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…
Sensor Network
Safecast Geiger Counter Reference Design
The following is a post by contributing author bunnie, mirrored from the bunniestudios blog. This past weekend marked the anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that devastated Japan. I had not felt my blood so cold since I watched the twin towers fall almost a decade earlier. I still vividly remember the twisting knots I felt…
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Open Research Forum – Scanning the Earth
On November 23rd, the Keio University Open Research Forum 2011 was held. The highlight was the talk by Prof Jun Murai (Keio SFC and Safecast Advisor) and Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab and Safecast Advisor). The talk featured Safecast and the ScanningTheEarth project, but also covered topics such as the direction of the Internet, impact…
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bGeigie Hackerspace World Tour!
If you’ve checked out our maps recently you know that we have covered a lot of ground in Japan, but only scattered readings around the rest of the world. We think these global measurements are really important both to provide some context for the readings we’re taking in Japan and to build a baseline so…
Safecasting inside the evacuation zone
If you’ve been following our measurements and discussions surrounding them, you know we’ve been saying that the decision to evacuate people in a set radius from the Fukushima Daiichi plant is flawed. Wind, weather, topography and many other factors ensure that radiation isn’t higher the closer you get to the plant, and lower further away,…
New Visualizations
One of our goals at Safecast, in addition to collecting radiation data, is putting that data into a format that is helpful and useful. If you’ve been following our work for the last few months you’ve seen the map we launched with on day one progress through several evolutions including being split out into several…
New Map on Safecast.org
It should be no surprise that we think about maps a lot here at Safecast. In fact, it’s probably one of the most frequent topics of conversation. Especially maps with a lot of data and especially making that data understandable. But more than understandable, it needs to be useful. Understanding what data a map is…
Kickstarter deployment begins
Anyone who has been following our Kickstarter project knows that the main goal was to deploy 100 sensors on the ground in Japan, and that anyone who donated $1000 or more would actually be sent their own geiger counter. We’re happy to announce that as of today both of these have started happening. We’ve been…
Safecast Visits C-10
Last week several members of the Safecast team had the opportunity to visit The C10 Research and Education Foundation, one of the oldest citizen radiation monitoring groups in the world. Based in Massachusetts, near the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, the group has had a sensor network in place and being monitored for over 20 years.…
Volunteer field report: Kiki
[Kiki Tanaka reached out to us and offered to help take readings. We set her up with a geiger counter and some instructions and asked that she report back what she found. This is the the first report from her.] May 8th, 2011 I am Kiki Tanaka. I am not a technical person, so I…