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Quake-Catcher Aims to be Largest Distributed Seismometer Network
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 28, 2008 11:22 PM
from the shake-rattle-and-roll dept.
from the shake-rattle-and-roll dept.
Nature is reporting that a new distributed computing application is looking to monitor earthquake data using the accelerometer in many computing devices. In the long run, "Quake-Catcher" will hopefully be fast enough to give warning before major earthquakes. "If it works, it will be the cheapest seismic network on the planet and could operate in any country. It wouldn't be as sensitive as traditional networks of seismometers, but Lawrence says that's not the point. 'If you have only two sensors in an area, you have to have a perfect system. If you have 15 sensors in a system it [can] be less perfect. One hundred, one thousand, ten thousand -- your need for the system to be perfect becomes much smaller,' he says. 'That's really our approach -- just to have massive numbers.'"
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Quake Catcher... (Score:3, Funny)
Accelerometers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Accelerometers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Accelerometers (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Re:Accelerometers (Score:4, Informative)
The fact that you could have corroboration from 1500 points in a 75 square mile area is quite an improvement on what they have now, and at a much cheaper price.
If you spend time analyzing data, it's amazing what you can find. That is one of the reasons that the US government wants to monitor everyone's communications... to spot small trends... and of course to gather evidence to use against political rivals thus ensuring their unending reign of
Back on track. The sensitivity of things like the wiimote add huge potential to such an endeavor. Just through sheer numbers, the size of the area shaking makes a big difference on the impact or relevance of the seismic event. It's physics, and if you are trying to see the true graph of something, the more data points you have to plot, the more informative it is. Even if some of the sensors are unreliable, they have the ability to ignore anomalous readings and use those that match others. Since you can be certain that there is an event happening (old system still in place) you can ignore or throw out data from sensors that are TOO active or not active at all, then sift through what is left to see what you find.
I'm reasonably certain that they will see a lot when they learn the true extent of the area affected by any particular event. For example, if the event stays limited to only the fault area it would be much different than if an entire area were affected outside the fault line area. Having thousands of sensors will help show that. Perhaps through this they will learn that certain geologic structures actually do redirect the energy to other areas, allowing predictions of damage to match what before were unpredictable events thus adding perhaps minutes to the warning times. That would save lives and that is what they want to do. Mapping effects through an area will help. Thousands of sensors will help achieve that despite the seemingly unreliability of the sensors themselves.
There are millions of ants in an ant hill, kill a couple hundred and they carry on. This is the same sort of idea.
Parent
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That'd be awesome! They might even bring down a bridge or two...
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Similar Project? (Score:2, Interesting)
I signed up for the Tsunami Harddisk Detector project, but don't know if they are related.
"Thanks for your interest in the Tsunami Harddisk Detector project. We are currently installing the system on a world wide basis. To keep the system in a stable state, further installation is an incremental process. We have put you on our mailing list and will inform you as soon as we can make the software available to you. Best regards, Michael Stadler ____________________ www.ninsight.at "
So I sent off an email
Hope is not a plan (Score:3, Insightful)
and the scientific basis for prediction is what, exactly?
a meaningful prediction has to be precise in location and in time.
time is the enemy:
the thirty second warning is little better than "duck and cover" if it cannot be communicated effectively.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
and the scientific basis for prediction is what, exactly?
Re:Hope is not a plan (Score:5, Insightful)
the thirty second warning is little better than "duck and cover" if it cannot be communicated effectively.
Actually, a 30 second warning is quite useful, but not to humans. There are such warning systems in California. When the warning system trips, elevators stop at the nearest floor, subways and BART trains stop, gas valves at schools and mobile home parks close, and some hazardous processes shut down.
But the data from that comes from fixed seismic stations, not somebody's random accelerometer.
Parent
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Tag: Gamespy (Score:2)
Re:Great vaporware application (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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I'm more skeptical as to how accurate he can geolocate each laptop. I've had IP-geolocation tools tell me I'm in a city 500km away...
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Plus it doesn't tear up your CPU at night
The article is thin on details, but I think this might kill your network instead of killing your CPU.
The idea here is to detect subtle movements of the laptop (which are small enough to not need shutting the laptop down). Apparently whenever the accelerometer senses a motion it will communicate to a central server within a second. Imagine using one of these in the train or a bus...the laptop would be constantly pinging the server. A quake of magnitude 4 is not going to feel any stronger than the moveme
Re:Great vaporware application (Score:5, Insightful)
1,000 laptop accelerometers cannot do what a single seismic sensor can, because they are orders of magnitude less sensitive. You can't take 1,000 sensors, add the data together, and say it is 1,000 times more effective than a single device. If the sensor granularity is not sufficient to detect what you are trying to detect, then one or one million will not be able to detect your subject. It'd be like using one cheap VGA webam to try to photograph surface topography on Pluto, and when that didn't work, trying the same thing by using 1,000 cheap VGA webcams together.
Stupid.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lucky Imaging uses multiple high accuracy devices that are accurate enough to capture the granularity required, but are otherwise limited by extraneous transient factors. By using multiple devices the chance of achieving an optimum reading vis a vis those extraneous factors is maximised. This situational opportunism is why it is called "Lucky Imaging", and it cannot be applied to the scenario where the device itself is not capable of making the reading necessary, even under optimum conditions.
A
Re:Great vaporware application (Score:5, Informative)
To extend this to a domain where you don't have the effective control, you have to automatically detect where different pictures fit. I remember having seen somebody that did this; I can't remember where, though.
Eivind.
Parent
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And your basis for this sweeping statement is