looking for.") Part 1
“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR…..” [Skip to Part 2] At Safecast we assumed from the start that our data should be accurate, easy to understand, informative, well-visualized, and easily accessible. In many respects this simply reflects “best practices” in information design, as well as a vision of social responsibility in which openness…
Information, Misinformation, Disinformation (or, "These aren't the droids you're looking for.") Part 2
GOVERNMENT MONITORING POSTS [Part 1 here] In recent months there has been a fair amount of controversy concerning the accuracy of the radiation monitoring posts the government has installed all over Fukushima prefecture, and in some neighboring prefectures as well. We wrote about it back in July, 2012: TEPCO cheating on radiation levels by using…
Building bGeigies in Aizu
Hikone 2012-12-19 From One Spike to 45 Blinking LED’s. From one Spike on a Software Scope in a Brazil Bar in Tokyo to 45 Blinking LEDs, the Sound of Fake Digital Crickets in a Science Room in Aizu. (A short summery of part of the flow of the radiation recorded from Cesium in Japan to…
Safecast Geiger Counter Limited Edition!
Earlier this year we announced a new geiger counter, designed by bunnie that we were hoping would be in production soon. We’re excited to announce two things – Firstly International Medcom is full steam ahead on a full production run of these devices that will be available later this year, and secondly we’re releasing a…
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