Explanation of the blotchiness of radiation levels along a road in Iitate mura area, Fukushima prefercture. Safecast’s Joe Moross shows how level vary dramatically over a few meters for both air and surface dose rates.
sean
May 6, 2012 07:13 May 6, 2012 07:13 May 6, 2012 07:13
April 1, 2012 13:59 April 1, 2012 13:59 April 1, 2012 13:59
When we founded Safecast we were very aware that Radiation wasn’t the only invisible environmental factor around us that people should have more data about. It was the most pressing and the spark that set this in motion, but we wanted to keep the doors open and use the platform we’ve built to expand the factors we’re monitoring. Last month at our one year anniversary meeting in Tokyo we announced that we’re taking the first step in that direction.
Beginning this year we’ll begin to monitor air quality as well as radiation. Safecast volunteer Ariel Levi Simons will be heading up this wing of the project – he’s based in Los Angeles where he’s a science teacher at The Wildwood School and where air quality is a constant topic, yet most people know very little about what the actual content of the air they breath is. This is the very early stages, but if you’d like to join these discussions we’ve created a Safecast Air Monitoring Project Mailing & Discussion list where we’ll begin to put these pieces together.
March 19, 2012 23:48 March 19, 2012 23:48 March 19, 2012 23:48
March 19, 2012 11:00 March 19, 2012 11:00 March 19, 2012 11:00
This coming weekend we’ll have a few events around Tokyo marking the 1 year anniversary of Safecast’s existence. On Saturday evening, March 24th from 2200 – 0030, we’ll participate in the Roppongi Art Night events. We’re presenting here in conjunction with others, we’ll actually only have 15 minutes of this time, but not sure when that 15 minutes will be. Safecast co-founders Sean Bonner (presenting in English) and Pieter Franken (presenting in Japanese) will spend 10 minutes showing photos from the last 12 months of Safecast, and Safecast visualization lead Tony DeVincenzi will join for the last few moments to show new maps and related visuals. Akiba will follow with 5 minutes of Geiger counter music.
On Sunday March 25th at Loftwork’s newly opened FabCafe in Shibuya we’ll have a bit longer to talk about what we’ve been up to for the last year. From 1100 – 1300 we’ll give a Safecast Presentation that is open to the public, press invited. We will show off selected photos and data from the first year of Safecast, as well as brand new data visualizations recently built by Tony DeVincenzi and his team at MIT Media Lab, and a prototype of the new geiger counter we’ve designed that will be in production soon. Following that from 1300 to 1500 we’ll host an open session for anything, Q&A, Demos, etc.
Hope you can make it!
March 7, 2012 13:59 March 7, 2012 13:59 March 7, 2012 13:59
This is a guest post written by Ryuichi Mori, ex vice chairman of Dentsu and Advisor to MIT media lab.
On March 1, I was invited by Pieter and Joe of Safecast Japan to convene a radiation seminar in the City of Iwaki, Fukushima. The tsunami all but wiped out Fukushima Prefecture’s fishing industry. The nuclear accidents added further insult to injury. Fukushima’s fish markets have been effectively obliterated. Radiation levels in the area make recovery all the more difficult, and the fishermen continue to spend their days in port rather than out at sea.
Here is the situation that Fukushima is facing. Continue reading »
March 7, 2012 13:43 March 7, 2012 13:43 March 7, 2012 13:43
Safecast friends Lisa Katayama and Jason Wishnow are working on a very cool film project called We Are All Radioactive about a group of surfers working to rebuild their towns in northern Japan after the 3/11 earthquake. They are raising funds on indiegogo right now. Safecast will play a part in some of the episodes and we’re excited to see the results from these hyper creative folks!
March 4, 2012 22:43 March 4, 2012 22:43 March 4, 2012 22:43
Thanks to the help of the great people at twitter, we’ve secured the username @safecast and will no longer be using @safecastdotorg
February 15, 2012 15:28 February 15, 2012 15:28 February 15, 2012 15:28
In a post I wrote last year about one of our drives through Fukushima I mentioned toward the end that we met up with Koroyama resident Tadao Munakata when he was driving by and recognized the Safecast logo on someone’s shirt and stopped to talk to us. At that point he was working with some other folks to produce a geiger counter in Fukushima. Since then he’s become a regular Safecast volunteer and continued diligently working on his project. When I was just in Japan I was able to see of the results, as they’ve got two models available now. One is a standalone unit and the other has no display, and instead includes a line out and needs to connect to a smartphone running an app like Geigerbot. Both of these devices are based on the Open Geiger project and have a Russian SBM-20 Geiger Mueller tube which is sensitive to beta and gamma radiation. We’re all really excited to see this project develop and it’s great to have something like this being produced directly in Fukushima.
February 5, 2012 18:39 February 5, 2012 18:39 February 5, 2012 18:39
Last month we were excited to announce that the World Karate Organization was jumping into the pool of Safecast volunteers and would be mapping out some new territory for us and helping us test our a new version of our bGeigie, that for this specific purpose we’re calling it the “Black Belt bGeigie”. We’re excited to say we’ve begun receiving data from them already and their new coverage of Sapporo is in our database now. New ground is always exciting for us, and new ground with normal levels is even better. We’re looking forward to the next batch of data and continuing to fill in the empty spaces on our maps!
February 5, 2012 16:24 February 5, 2012 16:24 February 5, 2012 16:24
Safecast is powered by volunteer efforts, and we’re always open for more help. We’ve got a big task ahead of us and it’s going to take a lot of helping hands to make happen. Luckily a lot of people want to help, so many in fact that we can’t keep up with them – a good problem to have, but a problem none the less. We’re looking for someone to join our ranks as something of a volunteer wrangler. Sound interesting? Excellent, here’s who we’re hoping to find:
- Bilingual – Our team includes English and Japanese speakers, we need you to be able to easily communicate with both of them.
- Communication – Now that you can speak to the team, what will you tell them? We need someone who can stay on top of the situation and make sure that people who want to help have something to do.
- Optimization – Some of our volunteers might be better at some things than others, and some of them might benefit from teaming up. We need you to talk with everyone and see where those alignments and adjustments can be made.
- Assessment – We get a lot of offers to help, which is great, but sometimes people genuinely want to help but don’t really have the time or aren’t in a position to do anything right now, we need you to keep on top of inbound offers and respond to people accordingly.
- Location doesn’t matter – As long as you have an internet connection, you can do this.
Does this sound like you? If so, drop me a line ( sean@safecast.org )
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