Safecast co-Founder Joi Ito and US President Barack Obama recently talked about the future for an issue of WIRED. Among the topics covered were the value of open data and some of Safecast’s work. Relevant portion begins around 7:00 in to this video: The print edition of the interview from the magazine can be found…
Safecast News
Safecast Merch
Over the last 5+ years we’ve almost never had publicly available merchandise, restricting our t-shirts and stickers and things to volunteers and in person visitors to our office. However we’re often asked if we have anything that people can buy to support us, and represent our work in their corner of the world. We’re happy…
Improving the EPA Smart City Air Challenge
Safecast believes strongly in citizen-based environmental monitoring, and we constantly encourage official government bodies and others to support it. Recently, the US EPA announced a grant program called the EPA Smart City Air Challenge, which asks communities to propose their own plans for deploying air quality sensors and offers up to $40,000 for implementation. It…
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Safecast Web Map Update
Check out the new Safecast Tilemap! While quite a few people depend upon Safecast’s open-source iOS and OSX native apps for investigating radiation levels around the world, our web-based tilemap undoubtedly gets the most use. Because it’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection and from any web browser, it’s extremely convenient. It’s also automatically…
Air Quality Beta Kit
Earlier this year we announced that our first real batch of Safecast Air Quality prototypes were being tested out in the field. These were all one of a kind devices with different configurations to help us understand how configuration variables would impact the data collected. We’re excited to now expand that beta testing group with…
kGeigie and the future citizen scientists
On 24th July 2016, a Safecast volunteer crew participated in hosting a workshop at the “Mirai Summer Camp Kids Workshop” event at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. About sixty kids from as young as eight to fifteen years old proved that anyone can be a citizen scientist. Safecast coordinated two three-hour workshops with three sessions each.…
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Notes from the road: Safecasting Iceland and France
During a recent family visit to Iceland and France this July, I took my bGeigie along, and in the course of a few weeks, this has allowed me to send about 50,000 measurements to the Safecast database, during many drives. Once you get into the habit of hanging the bGeigie on the outside of your car, it is…
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Pointcast Rollout, Part 2: Iitate Village
Above: The Pointcast installation in Iitate is at Iitate Farms, in Nodegami hamlet. (This is the second in a multipart series about the Pointcast realtime radiation sensor system. Part 1, which describes the technical aspects of the system, can be found here) As mentioned in Part 1, Safecasters Joe Moross, Pieter Franken, and Azby Brown…
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50 million data points!
This week Safecast hit a major milestone, reaching 50 million data points in our radiation measurement database. We hit the 40 million mark just last January, which means we’re logging close to two million data points a month now. Another way to look at it is that it took us 3 1/2 years to reach 25…
We just published our first scientific paper
Safecast marked another first recently with the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Journal of Radiological Protection (JRP). The paper, titled “Safecast: successful citizen-science for radiation measurement and communication after Fukushima,” tells the story of our project, attempting to place it within the spectrum of citizen science in general and to describe our…
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