Crowdsourcing Radiation Monitoring In Japan 66
fysdt writes "A new open- and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country. The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors."
Great... (Score:3, Interesting)
except Google Earth had a network sites for monitoring set up throughout Japan within a few days of the Fukushima news - government sites, university sites, private companies with monitoring, individuals with geiger counters. This site is near my house: http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/taisaku/en/measurement/index.html [aist.go.jp]
The radiation in Tokyo is less than the radiation in New York, so many places have stopped monitoring continuously now. According to most of the press, we should have been dead by now...
Problematic data (Score:4, Interesting)
Measuring radiation correctly is an expert task ! Without knowing the origin of the radiation, it's type and energy, the use of Geiger Counter is pretty much useless. One can get random numbers by using the wrong apparatus on the wrong radiation. In some case, the Geiger counter will over-react on the wrong radiation (e.g. x-rays), other radiation (e.g alphas) will not even enter the device. By having thousand of non-specialist running around with Geiger Counters, you will collect mainly garbage. But apparently that's what everyone (especially governments) want to do today. Collect data. Store it. Use it. Even if wrong.